Killing Orders

by Sara Paretsky

  I knelt down next to the bed and hugged him. Metzinger told me sharply not to touch him-the whole point of the gown and gauze was to keep germs out. I got to my feet.

  Uncle Stefan looked at the doctor. “So, Doctor. You are my good protector, eh? You keep the germs away and get me healthy quickly. Now, though, I have a few private words for Miss Warshawski only. So could I trouble you to leave?”

  I studiously avoided Metzinger’s face as he withdrew with a certain amount of ill grace. “You can have fifteen minutes. Remember, Miss Warshawski-you’re not to touch the patient.”

  “No, Dr. Metzinger. I won’t.” When the doctor had closed the door with an offended snap I pulled a chair to the side of the bed.

  “Uncle Stefan-I mean, Mr. Herschel-I’m so sorry I let you get involved in this.. Lotty is furious, and I don’t blame her-it was thoughtless. I could beat myself.”

  The wicked grin that made him look like Lotty came. “Please-call me Uncle Stefan. I like it. And do not beat your beautiful body, my dear new niece-Victoria, is it not? I told you to begin with that I am not afraid of death. And so I am not. You gave me a beautiful adventure, which I do not at all regret. Do not be sad or angry. But be careful. That is why I had to see you. The man who attacked me is very, very dangerous.”

  “What happened? I didn’t see your ad until yesterday afternoon-I’ve had sort of a wild week myself. But you made a stock certificate?”

  He chuckled wearily. “Yes, a very fine one, if I say so. For IBM. A good, solid company. One hundred shares common stock. So. Last Wednesday I finished him, no them. Sorry, with this injury my English goes a bit.” He stopped and breathed heavily for a minute. I wished I could hold his hand. Surely a little contact would do him more good than isolation and sterility.

  His papery eyelids fluttered open again. “Then I call a man I know. Who it is, maybe best you do not hear, my dear niece. And he calls a man, and so on. And on Wednesday afternoon one week later, I get a call. Someone is interested. A buyer, and he will be there Thursday afternoon, I rush to get an ad in the paper.

  “So, in the afternoon a man shows up. I know at once he is not a boss. The manner is that of an underling. Maybe you call him a legman.”

  “Legman. Yes. What did he look like?”

  “A thug.” Uncle Stefan produced the slang word proudly. “He is maybe forty. Heavy-not fat, you know. He looks Croatian, that thick jowl, thick eyebrows. He is as tall as you, but not as beautiful. Maybe a hundred pounds heavier.”

  He stopped again to breathe, and closed his eyes briefly. I glanced surreptitiously at my watch. Only five more minutes. I didn’t try to hurry him; that would only make him lose his train of thought.

  “Well, you were not there, and I, I had to play the clever detective. So I tell him I know about the priory forgeries, and I want a piece of that particular business. But I have to know who pays. Who the boss is. So we get into a-a fight. He takes my IBM stock. He takes your Acorn stock. He says, ‘You know too much for your own good, old man!’ and pulls out the knife, which I see. I have acid at my side, acid for my etching, you understand. This I throw at him, so when he stabs me, his hand is not quite true.”

  I laughed. “Wonderful. When you’ve recovered maybe you’d like to join my detective agency. I’ve never wanted a partner before, but you’d bring class to the operation.”

  The mischievous smile appeared briefly, weakly; he shut his eyes again. “It’s a deal, dear Victoria,” he said. I had to strain to catch the words.

  Dr. Metzinger bustled in. “You’ll have to leave now, Miss Warshawski.“

  I got up. “When the police talk to you, give them a description of the man. Not anything else. Random burglar after your silver, perhaps. And put in a good word for me with Lotty-she’s ready to flay me.”

  The lids fluttered open and his brown eyes twinkled weakly. “Lotty was always a headstrong, unmanageable child. When she was six-”

  Dr. Metzinger interrupted him. “You’re going to rest now. You can tell Miss Warshawski later.”

  “Oh, very well. Just ask her about her pony and the castle at Kleinsee,” he called as Metzinger hustled me out of the room.

  The policeman stopped me in the hallway. “I need a full report on your conversation.”

  “For what? Your memoirs?”

  The policeman grabbed my arm. “My orders are, if anyone talks to him, I have to find out what he said.”

  I jerked my arm down and away. “Very well. He told me he was sitting home on Thursday afternoon when a man came up the stairs. He let him in. Mr. Herschel’s an old man, lonely, wants visitors more than he wants to suspect people. He’s got a lot of valuable stuff in that apartment and it probably isn’t too much of a secret. Anyway, they got into a tussle of sorts- as much as a thug can be said to tussle with an eighty-year-old man. He had some jewelry cleaner in his desk, acid of some kind, threw it at him and got a knife in his side. I think he can give you a description of sorts.”

  “Why did he want to see you?” Metzinger demanded.

  I wanted to get home more than I wanted to fight. “I’m a friend of his niece, Dr. Herschel. He knows me through her, knows I’m a private detective. An old man like that would rather talk to someone he knows about his troubles than get caught in the impersonal police machinery.”

  The policeman insisted on my writing down what I had just told him and signing it before he let me go. “And your phone number. We need a number where we can reach you.” That reminded me-I hadn’t gotten to the phone company. I gave him my office number and left.

  Traffic on the Edens was thick by the time I reached it. It would be a parking lot where it joined the Kennedy. I exited on Peterson and headed south on side streets to Montrose. It was six-fifteen when I got to the Bellerophon. Setting my alarm for seven, I pulled the Murphy bed out of the wall and fell across it into a dreamless sleep.

  When the alarm rang, it took me a long time to wake up. At first I thought it was morning in my old place on Halsted. I switched off the ringing and started to go back to sleep. It dawned on me, however, that the bedside table was missing. I’d had to reach over the side of the bed to the floor to turn off the clock. This woke me enough to remember where I was and why I had to get up.

  I staggered into the bathroom, took a cold shower, and dressed in the new crimson outfit with more haste than grace. I dumped makeup from my suitcase into my purse, pulled on nylons and boots, stuck my Magli pumps under my arm, and headed for the car. I had a choice of the navy pea jacket or something filled with smoke, and chose the pea jacket-I’d just be checking it, after all.

  I was only twenty minutes late to the Hanover House, and happened to arrive at the same time as Phil. He was too well behaved to look askance at my outfit. Kissing me lightly on the cheek, he tucked my arm into his and escorted me into the hotel. He took boots and coat from me to check. The perfect gentleman.

  I’d put my makeup on at traffic lights and run a comb through my hair before leaving the car. Remembering the great Beau Brummell, who said that only the insecure primp once they’ve reached the party, I resisted the temptation to study myself in the floor-length mirrors covering the lobby walls.

  Dinner was served in the Trident Salon on the fourth floor. Smaller than the Grand Ballroom, it seated two hundred people who had paid a hundred dollars each for the privilege of dining with the archbishop. A gaunt woman in black collected tickets at the entrance to the salon. She greeted Phil by name, her thin, sour face coming close to pleasure at seeing him.

  “I guess it’s Dr. Paciorek, now isn’t it? I know how proud your parents must be of you. And is this the lucky young lady?”

  Phil blushed, suddenly looking very young indeed. “No, no, Sonia… Which table for us?”

  We were seated at table five, in the front of the room. Dr. and Mrs. Paciorek were at the head table, along with O’Faolin, Farber, and other well-to-do Catholics. Cecelia and her husband, Morris, were at our table. She was wearing a black evening gown
that emphasized her twenty extra pounds and the soft flab in her triceps.

  “Hello, Cecelia. Hi, Morris, good to see you,” I said cheerfully. Cecelia looked at me coldly, but Morris stood up to shake hands with me. An innocuous metals broker, he didn’t share the family feud against Agnes and her friends.

  For a hundred dollars, we got a tomato-based seafood chowder. The others at our table had already started eating; waiters brought Phil and me servings while I studied the program next to my plate. Funds raised by the dinner would support the Vatican, whose assets had been depleted by the recent recessionary spiral and the fall of the lira. Archbishop O’Faolin, head of the Vatican Finance Committee, was here to thank us in person for our generosity. After dinner and speeches by Farber and O’Faolin, and by Mrs. Catherine Paciorek, who had graciously organized the dinner, there would be an informal reception with cash bar in the George IV Salon next to our dining room.

  The overweight man on my left took a second roll from the basket in front of him but forbore to offer me any: hoard the supplies. I asked him what kind of business he was in and he responded briefly, “Insurance,” before popping half the roll into his mouth.

  “Splendid,” I said heartily. “Brokerage? Company?”

  His wife, a thin, twittery woman with a wreath of diamonds around her neck, leaned across him. “Harold is head of Burhop and Calends’ Chicago office.”

  “How fascinating!” I exclaimed. Burhop and Calends was a large national brokerage house, second in size behind Marsh and McLennan. “It so happens I’m working for Ajax Insurance right now. What do you think the impact would be on the industry if an outside interest acquired them?”

  “Wouldn’t affect the industry at all,” he muttered, pouring a pint of Thousand Island dressing over the salad he’d just received.

  Phil nudged my arm. “Vic, you don’t have to do a suburban Girl Scout impersonation just because I asked you to dinner. Tell me what you’ve been doing, instead.”

  I told him about my fire. He grimaced. “I’ve been on call almost all week. Haven’t seen a paper. I sometimes think the world could blow up and the only way I’d know would be by the casualties coming into ER.”

  “But you like what you do?”

  His face lit up. “I love it. Especially the research end. I’ve been working with epileptics during surgery to try to map neuron activity.” He was still young enough to give an uneducated audience the full force of his technical knowledge. I followed as best I could, more entertained by his enthusiasm than by what he was actually saying. How you get a verbal response from people whose brains are being operated on carried us through some decent halibut steak, which Phil ignored as he drew a diagram in pen on his cloth napkin.

  Cecelia tried to catch his eye several times; she felt tales of blood and surgery were not suited to the dinner table, although most of the guests were discussing their own operations, along with their children or what kind of snow-removal equipment they owned.

  When the waiters removed the dessert plates, including Phil’s uneaten profiteroles, the room quieted so that his was the only voice that carried. “That’s what they really mean by a physiological map,” he said earnestly. A ripple of laughter made him blush and break off in midsentence. It also drew the head table’s attention to him.

  Mrs. Paciorek had been too busy entertaining Archbishop O’Faolin to look at her children during dinner. Since eating had been well under way when we arrived, she probably never noticed Phil and me at all. Now his exposition and the laughter made her turn slightly so that she could identify the source. She saw him, then me. She froze, her well-bred mask slipping slightly. She glanced sharply at Cecelia, who made a helpless gesture.

  Mrs. Paciorek nudged Archbishop O’Faolin and whispered to him. He, too, turned to stare at our table, which was only fifteen feet or so away. Then he whispered back to Mrs. Paciorek, who nodded firmly. Instructions to get the Swiss Guard to throw me out?

  Phil was furiously stirring cream into his coffee. He was also still young enough to mind very much being laughed at. Under the noise of scraping chairs, as people rose for Cardinal Farber’s post-dinner benediction, I patted his arm comfortingly and said, “Remember: The only real social sin is to care what other people think of you.”

  Farber gave a brisk blessing for the meal we had just enjoyed, and went on to talk about how the Kingdom of Heaven could only be tended on earth with the help of earthly things, that God had given us an earthly creation to care for, and that the work of the temporal church could only be carried out with material goods. He felt especially blessed in being the archbishop of Chicago, not just the world’s largest archdiocese but also the most generous and loving. He was gratified at the response Chicago had made to the urgent needs of the Vatican, and here to thank us in person was the Most Reverend Xavier O’Faolin, archbishop of Ciudad Isabella and head of the Vatican Finance Committee.

  Well pleased with his praise, the crowd clapped enthusiastically. O’Faolin stepped to the podium at a raised stand in front of the room, commended his words to God in Latin, and began to speak. Once again the Spanish accent was so thick as to be nearly incomprehensible. People strained to listen, then squirmed, and finally began murmured private conversations.

  Phil shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him tonight,” he said. “The old boy usually speaks perfect English. Mother must have knocked him off balance.”

  I wondered again at the whispered exchange between her and O’Faolin. Since it was impossible to follow the Panamanian archbishop I let my mind wander. Applause roused me from a doze, and I shook my head to try to wake up again completely.

  Phil commented sarcastically on my sleeping, then said, “Now comes the fun part. You go around the reception detecting to see if you can find your mysterious caller, and I’ll watch.”

  “Great. Maybe you can incorporate it into an article on search-and-sort routines in the brain.”

  As we got up to follow the throng into the George IV Salon, Mrs. Paciorek pushed herself against the tide of traffic and came up to us. “What are you doing here?” she demanded of me abruptly.

  Phil pulled my hand through his arm. “She’s my dinner date, Mother. I didn’t think I could face the Plattens and Carrutherses without some moral support.”

  She stood fulminating, her color changed dangerously, but she had the sense to know she couldn’t order me out of the hotel. At last she turned to Cecelia and Morris. “Try to keep her away from Archbishop Farber. He doesn’t need to be insulted,” she tossed over her shoulder.

  Phil made a sour face. “Sorry about that, V.1. Want me to stay at your side? I don’t want anyone else to be rude to you.”

  I was amused and touched. “Not necessary, my friend. If they’re too rude, I’ll break their necks or something and you can patch them up and come out looking like a hero.”

  Phil went to get me a brandy, while I started counterclockwise around the room, stopping at small knots of people, introducing myself, chatting enough to get everyone to say a few words, and moving on. About halfway up the left side, I ran into Father Pelly with Cecelia and some strangers.

  “Father Pelly! Nice to see you.”

  He smiled austerely. “Miss Warshawski. I hardly thought of you as a supporter of the archdiocese.”

  I grinned appreciatively. “You thought correctly. Young Phil Paciorek brought me. How about yourself? I hardly thought the priory could afford this type of entertainment.”

  “We can’t. Xavier O’Faolin invited me-we used to work together, and I was his secretary when he was sent to the Vatican ten years ago.”

  “And you keep in close touch. That’s nice. He visit the priory while he’s in town?” I asked idly.

  “Actually, he’ll stay with us for three days before he flies back to Rome.”

  “That’s nice,” I repeated. Faced with Cecelia’s withering glare, I moved on. Phil caught up with me as I was nearing the knot around O’Faolin.

  “Nothing l
ike an evening with the old gang to make you feel you’re in kindergarten,” he said. “Every third person remembers when I broke the windows at the church with my catapult.”

  He introduced me to various people as I slowly worked my way up to O’Faolin. Someone was shaking hands with him and leaving just as I reached the group, so Phil and I were able to slip in next to him.

  “Archbishop, this is Ms. Warshawski. Perhaps you remember her from my sister’s funeral.”

  The great man favored me with a stately nod. He wore his episcopal purple shirt under a black suit of exquisite wool. His eyes were green, from his Irish father. I hadn’t noticed them before. “Perhaps the archbishop would prefer to converse in Italian,” I said, addressing him formally in that language.

  “You speak Italian?” Like his English, his Italian accent was tinged with Spanish, but not so distortingly. Something about his voice sounded familiar. I wondered if he’d been on television or radio while he was in Chicago and asked him that.

  “NBC was good enough to do a small interview. People think of the Vatican as a very wealthy organization, so it is hard for us to bring our story of poverty and begging to the people. They were kind enough to help.”

  I nodded. Chicago’s NBC station gave a lot of support to Catholic figures and causes. “Yes. The Vatican finances have been much in the papers here. Particularly after the unfortunate death of Signor Calvi last summer.” Was it my imagination, or did he flinch a bit? “Has.your work with the Vatican Finance Committee involved you at all with the Banco Ambrosiano?”

  “Signor Calvi was a most loyal Catholic. Unfortunately, his ardor caused him to overstep the bounds of propriety.” He had switched back to his heavily accented English. Although I made one or two more attempts at conversation, the interview was clearly over.