The Wolf's Flame

Chapter One

  The watch was the hardest part.

Caleb Asher stood in the half-dark of the garage with the drawer open and two watches in front of him. The first was a Patek Philippe he'd bought in Geneva in 1961 from a man who'd assumed he was somebody's grandson. The second was a Casio with a scratched face and a cracked strap, forty dollars at a pharmacy, and it was the one he picked up.

He always picked it up. He'd been picking it up for eleven months.

He fastened it and rolled the drawer shut. Then he scuffed the heel of his right shoe twice against the concrete step, because new shoes on a broke man read wrong, and went upstairs to make his son breakfast.

The kitchen smelled like burnt butter. Noah was already at the counter with his legs swinging and his chin on his hands, six years old and furious about it.

"You said pancakes."

"I'm making pancakes."

"You said it yesterday."

"And here we are, in the glorious future." Caleb cracked an egg one-handed into the bowl. "Yesterday's promise. Today's pancake. This is what people mean when they talk about a man's word."

Noah considered this with the gravity of a small judge.

"Can it be shaped like a dog?"

"It can be shaped like a smear."

"A dog."

"A dog-adjacent smear."

The boy laughed. That ugly, delighted noise kids make before they learn to be embarrassed about it.

Six years of it and it still got him. He had stopped pretending it didn't.

Vera came in barefoot, smelling like cedar shampoo and damp coats and, underneath it, warm animal. She put her hand flat against Caleb's back as she passed behind him and left it there a second longer than she needed to.

"You're up early," she said.

"First day."

"Mm." She reached past him for the coffee.

She was small and pale and came only to his shoulder, even in shoes. She had dyed her hair white in 1981 and never gone back to anything else. She had had her jaw done in Frankfurt three years before that, and had never said why, and he had never asked.

She turned the burner down two clicks without comment.

"Nervous?"

"No."

"Liar." She smiled into her cup.

She looked up at him over the rim of her cup. For a second she read his face.

"You'll be wonderful. She'd be lucky to have you."

He said, "It's an internship, Vera. She won't know I exist."

Vera looked at him a moment longer. Something moved behind her face, quick and gone. Then she reached up and fixed his collar with two fingers, tugging it straight.

"She'll know," she said.

⁂

The car he drove was a fourteen-year-old Corolla with a check-engine light he'd disconnected and reconnected twice to keep it authentic. His real car was in a storage unit in Queens under a name he hadn't used since the Eisenhower administration. His real apartment was eleven blocks from the office and he had never once slept in it.

The house, though. The house was real.

Small. Rented. Cracked drive, with Noah's room against the boiler. He could have picked any of forty like it.