Chapter 1
The problem with Fen Calloway was not that he was dangerous. Nora had grown up around dangerous men. She knew what they smelled like, knew how their voices dropped half a register when they got serious, knew the specific way they took up more space in a room than their actual bodies required.
The problem was that he didn’t look it.
He looked like someone’s older brother. He looked like the guy at the bar who buys a round for the table without making it weird. He had a crooked front tooth that should have made him less attractive and somehow didn’t, and he laughed with his whole face, and he was the kind of person strangers told things to on trains.
Nora knew all of this because she had spent four months cataloguing him from a distance.
She also knew he ran the Calloway network out of a building that looked like a very boring import company on the outside and was, on the inside, something she had not been able to fully map yet. She knew he had two phones and only answered one of them in front of other people. She knew he gave twenty percent tips regardless of service quality, which suggested either a rigidly held principle or the particular brand of guilt that money can’t metabolize.
She knew his coffee order.
She did not know how she was going to get close enough to find what her editor needed without getting herself killed.
The bar was on Callum Street, squeezed between a dry cleaner and a place that sold discount furniture. It had no sign. The regulars knew it as Rook’s, though nobody named Rook had worked there in eleven years. Nora knew this because she had talked to the current owner for a piece she’d written on neighborhood bars two years ago, before the bureau reassigned her to organized crime, before her whole career compressed into a single ongoing story she couldn’t tell anyone she was working on.
She sat at the far end of the bar. She ordered a Guinness because the pour took time and time was what she needed. The man she was watching was in the corner booth with two others she didn’t recognize, not looking at her, not looking at anything in particular. That was the thing about Fen Calloway. He never seemed to be paying attention and she had the distinct feeling he was paying attention to everything.
She was on her second sip when the stool beside her scraped and someone sat down.
“You’ve been in here four times this month,” said the someone. “Always that stool. Always a Guinness. Always alone.”
Nora did not turn her head. She took another sip. “Good beer. Good seat. I’m an introvert.”
“You’re a journalist.”
Now she turned.
Fen Calloway looked exactly like he looked from across a room, which was to say he looked completely harmless, and she had never been so aware of how badly that particular quality could be weaponized.
“I’m a lot of things,” she said.
“Nora Vass.” He said her name the same way he’d said journalist. Like he was reading from a list he’d already memorized. “You did that piece on the Aldermere port contracts. Good work. Shame about the ending.”
The ending had been her editor killing the third section because of legal. “Thanks.”
“You want to tell me what you’re doing in my bar?”
“Having a beer.”
“At my bar.”
She looked at him steadily. He looked back. There was nothing threatening in his expression, which was somehow the most threatening thing about it.
“I’m a regular,” she said. “I didn’t realize it required a permit.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one. “It doesn’t. I’m just curious.”
“About me.”
“About most things.” He signaled the bartender. “Can I buy you another?”
She should have said no. She had a list of things she should have done differently over the course of this investigation, and this was about to be added to it.
“Sure,” she said.
He didn’t ask her anything else that night. He bought her the beer and talked about the neighborhood and asked whether she’d tried the new Georgian place two blocks over, and she said no, and he said it was worth the walk. He was easy to talk to in a way that made her feel like she was being managed by a professional, except she couldn’t find the seam.
She left at ten-thirty. He was still in the booth when she walked out.
Outside on the pavement she stood in the cold for a second and breathed.
She’d spent four months avoiding his notice. She had been meticulous. She had changed her routes and varied her timings and sat in different spots. She had been, she thought, very good at this.
He had known her name.
He had known her work.
She pulled out her notebook and wrote: HE KNEW. Then she put it away and walked to the tube.
