Stratton stepped closer to study the vandalism. After a few moments he turned to the caretaker and asked, “Did you call the police?”
“Of course. They sent a man. So what? What can they do?”
The old man moved forward and pointed with his foot to an area around the Melmans’ granite slab. The dirt was dark and moist and loose, as if a shovel had been plunged into the ground and withdrawn.
“I figured they were interrupted by a car,” the old man speculated.
“What about Aunt Sarah?” Stratton asked.
The caretaker pointed to the next headstone on the row:
SARAH ROSE STEINWAY
1919—1983
The only mark of vandalism was another swastika, this one drawn in orange crayon between the “Sarah” and the “Rose.”
“Look at that,” Stratton said disgustedly.
“That’ll come right off, mister. I can get it with some turpentine, or some real strong acetate. Won’t harm the marble, either. I’ll clean it off this afternoon.”
Stratton set the flowers on the grave and stepped back to the footpath. The caretaker took a deep breath. “It’s impossible to guard a place like this twenty-four hours a day. You understand, don’t you? We’re just a small cemetery—I mean, we’ve got a watchman, but he’s old and he doesn’t hear so well.”
Stratton was only half listening. He concentrated on the Steinway grave. The sod around the marker was puckered in several places, and badly gashed near the headstone.
“When did all this happen?”
“Either last night or the night before. See, I don’t get around to this side every day. I mow it three times a week, though, and if there’s a visitor like yourself, or the men who came a couple of days ago, then I’ll bring ’em here to show the way.”
“What men?”
“They brought flowers for your Aunt Sarah there …” the caretaker began.
A lovely touch, Stratton thought.
“How many men?”
“Two. Said they were good friends of the deceased.”
The old man dabbed at his neck with the handkerchief. “I’m trying to remember their names. One of them was a thin fellow, about forty-five, fifty maybe. Had black hair. Dressed kind of bright for the cemetery. The other guy looked Japanese. He didn’t say much. Last time I saw them they were just sitting on the bench, talking quietly. I’m glad they weren’t here to see what happened to their flowers.”
STRATTON FOUND two motels within a half mile of the small cemetery. He went first to the Holiday Inn. The young junior-college student at the registration desk was helpful. He allowed Stratton to study the check-in cards going back for seven days; there were no Oriental names registered. Stratton asked the young desk clerk if he remembered an American and a Chinese staying there. The clerk shook his head no.
“And I probably would have noticed them,” the clerk said. “This is the slow time of the year. A lot of our business is lunch hour.” He winked.
Across the street at the Bay Vista Court, Stratton was greeted by an attractive, middle-aged woman with frosted hair and a warm smile.
“Carl Jurgens,” he said, holding out his hand. “Apex Car Rentals.”
“I’m Mrs. Singer,” the woman said. “How can I help you?”
“Well, a few days ago we rented a car to two fellows. A red Oldsmobile, brand-new. When they picked it up at Tampa Airport, they wrote on the rental agreement that they’d be staying here at your place. I’ve got a copy of the rental papers in the car.”
Mrs. Singer nodded. Stratton could tell that she was curious.
“Anyway,” he said, “they stiffed us. Dumped the car at a Grand Union over on Dale Mabrey.”
“I still don’t see how I can possibly help.”
“Simple, Mrs. Singer. Just tell me if they were here, and maybe let me have a look at the registration cards—to see if they left an address, or a phone number. The ones they gave our people were phony, of course. Maybe they paid you with a credit card. Now that would be great.”
Mrs. Singer stood up and smoothed her dress. “How much did they get you for?”
“A hundred and ninety-four,” Stratton replied. “It’s not Fort Knox or anything, I know …”
Mrs. Singer smiled. “It’s a lot of money. I understand, believe me. We’ve been burned a few times ourselves.” She pulled a Rolodex wheel across the counter and thumbed through the cards. “What were their names?”
“One was an Oriental name, a Chinese. His name is Wang. W-A-N-G. Like the computers.”
Mrs. Singer nodded vigorously. “Yes, I remember him. Here.” She unfastened a three-by-four card from the Rolodex.
“They stayed one night. Room forty-one, no phone calls. Paid with a Mastercard. Here’s a copy of the charge slip.”
Stratton read the name: Harold Broom.
Broom … Broom? Then he had it: the overbearing art broker he had met at the consular office in Peking. What was it he had said: This is new territory, and I don’t know whose back needs scratching. Maybe we could help each other out. Hey, pal, wanna buy some artifacts?—it was almost that blatant. Broom was a soulless cretin, the perfect confederate for the deputy minister of art and culture.
“Are these the men?” Mrs. Singer inquired.
“Yes. This is very good.”
“But they weren’t driving an Oldsmobile, Mr. Jurgens. They drove a white van—like a U-Haul, only white. Mr. Broom did all the driving.”
A van, of course. Prosaic but practical—a modern hearse for an eternal warrior.
Mrs. Singer asked, “Do you rent vans like that?”
“No, only cars. Perhaps they got the van after they ditched our Oldsmobile. Well, the important thing is that these are the fellows I’m looking for.”
She gave Stratton a coy look. “I might be able to help. Mr. Broom asked to borrow a phone book—we don’t keep them in the rooms anymore. They just get stolen. Anyway, I let him borrow the telephone book. Then he walked over to that pay phone and called Delta Airlines. He made reservations for today to New York. La Guardia, I think.”
Stratton wanted to hug her.
He drove to a Holiday Inn on the other side of St. Petersburg and checked in. It was almost dusk. He turned on every light in his room, slipped out of his shoes and sat down at a wobbly desk. From another pocket in his suit jacket, Stratton took the piece of paper that Jim McCarthy had delivered to him in Hong Kong. The list was typed under the letterhead of the Boston Globe. It said:
U.S. citizens deaths May—August 1983:
Steinway, Sarah 5-10-83 Canton St. Petersburg, Fl.
Mitchell, Kevin P. 6-22-83 Xian Baltimore, Md.
Bertecelli, John 7-4-83 Xian Queens, N.Y.
Friedman, Molly 8-14-83 Peking Fort Lauderdale, Fl.
Wang, David 8-16-83 Peking Pittsville, Ohio
With a blue felt-tip pen, Stratton circled the name of John Bertecelli, who had died on the Fourth of July in Xian. Bertecelli’s body now lay somewhere in New York. Probably Broom and Wang Bin were already there, and maybe already at work.
Stratton thought: I ought to leave right now. There is no time to do what I had planned. Catching them will not be easy, even with the right grave.
The right grave.
Stratton contemplated his macabre odyssey. Chasing the coffins was a shell game. Five caskets, three Chinese soldiers. Scratch off McCarthy’s list the name of David Wang, whose “death” at the Heping Hotel had been staged after the theft of the warriors. That left four possible caskets.
Stratton had arrived in San Francisco with a simple strategy: geography. He could think of no other logical way to go at it. He had booked a flight to Miami where he had planned to begin the search, moving north, following his death list.
Molly Friedman had been first. A death notice published in the Fort Lauderdale News had announced that Molly was at rest at the Temple of David Mausoleum in Hallandale. A brief memorial service had been held four days after her sudden death in Peking.
Rabbi Goren had kindly presided.
Stratton had found his way from the newspaper offices to the Temple of David. Bearing a small parcel of flowers from a Moonie working the stoplights on Federal Highway, he had been greeted at the door by a small balding man dressed in a dark wool suit. “Molly Friedman, please,” Stratton had whispered, and the greeter had led him down a chilly hallway with high granite walls. They had entered a huge vault bathed in purplish light that filtered from stained-glass panels set high in a rectangular ceiling.
The balding man had consulted a small, leatherbound directory. Then he had taken ten steps forward and pointed high up the wall. “There,” he had whispered. “G-one-two-oh.”
Stratton had squinted to see the name. Molly Friedman’s remains lay seven rows up, on a granite ledge—in an urn. A Chinese urn.
“Your flowers,” the greeter had whispered. “We can arrange them.”
“That will be just fine,” Stratton had said. Two hours later he had been on a plane to St. Petersburg.
And now the trail was red hot. Stratton rocked the chair, gripping the cheap desk by its corners. He was jittery, restive. How easily all the old hunting instincts had returned. He envisioned the icy-eyed old Chinese prowling a foreign graveyard, a remorseless night bandit. Why not go to New York tonight? Stratton thought. The grave of John Bertecelli waited. He could end it there.
Stratton thought of the old caretaker with the lawn mower at the St. Petersburg cemetery. He thought of the stinking garbage on the graves, the bloody swastikas, the vulgar poem—all doubtlessly the work of Harold Broom, relishing his role as a teenage vandal. If Wang Bin was a man to be feared, Broom clearly was a man to be hated. And not to be taken for granted. What if the despoliation was a double-blind, a misdirection on the off chance someone was following them? Unlikely, but …
Stratton resolved not to leave St. Petersburg without seeing the evidence with his own eyes, erasing what little doubt remained. He would do the work swiftly and neatly, leaving no clues.
He changed into jeans and a black T-shirt, and tied on a pair of Puma jogging shoes. At an Army-Navy store a few blocks from the motel, Stratton purchased a heavy-duty flashlight and a portable screw-down shovel. At midnight, he headed for the graveyard near the bay.
Stratton parked in a municipal lot not far from the gate. Carrying a shovel under one arm, he melted into a stand of pines and scouted the cemetery on foot. The caretaker had mentioned a security guard; Stratton found him in a matter of minutes. He was sitting in a compact car, reading a magazine by the dome light—a silver-haired black man, wearing the usual rent-a-cop uniform.
Stratton crossed behind the guard’s car, running low to the ground. He chose a path through the trees and scrub and purposely stayed clear of the water, which shimmered revealingly with the lights of Tampa. After about a hundred yards, Stratton flicked on the flashlight.
The caretaker had worked earnestly to clean up Broom’s foul mess. The trash was gone, and most of the glass had been swept up. The old man had scrubbed the Melmans’ grave marker until only a shadow of the swastika was visible. He had obviously devoted equal energy to the stone of Sarah Rose Steinway, although the orange crayon had proved stubborn. The Nazi emblem had become a permanent greasy smudge between the “Sarah” and the “Rose.”
Stratton unfolded the shovel and tightened a bolt at the neck. He began to dig with short, powerful strokes. There was no slab on the grave, only a layer of new sod. Below the grass, the earth was moist and soft. It gave way easily—too easily for a three-month-old grave.
For ninety minutes Stratton dug. He expected that the coffin had not actually been interred six feet deep, and he was right. He was only up to his armpits in the hole when the shovel bit struck metal. He dropped to his knees and cleared the rest of the dirt by hand. At the foot of the coffin, Stratton carved out a trench for himself. He stepped down and bent over so far that his chin nearly met the lid. In the darkness he fished like a raccoon for the corners of the coffin.
Stratton got a good grip and stood up with an involuntary grunt. The coffin came loose of the earth. Stratton backstepped out of the grave, dragging the thing half out of its cool pocket until it rested at a peculiar angle—head down, feet toward the sky.
Stratton was panting. He scoured the pines and the cart paths for headlights. His hands trembled and he wiped them on his jeans. He thought it obscene to use dirty hands for this. Obscene, but not inappropriate. With the point of the cheap shovel he gouged the seal of the coffin, and the lid flopped open with a cold click.
Stratton took a deep breath and aimed the flashlight.
The coffin of Sarah Rose Steinway was empty.
The cheap cotton lining bore the indentation of a rigid human form. Something sparkled microscopically against the fabric. Stratton ran a finger lightly along the inside of the casket, as if tracing the spine of the invisible dead.
In the beam of the flashlight, Stratton examined his fingertip and noticed a powdery film of red-brown clay. The ancient dust of another grave, another violated tomb.
Chapter 23
THE CAB RIDE FROM La Guardia was no more harrowing than a spin through downtown Peking, and Wang Bin rode in unperturbed silence. He grunted once when a sleek black limousine cut sharply in front of the taxi, and jumped slightly in his seat at the sudden blast of a trucker’s horn. But it was the vista of Manhattan, seen from the Triborough Bridge, that left him breathless. At first glimpse Wang Bin leaned close to the window and stared at the vast skyline marching along the river, molten in the pink light of the late afternoon. The city was like nothing the deputy minister had ever seen.
Harold Broom glanced over and smiled with a superior air. “Hey, Pop, the cabbie is Russian. How about that?”
Broom had taken to calling Wang Bin “Pop,” an annoying term that the deputy minister did not understand.
“Didya ever think you’d be riding with a Russian through the streets of America?” Broom roared at some dim irony while Wang Bin watched out the window in fascination as the skyline swallowed them.
The two men checked into a small, comfortable hotel on Central Park South. Broom did all the talking—to the cabbie, to the doormen, to the desk clerk, to the rental agent. Wang Bin had nothing to say; New York was richer and more bewildering than he had ever imagined. Compared to that of Peking, even the air was a tonic. The crowds of walkers were garish, and certainly less orderly than the Chinese, but the Americans were equally hurried and wore the same expressions of determination. And the automobiles were boggling—more cars than Wang Bin believed existed in all of China, stacked on every street, inching forward with horns blaring. The noise jarred his nerves.
Wang Bin stood at the window of the fifth-floor hotel room and watched a hansom cab clop down the street toward the Plaza Hotel. On the sidewalk at Columbus Circle, a ragged group of men and women waved placards and shook their fists. Two policemen stood at the corner, chatting calmly. Wang Bin did not understand why they did not hurry to arrest the demonstrators. He decided that the officers must be waiting for reinforcements.
Broom groomed himself in the mirror. “So what’s it gonna be tonight, Pop? Studio 54?”
Wang Bin scowled at the joke. “I am tired.”
“Okay, no disco. But we gotta eat,” the art broker said.
“I want to rest before we work.”
“Look out there, old man. That’s the greatest city in the world. Don’t you want to have a good time?”
“I am tired.”
“Hey, Pop, let’s celebrate a little. We’re rich, remember? You and me, we’re on a roll now. Packed our little pal off to our Florida buyer yesterday—that’s one down, two to go, and money in the bank.” Broom rubbed his hands together hungrily and gave the deputy minister another one of his winks. “Let’s see the sights!”
“You go ahead,” Wang Bin said, stepping away from the window. “I want to sleep.”
THE DEPUTY MINISTER was dressed for the graveyard when Harold Broo
m returned at one in the morning.
“Hey there, Pops, you missed a good time.” Broom weaved across the room and eased down on the sofa. He kicked off his shoes and scratched at his feet.
“You are drunk,” Wang Bin said angrily.
“Don’t worry, partner,” Broom struggled out of his clothes without assistance, but Wang Bin had to guide the art broker’s arms and legs into the dark gray coveralls that they had selected as their grave robbers’ uniform.
“Didya see the Post tonight?” Broom babbled. “It made the headline on one of the back pages: VANDALS DESECRATE JEWISH GRAVES AT FLORIDA CEMETERY. Just a little story, no big deal, but they printed part of my poem. Even had a photo of one of the headstones.”
Broom stretched out on the sofa and groaned feebly.
“It’s time to go now,” Wang Bin said, standing over him.
“In a minute.”
“Now!” said the deputy minister, grabbing Broom’s arm.
The art dealer easily shook himself free and pushed the old man away. “Don’t fuck with me, Pop! I got a tiny headache right at the moment so I’m gonna rest. I’m the driver, ’member? We go when I say.”
Wang Bin sat down only when he heard Broom start to snore.
TOM STRATTON SLOUCHED glumly in the Eastern Airlines lounge that overlooked the main runways at the Tampa—St. Petersburg Airport. A long line of jets sat in the slashing rain, the wing lights flicking red and white and red again, the pilots waiting for the weather to clear. Stratton’s flight to New York had already been delayed thirty minutes.
Stratton was on his second beer when he got the idea for a modest head start. He found a nest of deserted pay phones in the main lobby near the gift shops.
In a neat brownstone in one of the better neighborhoods of Queens, Violet Bertecelli cracked her shin on a coffee table as she fumbled in the dark for the telephone. When she finally found it, she was in too much pain to say a gracious hello.
Carl Hiaasen & William D. Montalbano Page 25
