by Medora Sale
“And where do we find these guys?” asked Dubinsky softly. “Because unless we can find them, your story isn’t worth a pinch of shit. Or two days off a sentence. Think about it, Walker. Armed robbery. Murder. Very big words. Long words. Fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years long.”
“Christ,” muttered Walker. He seemed to be counting. “I don’t know where the fence lived. I think he was an American or something. And the other guys . . .” His eyes shifted sideways in panic, and Dubinsky jotted an extra note on his page. “We used to meet in an apartment on Lippincott Street, a third-floor apartment. It was 1872 Lippincott Street. I think Manu and Carlos lived there. And look, you gotta give me protection. These guys aren’t just stealing stuff. They’re terrorists. They don’t give a damn what happens to anyone; they’ll have me killed. Tortured to death.” By now the sweat was pouring off Walker’s face and collecting in unpleasant pools around his flannelette shirt.
Veronika put down the last piece of pottery in the museum shop and walked over to the door. The lobby was even quieter than it had been when she entered, almost deserted except for two security guards chatting to a third man, dark haired and handsome, with an ominously familiar air. And that meant it was time she left for Munich. When security guards and their friends in a foreign city start to look familiar, it is time to go.
She wandered back inside the shop and drifted over to the jewelry counter. Her eye was caught by a medallion, enamel on copper, in brilliant greens and the amethyst of her new tweed suit, which depicted a ferocious bird with red garnet eyes. “How much is this?” she called to the shop assistant, who was wandering about in a desultory fashion, tidying up piles of sweatshirts and stacking boxes that had been knocked over.
“The copper medallion?” she answered, pausing to put down the boxes in her hand. “Two hundred. No, sorry. Two hundred and ten. That’s because the garnets—”
“I’ll take it,” said Veronika. “Don’t wrap it up. I’ll wear it. Here,” she said, dropping a pile of bills on the counter. “I just want to see if my friend has arrived. I’ll be back for the medallion and my change in a second.”
But the lobby remained deserted except for the bored-looking staff and two little girls clutching sketch pads who came giggling down the broad staircase, followed more slowly by a weary-looking mother. For the first time, it occurred to Veronika that Harriet might not have found her message on the machine yet, might not have remembered that she had promised to visit the museum with her today. She had promised, hadn’t she? Nikki tried to remember exactly what had been said, but the words were blocked out by the haze of exhaustion and sorrow that lingered just below her excitement. Tears sprang to her eyes.
“Miss? Oh, miss?” said a tired voice behind her. “Your medallion. And your change. Are you sure you don’t want a box?”
“No,” she said abruptly, and winced at her discourtesy. “This is fine. Thank you very much.”
She fastened the heavy piece of jewelry around her neck and looked at her watch. It was past four-thirty. Now that she was here, it would be silly to leave without looking at the exhibits. Biting her lip to hold back the tears, she returned to the admissions booth. “Where are the Greek and Roman collections?” she asked.
The attendant looked up from her novel, yawning. “Third floor at the back.”
“If my friend comes in and asks for me, could you say I’m up there?”
“Sure,” she replied. “What name—”
But Veronika was already gone, running up the staircase.
Carlos moved from the coat-check counter where he had been half-leaning, half-sitting, and raised a farewell hand at the woman seated there. “See you later, Bettina,” he said. “I’d better go see if I can round up the boss. Don’t work too hard.”
“Never fear,” she said, and plucked her novel out from a carton on the rack beside her.
Carlos strolled over to the telephone and dropped a quarter in the slot. After a brief murmured conversation he hung up and started up the staircase in long, easy strides.
Veronika stopped at the head of the stairs to catch her breath. She was offered a choice at this point between Truth and Beauty on her right, and the Classical World on the left. “Truth and Beauty later,” she said firmly, and plunged into the other corridor.
Roman pottery and statuary took up the first gallery, all fascinating, no doubt, but she found that she could not force herself to stop long enough to look at anything. She walked rapidly along, unsettled at being in the centre of a huge space where all the sight lines were broken up by pillars and false walls. She shivered. She shouldn’t have come here alone. Not now. This was worse than being alone in her mother’s house, with her mother’s ghost murmuring sorrowfully no matter where she went. Here there were thousands of ghosts sighing and shuffling along the marble floors. And invisible footsteps, always near her, belonging to no one.
The ambient lighting became darker as she penetrated farther into the classical exhibits, until she turned a corner and stopped, almost blinded by the sudden brilliance. To her left, a stone bridge crossed a vast, light-filled space in the centre of the building. She walked across it, giddy from a sense of floating precariously three stories above the ground, but the door at the other end of the bridge was locked, and she turned back to the dark enclosure of the exhibit area.
Right in front of her was the Etruscan collection, housed in its own set of walls, leaned on by the Greeks from one side and the Romans from the other. And a strange device, the gentle powdery green of old copper, hung on the wall directly before her eyes, in the centre of the collection. Some long-dead Etruscan artisan with a malevolent sense of humor had decorated its handle prettily in graceful spirals; and then he had finished it in a circle out of which protruded half a dozen or more curving spikes, each one viciously long and sharp. Veronika stared at it, unable to turn her eyes away. She moved forward toward the monstrous thing, drawn by curiosity and grim fascination, until she could read the neat card beneath it. “Etruscan meat hook,” it said primly, “or kreaga.” Her stomach turned; she gagged and turned rapidly to study a large amphora, decorated with the more disciplined swirling designs that she associated with the Etruscans, breathing deeply until her stomach calmed.
She turned to the case opposite the amphora and conscientiously studied each vase, each utensil, each painted pot, as if her life depended on it, finally letting her gaze drift over the passageway, out onto the stone bridge, where there was light and an absence of nightmarish visions. But in a cloistered passageway on the other side of the atrium, leaning on another stone parapet, watching her, was the man, the dark-haired man with large dark eyes, whom she had seen in the lobby. And suddenly the description of her “husband,” the person who had asked after her at the hairdresser’s, leapt into her mind.
“For God’s sake, Veronika,” she said aloud in the empty room. “Don’t be stupid. The man probably works here. And there are thousands of men in this city with dark hair and eyes. As many as there are in Munich.” Resolutely, she turned to her right and headed for classical Greece. The exhibit was much more brightly lit than the Etruscan gallery had been, and the pale statuary gleamed reassuringly in the artificial day. She stopped in front of a collection of copper pans from Grecian south Italy, transfixed between amusement and admiration. The handle of each one consisted of a delectable nude male, lying face-up, toes pointed, arms stretching panward. Now, if reproductions of those were available in the museum shop, she thought with a grin, they would be worth paying for. Somewhat cheered, she wandered without noticing where she was going through the darkened galleries behind the Etruscans.
“Would you like a beer?” asked Harriet. She was walking around the living room, energetically drying her hair with a large purple towel.
Sanders yawned. “Coffee is more like it. I have to do something useful before I fall asleep.”
“You seemed useful enough to me,” she hisse
d, and bumped him out of her way with a swing of her hip as she headed for the stove to make the coffee. “But if you want to be genuinely handy, you might check the answering machine and see why it isn’t working.” She turned on the tap to fill the coffee pot and pointed over to her desk with one foot to indicate where the thing lived.
“First of all, it isn’t on,” said Sanders in a slightly muffled tone as he bent over the desk. “And secondly, you seem to have wrenched the top off in one of your fits of temper. In addition, there aren’t any tapes in it. And,” he said, turning around and holding up a long gray wire, “it isn’t plugged in.”
“What?” said Harriet as she flicked the heat on under the coffee and turned to look. “What in hell have you done with it?”
“Me? I haven’t done anything. Come and look at it. Do you think your landlord might have been messing around with it?”
Harriet looked down at the gaping wound in the top of the machine. “Look, he’s not the world’s handiest guy, but he wouldn’t have done that.” She frowned and turned toward Sanders. “I don’t like this. I left that machine in perfect order, on. I even went back and checked as I was leaving. Just the way I double-checked that front door. Why would someone break in and rip apart my answering machine? I mean, look around you. Absolutely everything else in here is exactly the way I left it.” She sat down and looked around the room with an intensity of gaze that totally excluded him.
He watched her eyes move purposefully from deck, to kitchen, to desk, and finally, to the answering machine. Then she looked down the stairs, paused and nodded. She dropped her head onto the chair back and stared up at the ceiling; after a moment she closed her eyes. He sat down on the couch and waited impatiently for her to return her attention to him.
Just as he was deciding that she must have fallen asleep, she spoke with an irritating lack of relevance. “What did you mean by that crack about taking a lot of stuff to lunch?”
“What in hell has that to do with anything?” asked Sanders, and shook his head. “Leitner told me you were having lunch with Nikki. So I came over to wait for you to get back.”
“Why did he say that?”
“Presumably because she told him she was having lunch with you,” said Sanders.
“Omigod,” said Harriet. “Did I tell Nikki I’d have lunch with her today?” The towel dropped off her head, and a strand of wet hair fell onto her lip. She picked it up and began to twirl it around nervously. “Just let me call her. Get yourself some coffee, and some for me too, please.”
Sanders found himself slamming cupboard doors and running water to prevent himself from listening to Harriet’s murmured words. He was just heading for the sliding door onto the deck when she hung up and walked over. “She isn’t home, John. She hasn’t been home since this morning, apparently. And she did tell Klaus that she was having lunch with me.”
“Did you say you were going to have lunch with her?”
“Of course not! At least I don’t think so.” Harriet shook her head impatiently. “Maybe I did, just to calm her down and get rid of her. I was hellishly unpleasant to her yesterday. Damn that girl! No matter what happens, she always leaves me feeling guilty.”
Veronika suddenly realized that for the last ten minutes she had been staring at the same collection of pottery without even seeing it. Another wave of exhaustion and sudden nausea swept over her; she stretched and took a deep breath. Then, suddenly, reflected off a sheet of glass, she saw the dark-haired man again. And now not in reflection but distorted through two sets of glass cases. His head moved as he searched the room, slowly, methodically. She stepped back farther into the darkness, and when she raised her eyes again, he had disappeared. She looked frantically around, her view blocked by pillars and displays and heartlessly beautiful statues. He was nowhere.
Suddenly, there he was, in front of the pans she had laughed at minutes before, looking not at them but through the cases, searching.
She turned, began to run, and then stopped in a panic. Her footsteps resounded on the stone floor, each one giving away her location. She kicked off her little shoes and skidded around the next exhibit, aware of a blur of statues on her right and blank temporary walls everywhere else. Now she could hear footsteps behind her, easy, rapid, confident footsteps. She ducked behind a wall and found herself surrounded by three more walls. She whirled around. She was facing a mural in beige and burnt umber depicting a maze of hideous complexity. It towered over her, mocking her confusion. Horrified, she turned and ran toward what she hoped would be the front of the building, slipping on the floors in her stocking feet, once careening off a display case, once hurtling off the fragile-looking false wall of the Egyptian exhibit area and discovering it to be solid enough to hurt. Suddenly, in front of her, there was bright light coming from another open area. One more accessible to the public, she prayed. She ran toward it and with a sob of relief saw an escalator. The metal grillwork of the steps snatched painfully at her stockinged feet, but she kept running until she reached the second-floor landing. As she skidded across it to get on the escalator again, she stopped dead. At the bottom, looking up at her with a terrifying, gentle smile, was the handsome face of a man she knew, waiting for her as surely as the man behind her was chasing her. She reversed and bolted into the exhibit area on the second floor.
Veronika was aware of cases and cases of animals and birds; she brushed by one small girl, but otherwise, no living being who could be of any help. Ahead of her, past glassed-in forests and snarling stuffed predators, an exit sign glowed. Light-years away. As she ran toward it, on her left she saw an opening to an area of blackness and plunged in, panting. Velvety darkness enveloped her, and she leaned against the wall to catch her breath.
She was in a simulation of a cave, dark, with grottoes carved into the walls, some tiny, some vast enough to hold a party in. Pale illumination filtered down into them, allowing the visitor to see coiled figures of snakes and small mammals and various crustaceans sheltering in the rocky configuration. Above her head bats hung peacefully from the ceiling, and she felt safe. He would think she had left by the emergency exit and would follow. When he had gone, she would creep out and go down the main stairs again. In the distance she could hear the ringing of a bell. Closing time. Security guards would come around soon to clear out loiterers; they would protect her. She pressed herself against the wall and started to edge a little deeper into the cave.
She heard a voice in the distance. “Just a minute, Mummy. I’m going in the bat cave one more time. I’ll meet you at the top of the stairs.” Veronika began to move forward toward the voice. Then, suddenly, out of the darkness, a powerful hand seized her arm; her head jerked to one side with the force of a blow to the temple.
Carlos looked down at the crumpled girl. He was mildly surprised to discover that she was still breathing. Tough skull. He dropped the cosh into his pocket, reached into his jacket, and took out a thin knife. A sharp little voice from close by said, “Wait! I said I was coming right out.” He grabbed the limp Veronika by the hair, pulled back her head far enough to get his hand under her face, and made a rapid slashing movement. With satisfaction that lasted only a split second, he felt the familiar sensation of silent yielding flesh under his knife. Suddenly, the weapon caught noisily in something metal and wrenched itself out of his grip. Before he realized what had happened, his fingers were sliding through a pool of warm, sticky blood.
“Shit,” he muttered, and picked her up. He tumbled her headfirst into a darkened corner of the grotto beside them. She landed with a satisfactory thud. By the time anyone discovered her, he figured, between the knife wound and the head injury, she’d be long dead, anyway.
When the little girl was finally chased out of the cave by the security guard doing his check and restored to her mother in the front lobby, she was filled with excitement. “You know, Mummy, I never saw it before, but they have this really realistic body in the cave, too, a
ll crumpled up on the floor of one of the things in the wall. It’s creepy. It’s even creepier than the snakes. Can we come back tomorrow?”
“That’s nice, dear,” said her mother vaguely. “Now hold on to my hand before we get into the subway. It’s crowded. I don’t know what your daddy’s going to think when he finds out we’re not home yet,” she added. “Did you say come back tomorrow? Certainly not. I have to work late tomorrow. Maybe next week. But you must promise not to hide like that again. Mummy was worried.”
Chapter 12
Constables McNeill and Collins walked back into the room and threw down their coats. Dubinsky looked up at them and scowled. “You could’ve called in,” he said. “Or did you forget how? We were kind of interested in knowing what was going on out there.”
McNeill yawned and sat down in the chair beside Dubinsky’s desk. “What was the point of calling in? To tell you we found zip all?” He stretched his legs out in front of him. “There was no one home but Grandma and a kid. Grandma doesn’t speak any English, Collins here forgot to take a course in whatever the hell language she does speak, and Ma was at work until eleven. At the hospital. Which hospital? Who knows? Anyway, the kid never saw anyone who looked remotely like those two guys, never heard their names, never saw Walker around the house. Nothing.”
“Maybe he’s lying,” said Dubinsky.
“Maybe he is,” said McNeill. “You want me to go back and beat it out of him? He looks about ten, skinny, underfed. Just the kind the papers love to get hold of. I could break his arm, maybe. They’d love that. Anyway, we left a guy out there to keep an eye on the house.” He sat up and looked around. “I’m going out for something to eat. The inspector back yet?” There was silence. “Where is he, anyway?”
“How in hell should I know?” asked Dubinsky sourly. “Dead. Disappeared. On ten years’ leave. You think he ever tells me anything?”
