“Beg for my forgiveness.”
“Forgive me, Rocky. Forgive me. Forgive me.”
He said something in Plotzonian. It sounded like “vizhee co tebya” something something something …
Nadia caught my eye, looked back at Rocky, and said in English, “I don’t know how to get the Baby back. I sold it.”
“You sold it? Who to?”
“A woman.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
He walked over to me, dragging Mrs. Ramirez by the scruff of her dress. “Do you know?”
I shook my head.
Behind Rocky, Phil appeared in the doorway, and my spirits lifted, until Phil lurched forward and I saw his hands were cuffed behind his back and he was being pushed by the brown-eyed man with the bad toupee, now sans the AstroTurf. Behind them came a heavier-set man with blue eyes, pushing Maggie.
Bad Toupee spoke in Plotzonian, gesturing to his prisoners with a gun. Rocky barked out something, and the two men took Phil and Maggie away at gunpoint.
“You’re locking them in the chapel?” Nadia said. “You’re not going to hurt them, are you?”
“No,” Rocky said, though he was probably lying. “Not if we have no more trouble.”
He and Nadia argued in Plotzonian about the Baby.
Finally, Nadia blurted out in English, “All right, all right. I sold it to Miriam Grundy. She has it. Talk to her.”
“We must go get the icon,” Rocky said. “If she won’t give it back, we’ll force her to give it to us. Where is she?”
“At the Chelsea Hotel,” Nadia said.
chapter sixteen
There’s always that point, in the middle of a jam, when the usually dormant voice in the back of my head suddenly awakens and asks, “Where the hell are we and how did we get ourselves into this one, Robin?”
You probably know that voice. It’s the voice of reason. Sometimes events carry a person away, and the resulting clamor drowns out that voice until it’s almost too late.
In the past, I’ve heard it ask, “Robin, why are we beating that woman with her own comatose grandmother?” “Why are we locked in a cage like a lab animal?” “Why are we in black leather slave outfits and why are we being chased by a man with a sofa glued to his back?”
Now it was asking, “Robin, why are we chained to a bunch of nuns in the back of a cake-delivery van speeding its way into Manhattan to try to recover a legendary holy icon, and how the hell did we get here?”
Rocky and his two Plotzonian henchmen had this bright idea. They took me and the five nuns and joined us in a circle, with Rocky and Nadia in the center. On the upside, they untied our legs so we could walk in this awkward knot of nuns as one, like the crew of WJM in the group hug scene on the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show except that we were facing outward, not inward.
We formed a human shield around Rocky and Nadia. We were Rocky’s insurance policy. Bad Toupee—whose name, I gathered, was Pavli—was driving. The guy with the blue eyes had been left behind to watch Phil, Maggie, Mrs. Ramirez, and the nuns who were locked in the chapel. I’d managed to talk Rocky out of taking Mrs. Ramirez with us, pointing out that as a frail old woman (ha!) she would only slow him down. Nadia then pointed out that with five nuns, me, and a smattering of firearms, what more protection did they need?
Now that I was in the jam, the question was, How do I get out of it with minimum loss of life? Clearly, we knew too much and there would be considerable incentive to kill all of us once we were no longer needed, all except Nadia, who would either escape again, or get dragged back to Plotzonia to marry Rocky. Did Plotzonia have an extradition agreement with the United States, I wondered? As a haven for criminals and gunrunners, it was unlikely. If we all died, who would be able to tell this story, implicate the future dictator of Plotzonia, and see justice done? Lucia? She didn’t have much of the story, and wasn’t all that credible, being a scandalous exile who drank cocktails for lunch. Miriam Grundy knew about Nadia and the icon, but she didn’t know Nadia’s country or anything that didn’t seem to pertain to the icon itself. The Zenmaster wouldn’t get involved. Carlos the bullfighter had been gored in the head and had a short-term memory problem. The others who had come in contact with Nadia had only the tiniest pieces of the puzzle. With no witnesses left, what would the police think when they found a bunch of dead Sisters and a few dead laypeople in a convent on Long Island? What possible motive would they find for the mass murder of cake-baking nuns? Would a link be made to the profane and satanic graffiti on the convent walls the year before?
It wasn’t hard to see how this would play out. The public outcry would force a massive police investigation. With no witnesses or real clues, a witch hunt for satanists, wiccans, and New Age flakes would ensue, until some grandiose, recently released mental patient was arrested and either railroaded or induced into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. A crime like that can’t remain “unsolved.”
Six months later, someone would find a dog chewing on my femur in the Brooklyn dunes, and police dogs would sniff out the handcuffed remains of the other dead nuns. A mental patient would confess to these crimes too, and issue a manifesto talking about his regular visits preceding the crime, from the Archangel Gabriel, who appeared in the form of a mild-mannered hardware clerk talking in code at the local ServiStar.
Pavli of the bad toupee said something sharply in Plotzonian.
“You think we’re being followed? Who is following us?” Nadia asked, thoughtfully translating into English for the benefit of the rest of us.
More Plotzonian jangled through the air.
“The Knights of St. Michael the Martyr!” Nadia said. “How did they find us?”
Pavli said something, including, in English, “Long Island Expressway.”
“You thought you lost them on the Long Island Expressway on your way to the convent to meet Rocky?” Nadia repeated. “You fool. You know what will happen if they get their hands on me and Rocky? And the icon? Lose them!”
Pavli stepped on the gas, and Nadia screamed, “You fool! You want to attract the police and get a speeding ticket?”
Pavli began switching lanes, cutting from one into another, throwing us from side to side with every swerve, and taking a hard left onto a very bumpy road, so that the nuns and I bounced up and down on our bums. Three more hard lefts followed, until we were back on smooth highway. Pavli chuckled. We must have lost the Knights.
We rumbled over some kind of metal bridge, and slowed down. Through the back window of the van, which the Mother Superior, another nun, and I were facing, it looked like we were in Manhattan. Within ten minutes, we had pulled to a stop.
“Now what, Rocky?” Nadia asked.
“We’ll go inside, and try to convince this woman to return the icon. Pavli will stay here. When we have the icon, we’ll—” And he slipped back into Plotzonian again.
“Using the nuns as protection is a good idea, Rocky, in case we run into the Knights or the police. But why do we have to take a boat AND a ship AND an airplane to get home?” Nadia asked.
“Because that is what is decided,” Rocky said.
Yeah, with a gun you can control your woman, I thought. Even with a gun, he wasn’t manly. He was sullen and childish. If he succeeded in dragging Nadia back to Plotzonia, and marrying her, I gave the whole thing six months. If Nadia held on, it would only be until such time as her husband actually took power, and then he’d be found poisoned in the john while his wife engineered a coup Catherine the Great style. Or the common people she disparaged would overthrow them and display their dismembered heads on pikes high atop the palace walls.
Nadia would, I hoped, say something to Miriam Grundy that would tip her off that something was amiss, and Miriam Grundy would call the cops.
Next to me, the Mother Superior gave me a look. I wasn’t sure what it meant, just that it was supposed to mean something. She looked down at her feet, and I noticed she had wiggled her foot
half out of her shoe, which was really more of a slipper.
When Rocky and Nadia crawled out between our linked arms and jumped out of the van, the Mother Superior’s foot pushed forward, so the toe of her slipper was caught between the van doors, preventing the latch from fully catching. Quietly, and with as little movement as possible, she pushed the shoe upward and wiggled it until the latch loosened and the van door, with a soft click, opened the barest smidgen. She pulled the slipper back.
The Mother Superior tugged lightly on my arm, and at the arm of the woman next to her, who spread the tug around the circle until it came back to me and we inched ever so slightly toward the door, then stopped. We waited a moment—had to do this carefully so as not to alarm Pavli—and then moved forward another half inch or so.
We were mere inches from the door when Pavli erupted in what sounded like some pretty ripe Plotzonian cussing. He turned the engine back on and shifted into gear. As he did this, we bumped quickly toward the door, but were not able to get out until he suddenly pulled out, the van doors flew open, and we went tumbling in a pile on the pavement.
It took a moment to hoist ourselves to our feet, and there was no time to get untied, so with Mother Superior in the lead, and me at her right hand, the nuns and I began moving as one down the block, toward the Chelsea Hotel about fifty feet away. Pavli was in traffic now, and behind him was the car that had followed us on the way in, which slammed into the space Pavli had just vacated. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pavli jump out of the van in the middle of traffic and head our way on foot.
Remember, we were still gagged, so we couldn’t shout out anything such as “Call the cops” when we went into the Chelsea Hotel, a knot of gagged nuns. Here, where a scene from Aida was once filmed with live lions and the composer George Kleinsinger used to walk his alligator in the hallway, where Sarah Bernhardt had slept in a coffin and William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, where Robert Oppenheimer pondered the implications of his bomb, and painters of every major school of the twentieth century had worked, lived, loved, and passed out in the hallways, it was natural to assume five nuns and an incongruous redhead, tied together in a circle and gagged, were some sort of performance art or surrealist statement.
I tried to mime “Take the gags off” to our fellow elevator passengers, who unfortunately were three Mary Sue women, including the uptight one who looked like Marilyn Quayle, back presumably from a day learning how to rip off windows, orphans, and unemployed homeowners. Frantically, I waved my face at them, trying to communicate with my eyes that I wanted the gag off, but they just backed into a corner, forming their own little knot, while one pushed the seventh-floor button repeatedly, as if this might make the elevator go faster or make us vanish. The nun knot jumped over so I could lean down to the panel and punch 10 with my nose. As soon as I pressed it, the uptight woman who kind of looked like Marilyn Quayle screamed and sprayed me with pepper spray, missing my eyes and nose, but getting my cheek.
It stung like a sonofabitch. Unable to scream or gesticulate, I started writhing and twitching in pain, causing the nuns in the circle to bump awkwardly against each other, like buoys tied together in rough waters. This was the last straw for the uptight woman, who fainted just moments before the elevator stopped on seven. The other two pastel women each grabbed an arm of their fainted friend. They didn’t even take the time to try to help her to her feet. They half-ran out, dragging her down the hallway behind them.
The elevator doors closed and we lurched upward. Half my face stung and one eye was watering. At ten, we got off and, with me in the lead, shuffled quickly toward Miriam Grundy’s apartment.
Mother Superior pushed the doorbell with her nose, my face being a tad tender, and a butler, painted all blue and naked except for a blue loincloth, answered. We shoved past him, into the apartment, through the hallway to the spiral staircase up to her studio. The spiral staircase was a challenge for the six of us, but we managed to get up it. All the while, I was listening for the next doorbell, the one that might be Pavli, or the Knights of St. Michael the Martyr.
There was a real variety of humanity in this room, from men in black tie and women in formal dress to men with pompadours and zoot suits and women in pink leopard print and feather boas. That was in addition to several “living statues,” actors painted chalk white, posing very still in various positions, the Swinging Miriams female impersonators, some very, very short waiters, and a couple of tall people here just to mingle. Miriam was nowhere in sight.
As the gagged nuns and I moved as one among the guests, some man shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!” and started clapping, inciting others to applaud and cheer for us. The applause brought Miriam out from a room off the studio.
“What is going on?” she asked.
Behind her, Rocky appeared. When he saw us, he pulled out his gun and put it to Miriam’s head.
“Nobody move,” he said.
The guests laughed and clapped some more.
“I want the icon now,” he demanded.
“I told you I don’t have it,” Miriam said. To her guests, she screamed, “This is not art!”
“Where is it?” Rocky asked.
“I don’t know. This is not art!” said Miriam.
“Shut up,” said Rocky.
“This is a challenging piece,” said a woman behind me.
At this point, Pavli appeared, waving his gun in the air as he made his way through the crowd. I looked at the Mother Superior, trying to catch some hint that she knew what to do. But she looked as baffled as me. She shrugged. I shrugged. We began to shuffle toward Pavli, pushing some of the crowd ahead of us toward him, when the latest complication arrived, the Knights of St. Michael the Martyr, one of whom shot his gun into the air, silencing the crowd at last.
But the guests were only quiet for a moment, and then spontaneously burst into more laughter and applause.
When the Knights saw Rocky with his gun, they each grabbed a hostage, a Living Statue and a Swinging Miriam. There was some shouting in Plotzonian, and Ben appeared, holding up the icon.
“Ben, no,” Miriam said.
Rocky let go of Miriam and grabbed the icon. Pavli grabbed Miriam Grundy. One of the Knights pointed his gun at Rocky, and Rocky then pointed his gun at the icon of the baby Jesus and yelled something in Plotzonian.
The Knights dropped their guns and released their hostages.
“Nadia?” Rocky called. “Nadia? NADIA?”
Nadia had vanished.
Holding the icon hostage, Rocky stormed across the room, fell to the floor, and crawled between me and the nuns, reemerging in the center of the nun knot. With the icon in one hand, and a gun in the other—pointed at my head—he pushed us out of the studio and down the spiral staircase. I could hear Miriam Grundy behind us—“This is not art! This is not art!” and “Stop pulling my hair.”
When we got out the door, Pavli let Miriam go, and ran ahead of us to push the elevator button. There was no time to wait for it. We were pushed toward the wrought-iron stairwell that runs up the center of the building. It was just a matter of time before one of us tripped and we went rolling down.
That’s when I thought, I might as well take the bullet. It’s a far, far better thing I do, etc. etc., and it could prevent something worse, the deaths of all the nuns. What did I have to live for after all, now that I knew Pierre loved another? But first I needed to cripple Rocky to help give the other nuns the advantage, and so I could get a little revenge before I left this vale of tears.
My hands were cuffed, but my fingers were free. Suddenly, I reached back and grabbed the little gangster where he lived, yanking hard, really hard. I had a lot of pent-up anger. I grabbed him so hard that instead of shooting me, he shot above my head, into a painting on the wall. The nun knot bounced against the wall, and the gun flew out of Rocky’s hand and rattled down the stairs. Now he was unarmed, surrounded by six really pissed-off women with cuffed hands but free fingers.
What we had here was a Man Trap.<
br />
Pavli went to retrieve the gun. Behind us, the Knights, having retrieved their weapons and their living statue hostages, were shouting in their harsh language. We were caught between them, Rocky and the icon between us. At the tenth-floor stairwell railing, Miriam’s guests were watching, amused, a couple taking pictures, still not getting the message that this was not art. Below us, other residents had come out to see what was going on, including Lucia and Carlos, and were staring up the stairwell.
It was a stand-off, and we were in the crossfire if anyone started shooting.
Someone did, one of the Knights, but he missed us and hit Pavli in the chest. Pavli crumpled onto the delicate and beautiful wrought-iron railing, and fell over it, plunging all the way down to the first floor.
The party guests oohed and ahed as he was falling down, and stopped, and stared, as it dawned on them that this was not all part of the performance. Then they started screaming.
Amid the loud, Plotzonian shouting and the screaming of the party guests came a clear New York voice. It was Detective Burns of the NYPD.
“Put down your guns,” he shouted. “Police. You’re surrounded.”
He was standing on the tenth floor. Behind him, blue uniforms spilled out of the elevator, while other cops ran up the stairs toward us. The cavalry had arrived.
chapter seventeen
“I knew a little about the icon,” Ben admitted. “And I knew I hadn’t hired nuns and gunmen for Miriam’s party, so naturally, when I saw them, I did the logical thing. I called the police.”
We’d all of us been taken to Manhattan South to give formal statements, and Ben and his lawyer were with a cop at the desk next to me. That cop got the logical explanation.
Detective Burns, who was interviewing me, asked, “The Knights of St. Michael the Martyr grabbed the Living Statue and the Swinging Miriam before or after the Plotzonian princess escaped?”
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 20
