The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  She heard a noise like a body falling and ducked her head out into the hall to see. It was Hey. He’d dropped the ice bucket, and now he was on his hands and knees, furiously picking up cubes of ice like a farmer pulling weeds. But with only one hand—the other arm was still in a sling. “They’ll never know,” he sang out gaily, as if he’d planned it this way all along. “You know they’ll never know. It’s part of the peck of dirt they have to eat, like anybody else.”

  “I think this crowd eats dirt like peanuts,” Rita said. She stooped to help, glad to have something to do as the morning inched along. She was the only one used to Hey’s new mood. Nick and Peter thought he was having hysterics. He broke most things he put his hand to. The socks were all mismatched, and the shirts unironed. The food arrived at the table, Peter said, looking as if it had weathered a 7.0 on the Richter scale between the kitchen and the dining room. And nobody could ever find anything, once Hey put it away. But they let it pass. They’d all gone out of their way with one another in the month since the Monday in March. In time, they told each other, Hey would be back on his feet. Time was the key all around.

  “Nick wants you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Upstairs,” he said, blowing on his fingers to warm them up. “I swear to God, he’s been locked in his closet since right after breakfast. I think he thinks he’s back in the mine.” He meant to be darkly funny, as if Nick were a combat soldier who still woke up years later in the middle of a bloody battle.

  Could they really start to laugh about it now? Rita wondered. What if one of them got offended? “You think it’s ghosts?” she asked him lightly. “Maybe something tripped you.” And she liked the feel of it. Why not funny? Survivors told the roughest jokes to other survivors, not to the world at large. They talked cripple to cripple sometimes, and the jokes were the sort an outsider couldn’t handle. It was better than talking around it. Or acting as if it were over.

  “Not anymore. They’ve all gone back to their graves,” he said. They stood up and took the handle of the bucket between them like Jack and Jill. He was so excited about telling her the rest that he almost let it slip again, getting it up on the bar. He was giddy, Rita thought, but not upset. The only one among them overjoyed that Sam was dead. It seemed to set him free. “I didn’t tell you,” he said, “but Linda went away the minute I was shot. I could feel it, Rita. She pulled up her skirts and parted the curtain and let it fall.”

  “Did the bullet hit her, too?” She realized Hey had been waiting all along for a sign that he could talk. She and Peter had followed Nick’s lead in not revealing what they’d felt when Sam laid siege to Crook House. They’d discussed it, of course, all four, and finally decided, three to one, not to report it to anyone. They’d been over the course of the day with Sam a hundred times—that is, the plot of it. They needed to know what it all meant before they could close off the access routes. But no feelings, please.

  “Of course not,” he said. “But you see, when a lost soul comes back, it gets inside people who don’t have anything going. Somebody boring is what they like. And a well-kept house, because they’re trying to relax.” Then he paused abruptly as if to listen, in case the souls in Limbo thought he was misrepresenting the fix they were in. He may have gotten free of the spell he was under, but the superstition had a long way yet to go. “Being shot was just what I needed. But I bet it set Linda back ten years.”

  “I thought you liked having her around,” Rita said. “I thought it was part of your religion.”

  Hey shrugged. “It was all right for a while, I guess. It was different,” he said, putting out his free hand to rearrange the highball glasses. Two of them clicked together and cracked, and he picked them up to take away. “I wasn’t much good at it, though. And I always thought I would be.”

  “Good at what?”

  “Being a woman,” he said crossly, as if to say why didn’t she pay attention. “I thought it would be like being a ballerina. But it got so I thought about men all the time. Now that must sound awful. I don’t mean I wanted to get laid all the time, or fall in love. That’s not something that happens to me.” He smiled at his own remark. He seemed to count himself lucky. “But I felt—superior—you know? Men drove me crazy.”

  “Women aren’t so different,” she said absently. Best to keep clear, she thought, of Hey’s quack theory of gender. It didn’t seem any less appalling now than it did when he used too much mascara and walked around as if on tiptoe. Besides, she just caught sight of something in the carpet. She stooped to look closely, but she lost it again.

  “The other ghost who’s dead and buried now is Varda,” he announced portentously. He knew she’d lost all interest, but he plunged on anyway, addressing the back of her neck. “With the kid out of the way, I don’t have obligations to the past anymore. The present is all the time I’ve got. And it’s for us. You understand?”

  “Us who?”

  “Us four.”

  “Oh.” Thank God for little favors. She thought he might have taken a sudden fancy to her. She was just about to stand up when she sported it. She snatched it up fast, intrigued by any treasure that went without a map. It was a little cameo done up as a dangle earring. Pretty—but whose? No woman had slept in here but Rita in all the time Peter and Nick had lived in the house. She rose and held it close to Hey, swinging it just in front of his eyes like a hypnotist. “This isn’t yours, is it?” she asked. In return, he shot her his most unamused look, turned on his heel, fled the room, and marched away down the hall. “I didn’t really think it was,” she called apologetically, but he was gone. In fact, she decided, it served him right, trying to fence them in like a gang of thieves and counterfeiters. She understood the mood he was in, all right, but she guessed she’d liked him better when he used to wince and sigh a lot. Before he got to be a hero.

  She came out onto the terrace and crossed the garden to the dining room side. She looked at herself in all the French windows as she drifted by. He was a genuine hero, she had to admit, even if he’d only gotten in the way of a loaded gun. It had to do, somehow, with acting the same as ever in the face of great pain. And he meant well, of course, to think the four of them in Crook House were as clean and interlocked as astronauts. She clipped the earring on her left ear because there were no pockets in the peach dress. Her reflection in the living room windows was very faint and very real, and she didn’t so much as glance at the view of the city behind her. She would never have admitted it to Hey, but she felt a little betrayed herself sometimes by so much outside world so readily in evidence. It kept calling into question the self-contained oasis they’d inhabited here for the last month. They’d all been recovering nicely, like a solicitous group of people on the down side of a bad cold. Not really bedridden. Cozy in robe and slippers and boiling up pots of herbal tea. Kind of enjoying it.

  “Are you practicing what to say?”

  She looked up, bewildered, to Nick’s and Peter’s room, where Nick was standing at the window grinning. She hadn’t even noticed, but she’d stopped to stare into the glass doors to the dining room. Stood there maybe half a minute, eyes glued to her own eyes. But she didn’t blush to find herself discovered, so long as it was Nick or Peter. They all bumped into each other so regularly now that it came to be something of a need, as if the spells of solitude could be risked, after all, as long as there were others about to set limits. Nick was hanging something up—a blanket, it looked like—to cover the casement. The other window was already dark. Perhaps he was feeling a bit assaulted by the view himself.

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” she said. “I just don’t want Varda to sound like a gangster.”

  Nick shook his head vigorously. “‘Gangster’ is all wrong. You want him more of an outlaw. Western, like Jesse James. With maybe a hint of the Vanderbilts thrown in, just for class.”

  “Well,” she said, dubious and vague, but committed all the same to clichés of her own, “I want him to come off as a man with a
lonely vision. I have to play it by ear. Shall I come up?”

  “Not yet. I’m not ready,” he said, disappearing behind the blanket as he thumbed in the last tack. “Five minutes,” he called.

  What are you doing? she almost said, but decided she didn’t mind waiting to see. She walked on over to the pool and, in order not to look at the whole of LA, looked at herself again in the water. Nick ought to be at work. He and Peter planned to be home just before the press arrived at one, and they’d had to promise Hey they’d have eaten lunch first. Hey had to get all the servants’ work done beforehand, because the apron came off on the stroke of one, when he would be properly introduced as “Mr. Varda’s longtime companion.” Hey’s own phrase. “Let them make of it what they want,” he said with endless satisfaction, and Nick and Peter and Rita shrugged and let it go. As for Nick, Rita didn’t need Crook House all to herself all morning. What was stranger still, she warned herself, was the notion that she should always know what Nick was about. Why shouldn’t he spend the morning in his closet?

  In the beginning, just after the accident, Nick seemed to intuit that all he could do for Sam from here on in was to wipe out every trace of him. From his bed at home, his feet up in harnesses, salved every hour, he argued over the phone with Hey, who was still in the hospital. Hey was adamant—now that they were all safe, they had to tell the police. But why? Nick reasoned. The publicity would front-page their lives with the sort of ugly gay innuendo that kept away clients and crowded the driveway with ambulance chasers. And why give it both barrels to Sam’s unsuspecting friends and family, wherever they may be? Let them keep hoping he’d turned out all right. Hey had the more serious claim, of course, because he had taken the more serious wound. He thought of it as part of what he owed to Varda, as if the public proof that it was murder ten years ago proved also that somehow Varda might have otherwise lived forever. But he waffled for a couple of days, long enough for Nick to decide it was too late—the authorities would want to know why they’d waited at all. So when Hey came home and they began to have the summit meetings every evening in the secret room, Hey agreed to leave it buried, too. By then he’d come up with his own good reason. “It’ll be our secret, then,” he told them. “We’ll give up all of Varda’s things, and in return we’ll have Sam and the Rembrandt. Just us four.”

  They could have gone forward, of course, by simply expanding on Rita’s cottage industry, the hand-stringed packages without return addresses. They could have cabled the various owners—museums, town fathers, embassies, and idle rich—claiming rewards where available, using Peter’s shop as a conduit so that Crook House never got mentioned. But they didn’t. They completed the inventory first, down to the smallest diamond stickpin. They separated out those things whose owners were either unknown, long gone, or thieves themselves. Then they considered divvying up that half, but only Peter would have gotten any use out of medieval silver, Burmese ivories, and the like. There was enough to start their own museum, but none of them ever went to half the ones there already were. Besides, keeping it together would cheat them out of the thrill of dispersal. There was too much inertia pent up in Varda’s room. All his booty needed to have the dust of museums shaken out of it.

  “I’m not ashamed to admit there are things I’d like,” Peter had reminded them, twirling a gold-headed cane that Commodore Vanderbilt took out to promenade on Cliff Walk.

  “When would you ever use that?” Hey asked.

  “I don’t always use the things I like.”

  “I think we have to make a show of it,” Nick proposed, “for Varda’s sake. If everything gets siphoned off in bits and pieces, no one will ever know. People ought to know.”

  “I can’t allow it,” Hey said grandly, not at that point through with his duties to Varda’s memory. “He was a great director. We mustn’t work it so he’s more remembered for being a crook.”

  And that led to fruitless debate about one kind of fame and another. Nick said the taste in fame had changed since Varda’s death, and the smuggling and hoarding of masterpieces would catch the public fancy. There were already crowds of old movie people. If they could still walk, they were out telling stories, and everyone already had the picture.

  “I agree with Nick,” Rita said finally, speaking from the desk, her hand on the catalogue. She exuded the authority of one who knew the story here, at least, from cover to cover. “Let’s throw it open. But not just so people hear about a caper having to do with stolen art. We do it for Varda and Frances.”

  They hadn’t had enough of love in life, Rita argued. That was why he’d provisioned so well the journey through to the other side of the veil. And Rita proposed to bring their ghosts together, true to the spirit of Varda’s plan, by letting out their story. When Nick and Peter warned her that the press wouldn’t tell it in the nicest way, that they’d dredge up the dope story, make it all sound crazy and sad, Rita thought she’d take that chance. “He didn’t want to go to Heaven, anyway,” she said, staring at Nick. “The best we can do for Varda and Frances is make sure they’re linked and let them go.”

  It may have been sentimental rubbish, but it wasn’t too pretty for Hey. He loved it. Peter thought it was tacky, but he did like the thought of the fuss being made over his house, if only so he could pretend it was a nuisance. You can’t buy it, he always wished he could tell his clients when they coveted something of his that was fine and wanted one of their own. He had a secret wish to surround himself with a whole Russian prince’s worth of artifacts and one-of-a-kind, hand-done pieces. Then he could show the San Marino ladies how out of luck they were. And however darkly he tended to paint the press, he liked publicity quite for its own sake. It didn’t so much matter what they said, so long as they spelled the name right. Nick’s wish was much more basic. He wanted to see the treasure go through the transformation into cash. He wanted to flood the market, send the bidding through the roof, cash in his chips till he broke the bank. An auction of Varda’s things would bring out the real high rollers, and Nick liked to keep posted on how they were wearing their money this year.

  So they all agreed in the end because they had to. They each had a trove of sentimental rubbish of their own, and they saw there was safety in numbers.

  Five minutes up. Rita wondered now, as she turned from the pool, why she wasn’t more nervous. Probably, she thought, because Varda and Frances Dean had stayed at a certain remove from her since the day Sam died. Her sentimental projections aside, she was acting—like Hey—more out of duty than as if she were reading Anna Karenina. That phase probably ended on the day she pulled the plug at Desertside. She didn’t suffer for the star-crossed lovers anymore. Her pals in Crook House took up the slack and the empty spaces. Just like Hey said. Why was she mad at him for saying so?

  “You’re missing an earring,” Peter said.

  She turned away from the dining room door a second time. He was coming from the direction of her room, carrying a beat-up wooden box. As to the earring, he didn’t miss a trick. “Actually,” she said, “somebody else is missing it. I’m just the Lost and Found, as usual. What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Hey just handed it to me. I think it’s the house croquet set.”

  “What are you supposed to do with it?”

  “As near as I can tell,” he answered brightly, prepared for all eventualities, “it’s a present. ‘This ought to go to you,’ Hey said, ‘because you have the right kind of rhythm.’ What kind of rhythm is that, do you think?”

  He set down the box between them on the flagstones. The lid had two hooks, and they each undid one and lifted up the top like a captain’s chest. It was the juggler’s kit. They stooped to it wordlessly and took it apart. A shelf swung out that was constructed something like an egg carton, with hollows for sets of hard rubber balls. Four balls in red, four in green, in blue, in yellow, but ancient and worn-away with use. They looked like the pale, filtered colors of the sky in a Dutch painting. Presumably, if you got good enough to juggle more t
han four at once, you had to start mixing your colors. Under this shelf was a toy-maker’s grab bag of things to throw in the air. Brass rings, steel rings, cones, and batons. A set of frail ceramic birds that whistled when they flew. And then, in a special steel box at the bottom that reeked inside of kerosene, three weighted sticks all charred at one end—for juggling torches. Peter and Rita laid everything out on the ground around them, silent until they were done and the box was empty.

  “This is all he brought with him from Hungary,” Rita said quietly, though of course she had no way of knowing. But she flashed on an image of a young and dark-eyed juggler standing in line at Ellis Island, a box of tricks in his arms, game to find a circus on the Lower East Side. And if a man like that got old and died, she thought with a sudden flutter of grief and fury, then none of them were safe, even here.

  “I’m afraid I’m too old to learn it now,” Peter said. He’d have liked billiards better, or bowls or croquet.

  “It’s a talent, I suppose, like anything else,” she said, revolving a yellow ball in her hands. It made her think of the marble apple the goddess held in the secret room. “Like Hey says, you either have it or you don’t. Why not give it a try?”