Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “What will you do with the research?” asked Artie.

  “I’ll store it somewhere,” said Claire for the benefit of all the listening devices. “I’m through. The Feldmans are claiming the last valuable piece. That’s it. Let the British and the Feldmans fight for it.”

  “You gave it a good shot,” said Artie. “A great shot.”

  “I did,” said Claire. “I really did.” And she folded back a corner of the map, looking at Tilbury one last time, and then folded back another corner, revealing the bare white wall behind it. She had pressed so hard that some of the marks had dug into the wall. Even with the map gone, she could tell an indented line on flat white paint was her old Poseidon Enthroned coming out of Asia to Alexander. She took down a copy of Count Orofino Desini’s drawing and her own four pieces of notebook paper on which she had rapidly sketched a memory from a Carney cellar.

  She took down charts of dates, remembering a time when she thought history began with the birth of Christ just because the western calendar did. In the end, the wall was bare again, but it was not barren. She was not the same terrified person who had looked at infinity and an invincible world.

  It was all right to take it down now. She had found what she was looking for. It was not Arthur, although he was part of it. She had found herself, and quite simply she was someone she liked. She went into the bedroom and, from a drawer with her sweaters, took out Dad’s picture.

  Something had to go on the wall, and it was time he had an airing, not a saint, but her father, whom she loved and accepted. She was a woman. She could love people with flaws. She remembered taking the picture in Rome while they were on vacation, Mother staying in the hotel. She was a girl then. She had been a girl so long.

  “Good-bye, Dad,” she said as Artie held up the picture for placement against the wall. But it didn’t belong there. No single small framed photo belonged there, and she took it down to put later on her dresser.

  “Why good-bye?” asked Artie.

  “To what I thought of him.”

  “Hey, you said he only tried to leave you richer. That’s not all bad,” said Artie.

  “In a way. But it doesn’t matter. I think he would have liked you. I think he would have, Arthur.”

  “That would’ve been nice,” said Artie, and he hugged Claire. The wall was still bare. It would take a couple of chairs and perhaps a table with a vase of flowers to make it part of the room.

  “Yes,” said Claire, “I have a table back in Carney we can use here.”

  “My sister has a table,” said Artie, and they laughed, because that was all they could do with someone listening in. That night, at 3:00 A.M., while her man slept warm and oblivious in her sheets, she went out into the living room and looked at the wall so bare, so wall.

  “Thank you, wall,” she said.

  But she couldn’t stop thinking about what sort of relic would be so valuable as to kill for in the twentieth century. And the answer was, there wasn’t any. This was five hundred years too late for that. And besides, why torture and kill for information one could buy? If Captain Harry Rawson represented the Crown, couldn’t he purchase whatever information he needed? A person who could afford to leave the Christ’s head ruby could afford to buy most every one of those thieves and dealers.

  Dr. Peter Martins sealed Feldman’s collateral stones in small plastic bags, each no larger than a prune, and swallowed every one of them. He packed his bags and prepared to leave his Swiss chalet forever, the Chinese lacquered chests, the crystal dinnerware, the manservant, the designer drapes, the elegant clothes, the view of the mother of all civilized mountains, the Alps. Leave, too, all the fine dining places in Europe and America that knew him. He would have to leave his life to keep it.

  “Peter, what are you doing?” This from an absolutely delicious twenty-two-year-old woman whom he had introduced to the pleasures of her body seven years before, when she had been left in Lucerne for a proper education among girls of her own class. By sixteen, she already enjoyed several other lovers, but insisted Peter Martins had ruined her for life because she would never truly be able to enjoy the techniques of another man like him. Which meant, of course, that by sixteen she had already learned the essential ingredient of a fine affair: the skill to lie properly.

  Dr. Peter Martins would be leaving all that, too. She brushed the small hairs on his neck with her lips. Martins felt her body touch his back ever so slightly, just the nipples, then the pelvis, letting the most delicate scent of all, a young woman’s body, tantalize him.

  They were in the main bedroom, with the ceiling-high windows showing the rising snow peaks in the distance and the flowered fields beneath. He wore the gray slacks to his business suit. A green leather valise lay on the embroidered blue silk puff.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. Her name was Maria. She had a minor title from her mother and a major trust from her father. He had hoped to grow older with her, among other such lovely women. Each age had a delight all its own. He wondered if he would abstain from passion because it failed his standards. He assumed not. He wouldn’t be running for his life now, if he valued the quality of life above life itself. Funny, how one really discovered oneself only in trauma.

  “Maria, I am going to give you a very special gift now, and I hope you will appreciate it.”

  “I’m more than ready to appreciate it,” she said. He felt her hand slip a thumb under his belt buckle.

  “Get dressed. Take everything of yours from this house, go away, and tell everyone you know in subtle little ways that you have not seen me for months.”

  “Oh, this is exciting,” she said. “I want to be part of it.”

  Dr. Martins felt himself laugh lightly. It was more of a sigh. Where he was going, she would be the first to complain, return to her old play spots, and ultimately get him killed, possibly both of them.

  “I think not,” said Dr. Martins.

  “Daddy says you’re one of the shrewdest men he knows, and Daddy knows shrewd men.”

  Dr. Martins smiled. So shrewd, he thought. Killing pathetic Geoffrey Battissen had been an unpleasant necessity, much like making sure an overdue toilet was flushed. Dr. Martins had killed twice before under similar circumstances. These things came up. But then, in disposing of the gems, all his shrewdness, all his cunning turned from one inexplicable failure to another. He knew his world and this was a world he did not know.

  The polished diamonds should have been the easiest to dispose of. Diamonds for people who knew them were virtually as liquid as cash. He had hardly given that much thought, until Avril Gotbaum phoned him from New York City, saying he had been arrested. That was the first clue. Dr. Martins had carefully and precisely made sure Gotbaum would not phone his home again leaving a traceable number. He kept in phone contact with him every day, from Gotbaum’s high hopes early on to his desperation near the end, with every other word from Gotbaum’s mouth being, “Whoever brings Avril Gotbaum the best package will get Avril Gotbaum.”

  And, of course, the answer was: “Name the package. Let’s be reasonable.” This was designed to keep Gotbaum on the string until something could be worked out. There were some advantages in New York with the police refusing to make a deal to let the rabbi’s son off the hook. That looked perfect.

  And then Gotbaum, for no fathomable reason, was tortured to death. Was someone in a hurry? Was someone seeking revenge?

  Dr. Martins had stayed away from this precious home for days just to make sure his name had not been given away. And it hadn’t. Which was not all that surprising considering that Gotbaum had died not of torture but of a myocardial infarction. But that was too lucky. Dr. Martins did not trust luck.

  “Would you get me my red silk shirt?” he asked his young friend.

  “I’ve never seen you wear that before,” said Maria. She went to the four drawers set into the wall, which contained his shirts.

  “And the Polynesian design, too.”

  “That was for a costume ball
,” she said. “Now I am desperately intrigued, darling. Where are you going?”

  Maria, if she were ever asked to remember everything under torture or not, would remember those clothes. Dr. Martins had already decided to change bags. She would remember the green bag. He would throw that one away, along with the clothes she would remember. She bounced pertly over to him holding the shirts in front of her and then with the dramatic flair of a stripper, teased the shirts down the front of her body to the green leather valise.

  Then she took the shirts away completely. Dr. Martins sighed. Lovely. He would remember that body forever. He packed the shirts.

  Other than the diamonds, there were only really two other stones of value, the sapphire and, of course, the great ruby. The secret to wealth and survival was the ability to understand that one should never attempt to make all the profit, only some of it. And so Dr. Martins traded off the sapphire to see what was going on, specifically to know how he could best market the great ruby.

  “Green slacks?” asked Maria.

  “Yes, the green ones,” said Dr. Martins, watching her head for the pants closet. She had such a delightful bottom, he thought. Women lost that firmness first, but only a cad would tell them about it. A cad or an idiot.

  Werner Gruenwald offered several advantages. A petty businessman without the courage or skill to be an outright crook, Gruenwald not only lived close by, but, despite that proximity, never touched the world of Dr. Peter Martins. The class difference was so distinct and inviolate here that they both might have been on separate planets.

  Gruenwald had resisted at first.

  “How do I know this is not some piece of glass from a well-dressed con man. I don’t know that. You won’t even show me identification.”

  “The sapphire is its own identification.”

  “I gotta have my jeweler look at it.”

  “Fine.”

  “Leave it.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Is this hot?”

  “Burning,” Dr. Martins had said.

  Gruenwald had merely cocked his head, applied medicine drops to his eyes once more in his abysmal filing cabinet of an office, and called up some apparently quasilegal person with a jeweler’s loupe. All the man said was that it was a real sapphire. And Gruenwald, still oblivious to what he really had, bargained the price down a few thousand more, not really changing anything much. And, like the fool he was, he sold it for a pittance to the largest jewelry store he could think of.

  Which, of course, was what Dr. Martins knew he would do.

  “That tie?” asked Maria.

  “That tie,” said Dr. Martins. She hung a light blue paisley tantalizingly over one shoulder. Dr. Martins offered the expected comment of lust. What could he tell her? That fear could kill an erection faster than ice water?

  And Dr. Martins had waited, holding the ruby to see what, if anything, would happen to Werner Gruenwald. And when it happened, he knew something very dangerous was out there, and because of all the things he had known about Norman Feldman in the trading markets of the east, he was sure it was the ruby dealer after the Christ’s head.

  So he brought the ruby right to Feldman, the safest, most reasonable thing a man could do in those circumstances. Take less of a profit; let the monster have his way. And then Feldman had come to this chalet and threatened him for the strangest reasons, and the next thing Dr. Martins knew, from reading the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, was that Norman Feldman had not only been tortured to death. The ruby was found in his office. It was never the ruby.

  That was twenty minutes ago, and immediately Dr. Martins had swallowed his most sellable stones and begun to pack. Why the killer had not gotten here by now—the death was several days old—Dr. Martins did not know. He could not imagine Feldman protecting him. Something had happened to give him time, and he wasn’t wasting it.

  Maria, seeing the suitcase was full, sat down on it, and pulled Dr. Martins’s belt buckle toward her as she spread her young thighs to receive him. She pulled her head up to his belt, tongued the zipper lightly, and pulled it down, slowly and tantalizingly.

  She opened the fly and worked her fingers inside.

  “My friend knows me even when you don’t, Peter. He’s going to rise to meet me. He always does,” said Maria.

  Dr. Martins stood motionless. He let Maria work for a while until she looked up puzzled. This had never happened before.

  Locking eyes with her, Dr. Peter Martins said with paced gravity, “Things are that dangerous.”

  “Are those slips in the downstairs bathroom mine?” asked Maria, wanting to make sure she left nothing of hers in this place.

  “No,” said Dr. Martins.

  “Thank you,” she said and just before leaving added, “I am saying good-bye to someone I can never replace. You were the first and the best, Peter.”

  “How thoughtful, dear,” said Dr. Martins. He couldn’t even think of a compliment, not even an adequate lie. His hands were sweating, and he noticed his mouth was dry, but he didn’t want water. He wanted something calming, but not so calming that he might, at this most dangerous time, lose his wits. He administered fifty milligrams of chlordiazepoxide into the muscle of his left forearm, avoiding the vein to slow down the sedative’s action.

  Still, his hands sweat and his mouth perspired, and the pen he used to address the label shook ever so slightly. He copied the name and the address in the Herald Tribune onto the label.

  Careful not to get his fingerprints on the label, he pressed it onto purple wrapping paper anyone could buy in any store and found a box of biscuits and emptied them into the garbage. Then he took the box in gloved hands to a Chinese lacquered chest of drawers in the south sitting room and carefully removed that strange clay bowl with the dark lacquered stain in the bottom, the one in the belly of the cellar that the Herald Tribune indicated might also involve the British Crown in some way, and more thoroughly than he had ever prepared for an operation did Dr. Peter Martins clean the bowl of any possible fingerprints.

  And just as carefully he placed it in the box and wrapped the box in the purple paper to which had already been affixed the label; and then he forever left his home and the life he had known.

  It had to be the bowl that force, that monster, was looking for, for some strange, incomprehensible reason. All Dr. Martins knew was that to be associated with it would more than likely get him killed most horribly.

  His only chance was to offer up some other victim to that beast, who would then for its own reasons get its bowl and possibly search no more for the likes of a man who only wanted the finer things in life.

  On the way to the airport, he stopped at a post office in which he had never been before, and a clerk asked Dr. Martins if he had the American zip code for his package.

  “I am sorry. I only know it is Queens, New York City, USA,” he said. By now he was carrying a gray suitcase and wore a light blue suit. If the force should have caught up with Maria so quickly, she would have given them the wrong description.

  “In Her Majesty’s very presence, I was asked if indeed we had anything to do with the horrible killings around the world. It has been in so many newspapers. And do you know what I told her?”

  Sir Anthony trembled, furious. The little man in the back seat of the uncomfortable car with the darkened closed windows tapped the bowl of his awful smelling pipe against his knuckles. He had come on call to a specified street corner within twenty minutes.

  “I told her, no. I told her we have an exceptional person you supplied us. I assured her we were blameless. And she asked why these people were being killed so horribly. Every one of them was in some way connected to the object we sought.”

  “Oh,” said the little man. “You didn’t tell me that before.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “I think you should know a bit more about this exceptional captain, Harry Rawson. He is discreet. He is most capable of working alone. And he can keep his eye on
an objective to a point you might call ruthless. He is exceptionally coordinated and a fine specimen. All things being considered, he was the best candidate.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Sir Anthony.

  “No one human being is perfect. You just don’t find everything in someone; courage, resourcefulness, discretion, brilliance and topping it all off a morality that we approve of entirely.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “They were torture murders weren’t they?” asked the little man, and Sir Anthony did not even notice anymore when the pipe lit up, and filled the back seat with acrid fumes.

  XXV

  And the thicket closed behind her and the forest echoed “fool.”

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  “Vivien”

  Idylls of the King, 1859

  It was the day of reckoning, and Claire Andrews had to decide. Christmas had been one thing. Dad had just died, and she had just started on the search. Reverend McAdow could explain that to Mother and everyone, even the McCaffertys. But this Easter measured how far she had gone, how much she intended to stay away, and whether she would come home.

  Mother called while Claire was reading a small book titled The Torah Made Too Simple in preparation for a seder at Arthur’s sister’s house. Claire understood what this day meant to the Modelsteins: the highest Jewish holiday celebrated in the home, and also a chance to examine the important woman in Arthur’s life.

  It was serious, and she had been preparing in the one way she knew how, by studying and researching.

  “No, Mother,” Claire said. “I’m going to a seder at Arthur’s sister’s house.” Easter and Passover had fallen within two days of each other that year.

  “Was that the man who answered your phone twice?”

  “Yes, during your monthly call,” Claire said, hating herself for being sharp.

  Claire was sure she did not feel guilty about living with Arthur. More and more she was thinking about how impossible it would be to live without him. But when Mother asked not too coyly about the man who had answered Claire’s phone twice, Claire did feel that somehow she had done something wrong. For this she now felt doubly bad, because she felt she was betraying Arthur, by not telling Mother proudly about it, and Mother, by doing it at all, and herself, by feeling these things in the first place.