![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
White Collar fic: The Right Way to Fall (2/2)
Back to Part One
As the days passed, the tension cranked up -- not just for Neal and Mozzie, but for Elizabeth as well. She was working long hours overseeing the installation of the Kleinfeld and Tang Dynasty exhibits, and didn't have time for walks in the park, or hunting down phone numbers of elusive angel paramours. If she'd noticed that Neal had not called her back, she didn't keep pushing. He hoped she'd taken the hint.
Peter was snappy and withdrawn, on the infrequent occasions when Neal saw him. He was obviously trying to reassert the formal distance that was supposed to go along with their roles as guardian angel and charge, but it wasn't working, based on his tendency to show up in Neal's apartment at odd hours. "I should call the police," he said, beer in hand, staring over Neal's balcony at the lights of the city. "Anonymous tip. Get both of you arrested before you wreck your life even more than you already have. Or get someone killed."
"I'm not in any real danger; you'll be there," Neal pointed out through the open glass doors. He studied the completed, aged Kleinfeld from a distance, then up close. Mozzie was right, it was ugly and it wasn't going to net them much money, but everyone said it couldn't be done, and that was why he had to do it.
"I shouldn't be, though. We shouldn't even be having this discussion, because you shouldn't be -- this." He waved a hand to encompass Neal, the apartment, the forged painting. "There's no telling what you'd be today if I'd done my job properly. A painter, a corporate executive --"
"Dead at the age of three, is what I'd be," Neal said. "Will you stop it, seriously? I'm tired of being your excuse to wallow in misguided guilt. I am who I am, Peter. I like who I am. Maybe I'd be different and maybe I wouldn't be, but what's done is done, and I'm not sorry you saved my life all those years ago. Are you?"
Peter was silent for so long that Neal had to look up to make sure he hadn't disappeared again. He was still there, though. "No," he said at last, gently. "No, I'm not. And I don't regret this assignment, though I have to say that it's probably a good thing we don't pick our assignments -- no guardian angel in his right mind would ask to be assigned to you."
"Gee, thanks," Neal said, but he smiled.
"But you're right. If I had it to do over, I wouldn't change a thing. It's had its ups and downs, but --" He raised his beer in a semi-ironic salute. "Being your guardian angel was never boring."
"You're speaking in the past tense," Neal said, suddenly wary. "Do you know something I don't?"
Peter set the beer on the railing, and studied the view for a couple of minutes before he replied. "After this is all over, after I've seen you through yet another needlessly dangerous and avoidable crisis -- I'm putting in for reassignment. This is another reason why we don't usually keep an assignment for more than fifteen or twenty years: it messes with your head. I mean, look at me. I'm standing here in your apartment --"
"Outside it, you mean," Neal said flippantly, to cover the sinking sensation in his stomach, like the bottom had just dropped out of the world.
"Outside it, okay, but I'm still here, having a beer with someone who isn't even supposed to know I exist. I'm wanting -- things I'm not supposed to want --" He waved a hand at the city skyline in the general direction of the DeArmitt Gallery and Elizabeth. "It's a slippery slope. This is why the rules exist in the first place. You have a two-minute conversation with a three-year-old kid, and the next thing you know, you're fantasizing about a wife and a dog and a house in the suburbs, and -- Damn it, Neal," he burst out. Neal had never heard him swear before. "This isn't who I am."
"How do you know who you are?" Neal countered. "Maybe your mistake wasn't letting the rules slide just once, but letting them define you for so long." He tried to keep his voice normal and light, though he still felt like he'd been sucker-punched.
"Look who's talking," Peter shot back at him. "You never met a rule you didn't want to break."
"Okay, maybe I'm a bad example, but can you meet me in the middle, at least? If I can admit that I might have bent the rules too much in my life, can you return the favor by granting that maybe some rules need to be bent a little?"
"Are you admitting that?" Peter said, in a tone that was part hope, part challenge. "Does this mean you're thinking about calling off the DeArmitt heist?"
"No, damn it!"
They stood staring at each other, both of them breathing hard, tense with futile, frustrated anger.
The door opened behind Neal. "I think I've come up with a foolproof getaway plan --" Mozzie began, then broke off. "On second thought, it looks like I'm interrupting something --"
"No," Neal said. "Stay." He wasn't sure which of them he was talking to. He'd taken his eyes off Peter, and when he looked back he expected Peter to be gone, only to find him still on the balcony. Perhaps vanishing in full view of a mortal was too blatant a violation of his angelic code.
"I was just leaving anyway," Peter said. He set the beer bottle on the table. Glancing at Mozzie, he left via the door, closing it behind him. Neal didn't hear his footfalls on the stairs, though. He'd probably vanished as soon as he was out of sight.
"I'm guessing that was your mystery source," Mozzie said, eyes narrowed speculatively.
"Yes." Neal offered nothing more. "You said you had an improvement to the getaway plan?"
He could see that Mozzie wanted to ask, but they both had a history of respecting each other's privacy that was too well established. "There's a laundry on the next street over from the gallery, and every night at 12:15 a truck goes out," Mozzie began, and just like that, they were off and running.
******
Neal wasn't sure what rebellious urge made him call Elizabeth and invite her out to dinner the night before the double show opening. "I'm sure you're running around in fifteen directions with the opening tomorrow," he said, "but you work hard, Elizabeth. For once, you can delegate. Have a relaxing evening and be unstressed and unwound for the show's opening tomorrow."
"Oh, Nick," she said, after a moment's silence. "Nick, you're a very nice man, and I've enjoyed our talks, but I don't think --"
Now it was his turn to be startled. "No, I didn't mean it like that. I just meant --"
He hesitated. Up until that moment, he'd only meant to ask her to a friendly dinner, like their lunch date in the park, and enjoy one more conversation about art. It was his last chance; in twenty-four hours he'd be out of her life for good.
But what emerged instead was, "-- meant to ask you on behalf of Peter, actually. You know, the friend of mine that you met in the park --"
"Yes, I remember him," she said a little too quickly.
Neal didn't look around the apartment, but, though he hadn't heard a sound, he could actually feel the disapproval radiated by one seriously pissed-off guardian angel. It was like being in the same room with an angry cat. "He's too shy to ask you himself," he said. "But he's interested, believe me. There's an excellent restaurant on the edge of Little Italy called L'Amora -- have you been there?"
"I've heard of it," she said.
And he knew she liked Italian food; it was in her file. Score one for Peter's stalker tendencies. "There's a reservation for two in my name at seven p.m. tonight." Originally it had been for Neal and her, but she didn't need to know that.
"Nick," Elizabeth said cautiously, "if this is some kind of practical joke --"
"It's not a joke," Neal said. "He'll be there. It's a ..." He hesitated. He wasn't sure what it was, really. "A thank you, I guess," he said, and hung up.
When he looked over his shoulder, he found that his mental picture of Peter's glower was pretty close to the reality. If looks could kill, he'd be a smoking pile of ash on the carpet. "What are you doing?" Peter demanded.
"What you won't. If you're going to take the fall for breaking the rules, shouldn't you have some fun along the way?"
"Give me your phone. I'm calling her and telling her it's a mistake."
Neal hid the phone behind his back. "Live a little, Peter. What I've done is set you up for a pleasant evening with a pretty girl who likes you. There are worse fates."
"Yeah? Like pretending to be something I'm not, and leading her on? What am I supposed to tell her when she asks for a second date?"
"Why are you thinking second date when you haven't even had the first one?" Neal asked. "Go to the restaurant, Peter. Eat good food. Enjoy her company. If she asks, you can tell her that you're going away on business and won't be back for a long time. That lends you a very romantic air of mystique. It's not even technically lying."
"I'd be breaking every rule in the handbook." But he looked tempted nonetheless.
Neal gave him a little shove towards the door. "Peter, go. Have fun. You've been watching my back for thirty-two years. When was the last time you did something for yourself, something fun, something that makes you happy?"
Peter resisted Neal's efforts to push him on, and looked at him steadily with that too-penetrating gaze. "You're up to something. I know you are."
"What I'm up to is making sure that you have one night of fun for the first time in two thousand years. And you're going to be keeping a pretty girl waiting if you don't get a move on, so go."
"I can get there instantly," Peter pointed out. Then he looked down at himself, at the rumpled folds of the draped coat, and looked back at Neal with panic in his eyes. "I have no idea what to wear."
"Wear what you've got on. Elizabeth doesn't strike me as a woman who cares about clothes. She likes you." Neal made little shooing motions. "Go!"
Peter gave him one last look of pure panic, and vanished.
Neal waited to see if he came back. He didn't. The apartment had the emptier-than-usual feeling that he'd started to recognize which meant that Peter was really and truly gone. Neal drank a half-glass of wine and examined the Kleinfeld from every possible angle. It was as perfect a copy of Kleinfeld's untitled #9 as he knew how to make. He checked his watch: 7:15. Peter's date should be underway, and Neal sent well-wishes in the direction of the angel and Elizabeth: he genuinely hoped that they were having fun and enjoying each other's company. Then he called Mozzie.
"Hey, Moz. You busy tonight?"
"I have an excellent alibi, if that's what you're asking."
"What I'm asking is whether you'd be free to break into the DeArmitt Gallery tonight."
There was a very long pause. Then Mozzie said, "We've been planning this for weeks. And the plan, all along, was that we attend the opening, let every art appraiser and amateur enthusiast in the city take a good look at the paintings and make sure they're authentic, and then, after everyone's left, all tired and full of wine and canapes, we come back and swap the art. As opposed to doing it right before the spotlight's about to shine on it, when everyone is in a state of heightened security and paranoia. Which would be insane."
He said all of this in one breath.
"Moz, Moz, I know what the plan was," Neal said when Mozzie had to stop for air. "And this is very last-minute, I know. But the more I think about it -- the point is to prove that we can do it, right? That we can forge a supposedly unforgeable piece of art, and pass it off as the real thing right under the noses of the city's art intelligentsia and critics. How much do we prove by taking the real element of risk out of the equation: the opening of the show?"
And Peter's busy tonight, he thought. This is when I show him, when I show ME, that I can do this on my own, without the safety net. If he really means to reassign himself, I have to learn to do it sooner or later. Plus, he's got Elizabeth busy on the other side of Manhattan, so I know she's out of harm's way if things go wrong.
The silence on the other end of the line was becoming ominous. "Come on, Moz," Neal said. "I can't do this without you."
Mozzie heaved a huge sigh. "Well, you're the one who's taking the actual risk, the breaking and entering and whatnot. I'm just the wheelman."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's your funeral," Mozzie said, and despite his burgeoning relief -- he'd been worried that Moz wouldn't go for it at all -- Neal couldn't help wishing that his friend had chosen a slightly less ominous turn of phrase.
******
If only all their heists went so well.
Between the two of them, Neal and Mozzie had the guards' shifts worked out to the minute. Mozzie's little gizmos in the ceiling worked perfectly, feeding a taped loop to the cameras. The motion sensors and the door alarms were a snap. Neal was in and out in record time. There was no sign of Russian mobsters or anyone else. They didn't even have to use their emergency laundry-truck method of escape.
While he was in the darkened gallery, Neal couldn't help taking a long, covetous look at the Tang Dynasty sculptures, all arranged neatly and awaiting the curious eyes of the public in the morning. It was so very tempting to swipe one of them, just a very small one -- but, no; when it was discovered missing, the gallery would erupt in chaos, greatly heightening the chances of the Kleinfeld being discovered. And Elizabeth's opening would be ruined, which Neal wouldn't wish upon her.
Back in June's loft, Neal poured two glasses of wine -- one of June's best vintages. "To every job being as smooth as this one."
"And to us," Mozzie added. "Because we are the bomb, my friend."
"Hear, hear," Neal murmured, and drank.
They both looked at the real Kleinfeld, sitting in place of the fake one. Even to Neal's eye, the two of them were identical, in all their glorious postmodern homeliness. It wasn't his own eye that he had to fool, of course; the question was whether anyone at the gallery would detect it. If so, well, he'd tried. And if not, then he'd pulled off the coup everyone said was impossible.
Neal grinned. It was ironic that in order to "win", he had to make sure that no one found out what they'd done.
"You don't have to attend the opening, you know," Mozzie said. "Really, there's no point."
"Of course I do, and of course there is. What's the use of passing off a fake under the noses of half the art experts in the city if I'm not there to watch?"
"I could get you a feed from the cameras."
"It's not the same as actually be -- being there." The source of the interruption in his thought processes was Peter, who had appeared in the apartment with his usual sudden silence. At least he had, by pure chance, appeared behind Mozzie, not in front of him.
"Yeah, looking forward to that show opening," Neal said hastily, to cover any noise that Peter might be about to make. He saw Peter open his mouth -- he was grinning, his hair was mussed, presumably the date had been a hit -- and then, noticing Mozzie, Peter snapped his mouth shut and went silent. "Actually, if all goes well, I haven't ruled out the idea of being Nick Winters for awhile longer. The DeArmitt Gallery wants to show my work. If I have a real show as Nick, in a respected gallery, it'll make Nick Winters pretty nearly bulletproof."
Neal had been hoping Peter would vanish again, but he showed no signs of doing so. Instead he crossed to the fridge and opened it, which was the point at which Mozzie noticed him.
"Gah!" Moz nearly spilled his wine. "And I thought I was ninja-silent. I didn't hear you come in."
"He does that," Neal said, and gave Peter a steady look that was not quite a scowl. He was curious how the date had gone, but not right now, while he and Moz were still coming down off the high of a successful con that he couldn't admit to Peter he'd pulled off. He wanted to settle in with a glass of wine and enjoy the afterglow for a while.
Luckily, as much social obtuseness as Mozzie could occasionally display, he did understand the value of discretion when discussing criminal activity in the presence of unknown parties. "Yes, so," he said, glancing back and forth between the two of them. "The night is young. Places to go, things to do. I'll, uh, be in touch."
"Wait --" Neal began, but Moz was already out the door, though not without mouthing "Tell me later" and jabbing a quick finger at Peter.
Neal sighed and topped off his glass of wine. "Help yourself," he said wryly, when Peter turned back from the fridge with a bottle of beer in hand.
"Thanks. Just did." Peter flopped in the chair that Mozzie had just vacated. "That was -- she is -- Neal, that woman's amazing. Just -- amazing."
A little of Neal's stolen buzz began to sneak back. He'd never seen Peter so animated, so obviously happy. He was a little jealous -- a brief longing for Kate skipped across his heart -- but it would take a far more hard-hearted man than Neal Caffrey to remain unaffected by Peter's obvious joy. "I take it the date went well."
"Yes. Yes, it did. Well, beyond a little understandable awkwardness at the beginning."
Neal grinned; he could imagine that, both of them flustered and tongue-tied and blushing at each other. He wished he'd been a fly on the wall to see it.
"But after that ... I don't know, I thought it would be hard to find something to talk about, but it wasn't. It was just ... relaxing. Easy." He blushed a little. "She invited me up to her place for drinks."
"You dog, you."
Now the blush was flaming. "We didn't -- I'm not -- Nothing happened. Just a good-night kiss. She said she hasn't met anyone like me before." Peter sighed, and his elation deflated like a leaky balloon. "She doesn't know the half of it. I can't believe I did that, Neal. I just spent the entire evening lying to her."
"Did you lie, really?" Neal asked. "Knowing you, I'm guessing you just danced around it. You haven't said anything to her yet that you can't come back from, have you?"
"What am I supposed to say?" Peter said. Bitterness laced his words. "If I told her the truth, she'd think I was insane. And I'm leaving anyway, after --" He paused. Looked at Neal. Looked closely.
Uh-oh, Neal thought. Peter was too damn perceptive sometimes.
"You look ... satisfied," Peter said after a moment. "I know why I'm satisfied. What did you do tonight that's making you look so cheerful?"
Neal tried to wipe any traces of cheerfulness off his face. "Aren't I normally cheerful? I'm a cheerful person, Peter."
The temperature in the apartment seemed to plummet.
"You robbed the gallery tonight, didn't you?" Peter said. "The dinner with Elizabeth -- you planned that just to get me out of the way."
"It was not planned to get you out of the way," Neal protested. It was a completely spontaneous excuse to get you out of the way. Totally different. "You enjoyed yourself, right? You and Elizabeth both did."
Peter stood up, leaving his untouched beer on the table, and circled to look at the Kleinfeld. "Is this the real one?"
There was no way Neal could answer that question that wouldn't be either a direct lie or an admission of guilt, so he stayed silent.
"Neal," Peter said wearily.
Neal's temper flared. "So what if I did? You know who I am, Peter, and what I am. Yes, that's the real Kleinfeld. And the whole thing went off without a hitch."
"Behind my back!"
"Yes, so? You're the one who keeps telling me I need to learn to get along without you. So I did. Moz and I did the whole thing without the usual guardian-angel safety net, and you know what? It went fine. Better than fine. Not a single hair on any of these people's heads was harmed in any way." Neal slapped his hand on the pile of file folders that still graced the edge of the table. "Go ahead and put in for reassignment, Peter, because I'm doing just fine without you." And possibly doing even BETTER when you're not nagging me, he thought, but managed, with a heroic effort, not to add. Some words were impossible to take back.
"I don't believe this," Peter said. He looked exhausted, suddenly -- crumpled in his overcoat. "I thought we were getting somewhere, but you haven't changed at all, have you?"
He vanished.
"The only person who ever wanted me to change was you," Neal told the empty air bitterly, hoping Peter was still listening.
He took his glass of wine, and then, on reflection, the whole bottle, and went to bed. So much for enjoying the moment. The moment was pretty well ruined now.
******
By mid-afternoon Neal had managed to shake a lingering hangover, with generous applications of vitamins and coffee, and he headed down to the DeArmitt Gallery. It wouldn't be his first look at the show -- that had been last night, of course -- but it would be his first look in daylight, as it was meant to be seen. The reception was scheduled for 6 p.m., but the show was already open to the public. Neal wandered through, taking a special look at "his" Kleinfeld, and then enjoyed the Tang Dynasty exhibit for a while. Around him, tuxedo-clad caterers had begun setting up long white-draped tables for the opening refreshments.
"Isn't it lovely?" said a voice at his elbow, and he turned to see Elizabeth. Neal had heard of people looking radiant, but this was the first time he'd actually seen what it meant: it was like a warm glow lit her from within, spilling out in beauty and light to strike joy from everyone who came in contact with her. She was dressed for the occasion in a sweeping black gown, with her hair piled on her head in a simple yet striking updo, and Neal could recognize in her the same excitement that he felt in the buildup to a con. It wasn't just the adrenaline and endorphins of the big day, though. She was happy right down to her toes. Happiness practically spilled off her, the way it had off Peter last night.
I did this, Neal thought, and wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.
"I just have to thank you, Nick," she said, and tucked her hand through his arm. "For introducing me to Peter, and setting up the date last night. You're right, he's so shy that I don't think he would ever have asked me on his own, but we had a wonderful time."
"Thank you," he managed to say. "I mean, you're welcome. It was my pleasure, really."
And what happens now? he thought bleakly. When he chooses duty over her, and the days and then the weeks go by and he never calls, and all that joy drains right back out of her.
But -- no. Of all the decisions in his life that Neal had questioned afterwards, he couldn't believe that this one had been a mistake. Seize the day had always been his motto, and he'd seized one beautiful, perfect evening for Peter and Elizabeth. No matter what happened tonight or evermore, he had no regrets about that.
And there was something else that he needed to do. Maybe he should wait until the end of the evening, in case it produced awkward questions; he'd hate to have to duck out early to avoid a situation of his own making. But this felt like the right time.
"My name isn't Nick," he said, looking down into her eyes. "That's just a pseudonym that I use for my work." Which was entirely true, as far as it went. "My name's Neal Caffrey. I don't plan to tell everyone, but I wanted you to know."
She looked surprised for a moment, then she blinked and laughed. "Well, you're hardly the first artist to use a professional name. Though in your case, I think your real name has quite a lot of charm. I could understand if it was, say, Edwin Dweezilbaum ..."
Neal laughed, the coiled tension easing out of him. Peter was right, there was something about this woman that set you at ease, no matter what. "Let's just say I like to keep my professional and private life separate."
"I understand. I think it's a wise decision." She looked at him with a clear-eyed, speculative gaze. "So at least that part of what Peter said about you in the park was true," she began, and just as Neal started to think that he might not like where this was going, something over at the refreshment tables got her attention and she hurried off with a hasty, "Oh dear, no, you can't set that table up there, it's blocking a fire exit --"
Released for the moment, Neal resumed his wandering in and out of the sculpture. He texted Mozzie: SHOW IS GOOD, YOU SHOULD BE HERE.
The reply came back almost immediately: SECURITY NIGHTMARE, NOT MY SCENE.
Neal grinned and tucked away the phone. Moz was right, this sort of group event was a paranoiac's worst nightmare. Neal enjoyed it, though. He thrived on the electric atmosphere of a social gathering, especially when the topic at hand was one that was near and dear to his heart.
And so far, no one seemed to have tumbled to the forged Kleinfeld. Of course, with the ugly-duckling Kleinfelds right next to the beautiful Tang sculptures, the Kleinfeld room was showing a definite lack of patronage compared to the buzz of conversation surrounding the Tang exhibit.
The Russian mafia was here, though. Neal wasn't sure if Dimikov was among them, but he'd spotted three guys that he pegged immediately as "muscle", and unobtrusively swung close enough to one of them to hear him having a quiet conversation on his cell phone in a language with a distinctly Slavic sound.
They were almost certainly planning something. The question on Neal's mind was how far he should let them go with it. "Honor among thieves" might be a laughably naive myth, but there was still some truth to it, at least to the extent that it was considered bad form to mess with someone else's operation for no reason. Screwing the other guy if you were both after the same jewels? Perfectly fine, an accepted part of the chase. Narcing on the other guy just for the warm glow of helping out the cops and returning the family jewels to their rightful owner ... well, if word of that sort of thing got around on the street, Neal figured a lot of doors would slam shut for him.
"Peter?" he murmured, barely moving his lips. There was nowhere to be alone in the gallery, even in the less-populated Kleinfeld exhibit, and thus no opportunity to get Peter's attention. If Peter was here. As he wandered the exhibit, his mind going in circles, fear began to crawl up his spine: Peter might have pulled out for good this time. He'd said he planned to leave after the Kleinfeld job, and Neal had pulled that one off -- without him, as he'd taken pains to point out. And Peter had been pretty freaked about his date with Elizabeth.
Would he just pull up stakes and leave without saying goodbye? It seemed uncharacteristically spontaneous for a guy who'd spent thirty-two years watching Neal's every move. On the other hand, given Peter's crisis of conscience about breaking the rules, and the fact that he'd done almost nothing but break rules over the last couple of weeks ...
Maybe he'd broken down, decided to be a good law-abiding angel, and left. But maybe it was even worse, and he'd been pulled off Neal-watching duty by his superiors.
Neal circled the room aimlessly, while his thoughts went in circles as well. Then he sighed -- at himself, at the whole messed-up situation, he wasn't sure -- and looked around for Elizabeth. He finally found her at the refreshment tables, directing a rearrangement of canapes. "Elizabeth," Neal said, and touched her elbow. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"
"I'm a little busy," she began. Then she looked at him, and whatever she saw on his face must have convinced her, because she gave a last instruction to the caterer ("Please do keep the shrimp ones separate from the others; some people are allergic") and let Neal draw her away. "What's wrong?"
"I think we're about to have trouble," Neal began, and that was the moment when the door slammed with a very final crash, and several men carrying assault rifles and wearing ski masks burst into the room.
"Hands in the air!" one of them bellowed over the sound of startled screaming. "Everyone on the floor!"
Neal had been over the gallery plans dozens of times during his Kleinfeld theft prep, with a special eye for alcoves, back doors and places to hide. As soon as the trouble he'd anticipated began to materialize, he seized Elizabeth's arm and pulled her behind a pillar at the back of the Sato Room. There was a fire exit staircase that went to the offices upstairs. He wasn't sure where to go from there, since the office area hadn't been part of his careful memorizing of the plans, but anywhere had to be better than here, and Elizabeth would know the layout much better than he did.
Neal drew Elizabeth into the stairwell and closed the door quietly. The harsh voices of the gunmen, ordering their hostages to take off jewelry and throw away cell phones, went soft and muffled as the door thunked gently into place.
"I have to get out there --" Elizabeth gasped. "My friends -- my show --"
"There's nothing you can do. What we need to do" -- much as it pains me to admit it, he added inwardly -- "is call the police."
He took out his cell, shook it, held it up. "No signal?" he muttered in the phone's direction. "What do you mean, no signal?" Could the stairwell be blocking him that much? "Try your phone," he said, but with little hope that it would work. The mobsters were probably using some kind of jammer -- sophisticated equipment, if it was covering the entire building.
"I can't get a signal," Elizabeth said. "Maybe we need to get higher?"
"I doubt it'll help. What we need to do is get to a landline."
What I need to do is get out of here, Neal thought. This would be an excellent time for Peter to show up, except he hadn't, which meant that Peter was really and truly gone, and Neal was on his own.
A paralyzing shiver worked its way through him. No Peter, but lots of men with guns downstairs. He could die.
But then, so could Elizabeth, and she was quiet beside him, pale but composed. She'd wanted to go back and help her friends. Elizabeth might have a guardian angel of her own -- but no, Peter would have mentioned it, and besides, from what little he'd seen of Elizabeth so far, she'd probably been born rational and sensible; her guardian angel had probably been shuffled off to deal with more troublesome children when she was still in grade school.
Face it, Neal told himself grimly. This is what most people feel like ALL THE TIME. Don't like it? Too bad. Things need to be done, and you and Elizabeth need to do them.
The stairs ended at a fire door. Neal tested it cautiously -- not locked, but he pushed the bar in very slowly so as not to make noise. There was a carpeted hallway and a row of wooden office doors with small, frosted windows.
"This is where most of the regular business-office work is handled," Elizabeth whispered in his ear. "The gallery manager's office is upstairs, but mine is just to our left."
Below them, Neal heard the clunk of another door being opened into the stairwell. Elizabeth's eyes went round with fear. She and Neal slipped through the door and he tried to close it quietly enough not to make noise. Elizabeth, without being prompted, took out a large ring of keys and used one to unlock her office door. The two of them ducked inside. The office was considerably bigger than Neal had expected from its modest door, with a large desk, walls lined with filing cabinets, and a window with closed blinds.
Elizabeth reached for the light switch, but Neal shook his head. He crossed to the window and cracked the blinds to give them a bit of light, peeking out as he did so. The window overlooked a narrow slip of an employee parking area and a dumpster. They were on the third floor. It would be possible to go out this way, if he had to, but not comfortable. Also, he glimpsed at least one gunman moving around down there, too.
"This is Elizabeth Hart, assistant manager of the DeArmitt Gallery," Elizabeth said quietly, and Neal looked around to see her on the phone. "We're being robbed by a group of men with guns and masks. They have the entire gallery locked down, and they've taken hostages."
Neal leaned on the edge of the desk and murmured in her ear, "Russian mobsters. Tell them that. The name of the man in charge is Dimikov. They'll probably know him."
Elizabeth's eyes went large, but she passed the information along, and explained that she and one of the gallery's patrons were holed up in her office. Then she hung up the phone and turned to Neal.
"Long story," he said, holding up his hands.
"You're not -- with them," Elizabeth said cautiously.
"No. God, no." But I knew they were planning to rob your gallery, he thought, with a powerful twist of guilt. I just didn't realize they planned to pull off something this public and stupid. "Let's just say I've heard a few things, and put the pieces together."
Elizabeth's wary look promised that there would be discussion later. For now, though, she smoothed her hands down her long black skirt and tiptoed to the door. "It doesn't feel right to sit up here while people are in danger downstairs."
"As long as they cooperate, they'll probably be all right. The fact that the gang are wearing masks is a good sign; it means that they expect to leave witnesses alive. Anyway, I can't imagine that Dimikov plans to kill a whole room full of rich people. There's no profit in it for him." Although once the police showed up, it might be a different story ... Neal suddenly wondered if his brief foray on the legal side of the law was going to end in a bloodbath. Damn it, this was exactly the kind of situation that he wished he could talk to Peter about.
"I still can't just stay here." Elizabeth began to pace, rubbing her bare arms nervously. "There are a lot of my friends down there, not to mention old people with pacemakers, parents of little kids ... There has to be something we can do."
"What if there was something we could do?" Neal mused. "We're free, and Dimikov doesn't know about us." He conjured a mental image of the layout of the building. "Maybe we could help the police somehow, do something to take Dimikov and his men out of commission. They've probably got the surveillance room under control, but what about shutting off the power? There's a breaker box in the basement, right?" Mozzie would know; Mozzie had been handling the electrical and technical end of the heist. But Neal didn't want to drag him into this too.
Elizabeth brightened. "Oh, that's an excellent idea. Yes, it's in the basement."
"The fire escape goes all the way down to the basement?" he asked, and Elizabeth nodded. "Good, that way we won't have to cut through the Sato Room. They're probably focusing their attention on the main staircase anyway, since it's the most obvious way up or down." He was thinking out loud now, spinning possibilities as he normally did in his brainstorming sessions with Moz. "The outer door locks are electronic, so killing the power will disengage them, make it easier for the SWAT team to get in, as well as taking out the surveillance cameras."
Elizabeth turned to him with a frown. "You certainly know a lot about the layout of the gallery."
Oops. "You give good tours," he said, smiling. But the urge to smile deserted him as he thought about the mobsters suddenly plunged into darkness, people panicking and running around, maybe some of them trying to escape -- Damn it, consequences were a real pain. "We need to make sure that we time this correctly. We want to give the police an advantage, but we don't want to get anyone hurt. And if we move too early, or move too late and let both sides get set up for a long standoff, things could end very badly."
Elizabeth nodded. She opened a drawer of her desk, took out two small flashlights and handed one to him. "I was a Girl Scout," she said, smiling. "'Be Prepared' isn't just the Boy Scout motto, you know. This is my Be Prepared drawer."
"Anything else useful in there?" Neal asked, peering over her shoulder.
"Granola bars, $20 for pizza money or cab fare, stamps, a backup disk for my home computer's hard drive, a screwdriver --"
"I'll take the screwdriver."
Armed with flashlight and screwdriver, but still feeling badly outnumbered and outgunned, Neal cracked the door open and peeked out into the hall. It was still deserted, though he could hear footsteps on the floor above.
"They're probably coming and going using the front staircase, but they might have a guard on the fire stair as well," Neal whispered.
"What do we do then?" Elizabeth whispered back.
Get shot? Not a good answer. "We'll figure that out when we get there," he whispered. Then he pointed to her feet. "No heels. Too much noise, and you can't run."
Elizabeth nodded and slipped off her shoes.
Neal wished he could convince her to stay here. If his hare-brained plan got Elizabeth shot, he'd never forgive himself. But he was going to need her help in the basement. His original art-heist plan had never involved going anywhere near it, and he had no idea how big it was, or how much time he'd waste looking for the breaker box when Elizabeth knew exactly where it was.
He glanced out the window for flashing lights. Nothing. Well, time to get into position anyway.
The two of them left the refuge of Elizabeth's office and tiptoed to the fire door. Elizabeth held her fat ring of keys in her hand to keep it from rattling. She pushed open the fire door with the same slow caution that Neal had used, and they both peeked into the stairwell. Voices could be distantly heard, but there seemed to be no one on the stairs, up or down.
"All the way down," Neal whispered, and Elizabeth nodded.
They crept down the stairs as quickly as possible. Elizabeth hesitated at the door to the main gallery level, but Neal tugged her arm, drawing her away. "You can do a lot more free than as a hostage."
At the ground floor, Neal risked a peek outside through the small window in the door, and then drew back hastily when he caught sight of a shoulder and the muzzle of a gun. They did have a guard on this door, then -- on the outside, to catch anyone attempting to escape. The idea of someone using the stairwell to come and go within the building apparently had not occurred to them, or maybe they just didn't realize that anyone had escaped their initial sweep of the building.
There was no window in the door at the bottom of the stairs. They'd have to go in blind. Neal found that he'd moved automatically to block Elizabeth's body with his own, so that anyone they might encounter on the other side would shoot him first, not her. Stupid, he reminded himself, remember you don't have a guardian angel anymore, but he still kept himself between Elizabeth and the danger on the other side as he cracked open the door.
He saw a large, dim space, lit by a handful of naked bulbs and broken up into corridors by rows of heavy, utilitarian shelving. The shelves contained boxes, crates, wrapped pieces of artwork by the dozens, the hundreds. Damn, when he'd planned his heist of the upstairs gallery, he'd missed the motherlode down here -- no telling what was in all those packages. It was like thief Christmas. His fingers itched to unwrap some of them and see what was under there. Probably nothing worth any money, just a bunch of artwork the gallery had acquired on consignment or bought outright and then couldn't sell, but it tantalized him with the promise of the unknown --
"Is anyone there?" Elizabeth whispered, her breath stirring his hair, and he was jolted back to the mission at hand. Masked gunmen and lots of hostages in danger. Right.
"No --" he began, then hushed and held up a hand. He'd heard something, somewhere in that maze of shelves. A clatter. Then the distinct sound of a footstep. Rats. Whoever it was seemed to be making no attempt to keep quiet, so Neal guessed he or she wasn't on their side.
"There's someone down here. Hopefully just one person." Dimikov was thorough, it seemed. Neal hoped that the guard hadn't been specifically posted on the breaker box; was it possible they could have thought that far ahead?
"What do we do?" Elizabeth whispered back. "Wait for them to leave?"
Neal checked his watch. The police would be here any minute. They might already be surrounding the building. And letting Dimikov and his men get entrenched, he suspected, would be very bad indeed.
"No. If they do leave, it might be through here anyway." There was also, he recalled, a maintenance entrance to the basement from the other side of the building, but he didn't want to play the odds. "Where are we going?"
Elizabeth pointed. "To the right, back along the wall. The generator is there too."
Well, the footsteps weren't coming from that direction, so maybe they could do it. "Go," Neal whispered.
He had to hand it to her: Elizabeth looked terrified, but she was a natural at this sneaking-around business. Too bad she'd gone into the straight life, because she might have made a darned good burglar. The walls were bare concrete, with conduits that Neal made mental note of: electrical power here, water there ... no telling when he might need that information.
In moments they'd reached the circuit box. Elizabeth brought out another key from her big key ring, and unlocked the box. "Now?" she whispered.
Neal shook his head. He checked his cell: still no reception, though he might not have had it in the basement anyway. "I'm gonna go check things topside. If he comes this way, Elizabeth, hide -- it's not worth your life. Otherwise, wait for my signal."
"What signal?"
"You'll know it when it happens," Neal said dryly, and headed back the way they'd come with as much speed as he could manage.
He still didn't have a plan, really, so much as a cobbled-together bundle of mismatched possibilities. But that was how a lot of his plans went, so this was hardly different.
Except normally, you have an angel watching your back, ready to grab you and snatch you out of danger.
He checked the area around the stairwell again, and then darted inside. A quick peek out the ground-floor window netted him a glimpse of blue and red flashing lights. Excellent. New York's finest.
A door slammed open on one of the levels of the stairwell above him. Shit shit shit! With only an instant to decide which way to go, Neal went down, ducking underneath the first-floor landing. He heard feet pounding on the stairs, and then another door opening. For a minute he heard a babble of voices, and someone yelling at the hostages to get back on the floor or they were going to get shot, and then the door slammed.
If we're doing anything to help, we gotta do it now, he thought, and pushed open the basement door --
-- bringing himself face to face (or face-to-ski-mask) with one of Dimikov's men.
For an instant they just stared at each other. Then Neal dodged sideways, out the door and behind the nearest set of shelves. He didn't even catch up with his own thought processes until he was already in motion, because ducking back into the stairwell would have trapped him, and also, he couldn't leave Elizabeth alone with a gunman in the basement.
The rattle of gunfire was deafening in the enclosed space, reverberating off the walls. The guy couldn't see him, but bullets perforated the canvas wrappings just above his head.
The smart thing to do would be to lose the gunman in the maze of shelves. Making any noise would draw attention right to him. But if he and Elizabeth were going to be any use at all, they had to get the power off.
Neal drew a deep breath, hoping it wouldn't be his last. "Elizabeth!" he yelled. "Now!"
The whole room was plunged immediately into inky, Stygian blackness, lit an instant later by a series of muzzle flashes like lightning during a thunderstorm. Neal was already in motion; he knew there was open space between the shelves for at least twenty feet or so in front of him, and he went that way, half-running, half-crawling. A chip of something stung his face -- plaster or stone, no doubt a piece of some one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable sculpture. He winced.
In the darkness, he hesitated, listening. He heard running footsteps off to his left, then a loud crash, and a male voice cursing in what was probably Russian. Neal grinned to himself. Hopefully things were as chaotic and confusing upstairs as they were down here. And hopefully no hostages were getting shot in the chaos.
Other footsteps, quick and light, from a different direction. Elizabeth. Come on, Elizabeth, stay still, Neal thought. As if responding to his thought, the footsteps stopped, but the other ones were on the move again, closing on the first, punctuated by an occasional crash or clatter as various items were knocked off the crowded shelves.
Determined to get the mobster's attention before something happened to Elizabeth, Neal shoved the contents of the shelf nearest to him. Something hit the floor with a very expensive-sounding crunch. He winced, and then took off for the far side of the basement, groping his way along, trying not to knock over anything that wasn't on purpose.
His fingers touched the wall. All those conduits, right on the surface of the concrete -- surely there was something he could use. Electricity, water ... he could flood the basement, but that didn't seem like it would help anyone, particularly the two of them.
He felt his way back to the door to the stairwell, and cracked it open very quietly, only to hear the sound of footsteps within. And fast, angry voices speaking Russian. Crud -- they were coming down to get the lights back on. He shut the door and jammed the screwdriver under it -- that wouldn't hold them for long, but could buy them a little time, at least. Come on, NYPD, where are you? And I never thought I'd say that ...
There was a startling thump and a low rumble from somewhere else in the basement. Okay, now what? But he found out an instant later, when a few of the lights came back on, dimly, turning the basement into a patchwork of shadows. The emergency generator. And here he was, exposed in the open, right by the stairwell. Neal spun around and flung himself behind the nearest set of shelves when he glimpsed a black-clad figure down by the breaker box and the generator, pointing a gun at him.
The shot missed. In the stairwell, someone was pounding on the door.
"Neal!" Elizabeth grabbed his arm. He almost jumped out of his skin.
"You okay?" he whispered, leading her quickly back down the row of shelves. Damn it, they couldn't hide for long with the lights on. Where were those cops?
"He found the generator. I tried to lead him away, but he must've seen it earlier."
Neal had to hand it to Dimikov and his gang: they were good. Unfortunately, now they were trapped along with a lot of hostages. Hopefully he and Elizabeth had given the cops a window to get the jump on them without things going haywire upstairs. They'd never know until they got back upstairs, and they had problems enough of their own right now --
-- problems that had suddenly become acute. He heard a shriek of metal and a snap, as the screwdriver gave way and the fire door came open.
"Company," he hissed at Elizabeth. "You go that way, I'll go this --" But rounding the end of the shelves, they found themselves not ten feet away from the gunman. Or a different one.
"Finally," he snapped, pointing his gun at Neal's chest. "You two are a real pain."
"Are those the saboteurs? Shoot them!" a different voice bellowed from the direction of the stairwell. Dimikov, Neal guessed. He put an arm around Elizabeth, not that it would help. There had to be something that he could do, but his mind was a blank. His entire world had contracted to the cold black muzzle of the gun.
The gunman fired.
And Peter appeared out of nowhere: he wasn't there, and then he was, blinking into sight, blocking Neal's view of the gunman.
Neal saw Peter flinch from the bullet's impact. And for an instant, he glimpsed the wings that he'd always known Peter must have: huge and gray, hawks' wings, spreading to block Neal and Elizabeth from the danger in front of them.
Then Peter went down, went down hard in a spray of blood.
There were other things going on around him, though Neal was only half-aware of them: a voice yelled, "Police, freeze!" and the gunman, stunned and terrified by Peter's appearance out of thin air plus the arrival of the cops, turned and ran. But Neal's attention was riveted on Peter, a crumpled shape in a pool of blood. Elizabeth gave a strangled cry and started to lunge forward, when Peter snapped out of existence like a popped soap bubble.
Neal caught his breath. He can't die. Not like that. He told you so. And he trusted Peter not to lie to him. He'd just be -- reassigned, wasn't it? There was a pool of blood where he had been, dark and glistening. It looked just like regular human blood. On the spur of the moment, Neal seized the edge of the nearest shelf, dragging its contents down in a shattering cascade (what's another few pieces of irreplaceable art at this point, he thought numbly) and covering up the bloodstain. It would be one less thing to explain. Enough stuff was knocked down around the basement that no one ought to notice until the gallery got around to cleaning it up, and there was no body, anyway.
"What happened?" Elizabeth cried, gripping Neal's arm so hard it hurt. Her eyes were huge in her stark-white face. "I saw Peter, and then he -- Neal, what happened!"
"I'll explain later," Neal said, and then fully geared SWAT members surrounded them, pointing guns and then relaxing, sort of, when they saw that Neal and Elizabeth were both in evening dress and clearly misplaced members of the art show crowd from upstairs.
Elizabeth went off with a couple of cops to turn the power back on, and Neal found himself being shepherded upstairs. The scene in the gallery upstairs was one of controlled chaos. There were several members of Dimikov's gang being led out in handcuffs, and paramedics ministering to the confused, frightened hostages. Neal could see no sign that anyone was badly injured, though, and his stomach unknotted -- well, partly.
There was still Peter.
He's fine, Neal thought. Just ... elsewhere.
And almost certainly not coming back this time, a thought that he couldn't quite wrap his mind around. There had never been a time in his life when Peter wasn't looking over his shoulder, invisible and unheard, but there all the same. Even suspecting that he was gone wasn't the same as knowing it for certain. His absence left a sudden, gaping hole in Neal's life.
Why couldn't you have come back and talked to me, Peter, damn it? I never got to say goodbye.
He gave his statement several times to several different detectives. He was as honest as possible, and hoped that "Nick Winters" was a bulletproof enough alias to stand up to the investigation. Across the room he glimpsed Elizabeth having her own debriefing, and remembered with a sinking sensation that he'd told her his real name. Would she stick to the alias? He hoped so.
As the room began to clear out, Elizabeth came to his side, pale and tired-looking, but calm. "Would you like some coffee?" she asked him quietly.
Neal nodded.
They climbed the front stairs to Elizabeth's office. He noticed that she locked the door behind them so that they would not be disturbed. She plugged in a coffeepot and then took a small hairbrush from her "Be Prepared" drawer and began fixing her messed-up hair.
"What name did you give the police?" Neal asked. "Mine, I mean."
Elizabeth raised her head and met his eyes. "Nick Winters," she said. "That's who you are as far as the gallery is concerned. But there's more to it than that, isn't there?"
"There are a few things I need to tell you," Neal admitted.
"Start with Peter, please," Elizabeth said firmly, pouring coffee for both of them.
There in the pool of light from her desk lamp, Neal told her about the first time he met Peter, and the second, and, in general overview at least, all the times since.
"I shouldn't believe you," Elizabeth said. She clasped the coffee cup between her hands like a talisman. "It's too impossible. And yet -- there was always something about him, something not quite like the other guys I've dated. I can't say exactly what; a sort of inner stillness, I guess. And I certainly don't have a rational explanation for what happened down there." She looked up, hope blooming in her face. "You said he's all right, wherever he is?"
"As far as I know," Neal reminded her. "All I know about the whole guardian angel thing is what Peter's told me, and that isn't a lot." He took a deep breath. "And you're right, there are things you need to know about me, too."
He didn't hold back. Without going into details, he sketched the broad strokes of his career for her, including the merciless truth about his interest in the DeArmitt Gallery.
Elizabeth listened in silence. "You came here to rob us," she said very quietly when he was done.
"I did rob you," Neal reminded her. "The real Kleinfeld is ... in a safe place." He'd almost said in my apartment, but there was only so far that he was willing to go with his newborn honesty. "I wasn't planning to sell it -- it's not really worth a whole lot -- and I already did what I wanted to do, which was prove that I could forge a fake Dadaist collage that would pass inspection from the city's experts. I can return it tomorrow."
Elizabeth didn't say anything. Her face, in the shadows cast by the lamp, looked older than he remembered.
"The police are still downstairs," Neal said. He swallowed hard. "I'd understand, you know, if you wanted to go down and get them. Of course, I reserve the right to go out the window, in that case ..." He quickly judged the distance from himself to the window. It would be a hair-raising climb without safety equipment -- or angelic air support, he reminded himself; that was going to be hard to get used to -- but in a pinch, he was pretty sure he could make it.
Elizabeth dropped her gaze to her coffee again, then looked up at him. "Actually," she said, "I'd like to hire you."
This threw him for a loop. "Say what?"
"I'd like to hire you as a security consultant," Elizabeth said. "Counting your attempt, we've had two different robberies in two days. I would like to hire you as a consultant to help me fix our security gaps so that this doesn't happen again."
"I just told you that I stole from you," Neal said in disbelief. "And you trust me to handle your security?"
"Yes." She met his eyes. "Can I trust you, Neal?"
He sighed, and looked away. "Yeah," he said, sounding even to his own ears like a kid admitting an indiscretion. "You can." Glancing back at her a bit impishly, he asked, "How are you going to justify this to your boss, in terms of my, er, qualifications?"
A smile flickered around the corners of her mouth, though it was tinged with sadness. "That's my problem. You worry about bringing back that Kleinfeld. And fixing my gallery."
******
Two days later, Neal was crouching in the front doorway of the DeArmitt Gallery, running his fingers along the edge of the door, pondering what sort of physical reinforcements it might need, not to mention upgrades to the alarm system. It was downright weird looking at a heist from this side -- not viewing it in terms of getting into a building, but keeping people like himself out. Strangely enough, though, he'd found that it exercised the same part of his brain: it was very much like planning a theft or a con, except ... in reverse. He supposed that the novelty would wear off eventually, but in the meantime, it was an interesting new thing to do. He still hadn't admitted to Mozzie that he'd returned the Kleinfeld -- the original looked just like the forgery; it wasn't as if his friend could tell at a glance -- let alone that he had an actual job, sort of, temporary though it might be.
Am I conning Elizabeth? he thought uneasily. She clearly thought he was someone he wasn't. Maybe she didn't believe most of what he'd told her. But she'd appeared to believe it...
A shadow fell over him. "I'm sorry, the gallery's closed," he said, and then looked up, and did a double take. "Peter!"
He scrambled to his feet. Peter looked exactly like he always did -- long coat, a little rumpled ... well, okay, a lot rumpled today. He also looked exhausted.
"Are you all right?" was the first thing Peter said. "Is Elizabeth?"
"I'm fine," Neal said. "She's fine. You, uh --" He hesitated. His memory of Peter bleeding to death on the concrete basement floor was still painfully vivid. "Are you?"
"If you're asking about the bullet wound, it was temporary; I'm not hurt." Though Peter winced involuntarily; Neal guessed that it had hurt quite a lot at the time. "I'm sorry I didn't show up sooner the other night. Though I suppose my timing could have been worse."
Neal choked on a dry laugh. "Yeah. That's an understatement."
"I really did mean to go away," Peter said, his tone introspective. "From you, from Elizabeth -- I think I was doing more harm than good to both of you, simply by existing in your lives. But I couldn't bring myself to leave for good without coming back to say goodbye ..." His smile was small and rueful. "The timing was too tight to be coincidental, I suspect."
Neal decided not to touch that one. "You couldn't have done something other than jump in front of a bullet?"
"I wasn't thinking clearly," Peter said. He sounded embarrassed. "Believe me, I thought of quite a few less drastic solutions later, but at the time -- angelic reflexes aren't any faster than human ones, you know. I can't outrun a bullet. Blocking it was the only thing that came to mind." The worried look returned. "Elizabeth is really okay?"
Neal laughed. "She's fine, Rambo. She's upstairs. I can guarantee she'd be delighted to see you." He hesitated; he got the feeling that there was something Peter hadn't said yet, and that it was going to be a doozy when he got around to it. "So, uh -- you said they'd reassign you, or demote you. They didn't do that?"
"Oh, yes," Peter said. "They did. They demoted me about as far down as they could ... well, they gave me a few choices, and I took what seemed the least unappealing of the options. I sometimes wondered, you know, what happened to a disgraced guardian angel, but I never knew for sure."
Neal eyed him nervously. "You look fine. Well, really tired and stressed, but you kinda always did." Mostly, he was now aware, because of him. "What did they do to you?" But even before Peter said it, he'd begun to guess where this conversation might be going.
"They made me human," Peter said. "Not the proper starting-over kind, where you get a whole new life to work with -- as you can see, I'm still me, still the same age I was when I died and all of that."
Neal had to stifle a number of reactions that probably weren't what Peter was hoping for at all. "I'm not sure that sounds like a punishment to me, really," he managed at last in a neutral voice.
"Really? Well, you haven't been an angel for two thousand years. Also ..." He heaved a sigh. "You weren't dropped on a streetcorner in Queens and left to fend for yourself. At least I got to keep my clothes."
"Wait a minute," Neal said. "They didn't set you up with the angelic version of Witness Protection, or whatever? Papers, a job, a place to stay ..."
Peter shook his head. "No, I've spent the last, oh, twenty-four hours or so just figuring out how to find my way around New York without being able to fly." He looked suddenly very tired, and old. "There was a lot of walking involved."
"You don't have money, ID, nothing?"
Peter shook his head.
"Have you even eaten?"
"I found a soup kitchen by accident," Peter said. "Yesterday. I think it might have been in Brooklyn somewhere."
"Okay, that's it, get in here. Elizabeth and I are taking you to lunch." Neal steered him through the door; Peter, bemused, let him. "And after that ..." Neal grinned. "I know a guy who knows a guy who can help you with your ID problem."
"I thought you might."
~ The Beginning ~
As the days passed, the tension cranked up -- not just for Neal and Mozzie, but for Elizabeth as well. She was working long hours overseeing the installation of the Kleinfeld and Tang Dynasty exhibits, and didn't have time for walks in the park, or hunting down phone numbers of elusive angel paramours. If she'd noticed that Neal had not called her back, she didn't keep pushing. He hoped she'd taken the hint.
Peter was snappy and withdrawn, on the infrequent occasions when Neal saw him. He was obviously trying to reassert the formal distance that was supposed to go along with their roles as guardian angel and charge, but it wasn't working, based on his tendency to show up in Neal's apartment at odd hours. "I should call the police," he said, beer in hand, staring over Neal's balcony at the lights of the city. "Anonymous tip. Get both of you arrested before you wreck your life even more than you already have. Or get someone killed."
"I'm not in any real danger; you'll be there," Neal pointed out through the open glass doors. He studied the completed, aged Kleinfeld from a distance, then up close. Mozzie was right, it was ugly and it wasn't going to net them much money, but everyone said it couldn't be done, and that was why he had to do it.
"I shouldn't be, though. We shouldn't even be having this discussion, because you shouldn't be -- this." He waved a hand to encompass Neal, the apartment, the forged painting. "There's no telling what you'd be today if I'd done my job properly. A painter, a corporate executive --"
"Dead at the age of three, is what I'd be," Neal said. "Will you stop it, seriously? I'm tired of being your excuse to wallow in misguided guilt. I am who I am, Peter. I like who I am. Maybe I'd be different and maybe I wouldn't be, but what's done is done, and I'm not sorry you saved my life all those years ago. Are you?"
Peter was silent for so long that Neal had to look up to make sure he hadn't disappeared again. He was still there, though. "No," he said at last, gently. "No, I'm not. And I don't regret this assignment, though I have to say that it's probably a good thing we don't pick our assignments -- no guardian angel in his right mind would ask to be assigned to you."
"Gee, thanks," Neal said, but he smiled.
"But you're right. If I had it to do over, I wouldn't change a thing. It's had its ups and downs, but --" He raised his beer in a semi-ironic salute. "Being your guardian angel was never boring."
"You're speaking in the past tense," Neal said, suddenly wary. "Do you know something I don't?"
Peter set the beer on the railing, and studied the view for a couple of minutes before he replied. "After this is all over, after I've seen you through yet another needlessly dangerous and avoidable crisis -- I'm putting in for reassignment. This is another reason why we don't usually keep an assignment for more than fifteen or twenty years: it messes with your head. I mean, look at me. I'm standing here in your apartment --"
"Outside it, you mean," Neal said flippantly, to cover the sinking sensation in his stomach, like the bottom had just dropped out of the world.
"Outside it, okay, but I'm still here, having a beer with someone who isn't even supposed to know I exist. I'm wanting -- things I'm not supposed to want --" He waved a hand at the city skyline in the general direction of the DeArmitt Gallery and Elizabeth. "It's a slippery slope. This is why the rules exist in the first place. You have a two-minute conversation with a three-year-old kid, and the next thing you know, you're fantasizing about a wife and a dog and a house in the suburbs, and -- Damn it, Neal," he burst out. Neal had never heard him swear before. "This isn't who I am."
"How do you know who you are?" Neal countered. "Maybe your mistake wasn't letting the rules slide just once, but letting them define you for so long." He tried to keep his voice normal and light, though he still felt like he'd been sucker-punched.
"Look who's talking," Peter shot back at him. "You never met a rule you didn't want to break."
"Okay, maybe I'm a bad example, but can you meet me in the middle, at least? If I can admit that I might have bent the rules too much in my life, can you return the favor by granting that maybe some rules need to be bent a little?"
"Are you admitting that?" Peter said, in a tone that was part hope, part challenge. "Does this mean you're thinking about calling off the DeArmitt heist?"
"No, damn it!"
They stood staring at each other, both of them breathing hard, tense with futile, frustrated anger.
The door opened behind Neal. "I think I've come up with a foolproof getaway plan --" Mozzie began, then broke off. "On second thought, it looks like I'm interrupting something --"
"No," Neal said. "Stay." He wasn't sure which of them he was talking to. He'd taken his eyes off Peter, and when he looked back he expected Peter to be gone, only to find him still on the balcony. Perhaps vanishing in full view of a mortal was too blatant a violation of his angelic code.
"I was just leaving anyway," Peter said. He set the beer bottle on the table. Glancing at Mozzie, he left via the door, closing it behind him. Neal didn't hear his footfalls on the stairs, though. He'd probably vanished as soon as he was out of sight.
"I'm guessing that was your mystery source," Mozzie said, eyes narrowed speculatively.
"Yes." Neal offered nothing more. "You said you had an improvement to the getaway plan?"
He could see that Mozzie wanted to ask, but they both had a history of respecting each other's privacy that was too well established. "There's a laundry on the next street over from the gallery, and every night at 12:15 a truck goes out," Mozzie began, and just like that, they were off and running.
Neal wasn't sure what rebellious urge made him call Elizabeth and invite her out to dinner the night before the double show opening. "I'm sure you're running around in fifteen directions with the opening tomorrow," he said, "but you work hard, Elizabeth. For once, you can delegate. Have a relaxing evening and be unstressed and unwound for the show's opening tomorrow."
"Oh, Nick," she said, after a moment's silence. "Nick, you're a very nice man, and I've enjoyed our talks, but I don't think --"
Now it was his turn to be startled. "No, I didn't mean it like that. I just meant --"
He hesitated. Up until that moment, he'd only meant to ask her to a friendly dinner, like their lunch date in the park, and enjoy one more conversation about art. It was his last chance; in twenty-four hours he'd be out of her life for good.
But what emerged instead was, "-- meant to ask you on behalf of Peter, actually. You know, the friend of mine that you met in the park --"
"Yes, I remember him," she said a little too quickly.
Neal didn't look around the apartment, but, though he hadn't heard a sound, he could actually feel the disapproval radiated by one seriously pissed-off guardian angel. It was like being in the same room with an angry cat. "He's too shy to ask you himself," he said. "But he's interested, believe me. There's an excellent restaurant on the edge of Little Italy called L'Amora -- have you been there?"
"I've heard of it," she said.
And he knew she liked Italian food; it was in her file. Score one for Peter's stalker tendencies. "There's a reservation for two in my name at seven p.m. tonight." Originally it had been for Neal and her, but she didn't need to know that.
"Nick," Elizabeth said cautiously, "if this is some kind of practical joke --"
"It's not a joke," Neal said. "He'll be there. It's a ..." He hesitated. He wasn't sure what it was, really. "A thank you, I guess," he said, and hung up.
When he looked over his shoulder, he found that his mental picture of Peter's glower was pretty close to the reality. If looks could kill, he'd be a smoking pile of ash on the carpet. "What are you doing?" Peter demanded.
"What you won't. If you're going to take the fall for breaking the rules, shouldn't you have some fun along the way?"
"Give me your phone. I'm calling her and telling her it's a mistake."
Neal hid the phone behind his back. "Live a little, Peter. What I've done is set you up for a pleasant evening with a pretty girl who likes you. There are worse fates."
"Yeah? Like pretending to be something I'm not, and leading her on? What am I supposed to tell her when she asks for a second date?"
"Why are you thinking second date when you haven't even had the first one?" Neal asked. "Go to the restaurant, Peter. Eat good food. Enjoy her company. If she asks, you can tell her that you're going away on business and won't be back for a long time. That lends you a very romantic air of mystique. It's not even technically lying."
"I'd be breaking every rule in the handbook." But he looked tempted nonetheless.
Neal gave him a little shove towards the door. "Peter, go. Have fun. You've been watching my back for thirty-two years. When was the last time you did something for yourself, something fun, something that makes you happy?"
Peter resisted Neal's efforts to push him on, and looked at him steadily with that too-penetrating gaze. "You're up to something. I know you are."
"What I'm up to is making sure that you have one night of fun for the first time in two thousand years. And you're going to be keeping a pretty girl waiting if you don't get a move on, so go."
"I can get there instantly," Peter pointed out. Then he looked down at himself, at the rumpled folds of the draped coat, and looked back at Neal with panic in his eyes. "I have no idea what to wear."
"Wear what you've got on. Elizabeth doesn't strike me as a woman who cares about clothes. She likes you." Neal made little shooing motions. "Go!"
Peter gave him one last look of pure panic, and vanished.
Neal waited to see if he came back. He didn't. The apartment had the emptier-than-usual feeling that he'd started to recognize which meant that Peter was really and truly gone. Neal drank a half-glass of wine and examined the Kleinfeld from every possible angle. It was as perfect a copy of Kleinfeld's untitled #9 as he knew how to make. He checked his watch: 7:15. Peter's date should be underway, and Neal sent well-wishes in the direction of the angel and Elizabeth: he genuinely hoped that they were having fun and enjoying each other's company. Then he called Mozzie.
"Hey, Moz. You busy tonight?"
"I have an excellent alibi, if that's what you're asking."
"What I'm asking is whether you'd be free to break into the DeArmitt Gallery tonight."
There was a very long pause. Then Mozzie said, "We've been planning this for weeks. And the plan, all along, was that we attend the opening, let every art appraiser and amateur enthusiast in the city take a good look at the paintings and make sure they're authentic, and then, after everyone's left, all tired and full of wine and canapes, we come back and swap the art. As opposed to doing it right before the spotlight's about to shine on it, when everyone is in a state of heightened security and paranoia. Which would be insane."
He said all of this in one breath.
"Moz, Moz, I know what the plan was," Neal said when Mozzie had to stop for air. "And this is very last-minute, I know. But the more I think about it -- the point is to prove that we can do it, right? That we can forge a supposedly unforgeable piece of art, and pass it off as the real thing right under the noses of the city's art intelligentsia and critics. How much do we prove by taking the real element of risk out of the equation: the opening of the show?"
And Peter's busy tonight, he thought. This is when I show him, when I show ME, that I can do this on my own, without the safety net. If he really means to reassign himself, I have to learn to do it sooner or later. Plus, he's got Elizabeth busy on the other side of Manhattan, so I know she's out of harm's way if things go wrong.
The silence on the other end of the line was becoming ominous. "Come on, Moz," Neal said. "I can't do this without you."
Mozzie heaved a huge sigh. "Well, you're the one who's taking the actual risk, the breaking and entering and whatnot. I'm just the wheelman."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's your funeral," Mozzie said, and despite his burgeoning relief -- he'd been worried that Moz wouldn't go for it at all -- Neal couldn't help wishing that his friend had chosen a slightly less ominous turn of phrase.
If only all their heists went so well.
Between the two of them, Neal and Mozzie had the guards' shifts worked out to the minute. Mozzie's little gizmos in the ceiling worked perfectly, feeding a taped loop to the cameras. The motion sensors and the door alarms were a snap. Neal was in and out in record time. There was no sign of Russian mobsters or anyone else. They didn't even have to use their emergency laundry-truck method of escape.
While he was in the darkened gallery, Neal couldn't help taking a long, covetous look at the Tang Dynasty sculptures, all arranged neatly and awaiting the curious eyes of the public in the morning. It was so very tempting to swipe one of them, just a very small one -- but, no; when it was discovered missing, the gallery would erupt in chaos, greatly heightening the chances of the Kleinfeld being discovered. And Elizabeth's opening would be ruined, which Neal wouldn't wish upon her.
Back in June's loft, Neal poured two glasses of wine -- one of June's best vintages. "To every job being as smooth as this one."
"And to us," Mozzie added. "Because we are the bomb, my friend."
"Hear, hear," Neal murmured, and drank.
They both looked at the real Kleinfeld, sitting in place of the fake one. Even to Neal's eye, the two of them were identical, in all their glorious postmodern homeliness. It wasn't his own eye that he had to fool, of course; the question was whether anyone at the gallery would detect it. If so, well, he'd tried. And if not, then he'd pulled off the coup everyone said was impossible.
Neal grinned. It was ironic that in order to "win", he had to make sure that no one found out what they'd done.
"You don't have to attend the opening, you know," Mozzie said. "Really, there's no point."
"Of course I do, and of course there is. What's the use of passing off a fake under the noses of half the art experts in the city if I'm not there to watch?"
"I could get you a feed from the cameras."
"It's not the same as actually be -- being there." The source of the interruption in his thought processes was Peter, who had appeared in the apartment with his usual sudden silence. At least he had, by pure chance, appeared behind Mozzie, not in front of him.
"Yeah, looking forward to that show opening," Neal said hastily, to cover any noise that Peter might be about to make. He saw Peter open his mouth -- he was grinning, his hair was mussed, presumably the date had been a hit -- and then, noticing Mozzie, Peter snapped his mouth shut and went silent. "Actually, if all goes well, I haven't ruled out the idea of being Nick Winters for awhile longer. The DeArmitt Gallery wants to show my work. If I have a real show as Nick, in a respected gallery, it'll make Nick Winters pretty nearly bulletproof."
Neal had been hoping Peter would vanish again, but he showed no signs of doing so. Instead he crossed to the fridge and opened it, which was the point at which Mozzie noticed him.
"Gah!" Moz nearly spilled his wine. "And I thought I was ninja-silent. I didn't hear you come in."
"He does that," Neal said, and gave Peter a steady look that was not quite a scowl. He was curious how the date had gone, but not right now, while he and Moz were still coming down off the high of a successful con that he couldn't admit to Peter he'd pulled off. He wanted to settle in with a glass of wine and enjoy the afterglow for a while.
Luckily, as much social obtuseness as Mozzie could occasionally display, he did understand the value of discretion when discussing criminal activity in the presence of unknown parties. "Yes, so," he said, glancing back and forth between the two of them. "The night is young. Places to go, things to do. I'll, uh, be in touch."
"Wait --" Neal began, but Moz was already out the door, though not without mouthing "Tell me later" and jabbing a quick finger at Peter.
Neal sighed and topped off his glass of wine. "Help yourself," he said wryly, when Peter turned back from the fridge with a bottle of beer in hand.
"Thanks. Just did." Peter flopped in the chair that Mozzie had just vacated. "That was -- she is -- Neal, that woman's amazing. Just -- amazing."
A little of Neal's stolen buzz began to sneak back. He'd never seen Peter so animated, so obviously happy. He was a little jealous -- a brief longing for Kate skipped across his heart -- but it would take a far more hard-hearted man than Neal Caffrey to remain unaffected by Peter's obvious joy. "I take it the date went well."
"Yes. Yes, it did. Well, beyond a little understandable awkwardness at the beginning."
Neal grinned; he could imagine that, both of them flustered and tongue-tied and blushing at each other. He wished he'd been a fly on the wall to see it.
"But after that ... I don't know, I thought it would be hard to find something to talk about, but it wasn't. It was just ... relaxing. Easy." He blushed a little. "She invited me up to her place for drinks."
"You dog, you."
Now the blush was flaming. "We didn't -- I'm not -- Nothing happened. Just a good-night kiss. She said she hasn't met anyone like me before." Peter sighed, and his elation deflated like a leaky balloon. "She doesn't know the half of it. I can't believe I did that, Neal. I just spent the entire evening lying to her."
"Did you lie, really?" Neal asked. "Knowing you, I'm guessing you just danced around it. You haven't said anything to her yet that you can't come back from, have you?"
"What am I supposed to say?" Peter said. Bitterness laced his words. "If I told her the truth, she'd think I was insane. And I'm leaving anyway, after --" He paused. Looked at Neal. Looked closely.
Uh-oh, Neal thought. Peter was too damn perceptive sometimes.
"You look ... satisfied," Peter said after a moment. "I know why I'm satisfied. What did you do tonight that's making you look so cheerful?"
Neal tried to wipe any traces of cheerfulness off his face. "Aren't I normally cheerful? I'm a cheerful person, Peter."
The temperature in the apartment seemed to plummet.
"You robbed the gallery tonight, didn't you?" Peter said. "The dinner with Elizabeth -- you planned that just to get me out of the way."
"It was not planned to get you out of the way," Neal protested. It was a completely spontaneous excuse to get you out of the way. Totally different. "You enjoyed yourself, right? You and Elizabeth both did."
Peter stood up, leaving his untouched beer on the table, and circled to look at the Kleinfeld. "Is this the real one?"
There was no way Neal could answer that question that wouldn't be either a direct lie or an admission of guilt, so he stayed silent.
"Neal," Peter said wearily.
Neal's temper flared. "So what if I did? You know who I am, Peter, and what I am. Yes, that's the real Kleinfeld. And the whole thing went off without a hitch."
"Behind my back!"
"Yes, so? You're the one who keeps telling me I need to learn to get along without you. So I did. Moz and I did the whole thing without the usual guardian-angel safety net, and you know what? It went fine. Better than fine. Not a single hair on any of these people's heads was harmed in any way." Neal slapped his hand on the pile of file folders that still graced the edge of the table. "Go ahead and put in for reassignment, Peter, because I'm doing just fine without you." And possibly doing even BETTER when you're not nagging me, he thought, but managed, with a heroic effort, not to add. Some words were impossible to take back.
"I don't believe this," Peter said. He looked exhausted, suddenly -- crumpled in his overcoat. "I thought we were getting somewhere, but you haven't changed at all, have you?"
He vanished.
"The only person who ever wanted me to change was you," Neal told the empty air bitterly, hoping Peter was still listening.
He took his glass of wine, and then, on reflection, the whole bottle, and went to bed. So much for enjoying the moment. The moment was pretty well ruined now.
By mid-afternoon Neal had managed to shake a lingering hangover, with generous applications of vitamins and coffee, and he headed down to the DeArmitt Gallery. It wouldn't be his first look at the show -- that had been last night, of course -- but it would be his first look in daylight, as it was meant to be seen. The reception was scheduled for 6 p.m., but the show was already open to the public. Neal wandered through, taking a special look at "his" Kleinfeld, and then enjoyed the Tang Dynasty exhibit for a while. Around him, tuxedo-clad caterers had begun setting up long white-draped tables for the opening refreshments.
"Isn't it lovely?" said a voice at his elbow, and he turned to see Elizabeth. Neal had heard of people looking radiant, but this was the first time he'd actually seen what it meant: it was like a warm glow lit her from within, spilling out in beauty and light to strike joy from everyone who came in contact with her. She was dressed for the occasion in a sweeping black gown, with her hair piled on her head in a simple yet striking updo, and Neal could recognize in her the same excitement that he felt in the buildup to a con. It wasn't just the adrenaline and endorphins of the big day, though. She was happy right down to her toes. Happiness practically spilled off her, the way it had off Peter last night.
I did this, Neal thought, and wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.
"I just have to thank you, Nick," she said, and tucked her hand through his arm. "For introducing me to Peter, and setting up the date last night. You're right, he's so shy that I don't think he would ever have asked me on his own, but we had a wonderful time."
"Thank you," he managed to say. "I mean, you're welcome. It was my pleasure, really."
And what happens now? he thought bleakly. When he chooses duty over her, and the days and then the weeks go by and he never calls, and all that joy drains right back out of her.
But -- no. Of all the decisions in his life that Neal had questioned afterwards, he couldn't believe that this one had been a mistake. Seize the day had always been his motto, and he'd seized one beautiful, perfect evening for Peter and Elizabeth. No matter what happened tonight or evermore, he had no regrets about that.
And there was something else that he needed to do. Maybe he should wait until the end of the evening, in case it produced awkward questions; he'd hate to have to duck out early to avoid a situation of his own making. But this felt like the right time.
"My name isn't Nick," he said, looking down into her eyes. "That's just a pseudonym that I use for my work." Which was entirely true, as far as it went. "My name's Neal Caffrey. I don't plan to tell everyone, but I wanted you to know."
She looked surprised for a moment, then she blinked and laughed. "Well, you're hardly the first artist to use a professional name. Though in your case, I think your real name has quite a lot of charm. I could understand if it was, say, Edwin Dweezilbaum ..."
Neal laughed, the coiled tension easing out of him. Peter was right, there was something about this woman that set you at ease, no matter what. "Let's just say I like to keep my professional and private life separate."
"I understand. I think it's a wise decision." She looked at him with a clear-eyed, speculative gaze. "So at least that part of what Peter said about you in the park was true," she began, and just as Neal started to think that he might not like where this was going, something over at the refreshment tables got her attention and she hurried off with a hasty, "Oh dear, no, you can't set that table up there, it's blocking a fire exit --"
Released for the moment, Neal resumed his wandering in and out of the sculpture. He texted Mozzie: SHOW IS GOOD, YOU SHOULD BE HERE.
The reply came back almost immediately: SECURITY NIGHTMARE, NOT MY SCENE.
Neal grinned and tucked away the phone. Moz was right, this sort of group event was a paranoiac's worst nightmare. Neal enjoyed it, though. He thrived on the electric atmosphere of a social gathering, especially when the topic at hand was one that was near and dear to his heart.
And so far, no one seemed to have tumbled to the forged Kleinfeld. Of course, with the ugly-duckling Kleinfelds right next to the beautiful Tang sculptures, the Kleinfeld room was showing a definite lack of patronage compared to the buzz of conversation surrounding the Tang exhibit.
The Russian mafia was here, though. Neal wasn't sure if Dimikov was among them, but he'd spotted three guys that he pegged immediately as "muscle", and unobtrusively swung close enough to one of them to hear him having a quiet conversation on his cell phone in a language with a distinctly Slavic sound.
They were almost certainly planning something. The question on Neal's mind was how far he should let them go with it. "Honor among thieves" might be a laughably naive myth, but there was still some truth to it, at least to the extent that it was considered bad form to mess with someone else's operation for no reason. Screwing the other guy if you were both after the same jewels? Perfectly fine, an accepted part of the chase. Narcing on the other guy just for the warm glow of helping out the cops and returning the family jewels to their rightful owner ... well, if word of that sort of thing got around on the street, Neal figured a lot of doors would slam shut for him.
"Peter?" he murmured, barely moving his lips. There was nowhere to be alone in the gallery, even in the less-populated Kleinfeld exhibit, and thus no opportunity to get Peter's attention. If Peter was here. As he wandered the exhibit, his mind going in circles, fear began to crawl up his spine: Peter might have pulled out for good this time. He'd said he planned to leave after the Kleinfeld job, and Neal had pulled that one off -- without him, as he'd taken pains to point out. And Peter had been pretty freaked about his date with Elizabeth.
Would he just pull up stakes and leave without saying goodbye? It seemed uncharacteristically spontaneous for a guy who'd spent thirty-two years watching Neal's every move. On the other hand, given Peter's crisis of conscience about breaking the rules, and the fact that he'd done almost nothing but break rules over the last couple of weeks ...
Maybe he'd broken down, decided to be a good law-abiding angel, and left. But maybe it was even worse, and he'd been pulled off Neal-watching duty by his superiors.
Neal circled the room aimlessly, while his thoughts went in circles as well. Then he sighed -- at himself, at the whole messed-up situation, he wasn't sure -- and looked around for Elizabeth. He finally found her at the refreshment tables, directing a rearrangement of canapes. "Elizabeth," Neal said, and touched her elbow. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"
"I'm a little busy," she began. Then she looked at him, and whatever she saw on his face must have convinced her, because she gave a last instruction to the caterer ("Please do keep the shrimp ones separate from the others; some people are allergic") and let Neal draw her away. "What's wrong?"
"I think we're about to have trouble," Neal began, and that was the moment when the door slammed with a very final crash, and several men carrying assault rifles and wearing ski masks burst into the room.
"Hands in the air!" one of them bellowed over the sound of startled screaming. "Everyone on the floor!"
Neal had been over the gallery plans dozens of times during his Kleinfeld theft prep, with a special eye for alcoves, back doors and places to hide. As soon as the trouble he'd anticipated began to materialize, he seized Elizabeth's arm and pulled her behind a pillar at the back of the Sato Room. There was a fire exit staircase that went to the offices upstairs. He wasn't sure where to go from there, since the office area hadn't been part of his careful memorizing of the plans, but anywhere had to be better than here, and Elizabeth would know the layout much better than he did.
Neal drew Elizabeth into the stairwell and closed the door quietly. The harsh voices of the gunmen, ordering their hostages to take off jewelry and throw away cell phones, went soft and muffled as the door thunked gently into place.
"I have to get out there --" Elizabeth gasped. "My friends -- my show --"
"There's nothing you can do. What we need to do" -- much as it pains me to admit it, he added inwardly -- "is call the police."
He took out his cell, shook it, held it up. "No signal?" he muttered in the phone's direction. "What do you mean, no signal?" Could the stairwell be blocking him that much? "Try your phone," he said, but with little hope that it would work. The mobsters were probably using some kind of jammer -- sophisticated equipment, if it was covering the entire building.
"I can't get a signal," Elizabeth said. "Maybe we need to get higher?"
"I doubt it'll help. What we need to do is get to a landline."
What I need to do is get out of here, Neal thought. This would be an excellent time for Peter to show up, except he hadn't, which meant that Peter was really and truly gone, and Neal was on his own.
A paralyzing shiver worked its way through him. No Peter, but lots of men with guns downstairs. He could die.
But then, so could Elizabeth, and she was quiet beside him, pale but composed. She'd wanted to go back and help her friends. Elizabeth might have a guardian angel of her own -- but no, Peter would have mentioned it, and besides, from what little he'd seen of Elizabeth so far, she'd probably been born rational and sensible; her guardian angel had probably been shuffled off to deal with more troublesome children when she was still in grade school.
Face it, Neal told himself grimly. This is what most people feel like ALL THE TIME. Don't like it? Too bad. Things need to be done, and you and Elizabeth need to do them.
The stairs ended at a fire door. Neal tested it cautiously -- not locked, but he pushed the bar in very slowly so as not to make noise. There was a carpeted hallway and a row of wooden office doors with small, frosted windows.
"This is where most of the regular business-office work is handled," Elizabeth whispered in his ear. "The gallery manager's office is upstairs, but mine is just to our left."
Below them, Neal heard the clunk of another door being opened into the stairwell. Elizabeth's eyes went round with fear. She and Neal slipped through the door and he tried to close it quietly enough not to make noise. Elizabeth, without being prompted, took out a large ring of keys and used one to unlock her office door. The two of them ducked inside. The office was considerably bigger than Neal had expected from its modest door, with a large desk, walls lined with filing cabinets, and a window with closed blinds.
Elizabeth reached for the light switch, but Neal shook his head. He crossed to the window and cracked the blinds to give them a bit of light, peeking out as he did so. The window overlooked a narrow slip of an employee parking area and a dumpster. They were on the third floor. It would be possible to go out this way, if he had to, but not comfortable. Also, he glimpsed at least one gunman moving around down there, too.
"This is Elizabeth Hart, assistant manager of the DeArmitt Gallery," Elizabeth said quietly, and Neal looked around to see her on the phone. "We're being robbed by a group of men with guns and masks. They have the entire gallery locked down, and they've taken hostages."
Neal leaned on the edge of the desk and murmured in her ear, "Russian mobsters. Tell them that. The name of the man in charge is Dimikov. They'll probably know him."
Elizabeth's eyes went large, but she passed the information along, and explained that she and one of the gallery's patrons were holed up in her office. Then she hung up the phone and turned to Neal.
"Long story," he said, holding up his hands.
"You're not -- with them," Elizabeth said cautiously.
"No. God, no." But I knew they were planning to rob your gallery, he thought, with a powerful twist of guilt. I just didn't realize they planned to pull off something this public and stupid. "Let's just say I've heard a few things, and put the pieces together."
Elizabeth's wary look promised that there would be discussion later. For now, though, she smoothed her hands down her long black skirt and tiptoed to the door. "It doesn't feel right to sit up here while people are in danger downstairs."
"As long as they cooperate, they'll probably be all right. The fact that the gang are wearing masks is a good sign; it means that they expect to leave witnesses alive. Anyway, I can't imagine that Dimikov plans to kill a whole room full of rich people. There's no profit in it for him." Although once the police showed up, it might be a different story ... Neal suddenly wondered if his brief foray on the legal side of the law was going to end in a bloodbath. Damn it, this was exactly the kind of situation that he wished he could talk to Peter about.
"I still can't just stay here." Elizabeth began to pace, rubbing her bare arms nervously. "There are a lot of my friends down there, not to mention old people with pacemakers, parents of little kids ... There has to be something we can do."
"What if there was something we could do?" Neal mused. "We're free, and Dimikov doesn't know about us." He conjured a mental image of the layout of the building. "Maybe we could help the police somehow, do something to take Dimikov and his men out of commission. They've probably got the surveillance room under control, but what about shutting off the power? There's a breaker box in the basement, right?" Mozzie would know; Mozzie had been handling the electrical and technical end of the heist. But Neal didn't want to drag him into this too.
Elizabeth brightened. "Oh, that's an excellent idea. Yes, it's in the basement."
"The fire escape goes all the way down to the basement?" he asked, and Elizabeth nodded. "Good, that way we won't have to cut through the Sato Room. They're probably focusing their attention on the main staircase anyway, since it's the most obvious way up or down." He was thinking out loud now, spinning possibilities as he normally did in his brainstorming sessions with Moz. "The outer door locks are electronic, so killing the power will disengage them, make it easier for the SWAT team to get in, as well as taking out the surveillance cameras."
Elizabeth turned to him with a frown. "You certainly know a lot about the layout of the gallery."
Oops. "You give good tours," he said, smiling. But the urge to smile deserted him as he thought about the mobsters suddenly plunged into darkness, people panicking and running around, maybe some of them trying to escape -- Damn it, consequences were a real pain. "We need to make sure that we time this correctly. We want to give the police an advantage, but we don't want to get anyone hurt. And if we move too early, or move too late and let both sides get set up for a long standoff, things could end very badly."
Elizabeth nodded. She opened a drawer of her desk, took out two small flashlights and handed one to him. "I was a Girl Scout," she said, smiling. "'Be Prepared' isn't just the Boy Scout motto, you know. This is my Be Prepared drawer."
"Anything else useful in there?" Neal asked, peering over her shoulder.
"Granola bars, $20 for pizza money or cab fare, stamps, a backup disk for my home computer's hard drive, a screwdriver --"
"I'll take the screwdriver."
Armed with flashlight and screwdriver, but still feeling badly outnumbered and outgunned, Neal cracked the door open and peeked out into the hall. It was still deserted, though he could hear footsteps on the floor above.
"They're probably coming and going using the front staircase, but they might have a guard on the fire stair as well," Neal whispered.
"What do we do then?" Elizabeth whispered back.
Get shot? Not a good answer. "We'll figure that out when we get there," he whispered. Then he pointed to her feet. "No heels. Too much noise, and you can't run."
Elizabeth nodded and slipped off her shoes.
Neal wished he could convince her to stay here. If his hare-brained plan got Elizabeth shot, he'd never forgive himself. But he was going to need her help in the basement. His original art-heist plan had never involved going anywhere near it, and he had no idea how big it was, or how much time he'd waste looking for the breaker box when Elizabeth knew exactly where it was.
He glanced out the window for flashing lights. Nothing. Well, time to get into position anyway.
The two of them left the refuge of Elizabeth's office and tiptoed to the fire door. Elizabeth held her fat ring of keys in her hand to keep it from rattling. She pushed open the fire door with the same slow caution that Neal had used, and they both peeked into the stairwell. Voices could be distantly heard, but there seemed to be no one on the stairs, up or down.
"All the way down," Neal whispered, and Elizabeth nodded.
They crept down the stairs as quickly as possible. Elizabeth hesitated at the door to the main gallery level, but Neal tugged her arm, drawing her away. "You can do a lot more free than as a hostage."
At the ground floor, Neal risked a peek outside through the small window in the door, and then drew back hastily when he caught sight of a shoulder and the muzzle of a gun. They did have a guard on this door, then -- on the outside, to catch anyone attempting to escape. The idea of someone using the stairwell to come and go within the building apparently had not occurred to them, or maybe they just didn't realize that anyone had escaped their initial sweep of the building.
There was no window in the door at the bottom of the stairs. They'd have to go in blind. Neal found that he'd moved automatically to block Elizabeth's body with his own, so that anyone they might encounter on the other side would shoot him first, not her. Stupid, he reminded himself, remember you don't have a guardian angel anymore, but he still kept himself between Elizabeth and the danger on the other side as he cracked open the door.
He saw a large, dim space, lit by a handful of naked bulbs and broken up into corridors by rows of heavy, utilitarian shelving. The shelves contained boxes, crates, wrapped pieces of artwork by the dozens, the hundreds. Damn, when he'd planned his heist of the upstairs gallery, he'd missed the motherlode down here -- no telling what was in all those packages. It was like thief Christmas. His fingers itched to unwrap some of them and see what was under there. Probably nothing worth any money, just a bunch of artwork the gallery had acquired on consignment or bought outright and then couldn't sell, but it tantalized him with the promise of the unknown --
"Is anyone there?" Elizabeth whispered, her breath stirring his hair, and he was jolted back to the mission at hand. Masked gunmen and lots of hostages in danger. Right.
"No --" he began, then hushed and held up a hand. He'd heard something, somewhere in that maze of shelves. A clatter. Then the distinct sound of a footstep. Rats. Whoever it was seemed to be making no attempt to keep quiet, so Neal guessed he or she wasn't on their side.
"There's someone down here. Hopefully just one person." Dimikov was thorough, it seemed. Neal hoped that the guard hadn't been specifically posted on the breaker box; was it possible they could have thought that far ahead?
"What do we do?" Elizabeth whispered back. "Wait for them to leave?"
Neal checked his watch. The police would be here any minute. They might already be surrounding the building. And letting Dimikov and his men get entrenched, he suspected, would be very bad indeed.
"No. If they do leave, it might be through here anyway." There was also, he recalled, a maintenance entrance to the basement from the other side of the building, but he didn't want to play the odds. "Where are we going?"
Elizabeth pointed. "To the right, back along the wall. The generator is there too."
Well, the footsteps weren't coming from that direction, so maybe they could do it. "Go," Neal whispered.
He had to hand it to her: Elizabeth looked terrified, but she was a natural at this sneaking-around business. Too bad she'd gone into the straight life, because she might have made a darned good burglar. The walls were bare concrete, with conduits that Neal made mental note of: electrical power here, water there ... no telling when he might need that information.
In moments they'd reached the circuit box. Elizabeth brought out another key from her big key ring, and unlocked the box. "Now?" she whispered.
Neal shook his head. He checked his cell: still no reception, though he might not have had it in the basement anyway. "I'm gonna go check things topside. If he comes this way, Elizabeth, hide -- it's not worth your life. Otherwise, wait for my signal."
"What signal?"
"You'll know it when it happens," Neal said dryly, and headed back the way they'd come with as much speed as he could manage.
He still didn't have a plan, really, so much as a cobbled-together bundle of mismatched possibilities. But that was how a lot of his plans went, so this was hardly different.
Except normally, you have an angel watching your back, ready to grab you and snatch you out of danger.
He checked the area around the stairwell again, and then darted inside. A quick peek out the ground-floor window netted him a glimpse of blue and red flashing lights. Excellent. New York's finest.
A door slammed open on one of the levels of the stairwell above him. Shit shit shit! With only an instant to decide which way to go, Neal went down, ducking underneath the first-floor landing. He heard feet pounding on the stairs, and then another door opening. For a minute he heard a babble of voices, and someone yelling at the hostages to get back on the floor or they were going to get shot, and then the door slammed.
If we're doing anything to help, we gotta do it now, he thought, and pushed open the basement door --
-- bringing himself face to face (or face-to-ski-mask) with one of Dimikov's men.
For an instant they just stared at each other. Then Neal dodged sideways, out the door and behind the nearest set of shelves. He didn't even catch up with his own thought processes until he was already in motion, because ducking back into the stairwell would have trapped him, and also, he couldn't leave Elizabeth alone with a gunman in the basement.
The rattle of gunfire was deafening in the enclosed space, reverberating off the walls. The guy couldn't see him, but bullets perforated the canvas wrappings just above his head.
The smart thing to do would be to lose the gunman in the maze of shelves. Making any noise would draw attention right to him. But if he and Elizabeth were going to be any use at all, they had to get the power off.
Neal drew a deep breath, hoping it wouldn't be his last. "Elizabeth!" he yelled. "Now!"
The whole room was plunged immediately into inky, Stygian blackness, lit an instant later by a series of muzzle flashes like lightning during a thunderstorm. Neal was already in motion; he knew there was open space between the shelves for at least twenty feet or so in front of him, and he went that way, half-running, half-crawling. A chip of something stung his face -- plaster or stone, no doubt a piece of some one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable sculpture. He winced.
In the darkness, he hesitated, listening. He heard running footsteps off to his left, then a loud crash, and a male voice cursing in what was probably Russian. Neal grinned to himself. Hopefully things were as chaotic and confusing upstairs as they were down here. And hopefully no hostages were getting shot in the chaos.
Other footsteps, quick and light, from a different direction. Elizabeth. Come on, Elizabeth, stay still, Neal thought. As if responding to his thought, the footsteps stopped, but the other ones were on the move again, closing on the first, punctuated by an occasional crash or clatter as various items were knocked off the crowded shelves.
Determined to get the mobster's attention before something happened to Elizabeth, Neal shoved the contents of the shelf nearest to him. Something hit the floor with a very expensive-sounding crunch. He winced, and then took off for the far side of the basement, groping his way along, trying not to knock over anything that wasn't on purpose.
His fingers touched the wall. All those conduits, right on the surface of the concrete -- surely there was something he could use. Electricity, water ... he could flood the basement, but that didn't seem like it would help anyone, particularly the two of them.
He felt his way back to the door to the stairwell, and cracked it open very quietly, only to hear the sound of footsteps within. And fast, angry voices speaking Russian. Crud -- they were coming down to get the lights back on. He shut the door and jammed the screwdriver under it -- that wouldn't hold them for long, but could buy them a little time, at least. Come on, NYPD, where are you? And I never thought I'd say that ...
There was a startling thump and a low rumble from somewhere else in the basement. Okay, now what? But he found out an instant later, when a few of the lights came back on, dimly, turning the basement into a patchwork of shadows. The emergency generator. And here he was, exposed in the open, right by the stairwell. Neal spun around and flung himself behind the nearest set of shelves when he glimpsed a black-clad figure down by the breaker box and the generator, pointing a gun at him.
The shot missed. In the stairwell, someone was pounding on the door.
"Neal!" Elizabeth grabbed his arm. He almost jumped out of his skin.
"You okay?" he whispered, leading her quickly back down the row of shelves. Damn it, they couldn't hide for long with the lights on. Where were those cops?
"He found the generator. I tried to lead him away, but he must've seen it earlier."
Neal had to hand it to Dimikov and his gang: they were good. Unfortunately, now they were trapped along with a lot of hostages. Hopefully he and Elizabeth had given the cops a window to get the jump on them without things going haywire upstairs. They'd never know until they got back upstairs, and they had problems enough of their own right now --
-- problems that had suddenly become acute. He heard a shriek of metal and a snap, as the screwdriver gave way and the fire door came open.
"Company," he hissed at Elizabeth. "You go that way, I'll go this --" But rounding the end of the shelves, they found themselves not ten feet away from the gunman. Or a different one.
"Finally," he snapped, pointing his gun at Neal's chest. "You two are a real pain."
"Are those the saboteurs? Shoot them!" a different voice bellowed from the direction of the stairwell. Dimikov, Neal guessed. He put an arm around Elizabeth, not that it would help. There had to be something that he could do, but his mind was a blank. His entire world had contracted to the cold black muzzle of the gun.
The gunman fired.
And Peter appeared out of nowhere: he wasn't there, and then he was, blinking into sight, blocking Neal's view of the gunman.
Neal saw Peter flinch from the bullet's impact. And for an instant, he glimpsed the wings that he'd always known Peter must have: huge and gray, hawks' wings, spreading to block Neal and Elizabeth from the danger in front of them.
Then Peter went down, went down hard in a spray of blood.
There were other things going on around him, though Neal was only half-aware of them: a voice yelled, "Police, freeze!" and the gunman, stunned and terrified by Peter's appearance out of thin air plus the arrival of the cops, turned and ran. But Neal's attention was riveted on Peter, a crumpled shape in a pool of blood. Elizabeth gave a strangled cry and started to lunge forward, when Peter snapped out of existence like a popped soap bubble.
Neal caught his breath. He can't die. Not like that. He told you so. And he trusted Peter not to lie to him. He'd just be -- reassigned, wasn't it? There was a pool of blood where he had been, dark and glistening. It looked just like regular human blood. On the spur of the moment, Neal seized the edge of the nearest shelf, dragging its contents down in a shattering cascade (what's another few pieces of irreplaceable art at this point, he thought numbly) and covering up the bloodstain. It would be one less thing to explain. Enough stuff was knocked down around the basement that no one ought to notice until the gallery got around to cleaning it up, and there was no body, anyway.
"What happened?" Elizabeth cried, gripping Neal's arm so hard it hurt. Her eyes were huge in her stark-white face. "I saw Peter, and then he -- Neal, what happened!"
"I'll explain later," Neal said, and then fully geared SWAT members surrounded them, pointing guns and then relaxing, sort of, when they saw that Neal and Elizabeth were both in evening dress and clearly misplaced members of the art show crowd from upstairs.
Elizabeth went off with a couple of cops to turn the power back on, and Neal found himself being shepherded upstairs. The scene in the gallery upstairs was one of controlled chaos. There were several members of Dimikov's gang being led out in handcuffs, and paramedics ministering to the confused, frightened hostages. Neal could see no sign that anyone was badly injured, though, and his stomach unknotted -- well, partly.
There was still Peter.
He's fine, Neal thought. Just ... elsewhere.
And almost certainly not coming back this time, a thought that he couldn't quite wrap his mind around. There had never been a time in his life when Peter wasn't looking over his shoulder, invisible and unheard, but there all the same. Even suspecting that he was gone wasn't the same as knowing it for certain. His absence left a sudden, gaping hole in Neal's life.
Why couldn't you have come back and talked to me, Peter, damn it? I never got to say goodbye.
He gave his statement several times to several different detectives. He was as honest as possible, and hoped that "Nick Winters" was a bulletproof enough alias to stand up to the investigation. Across the room he glimpsed Elizabeth having her own debriefing, and remembered with a sinking sensation that he'd told her his real name. Would she stick to the alias? He hoped so.
As the room began to clear out, Elizabeth came to his side, pale and tired-looking, but calm. "Would you like some coffee?" she asked him quietly.
Neal nodded.
They climbed the front stairs to Elizabeth's office. He noticed that she locked the door behind them so that they would not be disturbed. She plugged in a coffeepot and then took a small hairbrush from her "Be Prepared" drawer and began fixing her messed-up hair.
"What name did you give the police?" Neal asked. "Mine, I mean."
Elizabeth raised her head and met his eyes. "Nick Winters," she said. "That's who you are as far as the gallery is concerned. But there's more to it than that, isn't there?"
"There are a few things I need to tell you," Neal admitted.
"Start with Peter, please," Elizabeth said firmly, pouring coffee for both of them.
There in the pool of light from her desk lamp, Neal told her about the first time he met Peter, and the second, and, in general overview at least, all the times since.
"I shouldn't believe you," Elizabeth said. She clasped the coffee cup between her hands like a talisman. "It's too impossible. And yet -- there was always something about him, something not quite like the other guys I've dated. I can't say exactly what; a sort of inner stillness, I guess. And I certainly don't have a rational explanation for what happened down there." She looked up, hope blooming in her face. "You said he's all right, wherever he is?"
"As far as I know," Neal reminded her. "All I know about the whole guardian angel thing is what Peter's told me, and that isn't a lot." He took a deep breath. "And you're right, there are things you need to know about me, too."
He didn't hold back. Without going into details, he sketched the broad strokes of his career for her, including the merciless truth about his interest in the DeArmitt Gallery.
Elizabeth listened in silence. "You came here to rob us," she said very quietly when he was done.
"I did rob you," Neal reminded her. "The real Kleinfeld is ... in a safe place." He'd almost said in my apartment, but there was only so far that he was willing to go with his newborn honesty. "I wasn't planning to sell it -- it's not really worth a whole lot -- and I already did what I wanted to do, which was prove that I could forge a fake Dadaist collage that would pass inspection from the city's experts. I can return it tomorrow."
Elizabeth didn't say anything. Her face, in the shadows cast by the lamp, looked older than he remembered.
"The police are still downstairs," Neal said. He swallowed hard. "I'd understand, you know, if you wanted to go down and get them. Of course, I reserve the right to go out the window, in that case ..." He quickly judged the distance from himself to the window. It would be a hair-raising climb without safety equipment -- or angelic air support, he reminded himself; that was going to be hard to get used to -- but in a pinch, he was pretty sure he could make it.
Elizabeth dropped her gaze to her coffee again, then looked up at him. "Actually," she said, "I'd like to hire you."
This threw him for a loop. "Say what?"
"I'd like to hire you as a security consultant," Elizabeth said. "Counting your attempt, we've had two different robberies in two days. I would like to hire you as a consultant to help me fix our security gaps so that this doesn't happen again."
"I just told you that I stole from you," Neal said in disbelief. "And you trust me to handle your security?"
"Yes." She met his eyes. "Can I trust you, Neal?"
He sighed, and looked away. "Yeah," he said, sounding even to his own ears like a kid admitting an indiscretion. "You can." Glancing back at her a bit impishly, he asked, "How are you going to justify this to your boss, in terms of my, er, qualifications?"
A smile flickered around the corners of her mouth, though it was tinged with sadness. "That's my problem. You worry about bringing back that Kleinfeld. And fixing my gallery."
Two days later, Neal was crouching in the front doorway of the DeArmitt Gallery, running his fingers along the edge of the door, pondering what sort of physical reinforcements it might need, not to mention upgrades to the alarm system. It was downright weird looking at a heist from this side -- not viewing it in terms of getting into a building, but keeping people like himself out. Strangely enough, though, he'd found that it exercised the same part of his brain: it was very much like planning a theft or a con, except ... in reverse. He supposed that the novelty would wear off eventually, but in the meantime, it was an interesting new thing to do. He still hadn't admitted to Mozzie that he'd returned the Kleinfeld -- the original looked just like the forgery; it wasn't as if his friend could tell at a glance -- let alone that he had an actual job, sort of, temporary though it might be.
Am I conning Elizabeth? he thought uneasily. She clearly thought he was someone he wasn't. Maybe she didn't believe most of what he'd told her. But she'd appeared to believe it...
A shadow fell over him. "I'm sorry, the gallery's closed," he said, and then looked up, and did a double take. "Peter!"
He scrambled to his feet. Peter looked exactly like he always did -- long coat, a little rumpled ... well, okay, a lot rumpled today. He also looked exhausted.
"Are you all right?" was the first thing Peter said. "Is Elizabeth?"
"I'm fine," Neal said. "She's fine. You, uh --" He hesitated. His memory of Peter bleeding to death on the concrete basement floor was still painfully vivid. "Are you?"
"If you're asking about the bullet wound, it was temporary; I'm not hurt." Though Peter winced involuntarily; Neal guessed that it had hurt quite a lot at the time. "I'm sorry I didn't show up sooner the other night. Though I suppose my timing could have been worse."
Neal choked on a dry laugh. "Yeah. That's an understatement."
"I really did mean to go away," Peter said, his tone introspective. "From you, from Elizabeth -- I think I was doing more harm than good to both of you, simply by existing in your lives. But I couldn't bring myself to leave for good without coming back to say goodbye ..." His smile was small and rueful. "The timing was too tight to be coincidental, I suspect."
Neal decided not to touch that one. "You couldn't have done something other than jump in front of a bullet?"
"I wasn't thinking clearly," Peter said. He sounded embarrassed. "Believe me, I thought of quite a few less drastic solutions later, but at the time -- angelic reflexes aren't any faster than human ones, you know. I can't outrun a bullet. Blocking it was the only thing that came to mind." The worried look returned. "Elizabeth is really okay?"
Neal laughed. "She's fine, Rambo. She's upstairs. I can guarantee she'd be delighted to see you." He hesitated; he got the feeling that there was something Peter hadn't said yet, and that it was going to be a doozy when he got around to it. "So, uh -- you said they'd reassign you, or demote you. They didn't do that?"
"Oh, yes," Peter said. "They did. They demoted me about as far down as they could ... well, they gave me a few choices, and I took what seemed the least unappealing of the options. I sometimes wondered, you know, what happened to a disgraced guardian angel, but I never knew for sure."
Neal eyed him nervously. "You look fine. Well, really tired and stressed, but you kinda always did." Mostly, he was now aware, because of him. "What did they do to you?" But even before Peter said it, he'd begun to guess where this conversation might be going.
"They made me human," Peter said. "Not the proper starting-over kind, where you get a whole new life to work with -- as you can see, I'm still me, still the same age I was when I died and all of that."
Neal had to stifle a number of reactions that probably weren't what Peter was hoping for at all. "I'm not sure that sounds like a punishment to me, really," he managed at last in a neutral voice.
"Really? Well, you haven't been an angel for two thousand years. Also ..." He heaved a sigh. "You weren't dropped on a streetcorner in Queens and left to fend for yourself. At least I got to keep my clothes."
"Wait a minute," Neal said. "They didn't set you up with the angelic version of Witness Protection, or whatever? Papers, a job, a place to stay ..."
Peter shook his head. "No, I've spent the last, oh, twenty-four hours or so just figuring out how to find my way around New York without being able to fly." He looked suddenly very tired, and old. "There was a lot of walking involved."
"You don't have money, ID, nothing?"
Peter shook his head.
"Have you even eaten?"
"I found a soup kitchen by accident," Peter said. "Yesterday. I think it might have been in Brooklyn somewhere."
"Okay, that's it, get in here. Elizabeth and I are taking you to lunch." Neal steered him through the door; Peter, bemused, let him. "And after that ..." Neal grinned. "I know a guy who knows a guy who can help you with your ID problem."
"I thought you might."
~ The Beginning ~
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Neal's journey in this reminded me of one of my favourite episodes, Front Man, and the way he dealt with Stewart Gless. I admit I like Neal feeling just a tiny, tiny bit guilty from time to time and Neal realising that he is actually a lot braver than he thinks he is.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
I loved the end - was it a reference to "Wings of Desire" - which happens to be one of my all time favorite movies?
no subject
The ending is not a deliberate reference to the movie, no. Actually, I don't recall if I've seen that particular movie. I'm quite sure I've been influenced by every angel movie I've ever seen in writing this, though. *g*
no subject
The conceit in the movie is that when an angel "falls" to earth, he has no resources at all, he has to rely on the kindness of strangers.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Edited because I can't type.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Peter as Neal's guardian angel -- YES. That is just so *perfect*.
Wonderful story!
no subject
no subject
Oh, Peter as Neal's guardian angel - the best idea ever. CANON *XD*
no subject
no subject
This is brilliant!
I love the beginning with little!Neal meeting Peter and doing things to keep meeting Peter and being disappointed that Peter isn't his friend and then being an adult and realizing: Peter is real! ♥
I love that Peter, Mozzie, Neal and Elizabeth are basically the same like in the show but still different.
I love long suffering guarding angels AUs and this one was so good! And of course Neal got an ex-cop as a guarding angel. :D Loved that so much!
I love how Neal set Peter and Elizabeth up and gave them a little nudge to go in this romantically direction.
I love how you let the friendship between Peter and Neal and Elizabeth and Neal grow. Slowly and just perfect.
Giving Peter hawk like wings and not the standard white ones? Perfect!
Also, thank you for several sentences and moments that let me laugh out loud (Peter making Mozzie jump for example).
Thank you so much for this fic!
PS.: I love the "Peter is suddenly appearing and snatching/taking Neal somewhere" thing. Castiel in "Supernatural" does the same and it never gets old and it makes me smile a lot! =)
no subject
I love the beginning with little!Neal meeting Peter and doing things to keep meeting Peter and being disappointed that Peter isn't his friend and then being an adult and realizing: Peter is real! ♥
*grins* I think the little-Neal scenes were my favorites to write, actually - little Neal with his (not) imaginary friend Peter is simply too adorable. :D
I love the "Peter is suddenly appearing and snatching/taking Neal somewhere" thing. Castiel in "Supernatural" does the same and it never gets old and it makes me smile a lot!
Heh, it is a very Castiel thing to do, isn't it? I think that I was probably influenced by every angel movie or TV show I've ever seen in writing this; there wasn't really a deliberate Castiel influence, but I'm sure he's in there somewhere ...
no subject
The little!Neal scenes are awesome and I can see this happening (and as long as I don't see something else in the show (which I think will happen) - this is my canon of Neal's childhood! Not the guarding angel thing but the constant moving and the little attention he got from his mother/parents and that he's been bullied in school and so on...)
It is. And I'm blaming you and this fic that I now have the urge to rewatch Season 4/5 of Supernatural to see Castiel snatching and surprising Dean (and Dean's reactions to it *grins)... *headdesk*
To be honest: at the moment I can't remember an other show with Angels in it and the only movies I know of are "Michael" with John Travolta, "Dogma" with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and "City of Angels" with Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage.
no subject
However, what I love about this the very most is how wonderfully it gets to the heart of the conflict between Peter and Neal in canon. The scene where Peter confronts Neal with the actual consequences of his crimes is really well done, and reminds us fans that theft and fraud are illegal for a reason. And that you don't have Neal immediately change his ways is necessary, because as season three has shown us, it's not easy to switch your entire way of living and thinking.
You took a crack premise, and turned it into both a highly entertaining story and an insightful character piece.
no subject
what I love about this the very most is how wonderfully it gets to the heart of the conflict between Peter and Neal in canon.
Oh, I'm so glad it came through that way, because yes, that is exactly what I wanted to do, and writing this as an AU gave me the opportunity to start from ground zero and build the conflict from scratch, but still keeping the basic canon elements intact. I wanted to make sure that both of them were as true to their canon personalities as I could get them (given that Peter is a 2000-year-old guardian angel *g*) and to be as respectful as possible to each of their individual points of view.
no subject
You really succeeded there, which makes me both happy and relieved, because it's a difficult balance. Fic authors have trouble with it, and I don't think even the show writers get it right 100% of the time. In fic, Peter veers from unreasonable authority figure to paragon of good, and Neal is either a criminal in name only or much darker and more selfish than we've ever seen him be in canon.
Er, I ramble.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Peter as as Neal's guardian angel
The begining with little Neal!!!! Awesome!!!
Elizabeth
And I like the end!!!!
Thanks !!!!
no subject
no subject
no subject
I wish I could see you all this fall! Tell Derry that she'd better not shut down the entire East Coast with a blizzard this time. :D
no subject
no subject
no subject
And, oh dear, the idea of a Neal who knows he's being protected from dying is slightly terrifying :P I really loved the build-up, and how believable you made this whole situation!
no subject