Max was dreaming. He pedaled his first two-wheeler down a concrete parking lot, arms aloft. “No hands, no hands!” he said.

“Get back here,” his father hollered. “Who taught you to be an idiot? Don’t you know they buried George Andersen’s kid last week? No hands on the bars, lost control, hit by a car.”

“I’m okay,” Max said, bringing the bike back around.

“You’re twelve,” his father said. “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

“I’m not,” Max said.

“Don’t be a smart-ass to the world, I mean. It’ll beat you down and then plant you.”

Max’s bike became their old blue Chevy. He drove through the neighborhood, his father in the passenger seat, wailing, “Brake, brake!” They swept past a stop sign. “Jesus,” his dad said, “they buried Sam Wilson last week, did the same thing, hit by a truck.” On cue, a truck horn blared—an eighteen-wheeler, bearing down on them. But Max only laughed as the Chevy’s tailfins began to flap. They ascended toward the clouds, toward the blazing sun, and . . .

Max awoke, to sunlight slipping through his bedroom’s slatted blinds. He groaned, the shreds of his dream fading away. He turned to his wife Hailey, asleep on her left side, hair aglow in the morning light like gold. He kissed her cheek. She didn’t stir.

Max swung his feet over the bed, planted them on soft carpet. The bedroom was white, pristine, immaculate, alien. Knew a guy, fast and loose, he played it, his father’s dream voice persisted. Buried in debt. They dumped him in Potter’s Field, in a crappy pine box.

Max retrieved the silk robe Hailey had bought him, which lay in a shiny blue pile beside the newly restored rocking chair. He shook it out, put it on, and sat, rocking slowly. He looked at his wife; and then at the crystal sconces above the bed; the heavy, intricate molding along the high ceiling; the matching Copeland hardwood dressers, chosen by the best decorator on the North Shore, as yet unpaid. “Go for it,” he’d said, drunk on the money.

A weeks-old People magazine lay on the glass table beside him. He opened it to page twenty-seven. Hailey, in the pictures, looked like a movie star, better. And he, tall, slim, with short gray hair and a dimpled smile, in his midnight suit, was a “man to look out for,” the article said. Maxfield Reynolds, who took over his uncle’s art-consulting firm, expanded it, brought it into the 21st century. Now he had billionaire clients. A major stake in a movie studio. A high-rise Manhattan office, a palatial home. He was generous, a philanthropist. A genius.

Max tossed the magazine in the ceramic wastebin. He put up coffee in the kitchen. He showered in the porcelain tub in his marble-tiled bathroom, brushed his teeth, put on a suit and tie—Hugo Boss, today. He wondered if Hailey was really still asleep. He ate a bowl of the organic Cheerios-pretender she always bought, had coffee, threw a second cup into a thermos, then grabbed his briefcase, hopped into his black BMW 5-series, and drove to the station.

The train was customarily packed for rush hour, filling steadily as it traveled west across Long Island, through Queens, and then into Manhattan. Max found a seat between a broker with his face buried in the stock pages, and a nervous young woman in a tidy skirt and blouse. She clutched her leather handbag like a raft, drowning in unknowable apprehensions. Max imagined her life, what he’d title a painting that captured her now. “Interview,” perhaps, or “First Day.”

After nearly an hour, the train pulled into the bowels of Penn Station. Max ambled slowly through the stifling crush of bodies, upstairs to the station proper, where he broke free, striding down the wide vaulted causeway lined with shops, weaving past slower commuters. He rode the escalators up to the street and crossed to One Penn Plaza: a titanic blue-gray slab against the sky.

His office was on the fiftieth floor. On the elevator, he studied an older man, with translucent pale skin, blue veins, crow’s feet radiating from his eyes like wheel spokes. Max mixed a palette in his mind. “American Dream,” this one would be called. A slow strangulation by lease payments, salaries, payroll tax, unemployment insurance, workmen’s comp, more.

The steel doors retracted. Max’s subject shuffled out. A young black woman boarded: gentle angles, accented by the light, sculpted in warm cocoa brown. Max composed his painting—titanium white mixed with ultramarine blue as underpainting, siennas for the skin, with a wisp of ochre and cadmium red. Umbers, the shadows. Impasto the highlights.

The elevator stopped again: the fiftieth floor. Max left his unsuspecting model. He walked down the hall, and through the glass doors of Reynolds International.

Sonja, the receptionist, doing her nails, waved. He returned the greeting, admiring instead the landscape by Maxfield Parrish—for whom he’d been named—on the wall behind her. It had been a gift to his great-grandfather, almost a hundred years ago. Down the corridor stood a Cassatt and Rousseau, purchased by his uncle, which now watched over employees tinkering on their phones while they lazed in ergonomic cubicle chairs. A few deigned to acknowledge him.

As Max headed for his private office, Jordy Davis trotted up behind him, wearing another gaudy plaid tucked into an Italian leather belt and jeans. “Craig’s bitching about a delivery date for the Calder piece,” he said as they walked. “The shipping company is fucking us.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Max said, sipping from his thermos. He opened the glass door to his office—his name in white lettering—leaving Jordy in the hall.

Inside, his friend Ellis sat behind the mahogany desk, looking out the tall windows. Ellis was darker than the woman in the elevator: no siennas, bluer in the shadows, a flash of bright white highlighting cheekbone and crown, a glint of gold for his wire-framed glasses. He swiveled toward Max. “Want your seat back?” he asked in his baritone.

“Keep it,” Max said. “Suits you.” He dropped into the smaller supplicant’s chair.

Ellis checked his watch. “Got an appraisal across town in forty-five. Start talking, Max.”

“I got a call yesterday from Argentina,” Max said. “From a lawyer wanting to move some artwork. Something special. She’s representing a client who’d rather not be named.”

“Sounds marvelously on the level,” Ellis said.

“Of course, I wanted to know why she came to me,” he said. “She said she researched sales, noticed I’ve been buying some minor Impressionists.”

“For that convention center,” Ellis said. “Providence.”

Max nodded. “So I asked what she had. And she says: ‘Four masterpieces, lost for over a century.’ Spun a story, how back in 1864, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille painted the same subject. ‘A young maiden, sitting on a bench beneath autumn colors.’ She was poetic, this woman.” He imitated her accent: “‘She plays a violin. Listen, and you can hear the music.’”

Ellis leaned in, adjusting his glasses. “She has the paintings there, in Argentina?”

“I asked if she’d bring them to New York,” Max said. “She said only to finalize a sale. There are other interested parties and she can’t travel all over.”

“You’re talking millions, Max, with no guarantees,” Ellis said. “It’s probably a scam.”

“I could get the money,” Max said. He was twelve again, on the bike. “I just have to secure a loan against the paintings.” Racing, no hands.

“No one’s seen the paintings,” Ellis said. “You can’t get a dime on just your say-so.”

“But I can on yours,” Max said. “Come with me, El.”

“No,” Ellis said. He jumped up, headed for the door, but Max stopped him. “I have classes to teach,” he protested. “A newborn. I won’t risk my reputation on a mad scheme.”

“This could be historic,” Max pleaded. “You just certify if they look real or not. It’s no different than what you do all the time.”

“Even if I okay them, they have to be tested,” Ellis said. “And then there’s provenance. Argentina has to set off alarms. Why risk it? Another write-up in People?”

“To be part of something. A great discovery,” Max said. “The glory doesn’t hurt.”

“I don’t buy it,” Ellis said. “What’s going on? Really, Max. The truth. Or I walk.”

“Shit, look, I . . .” He hesitated. “I’m underwater, here. I need a win. A big one.”

“Christ.” Ellis removed his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose. Finally he said, “I’ll call the Institute and the Art Loss Register in London. And Interpol. Don’t know how current their information is, but we’ll see what they have.” He replaced his specs. “It does fit in with history. Those artists were friends, even shared living spaces and studios at times.” He spoke as if convincing himself. “Bazille and Sisley painted the same still-life, a heron, in 1867. Monet and Renoir painted the same bouquet of flowers in 1869 . . .”

“El, thank you,” Max said.

“I’ll come for the curiosity,” Ellis said. “But get your house in order, Max.”

“I rode the wave a little too far,” Max said. “I’m reeling myself in. Don’t worry.”

“When you say that, it makes me more nervous.” Ellis clapped Max’s shoulder. “I’m going to catch a cab.” They hugged.

“I’ll call you tonight,” Max said.

“No,” Ellis said. “I’ll call you, after I figure out what I’m going to tell my wife.”

                                    *          *          *          *          *

Shortly after five o’clock, Max left the office, despite Jordy’s insistence that all of their clients were unmanageable unless Max personally fielded their calls. He read several text messages from Hailey asking where he was, would he pick up a bottle of wine; never mind, Sandra and John brought two bottles, but he should know she was serving dinner at six, regardless of whether he was home. He replied he was on his way, and hurried down into Penn, fighting through the crowd to reach the express train, only to realize he’d left his wallet at the office.

It was just before seven when he arrived at his small estate, the sky turning dark—yellows and burnished golds, dimming to copper and ochre, and then to velvet purple. The forsythia and annuals were in full flower. Max punched in the gate code, rolled up the winding driveway. He pulled into the attached garage next to Hailey’s silver Mercedes. In the far corner stood his restored ’56 T-bird, supple leather and flawless chrome. His father might say: Why waste money on a car you never drive? Max closed the garage door, entered the house.

A chicken cutlet, shriveled in a pan of burnt oil, awaited him in the kitchen. Other cutlets—and portions of string beans, potatoes, salad—lay in the trash. “Hailey,” Max called, voice echoing through cavernous rooms. No answer.

On the dining room table he found a plate of half-eaten food on a grease-soaked plate. He eventually located his wife in the den, curled tight into the corner of the sectional like part of the upholstery. Moonlight filtered through the glass walls, casting soft silver light through an otherwise dark room—spotless wood floors, carbon fiber rug, pristine white leather seating.

Max sat beside her. “Where’s Sandra and John?” he asked.

Hailey stirred, but didn’t look at him. “Sandra drank too much on an empty stomach. Got a headache. The usual.” She struggled upright. “We waited for you. I made dinner.”

“You said you were eating at six.”

“I was trying to do the right thing,” she said.

“Then you should’ve eaten when you wanted,” he said.

“Well, excuse me for caring.” She struggled to sitting and reached over the arm of the couch for a glass of scotch on the side table. Ice clinked. She drank.

“I missed my first train,” he said. “I should have called. I’m sorry.”

“You were supposed to leave by four,” she said. “You were at the office?”

“Where else?” he asked.

“You tell me,” she said.

“Jesus,” he said. “Where do you think all this money comes from?”

“I’m not the one who did this to us,” she said.

“Fine,” Max said. “Then let’s go back to the dilapidated old Cape Cod. And our Saturn with the broken seatbelts. Let’s pull Owen out of school and stick him in community college!”

“Sell the business,” she said, taking another drink. “You can go back to being an illustrator. You’ll be in high demand after everything. Our son can stay at Cornell.”

“I have assets tied up in escrow,” he said. “I’ve secured financing for deals more than a year out. I . . .” His hand found hers. “I’ll make it work, Hails. I swear I will.”

“Owen called,” she said. “He’s spending the summer at school. The whole summer.”

“But I set him up with the lifeguard job,” Max said.

“He doesn’t need me,” she said—the portrait of a mother’s love, suffused in moonglow.

“He does,” Max told her. “Just in a different way.”

“What about your mother?” she insisted. “You two never reconciled.”

“Why is this suddenly my fault?” he asked, pulling away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That isn’t what I meant.”

He fell quiet. Then, he said, “Listen . . . I have a trip coming up. To Argentina.”

“Have fun,” she said. She knocked back the rest of her scotch.

“This could be the find of my life,” he said.

She placed her empty glass on the coffee table. “That’s what you used to call me,” she said. Then she stood, and walked out.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3: Erich - 1932