Skulduggery
Page 14
Then he saw us.
“Ellen!” And I knew he hadn’t expected to see me, that he didn’t know I’d been grabbed. He looked from me to Jimmy. “What the hell’s going on!”
He had dropped down to untie me before he saw my back. Then, Jimmy’s. Dan’s face turned a dull angry red and the words came in a soft almost unintelligible rush. I reached out and grabbed his hand when he turned toward the doorway we had blocked. It took Jimmy and Buddy and me to stop him.
“All right,” he said finally, “all right.” He took a deep breath, then, his face still angry, he untied me and Jimmy. Miss Chow helped me to my feet.
“Get the cops, Buddy,” Dan ordered. “Hurry.”
Buddy was turning to go back through the uneven opening into his cellar storeroom when Jimmy said sharply, “Wait, Buddy! Wait!” Jimmy looked nervously toward the blocked door to the hallway. “Listen, they may come any time. Everybody stop and listen to me!” The urgency in his voice held us, turned every face toward him.
“Miss Chow,” he called her to him and his voice was gentle. “Miss Chow, did you give the fossils to them?”
There wasn’t much hope in Jimmy’s voice, but, still, a dream dies hard.
“I looked at your note very carefully,” she said, “and I felt that it was genuine.”
Jimmy sighed, nodded. “I know, and nobody could possibly blame you . . .”
“But I did not feel,” she interrupted, “that the young man who gave me the note had a good heart.” She shook her head back and forth. “When I gave the skull to you, agreed to have you sell the fossils to have money enough to save the hotel, I only did so because I trusted you.” She looked solemnly at Jimmy.
He nodded again but slowly, listening hard.
“I did not trust this young man, this Ted.”
I swear no one breathed. It was that quiet in the dusty dim cellar.
“You were right not to trust him,” Jimmy said bitterly. “But, I had to tell them where the fossils were because they stopped beating on me and were starting in on Dr. Christie. God, I’m sorry. Miss Chow. I wrote the note because I was afraid they would hurt you if you didn’t let them have the bones.” He stared at her. “You did give them the bones. Didn’t you?”
“Oh, no,” she said simply.
“But how in the world . . .”
Miss Chow smiled, a serene confident smile. “That was quite easy, Jimmy. I merely told them a truth and a lie.”
“The truth?” Buddy asked.
“I told Ted that I no longer had the bones. Of course, they searched my room, but, as you know, that was a simple matter and it convinced them I was telling the truth.”
“The lie?” Dan asked.
She looked a little shamefaced. “I do hope you will forgive me and I’m so glad I was able to call you at your office and bring us together to try and find Jimmy, but it was the first thing that came to my mind and you are, after all, such a big young man, I felt sure they would have a difficult time attacking you, and it has, I’m happy to say, worked out all for the best.”
Dan laughed softly. “So you told them big brother had the bones, huh?”
Reluctantly, she nodded.
“That’s all right. But I’m glad, too, that you called me before they got to me. As a matter of fact, it must have been close. I remember now that as I stepped out of the elevator at my office, I saw two young guys getting on the up-elevator. It may have been our friends going up to pay me a call.”
“I knew, of course, that I had to follow them after I told them you had the fossils,” Miss Chow said quickly. “I did so and they never even looked back! I suppose they thought there was nothing to fear from an old lady. I followed them directly to the Middle Kingdom Gallery and then I felt sure I knew what had happened. When they went inside, I called you from a pay telephone. And you knew enough of what had happened to agree with me that Jimmy must be a captive at the Gallery.”
The door to the hall didn’t move more than a half-inch before it stubbed into the wedged bookcase so that didn’t make a lot of noise. It was the sharp exclamation of surprise from beyond the door that jerked our heads around and set us into a furious flurry of motion.
Dan simply bent down and lifted Jimmy to his feet and ran for the irregular opening. Buddy took Miss Chow’s arm and mine and we were right behind them.
Behind us, we heard the hard regular thump and they thudded against the door, trying to push it in, but they succeeded only in shoving the bookcase tighter against the heavy rosewood table.
In the next cellar, Dan stopped abruptly. “What the hell are we running for?” he demanded. “Like I said before, let’s call the cops. It’s a matter of two kidnappings and torture. Let’s stop playing games with these bastards.”
Jimmy held onto his brother’s arm for support and I saw, with horror, that blood was dripping slowly onto the floor from the opened wounds on his back. But he ignored it, crying, “No, Dan! There isn’t time. And none of it matters if we can save the Green Door. We’ll see about it later, but right now time’s running out.
“I’ve got it all set up!” Jimmy said desperately. “At seven-thirty tonight. Behind the pillars at Grant and Bush. The fossils for one hundred and fifty grand and that’s enough to buy the Green Door. Don’t you see, Dan, we don’t have time to call the cops! My God, it would take hours to get it all straight.” He looked down at his watch. “It’s almost noon now.”
He moved away from Dan, walked unsteadily toward Miss Chow. “Because I’m right, aren’t I? You know where the fossils are. We haven’t lost them. We can still save the Green Door, can’t we?”
Buddy and I, our ears hanging out to hear, were busy dragging a heavy banquet table to block the hole between the cellars.
“So who can complain if part of the wall just collapses into my storeroom?” Buddy murmured.
I grinned at him. Sweat trickled down his face, his dark suit was rumpled and dusty, his hands scratched and bruised, and I could have hugged every plump, out-of-shape inch of him.
We had the table upended, covering the opening, and four more tables stacked vertically to jam the covering table before we heard the first splintery sound of breaking wood from the cellar beyond.
And we had listened as Miss Chow described her uncertainty about what to do with the fossils after Dan and I visited her. She wasn’t fooled by our visit even though, she said with a little smile and nod, she found us very charming. She knew we didn’t have Jimmy’s confidence or we would have spoken frankly to her about Peking Man. So she made her decision: she must hide the fossils.
Buddy and I heard the screech of wood in the cellar beyond. “Hey folks, I’m hanging on every word, but let’s go upstairs to my office for the finale. There’s some riffraff at the door.”
It would still take them a minute or so to reach our makeshift barrier. There was no knowing whether they would try to breach it. But there was no point in waiting around to see.
We went up a narrow backstair that opened into the hall outside Buddy’s office. He left us briefly and came back with Joe, a huge young man who made Buddy and Dan look small. I suppose even the nicest restaurants have someone at hand for emergencies. I didn’t worry about an attack from the cellar after I saw Joe. He listened closely to Buddy’s instructions, his mouth drawn up in a perennial smile from the half-moon scar that pulled the skin on his right cheek.
“I always believe in securing my rear,” Buddy observed as he shepherded us into his office. Once settled, we all looked at Miss Chow, who had decided she must hide the fossils.
“In your room . . .” Dan began doubtfully.
“Oh no,” she said quickly. “I knew that my room offered no safety to Peking Man. And that proved to be true for that young man did search my room. Of course, the fossils were gone by then.”
“But where?” Jimmy demanded, almost ferociously.
So she told us. After Dan and I left, she opened the metal container in which she had carried the bones (U.S. Cu
stoms wasn’t concerned, after all, for many Chinese venerate their dead and, for many years, bones were sent home to China for burial so what was odd about an old lady from China bringing along the bones of her ancestors?), and lifted out the yellowed hard fossils and dumped all of them into a cardboard suitcase. She wedged the suitcase into her sturdy knitting bag, and, after a little thought, added her sewing kit with its variety of needles, thread and scissors.
It had taken her almost an hour to walk the six long blocks from the hotel to Market Street, but then it was easy. A nickel for the streetcar, a swift ride to Polk, and only three blocks to go.
There was a moment of stunned silence after she finished and everyone realized where the bones were hidden.
It was Jimmy who summed it up.
“My God, what are we going to do?”
EIGHTEEN
“It would be easier to get into a nunnery on Saturday afternoon,” Buddy offered.
Miss Chow was distressed.
“Oh, that never occurred to me. But it was the only place outside of Chinatown that I had visited in recent years.” She looked at Jimmy imploringly. “You remember when the busloads of us attended the city council meetings to ask for more housing for the elderly.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said limply. “The second floor?”
She nodded unhappily. “I don’t suppose,” she began in a small voice, “there is anyone we could call, anyone who would open the building for us . . .”
Four heads shook back and forth. Open City Hall? On a Saturday afternoon? Maybe for the millennium. Not much short of it. Certainly not for our ill-assorted little group of conspirators.
“So your buyer’s set to show up at Bush and Grant at seven-thirty?” Dan asked.
Jimmy nodded.
We all looked at our watches. Fifteen minutes past noon.
“Can you get in touch with him, reschedule . . .”
Jimmy shook his head. “No way. Even if I could, it would probably blow the deal. He’s skittish anyway. I talked to him on the phone this morning and he damn near whispered the whole time and he has a funny accent . . .”
“Who is he?” I asked. Maybe it was a curator, an anthropologist, somebody who would take care of the bones, then I could be excused for not blowing the whistle.
“I’m not sure,” Jimmy said uncertainly. “But he has to be okay even though he didn’t sound like the guy I set it up with.”
Jimmy hadn’t fooled around. “I called the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa and asked to be connected with someone who had the authority to discuss the return of Peking Man.”
Simple. Direct. And, apparently, successful.
“It seemed like forever before anybody came on the line.” He suddenly looked very young. “You see, I was paying for the call and you can imagine how it was mounting up. But there’ll be enough money—if we can get to the bones. Anyway, this old guy finally came on the line and we talked, oh, it must have been for half-an-hour. The funny thing is, I don’t think he ever doubted that I had the real thing. I guess there’s something about telling somebody the truth. I mean, I didn’t tell him my name or Miss Chow’s but I told him how Dr. Tang got the bones and how a friend brought them to the United States and kept them all these years and how we needed a certain amount of money, not even nearly as much as the fossils were worth, but we would let them go for a hundred and fifty thousand, and I told him what the skull looked like that I had . . .”
“Where is it?” I interrupted sharply. I had forgotten all about that first skull. But, if Jimmy had not told about Miss Chow until he protected me, then more than likely he hadn’t revealed where he had hidden that skull, either.
“It’s okay. I left it at my friend’s in Berkeley. See, I was on my way to Miss Chow’s to get the rest of the fossils when those thugs got me. Anyway, I told the old guy at the Embassy about the funny kind of dent on the right side of the skull and he got real excited and said he knew which skull I meant because Dr. Weidenreich had shown that particular skull to him in 1939. It seems he knew Weidenreich even though he wasn’t a scientist himself. So we set it up for him to come to San Francisco and call me this morning.”
The phone-call came right on schedule but the talk wasn’t easy then. The man whispered and kept turning down all Jimmy’s suggestions on where to meet.
“He kept saying he wanted to be where there were lots of people. I told him this was the right night to be in San Francisco, nothing but people and all of them packed into Chinatown for the big parade. He liked that fine.” Jimmy frowned. “He sure acted spooky. I’d almost think it wasn’t the guy I talked to before but it had to be because he mentioned that skull again and he had my phone number and knew the password we’d worked out.”
Password.
I won’t say I had a premonition. Nothing that specific. It was just a flicker of distress, the clear sharp knowledge that Jimmy had plunged into a world much darker and more dangerous than a make-believe game of passwords could ever be.
But that tremor at the incongruity of passwords was lost in a flood of relief that Jimmy had at least set up an exchange with responsible people. If the sale went through, the fossils would be going home to China and nobody could quarrel with that.
Although, if the story ever became public and I was linked to it, I could already hear the carping, “Dr. Christie, as a responsible member of the scientific community, surely you made every effort . . .”
Dan was shaking his head. “. . . no way, Jimmy. How the hell could we get in? You can’t just smash a window at City Hall and climb in. There would be a patrol car there in seconds! And the damn thing’s lit up at night, even if we could wait ‘til after dark. I don’t see any way.”
“Alfred,” Buddy said excitedly.
Dan and Jimmy, Miss Chow and I all looked at him.
“Alfred,” he repeated loudly.
“Oh,” Dan said slowly, “you mean your brother, Alfred, the one who . . .”
“Right. He’ll help us. Sure he will.”
Once Buddy made the plan clear to us, we all chimed in and, in five minutes, we had come up with the damnedest scheme. Only in California, I thought. And an idea that would occur only to a Californian.
Once Buddy had a plan, he wasn’t content merely to run with it. He led the charge.
But first, he found a clean chef’s coat from his kitchen, gently hung it around Jimmy’s shoulders, then packed him off to see another Wu brother, Calvin, a general practitioner who would treat an unusual wound and keep his mouth shut.
Jimmy didn’t want to go.
“You want maybe to collapse from loss of blood? Besides, you are staining my office floor. Look, Calvin will fix you up and then you might as well get some rest because, if everything works out and we get the bones, you’ll be a busy man tonight.”
Miss Chow would not be detached. I didn’t blame her. She intended to be in on the finale of the fossils that had been in her charge for so many years.
Me, I was to go along to Calvin’s, get my back treated then rejoin the troupe and become part of the dramatic personae along with Dan.
Buddy, of course, was producer and director.
It was a gem of a plan but we were almost undone before we had begun by something absolutely beyond our control—the weather.
That morning, a million years ago, had dawned clear and lovely, the sky a clean-washed blue, the air whippy and fresh, Dan said. But, when we came out of the East Wind Restaurant, San Francisco had turned her face to the hills, the sunshine gone. Low soft rainsodden clouds hung heavily in the sky and Grant Avenue looked older, colder.
“If it rains . . .” Buddy muttered.
He didn’t have to finish. If it rained, everything was kaput.
Alfred was waiting for us, his truck parked in a no-parking zone right in front of City Hall, a huge domed building that looks enough like the Capitol in Washington to be its double. Alfred was Buddy twenty pounds heavier, five years older, emanating the same confidence, the same élan.
But there was no chance now of a quiet word with Dan. No chance to justify myself. No chance to ask him to consider my feelings.
You can change your mind at the amusement park up to the time you climb into the roller coaster car and it clanks up the wooden rails, reaches the top, then begins to hurtle down. Then there’s no more time.
Everything was moving fast now, the car hurtling down the steep roller coaster incline. Alfred and three young assistants were rolling the pedal-powered dolly down the ramp from the truck, wheeling it to the south side of the portico, fastening the tripod legs, mounting the camera on the head, checking the light meter, unloading three tripod-mounted lamps.
Dan looked dashing in his ill-fitting khaki tunic, jodhpurs and a cap that sported a small rounded black bill. He tried to help unload, too, until Buddy hissed at him that actors are unionized, dummy, and they don’t carry the cameras.
Dan and I stood in the shadow of the south wall of the City Hall portico along with Miss Chow, whose bright black eyes sparkled with excitement, while Alfred’s assistants unfolded and set up an aluminum ladder. One of the boys ran lightly up the metal steps to the second-floor balcony and hung the rope ladder, jerking at it to make sure it was secure.
Then Buddy was calling out, “Okay, Ellen, up you go.”
And my last chance to speak out to Dan was gone.
It had been my decision, my insistence, that I be the one to go up. I had pointed out that in Arkansas breaking and entering was a felony and any lawyer convicted of a felony would be disbarred. I didn’t know the penalty in California—a felony, Dan agreed—but I knew damn well that any lawyer caught breaking into City Hall was in trouble.