by Medora Sale
The crowd that met in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum looked small and insignificant, dwarfed by the shadowy heights of the totem pole that rose almost to the ceiling three floors above and by the curling staircases that surrounded it. Their feet echoed on the marble floor, and Harriet shivered. Power, primitive and menacing, seemed to emanate from the darkness around that great stolen symbol, and in spite of the imposing bulk of five police officers standing near her, she felt uneasy.
Sanders was in low-voiced conversation with the security guards and two additional administration people, while Harriet tried to avoid looking at the fierce totemic figures carved in wood beside her. She gasped, startled, at the sound of his voice in her ear. “We’ll do the public areas with Mr. Arkwright here,” he said, nodding at one of the university students who work as guards during the night. “The rest of the guards and Collins and McNeill will do the areas that are closed to the public.” Two of the police officers walked over to the knot of museum security officials. “We’ll start on the third floor. Lucas, you come with us, and you,” he said to the last two officers, “stay down here and make sure our pigeon doesn’t fly out the front door unnoticed.”
Mr. Arkwright made an admirable guide. He took them carefully through every section of the third floor that a member of the public could possibly penetrate, accompanying the search with scandalous and funny tales of oddities he, or somebody, had encountered. Until Sanders told him rather coldly to keep quiet. “If she’s here, which I doubt, there’s no point in warning her that we’re coming, is there?”
Harriet glared at him, and the party proceeded in silence. She would have infinitely preferred any kind of chat to this silent procession through the pale, glimmering figures of the past.
“Well,” said Mr. Arkwright as he peered around the last pedestal holding up the farthest statue, “if there’s something alive up here bigger than a mouse, I’ll turn in my badge. Let’s try the second floor. More places to hide down there.” And the party stalked, ran, or clattered its way down the stairs.
The statues on the third floor were unsettling enough, but they were nothing compared to the cases of stuffed predators glaring dimly out at her in the natural history sections. She felt eyes boring into her back and hot breath brushing her neck as she followed along behind John, resisting the impulse to run over and hang on to him. But her pride was more powerful than her nerves, and she stayed a deliberate eight or ten paces back, in the aisle to the left of him. Rob Lucas was over on the right, and Mr. Arkwright was moving quietly along up ahead.
At the end of the display, they stopped and looked at Mr. Arkwright; he raised his hand to point to his right. Then the unnatural silence of the room was broken by a rasping moan and a sharp, retching cough. “Omigod,” said Harriet, “what was that?”
“Shhh,” said Mr. Arkwright. There was another cough. “The bat cave,” he said. “The goddamn bat cave.” He ran over to the wall with his keys in his hand, searched out one, and inserted it into a metal plate. The dark mass ahead and to their left revealed itself as an archway ablaze with light. He ran toward it, followed by the others. At the entrance, he turned to Lucas. “Go to the other end. Check all the grottoes.” Lucas disappeared.
Before they were past the first bend, they heard Lucas shout, “Up here.”
Veronika was facedown, one knee close to her chest, the other leg straight. Her hands were just above her head, and she lay like a small child asleep. As they stared down, she made a slight effort to raise her head, and her rasping breathing echoed in the enclosed space.
“What’s that?” said Harriet quietly, pointing down at her.
“Blood,” said Sanders. “She’s hurt, but she’s still alive. We’d better get—”
“The guard’s gone for an ambulance,” said Lucas. “And to get the keys to open up the exhibit to get her out.”
“No, I realize that’s blood,” said Harriet. “I’m not completely stupefied. I mean that thing sitting at ten o’clock to her head.”
Sanders looked down for a moment, then vaulted over the railing and landed, much harder than he had expected, in the sharp and nasty surface of the exhibit. He felt Veronika’s neck with a delicate touch, then took off his jacket and slid it gently under her face. Lucas reached over the rail and handed him a plastic bag. “Thank you, Constable,” he said, and leaned over to pick up Carlos Ramirez’s knife from the floor of the exhibit. “You have good eyes, Miss Jeffries,” he said with a glance in her direction. “But then you always did, didn’t you?”
An hour later and Sanders had done everything, for the moment, that he had to do. “Come on,” he said to Harriet. “I’ll take you home.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve got my car. If I leave it out there, I’ll get a fifty-dollar ticket. If I haven’t got one already.”
“Give me your keys,” he said. Harriet was too tired to resist. She pulled them out of her pocket and handed them over. Sanders removed his own keys from his rumpled and dirty jacket, restored to him once the delicate operation of removing the injured girl had been completed, and tossed them over to Lucas. “Take the car back, will you, Constable?” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“I’d be glad to follow behind and pick you up once you’ve dropped off Miss Jeffries,” said Lucas. “It’s no trouble.”
“No, thank you, Constable. That won’t be necessary.” If the words hadn’t told him, the glare would have; Lucas, suddenly enlightened, waved the keys cheerfully in the direction of the two of them and left.
“Tired?” asked Sanders. They were sitting in a small restaurant with bowls of goulash and a large basket of bread in front of them.
Harriet shook her head. “Starved. I had no idea how hungry I was,” she said as Sanders refilled her wineglass. “I wonder how Nikki is,” she added. “I still feel—”
“Just a minute.” Sanders got up and left the room. In less than two minutes he was back. “She’s okay. Not great, but she’ll do. There was a botched attempt to cut her throat; hence, the blood. Probably caught the knife in that pendant she was wearing. She has two head injuries, the one at the point of impact, where she landed in that grotto, and another on the side of the head. Which means he coshed her, probably aiming at the temple, tried to cut her throat, and then dumped her into the grotto. She has a concussion, but she didn’t lose that much blood, apparently.”
“When did it happen?”
“Before closing time. Otherwise, the guy is still in there; he couldn’t get out without setting off alarms. Anyway, she probably would have been seen if she’d been walking around after closing.”
Harriet shook her head. “I can’t understand why no one saw her. I mean, she was just lying there! Large as life.”
“Well, even with full lighting the cave has strange shadows. And the guard said that when he checked the area he was so busy chasing a little girl out that maybe he didn’t look as carefully as he should have. But basically they really don’t expect to find bodies in the exhibits.” He looked over at her pale and unhappy face and covered her hand with his. “Listen, it isn’t your fault. Did you make a definite appointment with her to go to the museum? Do you remember?”
Harriet shook her head again. “I don’t think so. She was supposed to call me, and we were going to set a time. But then my answering machine was all screwed up and—”
“And so, if she did call and tell you to meet her there at four or five or whenever, you couldn’t possibly have gotten the message.”
“Do you think that whoever tried to kill her knew she had telephoned me? And knew who I was and knew where I lived? And took the tape out of my answering machine so I wouldn’t go to meet her? That’s a lot of ands,” she added with a shaky smile. “You know, John, I don’t care for this very much. It sounds like someone living in Clara’s house,” she said, thinking of the handsome and plausible young man whom she had so generously
offered to help and to whom she had given her business card.
“Eat your goulash like a good girl and drink your wine. I’m not leaving you alone tonight. You’ll be safe.”
This time she didn’t protest.
At one-thirty a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, Manu Iturralde stepped out of the Iberia Airways 747 and blinked in the pleasantly cool continental dawn of the airport at Malaga, far to the south, the other side of the country from his native San Sebastian. He walked briskly over to passport control, where the usual customs and immigration officials had been bolstered by an unusual number of members of the Guardia Civil. Three unfortunates ahead of him, whose names happened to include the given name Manuel, and one gentleman with a slightly Basque-sounding last name, not terribly long hair, but a definite mustache, had all been called over to one side, for what was probably going to be a lengthy investigation of their luggage and discussion of their papers.
But Manu, whose passport identified him as Pedro Albornoz y Miró, received only a perfunctory glance. The officer in the Guardia Civil took in his erect carriage, his sober gray suit, his elegantly cut hair, and his clean-shaven face, and nodded politely. Senor Albornoz gave him an almost imperceptible, chilly smile and walked away, unmolested, to catch the bus that would take him into the centre of town.
Chapter 13
John Sanders stood in the middle of the hospital room, feeling awkward and out of place. Ed Dubinsky was leaning on the windowsill, managing to look unobtrusive; Veronika von Hohenkammer lay in corpselike silence, her face gray except for deep black smears under her eyes. With white bandages around her head and throat, she looked to Sanders as if someone had started to mummify her and then left for his coffee break. “I thought you said she was conscious and fit to be interviewed,” he hissed at the white-coated woman standing beside him.
“She is, in a manner of speaking,” the resident answered in normal tones. “She’s just asleep. You said it was urgent, so the best thing is to wait around a bit and catch her while she’s awake. She drifts in and out, but basically she’s all right.”
“Can she remember anything?” asked Sanders with some apprehension.
“You have to expect a certain amount of amnesia with head injuries. Hers doesn’t seem to be too severe. She knows who she is, and she was surprised to find herself here instead of at the museum. By the way, was she at the museum?”
Sanders nodded. “That was where we found her.”
“Then it sounds pretty good to me. I wasn’t sure where she’d been when she injured herself; if the visit to the museum had been six months ago, then you’d be in real trouble.” The resident laughed cheerfully. “Why don’t you sit down instead of looming over her like that? She’ll wake up in a minute. And don’t shake her. Her head hurts.” She moved over close to the door and leaned against the wall, determined, it seemed, to monitor the interview.
Sanders picked up a chair and set it beside the bed. This was the second woman in the last twenty-four hours who had accused him of looming. “Were there facial injuries?” he asked, looking over at the doctor.
She shook her head. “Back and side,” she said, sounding like a barber and touching her own head to indicate the site of the blows.
“Then why the black eyes?”
The resident snorted with laughter. “Mascara and God knows what other kinds of goop. Don’t look at me like that. She was wearing a lot of eye makeup, and it got smeared. The nurses will clean her up today, don’t worry. We took the worst of it off just to get a look at her skin color, but we didn’t bother with the eyes.”
Before Sanders could comment, those same eyes flew open. Veronika stared up at Sanders’s face, puzzled for a moment, and then smiled. “Hello, Inspector,” she said, her voice rather hoarse and weak.
“How’s your head?” asked the doctor.
“Bad,” said Veronika. Her eyes swam with tears.
“Keep this short,” said the resident, turning toward the door. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
“Who attacked you, Miss von Hohenkammer?” asked Sanders. If he was going to be hurried out of here in ten minutes, he had no time for idle preliminaries.
“I didn’t see him.”
“Him? It was a man, then.”
“I think so. A man had been following me.”
“In the museum?”
“And before. A man asked for me at the hairdresser’s.”
“And where was that? Which hairdresser’s?”
“It had an Italian name, near Bloor and Avenue Road. I can’t remember . . . it reminded me of the wine . . .”
“Chianti?” said Dubinsky, his pen poised but idle for the moment.
That brought a small smile. “Wrong wine. Orvieto—it was Arvieto’s or Orveto’s or something like that. I had my hair cut before I went to the museum.”
“Can you describe the man who followed you?”
She started to nod her head and stopped again. “Yes. I saw him several times.” She shut her eyes and went on speaking. “He’s almost as tall as Klaus. He has dark hair, almost black, curly, but not very. Cut stylishly, but short. Big eyes, dark brown, thin eyebrows, and the one on my right is arched, the other is straight. His nose is thin and long. He has those cheeks that sink in, almost with a line down them, you know? And his chin comes down in a point that is squared at the bottom.” Dubinsky was scribbling rapidly as she talked. “He is thin, but his shoulders are not— They are wide, uh, broad. He walks like a dancer. If you know what I mean.”
“Perhaps you could explain,” said Sanders, who didn’t.
“No, I’m too tired.” She opened her eyes again; they were moist with tears.
“Rest for a minute.” Sanders turned to his partner. “Get the artist over here right away.” When Dubinsky had left, he turned back to the injured young woman. “I’ll just tell you what we’re doing. Don’t bother to answer. I’m sending for our sketch artist. We will give him that description; he’ll do a drawing and then ask you how it should be altered to make it accurate.” Her eyes drifted shut again, and Sanders realized he was pouring his words into a vacuum. He moved his chair over by the window, stared out over the rooftops of the downtown core of the city, and considered what she had been saying. Chances were that this fantastically detailed description was pure hogwash. Witnesses could rarely recall anything with such clarity and detail. Yet she just might be that one in a hundred with a strong visual memory. He wondered if the medicos would let her sit up and look at mug shots. She ought to be able to pick him out, if he existed. Who in hell was he, anyway? And why did he want to get rid of her? Maybe her sister, after all, had hired him, making one last attempt to get the whole pie.
Dubinsky walked quietly into the room. “He’ll be here in an hour or so,” he said. “He’s doing someone for Volchek. She say anything else?”
“Not a word. She’s asleep again.”
“No, I’m not asleep.” Her voice was clearer now, and stronger.
“Can you tell me what else happened yesterday?” Sanders spoke as gently as he could. “We’re trying to figure out why someone would want to attack you.”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing happened yesterday. I went shopping and had my hair done and went to the museum.”
“Who knew you were going?”
“No one knew, except I left a message on Harriet’s answering machine. We were going to meet at the museum but hadn’t set a time. I told her I’d be there at four. She never came.” Again her eyes filled with tears.
“She didn’t get the message,” said Sanders. “Her answering machine was broken.”
Dubinsky raised his pen and then his eyebrow as he looked over at his partner.
“Who was in the house when you left? And could have known that you were going out? Maybe heard you leaving that message?”
“No one. Bettl was out, and Klaus had gone over to m
y sister’s.”
“Ah, yes, so he said. When did you leave the house? Right after he did?”
“No, I was very cold, and I got changed first.” A patch of hectic color flared up in her gray cheeks and then started to fade again.
Sanders paused. What had happened while she was changing to cause such a reaction? “Then tell me precisely everything you did.” As she talked, her voice growing hoarser and more hesitant, he wondered why he was putting her through this. Except that he was void of ideas. “Who else did you see in the museum? Besides the man with the thin cheeks. Was he with anyone, did you notice?” Stupid question. Why in hell would you take a friend to help you hit a small female over the head?
Veronika von Hohenkammer reddened again. Once more she forgot and shook her head. The color drained rapidly from her cheeks, leaving them even grayer than before. She closed her eyes in pain and then opened them once more. This time their gaze was wide and candid. “No, of course not. I saw no one else. Just the people I mentioned.”
The door flew open. “Out,” said the resident briskly. “Before I put you out.”
“Why is she lying?” asked Sanders as they waited for the elevator.
Dubinsky looked over at him. “Who knows? Any number of reasons. How about, she knows who he is, she saw him talking to her sister or whoever, and she doesn’t want to blow the whistle on them.”
“Then why the detailed description?”
“Yeah, well, wouldn’t you? I mean, family feeling only goes so far. The guy tried to murder her. There’s a difference between fingering your own sister, or cousin, and having us catch them in the course of our investigations. Right? If we do get this bastard and if he points the finger at Theresa baby, then that’s not her fault, is it? So she’s done what she wanted to do. Saved her own skin without doing anything mean or nasty, like squealing on a sister.”
