THE MAN WHO CANNOT BE FRIGHTENED

Callum Draycott kept his study on the north side of Halcyon House, where the windows faced the cliff and the sea and not the party.

It was a room built for a man who disliked being agreed with. The walls were dark oak. The desk was a slab of black walnut with nothing on it but a green-shaded lamp, a fountain pen, and a leather folio that no one but Margaux Teague had ever been permitted to open. There was no art. There was a fire laid in the grate, which he had not lit, and a decanter of Scotch on the sideboard, which he had not touched in three years.

At ten past one in the morning he stood at the window with his back to the room, listening to the faint, civilized roar of the Gilded Hour two floors beneath his feet, and thought about a woman who had not looked at him.

It was a very small thing. He knew that. He had held, at last count, the mortgages of eleven men in that ballroom and the careers of nine more. A senator's wife had once fainted in this house because he had said her name. For twenty-two years, the people around him had been arranging their faces, their voices, and their pulses in advance of his arrival, like a field laid flat before a storm, and he had grown so used to the shape of that fear that he no longer noticed it, the way a man doesn't notice the sound of his own blood.

Then a woman in a black dress had stood with her back to him, adjusting a fold of silk at her waist, and had not flinched.

I'm busy with other things.

He turned the watch over in his palm. It was an old silver pocket watch with a worn lid and a crack across the crystal, and its hands had stood at four seventeen for as long as he had owned it. He opened it with his thumb. Closed it. Opened it.

Someone knocked twice on the study door. He didn't have to look to know who. Only one person in the world knocked as though she were delivering a verdict.

"Come."

Margaux Teague came in and closed the door behind her without a sound. She was forty-seven, narrow and straight, with iron-colored hair cut at the jaw and a black suit that had never once wrinkled in her service. She carried a tablet in the crook of her arm and no expression at all.

"Report," said Callum.

"Subject entered at 9:48 on the Pell card. The Maybach was hers, booked through the agency, and returned empty. She has been in the building three hours and eleven minutes. She has taken two glasses of Krug and eaten nothing." Margaux did not consult the tablet. "She declined an introduction from Mr. Van Ness, a second from Mr. Alder's wife, and a third from a man who is not on the list and whom I have had removed."

"Removed."

"Politely."

"What else?"

"Pell registered her under a pseudonym, as expected. I have not run it." Margaux paused. "I could have the name in forty minutes."

"Don't."

"I understand."

"Tell me what you have."

"Nothing you couldn't see from the window." A very small movement of her mouth. "She is between twenty-eight and thirty-two. She walks like someone who has been taught to stand up straight and has resented it. She has no jewelry on her left hand, and a pale band on the fourth finger where a ring was recently removed. She is thin under the dress. Thinner than the dress was cut for. Her hands are clean and dry and have been manicured within the week, by someone cheap and quick, not by anyone she would ordinarily pay." She finally looked at him. "She paid cash at the boutique on Fifth. The clerk remembers her because she did not ask the price."

"Anything else?"

"She doesn't drink the way people drink to be brave. She drinks like someone who wants to know what it tastes like."

Callum was quiet.

"I take it that interests you," said Margaux.

"It's irregular."

"You've found irregular things before. Mostly they bored you in under a week."

"Thank you, Margaux."

She inclined her head and did not leave. It was one of the three liberties he allowed her, and he understood that she was about to use it.

"Mr. Draycott," she said. "Mrs. Locke was removed from the house last night for crying. Tonight the same room has a woman who will not be afraid of you. I thought you ought to hear me say that the two things might, for you, be equally dangerous."

"For me?"

"One of them cost you nothing. The other might."

He looked at her for a long time. It was, he thought, the nearest thing to a joke she had ever made, and he was not sure it was one.

"Send her up," he said. "To the third-floor terrace. In ten minutes."

"Alone?"

"Alone."

"And if she declines?"

"Then I will have been wrong about her," said Callum, "and I'll be glad to know it."

…

The terrace on the third floor was the oldest part of Halcyon House. A hundred and thirty years earlier, a shipping magnate had built it for his wife, who was fond of the view and, according to the local histories, of a number of other things. It was a long slab of weathered limestone with a balustrade that came to a woman's hip, and beyond the balustrade there was nothing at all for sixty feet but air, and then the black rocks, and the sea.

The wind was strong up here. It came off the Atlantic with the smell of iron and cold, and it pulled at the flame in the bronze braziers until the whole terrace shuddered with moving light.

He heard her heels before he saw her.

She came through the glass door at the end of the gallery without hurry, and stopped just inside the sill, and looked at the view. She had taken off the mask. He noticed that first, and it annoyed him: it was an infraction, a small one, and she had done it without being told it was permitted. Her face in the firelight was narrow and pale and arrestingly composed, the face of a woman who had learned young that composure was cheaper than anything else on offer. Her eyes were very dark. They went to the balustrade, and to the drop, and then, finally, to him.

"Mr. Draycott."

"You know my name."

"I know what the room does when you walk through it." She came forward, her gown whispering across the stone. "That's a kind of introduction."

"You're not supposed to take your mask off."

"I'm told there are no rules about it." She tilted her head. "Odessa Pell said come as nobody. I'm nobody. Nobody doesn't need a mask."

The wind tugged a strand of black hair loose from her pinned coil and laid it across her cheek. She did not touch it.

"Do you like heights?" said Callum.

"I don't have a position on them."

"Everyone has a position on them."

"I price risk for a living," said Win. "Heights are among the more honest hazards. Gravity is constant. It doesn't take bribes."

Price risk. He filed it, and did not let her see him do it.

"Come here," he said.

She came. He had expected her to hesitate and she did not. She walked to the balustrade beside him and stood with her hands resting on the cold stone, looking down at the surf. Sixty feet below, the sea hit the rocks and went up in white sheets and fell back. The sound reached them a half second late, a great slow thudding like a heart in another room.

"People lean back from this railing," Callum said. "Even the ones who aren't afraid of falling. They've got an instinct that doesn't answer to reason. I've watched a man who ran a hedge fund cling to that wall like a child on a ladder."

"What did you do to him?"

"Nothing. I stood here."

"Hm." She turned her head and looked at him, and for the first time he saw a flicker of something in the dark eyes that was not composure. "That sounds like a thing you're proud of."

"I don't feel pride."

"That sounds like a thing you're proud of, too."

It was so quick and so dry that for a moment he did not know what to do with it. No one spoke to him like that. He had arranged his life so that no one could.

"I would like to see you stand on the railing," he said.

He watched her face while he said it. He watched for the small contraction around the eyes, the indrawn breath, the glance toward the door; the signals, all of them, that he had learned to read in the way a pilot reads weather. He had never in twenty-two years asked anyone to do something that did not, somewhere, produce a flinch. The flinch was the point. It was the only warmth he had left.

Win looked at the railing. She looked at the drop. She looked, briefly, at the sea.

Then she bent, took the hem of her gown in one hand, put the other flat on the balustrade, and stepped up onto it.

The limestone was perhaps eight inches wide. The wind came off the ocean like a hand. Her heels, black, red-soled, absurd, found the narrow stone and held. She straightened, slowly, with the skirt streaming out sideways, and stood there on the edge of the world with the sea breaking sixty feet below her, and lifted both arms out from her sides.

She did not look down. She looked straight out at the dark.

And she began, in a low and wholly delighted voice, to laugh.

…

He couldn't have said how long it was. Four seconds. Five.

He had stopped breathing. He understood that only afterward. What he understood at the time was that something in the center of his chest had turned over like a key in a lock, a violent, ugly, unfamiliar lurch that went all the way down to his knees, and that his right hand had closed on the cold stone beside her ankle so tightly that the knuckles were white.

It was not admiration. It was not desire. He knew what both of those were.

It was fear.

Get down.

He did not say it. He heard it, very loud, in a voice that was not his own, a boy's voice, cracked in the middle; and with it came the smell of green water and hot wood and sunscreen, and a sound that he had spent twenty-two years refusing to hear.

The lake had been called Pennywhistle, which was a stupid name for a lake. It lay in a fold of the hills two hours north of Cleveland, behind the house his parents rented every August and the dock Theo had begged to be allowed to swim off alone. Theo was eleven. He had a gap in his teeth and a wet red towel round his neck and a silver pocket watch of their grandfather's, which he had been given on his birthday and refused to take off, even in the water, because he said a watch ought to know what it was for.

Callum had been seventeen and bored. He had been on the dock with a paperback and a sunburn. At four-seventeen in the afternoon, according to the watch that the police would later return to him in a clear plastic bag, his brother had gone off the end of the dock after a dropped towel, and the water had closed over his head without a sound.

Callum had looked up from his book.

He had watched.

That was the part no one ever understood, because he had never told them, and that was the part he had told himself every night since. He had not been paralyzed. He had not been struck dumb. He had been looking. He had seen the pale shape of his brother's body turning below the surface, six feet down, in water that was clear enough to count freckles, and he had seen the little bright disc of the watch catching the light, and he had stood on the dock for what the police report said was forty seconds and what Callum knew to be a great deal longer, doing nothing at all.

Waiting, apparently, for it to be someone else's problem.

When he finally went in, it was too late. He had always known it was too late. The last thing he had felt in the whole of his body, in the cold green dark with his brother's weight in his arms, was a terror so complete that it simply burned out the part of him that had made it. He hadn't been afraid since. Not of the dark, or men with guns, or the nine-figure losses that put other men in hospital. Not of anything. Something in him had gone out on that lake and never come back in.

Except that tonight, on a limestone railing, with the wind in his hair, it had.

For six seconds, because a woman in a black dress had stood on the edge of a drop with her arms open and laughed.

"You can come down," he said.

His voice was perfectly level. It cost him more than anything he had ever done.

Win looked down at him. In the light from the braziers her face was fierce and bright and strange, and there was color in it, high on the cheekbones, that had not been there before. She was breathing hard.

"Was that the test?" she said.

"Yes."

"Did I pass?"

"Come down."

"You're holding my ankle."

He looked. He was. He had no memory of doing it.

He let go.

She stepped down, lightly, in one smooth movement, with her skirt falling back round her shins like water. The wind dropped, as though it too had been holding its breath. She stood very close to him, closer than the terrace required. She smelled of night-blooming jasmine and champagne and, underneath, something faint and clean and medicinal that he could not place.

"You're pale," she said.

"I'm always pale."

"You were holding on to the wall."

"I was holding on to your ankle."

"Mm. Same thing." She smiled slowly. "You were afraid."

"No."

"Mr. Draycott. I price risk for a living. Your pupils dilated, your breathing changed, and the hand on my leg was shaking." Her voice dropped. It was not mocking. It was a great deal worse than mocking; it was interested. "You thought I would fall."

"I thought nothing."

"Liar," said Win, so gently that it took him a moment to understand that she had said it.

Nobody had ever called him that to his face. He found that he did not know what he wanted to do about it. Part of him wanted to have her removed from the house, quietly, by Margaux. Part of him wanted to stand here until the sun came up.

"What do you want?" he said.

"I want to spend money," said Win. "A great deal of it, in the next few months, on interesting things. I was told you sell them."

"I don't sell anything."

"Then why am I standing on your terrace?"

"Because I'm curious what you're for."

She laughed again, shorter this time, almost surprised. Then she studied him: the black suit, the half-mask pushed up into his hair, the watch in his closed hand, the long pale scar on the back of his wrist that no tailor had ever managed to hide. She studied him as though he were a file, and he understood, with an unwelcome little shock of recognition, that he had been appraised by a professional.

"I'll tell you what I think," she said. "I think you have a game. I think it's a good one, and I think nobody has beaten it, and I think you've been looking for someone who could for a very long time."

"And if you're right?"

"Then name your price."

The words went through him oddly. It was the formula he used himself, at the end of every negotiation of his adult life, to close a deal on his own terms. He had never heard it said back.

"No," said Callum.

For the first time that night, she looked genuinely surprised.

"I'm sorry?"

"You name yours," he said. "First. I want to know how much you think you're worth."

She was silent.

The braziers snapped. Far below, the Danse Macabre had ended and begun again. Win stood with her arms at her sides and her hair coming down, and the firelight lit one side of her face and left the other in darkness, and he watched her, with something that was not yet interest and not yet fear, decide how much of the truth she could afford to spend.

"Tonight," she said at last, "I'm priceless. Ask me again in the morning."

She turned and walked away across the terrace. At the glass door she stopped, without looking back.

"Mr. Draycott. For the record. I wasn't laughing at the drop."

"What were you laughing at?"

"I'd forgotten what it felt like," said Win, "to be looked at as if I were still going to be here tomorrow."

The door closed behind her.

Callum Draycott stood alone on the terrace for a long time. The sea went on hitting the rocks. After a while he looked down and found that his hand, the one that had held her ankle, was still shaking. He put it, deliberately, in his pocket.

In the other hand the watch lay open, and the hands had not moved.

Four seventeen, he thought. Four seventeen.

For one moment, I forgot to count.