“Why do I trust you?” Jane asks.
“I don’t know,” Ivy says. “I trust you too. And I’ve been trying to imagine finding out that my aunt, who was basically my mom, was an operative. You’ve been so cool about it. I’d be furious.”
“You have no idea.”
Ivy hesitates again. “I think,” she says cautiously, “you should let Mrs. Vanders tell you whatever she knows. All the details, whatever they are. It might not help right away. But maybe it’ll help eventually.”
Jane gives up on her dumbwaiter metaphor. As a tear slides down her face, Ivy takes her hand.
Aunt Magnolia? Jane thinks, then remembers, with a sad tug, that she’s no longer speaking to Aunt Magnolia.
“Come up to the attics,” Ivy says. “You’ll be safe up there.”
* * *
In the west attics, Jane finds Kiran and Mrs. Vanders standing on opposite sides of a long table, arguing.
“You understand this was over a hundred years ago?” Mrs. Vanders is saying in a voice of exasperation.
“What does that matter?”
“The first housekeeper of Tu Reviens had a son,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Her son had gotten mixed up in the Spanish-American War some years before and became an American operative. He’d also fallen in love with a Cuban agent.”
“How romantic,” says Kiran caustically.
“It ended with both of them dead.”
“Of course it did,” says Kiran, “or it wouldn’t be so romantic.”
“They were Mr. Vanders’s grandparents,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Afterward, Espions Sans Frontières approached his great-grandmother, the housekeeper, about secretly using her employer’s house. Given that such an organization might have saved her son, can you really blame her for saying yes?”
“Yes to lying to my great-great-grandfather, who trusted her?” Kiran says. “Yes to endangering everyone in this house, which wasn’t hers, for generation upon generation? For making the family liable?!”
Another pitched battle that’s been taking place behind Kiran finally erupts into something no one can ignore. It’s a quarrel between Patrick and Grace Panzavecchia, who’s refusing to get into the dumbwaiter. “Why don’t you make me?” the little girl yells. “Why don’t you stab me with methohexital, again? I hate you!”
“Yeah,” responds Patrick reasonably, “I know you do, Grace, but Christopher’s down there all alone with Cook.”
“Because you brought him down there!”
“Yes. I know it’s unfair,” says Patrick. “Now, do you want to be awake to look after your little brother, or do you want to be asleep?”
“I hate you!” Grace yells. “You ruined my life! You left Edward Jenner behind!”
Ivy pulls out a chair at the table, then nudges Jane toward it. Numbly, Jane sits, Jasper settling in around her feet. Then Ivy moves to the end of the table and begins wrapping something with long sheets of bubble wrap. Vaguely, Jane recognizes it as the Brancusi sculpture, which is complete again, a flat, oblong piece of marble—the missing fish—attached to the pedestal. Ivy takes great care, as if she’s winding sticking plaster around a broken bone. The fish is pale and smooth, bonelike. It soothes Jane to watch.
“It’s your decision, Grace,” says Patrick calmly. “Awake or asleep?”
“It’s not my decision!” Grace says. “I didn’t decide to go away from home! I didn’t decide to leave Edward Jenner behind!”
“It’s true, she didn’t,” says Ivy quietly. “The least we could’ve done was collect Edward Jenner.”
“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders sharply, “that’s enough.”
“Okay,” says Kiran, “I give up. Isn’t Edward Jenner the guy who developed the smallpox vaccine? Like, two hundred years ago?”
“Edward Jenner—” Patrick begins.
“I was not talking to you,” says Kiran behind bared teeth, not looking at Patrick.
“It’s the dog,” Jane realizes.
Mrs. Vanders clears her throat. “Yes,” she says, “that’s correct. When Ivy, Patrick, and Cook collected the children from school and the park, the dog was at home. They had to leave him behind.”
“You left him alone in the house,” Grace says. “Now some mean people probably have him. He’s living with strangers. He’s a German shepherd! That means he’s genetically predisposed to degenerative myelopathy! Who’s going to take care of him?” Grace’s eyes are swollen and crying, her fists are held tight, and her small body is taut with the fury of despair. In Grace’s eyes, Jane sees something she recognizes. Grace Panzavecchia has been betrayed.
“Why is this necessary?” Jane hears herself asking, with real indignation. “She’s eight years old!”
With a sigh, Mrs. Vanders pulls a chair out and, heavily, sits down. “Because she’s in danger and we intend to help her.”
“But not my dog!” says Grace. “You don’t intend to help my dog! I hate my parents! They drugged me with a diuretic so I’d have to go to the bathroom so you could grab me! What kind of parents drug their kid? You’re all kid-snatchers!”
“Christopher is downstairs alone,” Patrick reminds her.
“I hate you!”
Jasper has stirred from Jane’s feet. He steps out from under the table tentatively. He walks a few steps toward Grace and stands before her.
“That’s not my dog!” says Grace. “That’s the stupidest dog I’ve ever seen! What’s wrong with his legs!” Then she drops down onto the floor and holds out her arms and Jasper climbs into her lap and she starts yelling “Ow! Ow!” because he’s heavy, and then she wraps her arms around him, presses her face into his neck, and starts howling. Jane is proud of Jasper. Possibly he’s the most sensible adult in the attics.
“I am never,” Ivy mutters from her end of the table, “ever, involving myself in anything like this again.” She’s now turned her attention to a painting. It’s the picture of the man in the feathered hat, the Rembrandt Jane saw on her first day in this house, sitting on a table inside Mrs. Vanders’s glass restoration room. It’s large and seems heavy. Ivy labors to move it around.
Grace throws her head back from Jasper and yells, “Someday I’m going to kill you all!”
“This is the last time I’m asking, Grace,” says Patrick. “Awake in the dumbwaiter or asleep in the dumbwaiter?” Patrick remains calm; he might be giving her the choice of broccoli or peas for dinner.
“She’s not going to keep quiet,” says Ivy. “Do you want a screaming dumbwaiter to slide past the gala guests who are looking at the second-story art?”
“No,” says Patrick, “which is why, unless you’re silent all the way down, Grace, Cook is going to put you to sleep the moment you reach the cellars, and then Christopher will see you that way.”
Grace has grown eerily calm. “Someday I’m going to kill you all,” she says, then adds, specially for Patrick, “And I’m going to kill you first.”
“Someday,” Patrick says with a suppressed sigh, “you’re going to look back on this experience and be amazed by how much latitude we allowed you, given the circumstances.”
Ivy makes a tiny snorting noise that brings Mrs. Vanders swinging sideways to direct at her the full force of an outraged expression.
“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders, “we’re aware of your dissatisfaction and we’re used to your childish tantrums. But HQ will not extend you the same latitude. If you expect fair treatment from them during your exit interview, you’re going to have to curb your self-righteousness and your sarcasm long before you get to Geneva.”
Ivy doesn’t respond to this, only looks down at the Rembrandt as if she’d like to pick it up and smash it on the floor. Instead, she sighs, runs one gentle finger along its top ridge, then eases a soft sack over its form. She follows this with the most enormous sealable plastic bag Jane has ever seen.
“I wa
nt my brother,” says Grace.
“Have you decided, then?” asks Patrick.
There’s a pause. “I’ll go if I can take the dog with me in the dumbwaiter,” says Grace.
“Quietly?” says Patrick.
“I’ll be quiet,” says Grace. “I can’t help it if the dog starts barking.”
“What are you going to do, pinch him?” says Patrick.
“You would think that,” says Grace, in a voice of the purest disgust. “You would think I’d pinch the dog, probably because you pinch dogs every day for fun.”
“All right,” says Patrick, with a touch of weariness, gesturing toward the dumbwaiter. “Get in.”
“Put the dog in first,” says Grace.
“You think I’m going to trick you and send you down without the dog?”
“Yes.”
Patrick chuckles once, briefly, then cuts himself off. He crouches down to Jasper. Once Jasper is standing cheerfully in the dumbwaiter carriage, looking like some sort of strange wall ornament, Grace climbs in around him. She grabs on to him and shoots Patrick one last expression of loathing.
“Good luck, Grace,” Patrick says, then shuts the dumbwaiter door. He hauls at the cables in the narrow side cabinet for some time, then slows his pulling and stops. Leaning back against the dumbwaiter door, he closes his eyes and releases an enormous sigh.
“I love that kid,” he says.
“Do you?” says Kiran, not looking at him. “That explains why you’re so awful to her.”
An amused bitterness twists Patrick’s mouth. “And you’ve always been so wonderful to me,” he says. “How’s your fancy boyfriend?”
“Don’t you even pretend that this conversation is that conversation,” Kiran says. “At least you know all my secrets.”
“Kiran,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Patrick has wanted to tell you his secrets for some time. Mr. Vanders and I absolutely forbade it, because they aren’t just his secrets, they’re ours, and many other people’s too.”
“My mother forbade me to tell anyone her secrets too,” Kiran says hotly. “Guess who I told anyway? Patrick.”
“We’re not going to discuss your mother’s secrets,” says Mrs. Vanders.
“You know why?” says Kiran. “Because I trusted him. Because I wanted him to know me and all the places I’ve been!”
Mrs. Vanders stands so quickly that her chair shudders back across the floor. “I forbid any talk of your mother and her magic in this room,” she says in a voice that reaches into the roots of Jane’s teeth. “We’re trying to do good, simple, natural work here!”
“Oh my god,” says Kiran, suddenly sounding exhausted. Pulling out a chair, she slumps into it, rubbing her face. “Listen to yourself, Vanny. My mother isn’t a witch, she’s a scientist.”
Jane doesn’t understand this turn in the conversation, but she finds she doesn’t much care. She’s watching Ivy lower the Brancusi, then the Rembrandt, into crates.
Mrs. Vanders sits down again, clasps her hands together, and directs her steely expression at Kiran. “I’ll explain everything, as long as you swear there’ll be no more talk of your mother.”
“All right!” says Kiran, flapping an impatient hand. “I swear! Jeez!”
“Very well,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Victoria and Giuseppe Panzavecchia are microbiologists.”
“I know that,” says Kiran. “Apparently they’re also secret agents.”
“The Panzavecchias are not agents,” Mrs. Vanders says. “They’re contractors. They’ve been working under the auspices of a special CIA research and development grant for the purposes of discovering whether it’s possible to develop an immediately contagious strain of smallpox, the indicative symptoms of which manifest late in the course of infection.”
Kiran freezes, then speaks in a tone of pure disgust. “You mean a smallpox that wouldn’t be recognized as smallpox until it had already spread far and wide.”
“Yes,” says Mrs. Vanders, “precisely. They’ve been contracted to experiment with forms of smallpox that could serve as effective biological weapons.”
“This is your good, simple, natural work? Genetically modified smallpox?”
“In case you’re wondering why I want out,” Ivy mutters from her end of the table, where she’s now pouring an avalanche of packing peanuts into the crate containing the Brancusi. They make a tinkling sound, like ice. Patrick walks over to her and gathers up the ones that hit the floor, plowing them with his boots.
“We don’t work with biological weapons ourselves,” says Mrs. Vanders. “And our understanding is that the CIA runs these experiments not with the intention of using the weapons themselves, but rather to be better prepared should an enemy to the United States develop the same strain and attack with it.”
“Oh, right, I’ve never heard that one before!” Kiran practically yells.
“Think what you will. Their intentions don’t matter to Espions Sans Frontières. We’re nonpartisan.”
“Another word for complicit.”
“A couple of weeks back,” Mrs. Vanders continues, ignoring this, “Giuseppe and Victoria had a breakthrough. They discovered something unexpected, I’ve no idea how. But the fruit of their discovery was pretty much what they’d been directed to develop, a strain of smallpox that’s highly contagious long before the carrier can begin to suspect it’s smallpox. And then one odd thing and one terrible thing happened. The odd thing is that when they informed their research director at the CIA of their success, that man became afflicted suddenly with a different experimental strain of smallpox, an opposite sort of strain in which the indicative symptoms manifest very quickly. A week or so later, he died, and ‘A Smallpox Case in New York’ became headline news.”
“That’s the odd thing?” Jane says numbly. “That’s the odd thing? What’s the terrible thing?”
“No, wait,” says Kiran. “I heard about the smallpox guy, of course, but not that it was some sort of experimental strain of smallpox. They said he was a suicidal guy who used to work for the World Health Organization and had broken into the laboratories of the CDC in Atlanta. Which we’ve all been assured,” Kiran says, her voice growing harder, “is one of only two places in the world where the smallpox virus is kept, the other being a closely monitored lab in Russia. Smallpox,” she says in a voice now verging on shrill, “is no longer supposed to be a danger anywhere in the world.”
“Have your little hissy fit, Kiran,” says Mrs. Vanders, “then return yourself to reason. Your brother wears rose-colored glasses, but you’ve never been naïve.”
“How did that guy get smallpox?” Kiran demands.
“We don’t know,” says Mrs. Vanders. “He certainly never broke into any lab in Atlanta. The Panzavecchias believe he was infected with a strain they kept in their lab in New York, which means that someone got access to a part of that lab no one but they and a few particular people with CIA connections should have had access to. Which suggests a traitor.”
“Okay,” says Kiran. “Why did the guy get smallpox?”
“We don’t know that either,” says Mrs. Vanders. “But we think it’s likely he was infected as a message to the United States from some other state.”
“What’s the message?” Kiran asks.
“‘We know what you’re doing,’” says Mrs. Vanders. “‘We can get in anywhere. We’re one step ahead of you, you can’t protect yourself, and by the way, thanks for inventing all this nifty smallpox.’”
“Okay, that’s terrifying,” says Kiran. “But why infect the guy with some random strain? Why not the new, successful strain?”
“Two reasons,” says Mrs. Vanders. “One, the strain they chose was one unlikely to create an epidemic. It’s a message, not an act of war, you understand? The man suspected almost immediately what disease he had. He was able to quarantine himself. He called the hospital, sent them p
ictures of his mouth and skin, and told them his made-up CDC story, so that only vaccinated health workers would be sent to care for him. Two, the Panzavecchias’ new strain wasn’t available, because once they realized what they had, they got scared. They brought it, and all their notes about it, home, where they could control who had access to it. Which leads us to the terrible thing.”
“Home!” cries Kiran. “Oh god. Oh god! Please tell me Baby Leo doesn’t have smallpox!”
“Of course he doesn’t have smallpox,” says Mrs. Vanders. “What do you think they did, left vials of it in his crib? Baby Leo has chicken pox.”
“How do you know?”
“Because one of the cousins who attended Grace’s eighth birthday party two weeks ago had chicken pox. Don’t worry about Baby Leo. Espions Sans Frontières has engaged a doctor to care for him personally.”
“Philip Okada,” Jane says flatly.
“Philip Okada?” Kiran says. “Philip Okada is a spy?”
“He’s a doctor,” says Mrs. Vanders, “and a British asset who’s helping us out. Not a spy. You need to stop throwing these words around. In our circles, spy is a rather derogatory term.”
“Well, forgive me for the gap in my education. You’re the one who could’ve taught me the vocabulary. What’s the terrible thing that happened?”
“It relates to Grace,” says Mrs. Vanders.
“Grace?” says Kiran. “Obviously she doesn’t have smallpox or she wouldn’t be in this house.”
“Will you get it out of your head that someone has smallpox?” says Mrs. Vanders.
“You’ve made it clear that anyone could!” Kiran fires back. “We all could tomorrow!”
“Oh, everything could happen tomorrow!” says Mrs. Vanders. “If you can’t cope with all the awful things that are always on the verge of happening, then this isn’t the work for you!”
“Whoever said it was?” says Kiran. “Fucking hell, Vanny!”
Mrs. Vanders glares at Kiran with her hallmark enigmatic aggression. Kiran glares back. Jane has no idea where everyone’s getting all this energy.
“Grace doesn’t have smallpox,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Her problem is that she’s a natural-born snoop with an extraordinary affinity for mnemonic devices.”