by Paul Monette
The next thing was big. It fell along the hall seven or eight feet, and it had the shape and heft of a railroad tie. A totem pole, in point of fact. And now Peter guessed Rita was in it so deep, she couldn’t even be doing it solo anymore. She could never have lifted this herself. She had to have an accomplice. And what if it was Nick? He stopped. He didn’t have time, but he had to look at this totem, it was just too beautiful. He peered closely at the worn, cracked wood where a bear stood on top of an elk, and a wolf on a bear, and then a man. No, he thought as he hurried himself along, it wasn’t Nick’s style to turn it into a treasure hunt. Nick could never be playful with things that came so close to art. He could make a game of giving away a green MG or anything else you could buy off the floor. But something that carried an air of age and values, one-of-a-kind, always left him stone-cold sober. The accomplice had to be someone as unafraid of the beautiful as Rita, who could pick things up and put them down, who had to have a feel of everything.
Further on, just within reach of Rita’s door, was another block of wood, sculpted this time in India. A plump figure in a full lotus, with a look on his face that made him seem like the god of compassion. Exquisite, and any other time Peter would have gazed at it long enough to lay a claim, but a corner of his eye had caught the last thing hanging on the door. A Cézanne watercolor of rocks and a tree, hardly finished, the tree hardly begun, and yet it made Peter want to give up everything and go live there, as if he would never need to move from just that random space of a few feet of forest. Peter’s continuous process of picking the best wherever he was took a deep breath. Everything else, all the way back to the coins on the living room floor, was nothing compared with this. The snake-lidded cigarette case was marvelous and frivolous and ritzy, but a real Cézanne showed it up as a curious toy. Peter had two thoughts at once—that value was a very subjective thing, particularly in the presence of what was priceless, and that Rita had gone too far for even him and Nick to get her out of it.
Though he gaped at the watercolor, he must have knocked right away, as if he didn’t dare spend too long in a rapture when there was so much to get to the bottom of. But as he was dazed, he didn’t remember the knocking. All he knew was that he was an inch from the painting one moment, and the next thing he knew, the door was wide open and Rita was grinning as if he’d come to pay a social call. He was hit just then by a crippling sadness. It all seemed to mean he didn’t know her at all, and he couldn’t afford to lose either of the members of his team. At the same time, he must have panicked at the thought that if he lost Rita now, what little he had of the past went with her. Take care, he told himself. They stood in silence, staring at each other across the threshold. Rita’s grin softened when she saw that he was in turmoil, and as the tenderness welled up in her eyes, Peter felt the color coming back to him, too. In a minute, they looked exactly the same, tuned to each other again and ready to sing a duet. Partly, it was a brave front, but Peter realized it wasn’t in him to react to anything Rita did with anything like moral criticism. If she’d had to kill to get this stuff, she must have had a good reason. All Peter cared about was that she not get hurt. He’d kill, too, if he had to, to keep her safe.
“You’re very clever, I see,” she said, pulling him into the room and locking the door behind them. Against whom, he wondered, but let it go. “It would take some men months to follow those clues to the end.”
“Would it?” he asked lamely. The sorrow gripped him again like a cramp. He’d like it better if they got right down to it. He didn’t think they’d be laughing once they’d started.
“Oh, at least,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t go any further than the gold coins. A bird in the hand, you know. Then, if they got as far as the telescope, they’d have to diddle around with that.” She talked right at him for a bit, but she couldn’t seem to stand in one place. She turned to the windows and, starting at one end, went down the row, shutting and locking. “Who ever gets to the good stuff, Pete? And how do they even know when they’re there? What percent of the world even knows who Cézanne is?”
“Rita, where did you get all this?”
“You’ll see, you’ll see,” she said, coming back from the end of the windows and holding out her hand. “Come on.”
“Wait,” he said, his hands stiff at his sides. “None of it’s yours, right?”
“I’m trying to show you, Pete.” She made it sound as if he was getting in the way of a good explanation. But she saw at last how far off the track he was, and she acted quickly to ease his mind. He wasn’t having any fun. “Listen,” she said, “we aren’t in any trouble. A lot of this is against the law, but all the criminals have run away. I swear it, Pete, if the cops do anything to us, it’ll be to give us medals. Do you trust me?”
“All right.” He gave her his hand and let himself be led across the room to the closet. He knew enough now to guess the rest, and it showed what he could do with his mind instead of mere thinking. It had to be Rusty Varda, he suddenly decided, and the stuff must come from a secret cache. Of course. It was as if, in some unfocused corner of his mind, he’d always known. There was always something more to Crook House. He understood houses so well that his antennae had at some point picked up the extra space, but he hadn’t got around to it consciously yet. Eventually he would have groped his way here, though still it took a Rita to crack the lock. Peter would have had to break through the mirrored door with a hatchet. Now, as Rita ushered him into the closet, he realized that he’d never been satisfied with the Varda story. All that waiting around in Crook House, forty years of it, had to have a purpose beyond forgetting to give away twelve million. Peter used to ask Hey: What did Rusty Varda do? Hey didn’t know. Said he didn’t know. Peter abandoned it in the end, but something never ceased to nag at him. Now it came back at full volume when Rita closed the door. Strangely, he felt as if he’d been waiting all his life for this.
“Ready?” she asked, holding a finger up like a magic wand.
“Does Nick know?”
“Yes.”
“Who else?”
“Nobody else.”
“Go ahead.”
She was standing with her back to the door. She brought her finger down to her side and touched it against the button in the doorknob. Click. As the mirror swung open, Peter became aware of a smell that he knew and couldn’t name. In a way it was the smell of money, but later he would place it more precisely. A certain kind of Brooklyn Heights apartment, full of the goods of Europe and smuggled haphazardly out of Russia. Louis XVI painted furniture, polished silver, and old masters—the smell of all the princely quarters of Saint Petersburg.
She lit the candles, and they wandered in like Hansel and Gretel at the edge of the Black Forest. For the longest time they said nothing at all. She didn’t, of course, have to identify anything to Peter, who supplied a running commentary in his own head, mentally fixing a label and a price on every piece. Rita had by this time sent off twenty or twenty-five packages, but she’d hardly made an appreciable dent. Lots of it was very big. It was one thing to drag a totem pole out to the hallway, quite another to put it through a mail slot. Rita knew she had to expand her operation, which was the main reason she’d decided to let Peter in on it.
But practical matters aside, being there with Peter was like being there the first time again. Rusty Varda couldn’t have asked for a better audience. They were kids in a toy shop, kids in an attic, but because they knew the magnitude of the power they stood at the center of, they could hardly get more grown-up either. They were like a king looking out from a mountain at miles and miles of his land. Some of it was sheer possession, of course:All the world they can imagine is theirs, look at the proof, or perhaps there isn’t a meaningful line anymore between them and the world. But mostly, in their case as with a kingdom, it had to do with being overwhelmed by a glut of beauty. Nick had told them both that, when he walked up north through a redwood grove, he found himself in the presence of superior beings. For Peter and R
ita, it was as if all the artists who did these things were in the room with them, from Rembrandt standing like a tragic philosopher all the way down to the Chinese weaver embroidering, stitch by stitch, the cloth of gold draped on the stone table. It was how Rusty Varda must have seen it, as a meeting ground for artful spirits.
“Where’s it all from?” Peter asked quietly, moving off by himself from one thing to another while Rita followed behind, content to go his way and watch it all discovered.
“Everywhere,” she said. “Museums, colleges, libraries. A lot of it belonged to the anonymous rich. It’s all in a book he kept.”
“Where?”
“Keep going. That’s my office up there.”
She sat him down on the sofa, brought over the book, and put on his head the miner’s lamp she’d found in the desk’s file drawer. She faced him in the wizard’s chair. He was turning to the book, she knew, to take a break, so his mind could adjust to the size of the treasure ground. He wanted to anchor himself in details. And with his background, even the diary was gripping, a Gone with the Wind reduced to its lists of damages. It could have been an accounting of the Kirkov losses in ’17. Rita watched him to be sure she’d been right to tell him. Oh yes, she thought, no problem. Of course, she still had to convince him to agree to keep returning what was returnable. Nothing prevented him from calling a halt to the mail-order business. He could hoard the room from now on as the closest he was ever going to get to the inheritance modern politics stole from him. But Rita didn’t think he would. What made the secret room serene was the feeling of being touched by a fabulous story. No matter what else was closing in outside on their actual lives, Rusty Varda’s dream sat them down and promised that life wasn’t boring at all to those who went after something. Peter was the acid test, since he would appreciate everything here so much, but Rita believed all along that the experience of the place didn’t make a person feel possessive. She would let Peter see that they had enough work to do in here to keep them busy for weeks. And the work was enough. It was power over things without the responsibility of owning them.
“There’s a Rembrandt?” Peter asked, looking over at her a moment so that the miner’s light shone in her eyes.
“You went right by it,” she said, as if that in itself was something of an event. “But I put a sheet over it so I could save it for last. You won’t believe it.”
He took off the helmet and laid it in his lap as he leaned his head back in the pillows. He settled down to being as happy as she was, since it was turning out to be dinner at ‘21’ all over again—actually much much more, because their standards had gotten higher. They’d done enough ‘21’ and the like in the past few years to know the menu inside out. So they prepared to bask in the glow of this place with a vengeance, like a week flat on the beach in Hawaii. And just as Rita had predicted, the afternoon in the real world was canceled. They were going to get light in the head in the next few hours. They wouldn’t be any good at other people’s houses, not today, even if they could have torn themselves away. They had something amazing they had to work out.
“Do you think they used to come here and have love scenes?”
“Who?” Rita asked abruptly. She hadn’t gotten as far as Rusty Varda and Frances Dean.
“Rusty Varda and Frances Dean,” he said, reading her mind down to the least inflection. “You don’t go as far as this just to give yourself a little privacy. You have to have someone to do it for.” His head lolled in the goose down, and he spoke up at the rough-beamed ceiling. Rita saw a split she wasn’t ready for. It sounded as if they were going to be in passionate accord about the treasure and hardly understand what each other meant by Rusty Varda and Frances Dean. “Like some of my clients,” he said. “When they do over their houses, and they feel they’re doing it for me, they do a fabulous job.”
“I don’t know if they were ever actually here inside,” Rita said. Which was fussy of her, since she’d fantasized any number of times about Varda showing off the masterworks to his movie star by the light of a single candle. To Peter, she seemed to be trying to say it was only a storeroom in here. But wait, she said to herself, you don’t have to protect them anymore. The spirits of Varda and Frances Dean were on their own. In fact, Rita remembered just in time, she needed to hear opinions totally different from her own, if only to begin to draw her out of the story. If Peter thought it was folly and she thought it a great romance, it didn’t mean either was wrong. But even if it meant they were both right, she had to admit it was a romance made up entirely of yearnings for what might have been. All doom and no all-night kisses. She knew she might have to make do with the notion that, though it was more folly than not, at least it was vast.
“Tell me about them, will you?” Peter said. He must have sensed he was intruding on something of Rita’s that was very far advanced, and that she had the prior claim. Just as he didn’t have to ask how she’d stumbled on the room or gotten in—it simply had to do with being Rita—he didn’t wonder how accurate her information was. If it wasn’t the truth, so what. It was better than the actual facts because it came so close to who the people thought they were.
“I probably don’t know anything you don’t know,” she said, conveniently letting a little desert murder slip her mind. “But as far as I can guess, she was scared of life, and he was scared of death. So he had to think up something as ingenious as junk was for her. And this is it.” She spread her arms helplessly, trying to take in the two thousand years of art as well as the hillside room. But in the gesture there was something of a shrug, too, as if to finish up by saying nothing cheated death, even if it took the fear away.
Then she passed across to him the note that Varda left for Frances Dean’s ghost. And then they began to look at the things one by one. And once they were doing that, it was easy for Rita to start detailing the method of her retrieval project. Peter understood everything right away. They went very fast. They would have gone on all day without a break, except that the air usually got tight after an hour or two. So Rita decided they’d work until one-thirty, and then they’d go out into the house for lunch, where she knew they’d be savoring higher matters than food. If they had an image of the whole of Crook House in their minds just then, it must have seemed open and bright and very alive. In the secret room, they were in the heart of something larger, and the peopled house about them was wonderfully calm and humane precisely because it had a secret heart. Neither of them could have imagined violence or chaos possible, now that they were in possession of such a completely real inner world. For a little while, they were wholly without the need of dreams.
Which is why some people get bitten by snakes when they least expect it.
Hey knew what was going on in there. He was sitting in the kitchen, his stool up close to the parrot’s cage, and when he heard Peter call to Rita in the living room, he knew the two of them would be locked in her room within a few minutes, and then he could have the house to himself again for a while. Rita had told him only to stay in the kitchen till quarter after twelve, so he knew she must have it timed down to the minute. She didn’t mind him watching her set up the treasure trail, and she even asked him to help her drag the Eskimo piece out of her room, though of course she didn’t ask till it was already out of the closet. She wouldn’t have let him see that. And Hey smiled mildly, thinking of her precautions. Why hadn’t she guessed? He’d been in and out of there a thousand times.
He wondered now and again why he’d never told her, since he’d told her everything else he knew. It was as if, somehow, he had to keep himself out of it entirely to give Rita more space in which to maneuver. The moment he laid eyes on her at the airport, Hey was convinced he’d found the right person to let into Rusty Varda’s room. It was destiny, pure and simple. As Holy Brother had promised, he was coming into a time of great release, and Hey could tell on the spot that Rita was part of the ticket. He gave her what clues he could and was delighted to find her skimming along on the same wavelength, pursu
ing her own investigation before she was in the house a week. Curiously, he refrained from telling Holy Brother what a burden she lifted from his shoulders on the Monday night she figured out the trick to getting inside. But then in one way it made sense, because he’d never gotten around to mentioning Varda’s room to Holy Brother in the first place. He said to himself it was all for the dead man’s sake. Hey protected Varda’s right to a world undelivered by holiness, a world that scorned the universe and made its own nest. But it was also true that he wanted to cover his bets. He held Holy Brother at arm’s length in just this one thing, partly to have a secret shelter of his own from everything, if it ever came to that, and partly as a test of Holy Brother’s power to see through walls. A test Holy Brother had so far bagged.
So Hey was not as duped as the current residents of Crook House seemed to think. The really serious business between Hey and Holy Brother was limited more than anyone knew to Linda. It was the one direction of energy in his life that scared Hey, and nobody else had an explanation that comforted him so much as the notion of visits from another life. He had to sit through a lot of smoke and long white robes that faintly offended his sense of theater—he had, after all, studied under Balanchine. The philosophy of Holy Brother was brimful of fateful accidents and wild reversals, and Hey noticed that all the previous lives Brother uncovered in his congregation went on in glamorous ancient times, with Hollywood sets and costumes. No one had ever been just a farmer or a clerk. They were priests of Ra or favorites of the courts of the Louis, or they were extreme and particular people like the disciple Andrew or Marco Polo. But Hey was impressed by the psychological profile Holy Brother drew of two selves dancing in a single soul. He knew now that the presence of Linda had a beginning and an end, and he spent a lot of time just waiting for it to be over and taking it as it came. And when it was over, he planned to drop back to being a Christmas-and-Easter parishioner of Holy Brother. He’d pay his dues, of course, as insurance against another onset out of the past, but otherwise he’d had enough of holy bullshit.
