A Deadly Shade of Gold

by John D. MacDonald

  I registered astonishment. "Yes! How could you know that?"

  "Never mind," she said, and slid all the photographs back into the envelope and returned it to her purse. "One more drink and let's order, shall we?"

  "Good idea."

  "Mr. Taggart, your credentials are in order. But I didn't know he would have so many."

  "Who would have so many?"

  "Oh, come now!" she said. "Couldn't we stop playing games now? He bought from us. Of course, he would have other sources, in the position he was in."

  "Put it this way Betty. There was another party in the middle."

  "You aren't acting as his agent, are you?"

  "Why do you ask a thing like that?"

  "I don't think you are completely the rude type you pretend to be, Sam. I can understand how, in the present circumstances, he might want to sell out through a clever agent. If you could prove you're his agent, we might see our way to being a little more liberal. After all, he was a good customer, long ago."

  "If I knew his name, I'd try to convince you I was working for him."

  "Politics creates a lot of confusion, doesn't it?"

  "I don't even know what you mean by that."

  "Then you are quite an innocent in this whole thing, and I shan't try to confuse you, Sam. Let me just say that I am personally convinced that the twenty-eight items are legitimate, and we would like to purchase them."

  "For how much?"

  "One hundred thousand dollars, Sam."

  "So I melt them, Betty. Maybe I can get that for the gold alone. Maybe more. I'm talking about a hundred and forty pounds of gold."

  "A lot of trouble, isn't it, finding a safe place to melt them down, then smuggling the gold out, finding a buyer, trying to get your money without getting hit on the head?"

  "I've had little problems like that before."

  "This would be cash, Sam. In small bills, if you'd like. No records of the transaction. We'll cover it on our books with a fake transaction with a foreign dealer. It would just be a case of meeting on neutral ground to trade money for the Mente... the collection, with a chance for both parties to examine what they are getting."

  "What did you start to say?"

  "Nothing of importance. You're very quick, aren't you?"

  "Money quickens me, Betty."

  "I too have a certain fondness for it. That's why I don't part with it readily."

  "You won't have to part with a single dime of that hundred thousand."

  "What would I have to part with?"

  "Let's say twice that."

  "Oh, my God! You are dreaming."

  "So are you, lady."

  "I'll tell you what. If the other pieces are as good as the five we know, I will go up to one twenty-five, absolute tops."

  "The other pieces are better, and one seventy-five is absolute bottom. Take it or leave it."

  We ordered. We haggled all the way through the late dinner. She was good at the game. Over plain coffee for me, coffee and a gooey dessert for Betty Borlika, we worked our way down to a five thousand dollar difference, and then split that down the middle, for an agreed price of a hundred and thirty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars. We shook hands.

  "Even if you were his agent, I couldn't give you a penny more."

  "You'll get a quarter of a million when you sell them."

  "We might. Over a period of years. There isn't an active market in this sort of thing, Sam. You saw the jeweled toad. We've had that for over four months. We have considerable overhead you know. Rent, salaries, money tied up in inventory."

  "You'll have me crying any moment."

  "Don't cry. You drove a very good bargain. How would you like the money?"

  "Used money. Fifties and smaller."

  "It will take several days to accumulate it, Sam."

  "I haven't exactly got the little golden people stashed in a coin locker."

  "Of course not. From my estimate of you, they are probably in a very safe place. How long will it take you to bring them here?"

  "You just get the cash and hang onto it and I'll phone you when I get back to town. How will we make the transfer?"

  "Do you trust me, Sam?" I could not get used to being called that. I kept seeing those pink teeth.

  I returned her smile. "I don't trust anybody. It's sort of a religion."

  "We're members of the same sect, dear. And that gives us a problem, doesn't it? Any suggestions?"

  "A very public place. How about a bank? Borrow a private room. They have them. Then nobody can get rough or tricky."

  "You are a very clever man, Mr. Taggart. Now we can forget it all until I hear from you again. And could you order us a brandy? The deal is made. From now on it's social."

  "Social," I agreed. Her eyes were softer, and her smile a little wider.

  "You are a very competent ruffian, Sam. You give me problems. Did you know that?"

  For the first time I could see that the drinks were working on her. "Not intentionally."

  She frowned judiciously. "You know, I deal all the time with shifty shifty people. How many ways can a person be shifty? Not so many ways, Sam. It's like dancing. Ballroom dancing. It takes a few bars of music to get in step, and then you can follow every lead. But I stumble a little with you. You have contradictions, Sam. You look a little bit rough and sort of mild and sleepy and, excuse me, not too terribly sharp. I think I have you cased and then something else shows, and you go out of focus. Something quick and bitter and secretly laughing. Then I feel trivial and transparent. But I'm not!" She glowered at me. "Damn it, I'm not!"

  "I know you're not, Betty."

  I had seen the same thing happen with businessmen. The deal in process would sustain them, keep them alert and organized and watchful, and when it was settled, they would turn into softer more vulnerable mechanisms. The Betty Borlika of appraisals and bids, of dickering and expertise, had faded away. This was the woman of the bitten nails and the small petulant mouth, and blue Irish eyes slightly mazed, the young Irish widow, with a hidden uncertainty about the value of her goals and her attainments, driving loneliness underground with the pressures of her work.

  I paid the check and helped her into her cape. The place was nearly empty. On the way out we stopped at the bar, at her suggestion, for another brandy.

  "I came down here and got a small job," she said. "Betty O'Donnell, curator of practically nothing. Scut work at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. I lived in the Village and dressed the part. Hairy stockings and ballet slippers. And I answered the Borlika ad. I worked there almost a year and then married Tony." She turned and stared up at me. "You see, my best professional asset is a hell of a fantastic memory Sam. I can read an illustrated catalogue of a sale, and if five years later I come across something that appeared in that catalogue, I can recognize it, identify it, classify it, and remember what it brought at auction." She shook her head as though puzzled. "And I don't even have to work."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Maybe you read about it. It was such a weird accident it was in papers all over the country. High up on one of those crappy buildings they were building, a slab of some kind of imitation stone gunk came out of a sling and fell and hit a cornice and ricocheted across Park Avenue and smashed Tony dead. It was a nice day. He'd decided to walk. A lot of money came out of that, Sam. An awful lot. But I should work at what I'm good at, shouldn't I?"

  "Of course."

  She put her empty glass down. "It's such a family thing, you know. I'm a Borlika. I'm caught in it. Probably forever. At least it isn't, for God's sake, a chain of laundries. Beautiful things, Sam. Beautiful lovely things to buy and sell."

  We went out. It was well below freezing, and the sky had cleared, the high stars weak against the city glow. The sidewalks were dry. We walked to her place, her tall heels tocking, her arm hooked firmly around mine.

  "You don't say anything about yourself Sam."

  "Nothing much to say. I keep moving. I hustle a little of this an
d a little of that. I avoid agitation."

  "When this is over, what will you do?"

  "Bahamas, maybe. Lease a little ketch, ram around, fish, play with the play people. Drink black Haitian rum. Snorkel around the coral heads and watch the pretty fish."

  "God! Can I sign on?"

  "As cabin boy? Sure."

  We arrived at her place. Three stone steps up to the street door. "Nightcap time?" she said as she got her key out.

  "If it doesn't have to be brandy"

  "Right. The hell with brandy."

  The elevator was a little larger than a phone booth. It creaked and juggled and shimmied upward, taking a long time to reach the fourth floor. She had become very animated and chatty, posing her face this way and that as though I held a camera aimed at her, talking as though we were recording it all. Women act that way on television commercials.

  Her apartment was big. She bustled about, turning on strategic lighting, tossing her cape aside. Modern paintings, lighted by spots, made big bright explosions on the walls. A complex wire sculpture on a low pedestal was lighted in such a way it threw a huge mysterious shadow form on a far wall.

  "In spite of all the Borlikas," she said, "my personal tastes are contemporary. I happen to feel that...." The phone started ringing. She excused herself, started toward it, then went into the bedroom and closed the door. The phone stopped. She came back out a few moments later, brisk and chatty.

  She opened a small lacquered bar and scurried off to the kitchen to get cubes. I made us two tall highballs. She took me on a circular tour of inspection of the paintings and sculpture, lecturing like a museum guide.

  Then she said, "I do have one little collection of eighteenth century art. Come along." With a brassy and forlorn confidence she marched me into her bedroom. It was more persuasively feminine than I would have guessed, canopied bed, pastel ruffles and furry rugs. She turned on a display light which illuminated a dark blue panel in the bedroom wall. In random arrangement against the panel were a dozen or so delicate little paintings, most of them round, a few of them oval, all framed in narrow gold, all a little smaller than saucers.

  "French," she said. "Metallic paints on tortoise shell. It was a precious little fad for a time. They are quite rare and valuable."

  "Very nice," I said.

  "Look at them closely, dear," she said, with a mocking smile.

  I did so, and suddenly realized that they were not what they appeared to be, not innocent little scenes of life in the king's court. They were not pornographic. They were merely exquisitely, decadently sensual.

  "I'll be damned!" I said, and she gave a husky laugh of delight.

  She moved closer and pointed to one. "This is my favorite. Will you just look at the fatuous expression on that sly devil's face."

  "And she looks so completely innocent."

  "Of course," she said. Her smile faded as she looked at me. She turned and with exaggerated care placed her empty glass on a small ornate table with a white marble top. It made a small audible click as she set it down. She turned back with her eyes almost closed and groped her way into my arms, whispering, in a private argument with herself, "I'm not like this. I'm really not like this."

  The physical act, when undertaken for any motive other than love and need, is a fragmenting experience. The spirit wanders. There is a mild feeling of distaste for one's self. She was certainly sufficiently attractive, mature, totally eager, but we were still strangers. She wanted to use me as a weapon against her own lonely demons. I wanted information from her. We were more adversaries than lovers. The comments of old Samuel Johnson about the pursuit of women kept drifting into my mind. The expense is damnable, the position ridiculous, the pleasure fleeting.

  But it went very well for her there in the faint night light under the yellow ruffles of the canopy, very well on a physical basis, which is, perhaps, the least important part, sufficiently well to induce her, in the post-tempest euphoria, to give myriad little kitteny affections, a purring gratitude.

  "This is the last thing I expected to happen," she said, with a luxurious stretching. "You're very sweet."

  "Sure."

  She took my wrist, guided my cigarette to her lips. When she exhaled she said, "Did you expect it to happen?"

  "Let's put it this way. I hoped it would. Life is full of coincidences, Betty. Some of them are nasty. Some of them are fine. I guess they're supposed to balance out sometime. I suppose, in a sense, that guy brought us together."

  "Who, darling?"

  "The guy who collected the little gold people."

  "Oh," she said in a sleepy voice. "Carlos Menterez y Cruzada."

  "Who's he?"

  I made it a bored question, as indifferent as her response had been.

  "Sort of a bastard, dear. A Cuban bastard. Very close to Batista. A collector. Those five you picked out, he bought them from us." She yawned, snuggled more comfortably against me and gave a little snorting sound of derision and said, "He collected me, too. In a sort of offhand way. I guess women were a lot more abundant than gold for Senor Menterez. I hated him a while. I don't any more."

  "How did it happen?"

  "Because I was a stupid young girl and he was a very knowing man. It was when I was working at the place, before I married Tony. We had two items he was interested in. I was on salary and two percent commission. He said he couldn't make up his mind. He had a suite at the Waldorf. He called up just before we closed and asked me to bring the photographs over. Drinks and dinner in the suite, of course. He was very charming, very amusing. He didn't make the mistake of begging or insisting or arguing. He just seemed to assume that I was going to go to bed with him, and that I wouldn't have come to the suite if I wasn't willing, and it all seemed to be so settled in advance, I just didn't know how to handle it. I couldn't seem to find the right moment to set my heels and pretty soon, there I was in bed, scared, confused and apologetic. A knowing man can manage it that way with a green girl."

  "How old was he then?"

  "Mmm. Eight years ago. Early forties. Twenty years older than I was."

  "Nice-looking man?"

  "No. Not very tall. Sort of portly, even. Thin little mustache and going bald. Very nice yes. Long lashes. Beautiful suits and shirts, and beautiful grooming. Manicures and facials and cologne and massages. A car and driver picked me up after work the next day too. He was in New York on business with several other Cuban businessmen, but he had the suite to himself. He bought me an absolutely beautiful gown. He wanted me to go back to Havana with him. He said he could set me up with a little shop of my own there. He had me in such a confused daze, I almost made that much of a fool of myself. I didn't even really like him. I couldn't understand why I kept doing exactly as he asked me to do. He didn't seem... very intense about me. Just sort of jocular and fond, like people are toward dogs."

  "Was he married?"

  "Yes. After he left it took me about two weeks to come out of the fog. You know, I had always wondered how reasonably attractive girls ever got themselves into entanglements like that with older married men. I just had a kind of anxious, earnest desire to please him. I didn't want him to be disappointed in me in any way. A vassal state. Then I woke up and knew it had been a very dirty business."

  "What kind of business was he in in Cuba?"

  She yawned. "I don't know. Lots of things. After the roof fell in on all those people down there, I used to wonder what happened to the Menterez collection. I suppose he got out with it. And whatever else he could carry. I wondered if we would ever hear. Or if he would show up to peddle it all back to us. But somebody got it away from him, and you got it away from somebody else?"

  "Something like that."

  "It doesn't matter does it, darling? Whether he's alive or dead. I'm so deliciously sleepy, dear. Let's sleep for a little while."

  Something awakened me, perhaps the little tilt of the bed as she left it. I turned over, feigning sleep, and through slitted lids saw her, nude-white in the small am
ber of the night light, staring back at me, her body slightly crouched, the dark hair tangled across her pale forehead. After I took several deep breaths, she went plodding silently over to the chair where I had tossed my clothing. Though I could not see her clearly I knew she was going through the pockets. She would find cigarettes, lighter, change and a thin packet of bills. All identification was back in the bureau drawer of my locked room in the Wharton.

  When she was through, she came stealthily back to bed, lay silently beside me for perhaps ten minutes, and then set about gently awakening me. When she dropped off into sleep again, I could sense that it was a very deep sleep. I tested it by shaking her, speaking her name. She made querulous little sounds that faded into a small buzzing snore. Ten minutes later I flagged down a hurrying cab on Third Avenue, in the first grey of a tomcat dawn. At the Wharton, I got my key at the desk and went up and took a shower.