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I squint at the photo, trying to make out their faces. “I’ve no idea,” I say irritably.
“This is your mother, Julian,” he says, enlarging the black and white photograph and shoving it into my face again. “Don’t you recognize her?”
I stare at the photograph. “Ah,” I say vaguely. “Yes...well, it’s not a very good photograph of her, is it?”
Jack shows the picture to Sandro, who frowns. Confused.
Fuck.
“Julian,” Jack says, “this isn’t your mom. This is Grace Kelly. Are you going to tell me all blondes look alike to you, too? Including your own mother?”
“I had a very late night, Jack, after someone—two someones—tried to kill me. I’m not in the mood to play ‘Guess Who,’ so—“
“What’s going on here?” Sandro demands.
When Jack speaks, the warning tone in his voice from a few minutes ago is back. “If you won’t tell him,” he says, “I will.”
“There’s nothing to tell!”
“Julian.” Jack sounds almost sympathetic. “Come on. Game over.”
Perhaps I could kill Jack. Perhaps I could just cut off his tongue, and his fingers too, to make sure he can’t write anything. But it would be difficult to do all that without him fighting back, and I get the feeling Sandro would be on Jack’s side.
Not mine.
No. I think the only way out of this is honesty, or something parallel to it. I turn to Sandro. “I have trouble with faces sometimes, that’s all.”
“Trouble with…faces?”
“I’d say it’s a little more than that.” Jack sits back against the desk and folds his arms, looking down at me with interest. “I’d say you’ve got a pretty severe condition there, Julian.”
I should have killed him.
Too late now.
CHAPTER30
JULIAN
“So you knowI have those arty cousins I grew up with back in Vegas,” Jack says conversationally, and for the first time, I see Sandro twitch with impatience. “One of them had a problem. Whole family of painters, sculptors, crafters—you name it, they did it. Valentina was as gifted as the rest of them, so it took a while before anyone noticed she had trouble telling one face from another. She was actually a very gifted portrait artist—maybe because every time she looked at a face, she was seeing it for the first time. Capturing it pure, for what it was. But there was an awkward incident where she was doing two different nude studies commissioned by one man, and, well, suffice to say, she sent the wrong portrait to the wrong person. And making a mistake like that when your client is Sonny Vegas...” Jack grins. “I can tell you, it’s no fun. Anyway. My cousin—she had this same thing Julian has. Face blindness, she called it.”
Sandro stares me down. “Face blindness?”
Jack shrugs. “It’s got a technical term. Something long and complicated.”
I look away. “Prosopagnosia.”
“Bit of a mouthful,” Jack says. “But yeah. That’s it. When I asked my cousin how she hid it for so long, she said it just made her more creative—forced her to look for ways to identify people not based on looks alone.”
“Scents,” I say, watching Sandro pace in front of the bay windows. “And voices. And gaits, and hats, and…scars.” Sandro stops dead and gives me a dirty look. “You two are very familiar to me now, and Sandro’s scar makes him...memorable—but I certainly couldn’t pick Jack out by his mugshot, which is actually rather useful when you think about it.”
“But not,” Jack says, “a very useful trait in an assassin, I’d say.”
“You recognize voices,” Sandro says. “But you did not recognize the Lion’s voice during your time with him?”
That’s a sore point to me, but I take it on the chin. “I’d never spoken to Leo before we started hooking up at The Cellar, or not to remember, anyway. So…no. I didn’t recognize his voice.”
Sandro gives an appreciative, ironic laugh. “Shiny DeAngelo.”
