“They’re not there,” Lewyn interjected. “We looked, just this morning. And in all the years I’ve worked in that building, I’ve never seen a single piece that matches the pictures I saw online, let alone an entire collection. I would absolutely give them to you if I could. But I don’t know where they are.”
“Harrison does,” I said.
All of them looked at me.
“He does. He wouldn’t tell me. But he does. Mom does, too. I mean, if Harrison knows, Mom knows.”
“Well,” Stella said, after a moment, “after the film airs on PBS, a lot of people will want to see those pictures. Maybe they’ll be more willing to comply with the museum’s request than they were to mine.”
“I don’t think they’ll be willing,” I said. “I think it will take something more. I think we’ll need to come up with something else.”
And we began to work out what that something else might be.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tabula Rasa
In which it is established, once and for all, that Oppenheimer is not a particularly common name
I dressed up a bit for my appointment at Rochelle Steiner’s law firm, which was on Madison Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, right around the corner from the Cornell Club, where she had once climbed onto a chartered bus, chosen a seat next to the toilet, and set a number of complicated, long-ranging things into motion. It was a general law firm, and it looked to be evenly balanced in terms of women and men, which might have been one of the reasons Rochelle picked it （and after Harvard Law, a clerkship for a New York State Supreme Court judge, and the obvious fact that she was ridiculously good at practicing law, she probably had her pick of attractive options）。 A woman showed me into the office one afternoon a couple of weeks later, and from the beginning it didn’t go as I’d planned. Which is not to say that it went badly. Just … not as planned.
“Phoebe Oppenheimer,” said Rochelle Steiner. She got up from behind her desk. “Well.”
I’d been doing pretty much everything I could do to seem older than seventeen, from the go-to-work skirt I’d bought for an internship at Wurttemberg the summer before junior year to the mascara swipe, and I was instantly thrown, but I did my best to crawl back into the saddle. “Hi, my name is Phoebe.”
“Yes. Phoebe Oppenheimer. Like it says here on your file. Which my assistant prepared for me when you made your appointment.” Rochelle held it up: a generic red folder, with a name on the label: Oppenheimer, Phoebe. “You’ll recall that you gave my assistant your name.”
I nodded. Exactly thirty seconds in and I was bested. No longer trying to seem older than seventeen, now I was trying to seem older than ten.
“Yes.”
I took the seat Rochelle Steiner was pointing at. The desk between us was wide and covered with an old-fashioned blotter, which made no sense given the oversized iMac desktop weighing it down. The walls were not crowded, the better to focus on her college and law school diplomas in oversized frames, and a photograph of a very young Rochelle, standing beside a woman in a sleeveless yellow dress.
“I used to know a couple of people named Oppenheimer,” Rochelle was saying.
“Oh? Well, it’s a common name.”
Rochelle threw her head back and howled with laughter. It was so surprising I could only stare at her.
“I’m certainly not falling for that one again,” she said, after a moment. “Phoebe Oppenheimer. Sister of Sally and Lewyn, I presume. And that other one, from Fox News. What a shanda.”
I could not disagree, so I said nothing.
“The last time I saw you was on a beach on Martha’s Vineyard. September 10, 2001. A hard date to forget.”