by James Short
“Be more careful, madam, the next time you choose a school for your daughter. You would not want to put her in harm’s way.”
“Harm’s way? Me put my daughter into harm’s way?” She clasped her hands to her chest and swayed. Franklin saw clearly now the drug induced illness in her features. “This is simply too much for a mother to bear. Leave my compartment, sir, or I’ll have the conductor throw you off the train for insulting and threatening me.”
Franklin bowed his head and started to exit. Job done. Was it his responsibility to tell this mother how to treat her daughter? Of course not, he told himself. However, he couldn’t erase from his thoughts the puffy face of Monsieur Girard. He believed each kind of vice makes a special imprint on its possessor’s features—and Girard’s imprint was especially disturbing considering the profession he had claimed. Franklin turned towards Mrs. Boller again. “I repeat: do not put your daughter in harm’s way. Good-bye, Penny.”
“Bright as a Penny,” she sang, pressing her glasses to her face and squinting at him.
Franklin went to the dining car and ordered a cup of chocolate for Penny.
When he returned to Paris, Franklin visited the hotel, out of curiosity he told himself, and obtained the address of Madeleine and Penelope Boller. Although the town of Solvidado in the state of California wasn’t the ends of the earth, it was certainly an out-of-the-way corner. In any event, he would never return to the land where he had spent the first decade of his life as a slave. Although they had fought a war, he was skeptical that the heart of that sprawling nation had changed.
Franklin then went to his rooms. He was a man of quiet habitual enjoyments such as long walks or delving into scientific journals. He had looked forward to replying to a German geologist on the subject of the formation of diamonds, but he discovered that he didn’t have the taste for correspondence at the moment. He considered going to the theatre, which he normally avoided.
Instead, he visited Monsieur Jerome Landau, the man who had helped him start his career as a dealer in gems. Landau now lived with his daughter in a comfortable room with a view of the Champs d’Elysée. Landau had good days when his worldly humor was as sharp as ever and bad days, now more frequent, when his eyes seemed like those of a child lost in a crowd.
This evening, Landau was gazing out of the window at the city lights disappearing into a bank of fog. Franklin couldn’t discern his state of mind at first. When Landau became aware of Franklin’s presence and looked up at him, his gaze was unfocused. Then a glimmer shone through. He studied Franklin further, his face lighting up. “Ah, finally an affair of the heart?”
“No,” Franklin said, surprised that the comment gave him a sense of unease. “Not at all.”
“Then is it worth talking about?”
Father Perkins
“I have a game that I want to play with you, father.”
The girl sat with a priest at the table underneath the awning that stretched out from the trailer home. She pulled the woolen cap down to her eyebrows and folded her matchstick thin arms indicating the conversation would go no further until he agreed. Her eyes glowed with the fever that never quite left her, and her body seemingly diminished to nothingness beneath her rumpled blouse and sweatpants.
“Okay, Dory. What sort of game?” The priest leaned back in his chair, stretched and gazed beyond her at the fringe of the placid ocean. He sounded indifferent. That was his game. She would have to make an effort to interest him.
“A guessing game, father.” She smiled. Dory had never learned to temper or modulate her smile. It was a beam brighter for its rarity, and brightest when she knew something he did not. “You must guess where the gold is.”
“What gold?”
She thumped her small fist down on the table with surprising resonance. “Don’t make me think you’re stupid. The end of your nose twitches when you lie.”
“Why do you think I would care about gold?”
“Of course you care because you do. I think you’re a poor excuse for a priest. Whenever you come here, you bring too much of the world with you to be a good priest.” She stared at him defiantly.
“It’s not a requirement for priests to be unworldly all the time. But it is true, Dory, that I don’t bother myself with old stories of buried treasures. I think if the gold did exist, it would have been discovered by now.” He affected a stifled yawn, which he saw irritated her.
“Well, it does exist, and I know where it is.” She eyed him carefully, searching for the slightest hint of doubt on his face.
“Have you seen the treasure?”
“Yes, and I even touched it.” Her face glowed with self-satisfaction. “After therapy last week, mom and dad took me to the cliff where they went over—Solvidado’s star-crossed lovers, the plaque called them, Tom Deering and Penelope Boller.”
Dory made a disgusted face. “I thought they were more stupid than star-crossed. Romeo and Juliet weren’t thieves like Tom and Penelope. They didn’t make a whole town mad at them and chase them over a cliff to get their hands on them and the gold. Except there was hardly any gold—only a few coins dropped during the chase—so the town seemed pretty stupid too. Then I asked myself, ‘What if the gold really did exist? Where would they hide it? Did someone find it and secretly take it away?’ I was asking myself those questions when dad let me look down at the waves and rocks where they went splat. I think he was hinting that I follow their example to save more hospital bills.” Dory loved making her parents—bland, nearly sinless souls—into villains.
“Your parents love you.”
“I didn’t jump because I saw what happened, I saw them ride over the cliff, and I saw what they did with the gold.”
“Whatever your overheated imagination came up with concerning something that happened over a hundred years ago isn’t the same as seeing this table.” He tapped the aluminum surface for emphasis.
She glared at him. A gifted storyteller, Dory could dissolve whatever was in front of a listener’s eyes and replace it with a superior reality. Usually, he played along, for the fictions distracted and comforted her, but sometimes to annoy her, he didn’t.
“Guess.” Her fist banged the table again. “You’re allowed one guess a visit.”
He assumed a mock serious face. “The treasure is underneath the lamppost on the corner of 5th Street and Spinnaker Avenue.”
“No, really guess.” A pleading note crept into her voice.
“In a cave on the side of the cliff where they fell.”
“How could they have put the gold there? Did they pause while they were plunging to their deaths to stash it?” Dory was good at mocking him in return.
“They did it before they committed suicide.”
“No, no, no. I’ll give you a hint. It’s where an honest man would put it.”
“An honest man wouldn’t hide stolen goods.”
“No more hints.” She clutched her fists to her chest. “Poor priest. No worldly treasures for you today.”
Dory was right as usual. Father Perkins was a poor excuse for a priest, and as for worldly treasures, he cared a great deal about them. In fact, gold was on his mind as he passed into the lobby of the Hotel Madeleine.
He had shed his name along with his clerical collar and had acquired another—Aquino—although very few people addressed him thus. Aquino easily blended into a large extended family streaming towards the in-house restaurant Chez Pierre, famous for its yard-long crepes. And not only gold was on his mind, but diamonds and pearls and brooches, bracelets, earrings and, this afternoon, a particular necklace where a school of precious and semiprecious stones swam down a pure lustrous fourteen-carat rivulet.
The necklace had glinted coyly at him asking to be unlatched from that swollen neck; much like a fetching young woman with an unsatisfactory date at a party will flirt with a man she really wants to take her home. Aquino almost promised they would have a rendezvous later that evening.
Her name was Jeanine Brown—that i
s the possessor of the necklace. A former trophy wife, she now had all the trophies, a come-hither gleam in her eye, and enough beauty remaining in her ample form to make connoisseurs of the mature zaftig figure come hither. She was staying in room 204 of the Hotel Madeleine. And she was risky, oh so risky, because being led purely by pleasures of the flesh, her comings and goings weren’t entirely predictable. Yes, without doubt, he was a poor excuse for a priest, a cracked vessel of humanity, and a damn good burglar.
Despite the temptation, Aquino decided not to throw caution to the wind. There were others almost as alluring, and he had spotted a possibility seated at a table in the Chez Pierre’s glass-encased dining room. Exiting on the third floor, he covered his face as if he was about to sneeze so the nearest surveillance camera mounted in the corner of the hall couldn’t catch a close-up of his features, then bent his head down, pretending to have difficulty extracting the key from his pocket while he followed the length of the hall. He stepped into a short passageway considered too inconsequential for surveillance. Three steps brought him to a closet where cleaning materials were stored and three more to a sliding glass door leading to a balcony alcove.
The glass panel opened noiselessly, and as its reward, he deposited another five drops of oil on its tracks. He slipped outside. Glancing at the roseate wisps of clouds, he knew the western face of the hotel was experiencing a typical magnificent ocean sunset. This, however, was the eastern side, which, pressed close to a stubby mountain, was buried in deep shadow from late afternoon on. He listened. The hallway was deserted. That was good. He required twenty-eight uninterrupted seconds.
Quickly, Aquino peeled off his plaid shirt and gray slacks revealing underneath their closely fitting black counterparts. He rolled the outer garments up tightly and stuffed them into a small belt pack. Slipping on gloves, he climbed onto the balcony railing and leaning to the side, half-jumped and half fell onto a vine-tangled trellis. Like a human spider, he crossed several trellises towards the illuminated facade of the hotel. The balcony of his quarry was just inside the shadow cast by the stubby mountain.
Eight feet separated the iron grating enclosing its balcony from the trellis, so he had to push off. For a thrilling moment, he was airborne. His right hand missed its hold, however three fingers of his left wrapped around a grate-iron leaf, and that was sufficient to sustain his weight. His right hand swept up, grasped a vertical bar, and his right foot managed to lodge itself between the bottom rail and the concrete base. He climbed onto the balcony, making no more noise than the four seagulls he had startled. The sliding glass door was ajar. He nudged it three more inches and slipped inside.
The outlines of the furniture were barely materialized in the deep twilight pervading the room. This was the McBrides suite. Aquino had observed the pair earlier today in the lobby and two and a half minutes ago had seen them being served one of Chez Pierre’s monstrous crepes.
Frank and Elaine McBride were a loud, publicly dysfunctional couple with an insatiable sense of entitlement. Within the first minute of entering the lobby of Hotel Madeleine, the snarling duo started an argument with the desk clerk over the location of their room, which ended with them declaiming in the voices of Roman orators that in all of their extensive travels on six continents, they had never come across a worse excuse for a hotel. But how this loathsome pair had jangled and glittered in their outrage, shone and shimmered, as eye-catching as an ambulatory jewelry display case.
Aquino caught a glint on the night table—obviously, a trinket left out to entrap the maid and provide the McBrides with an excuse to dispute the hotel’s charge on their credit card. No, the real stones would be stowed in a hidden compartment of their suitcase, which would be locked and perhaps have an alarm. It was the work of a minute to locate the suitcase, disarm the alarm, pop the lock, and stuff three fistfuls of jewelry into his pack. Unexpectedly, he experienced a twinge of conscience. Aquino pulled a ring out of his pack and with a penlight examined it. At first glance, it seemed a rather plain wedding band. Inside he could barely make out an inscription: “My eternal soul-mate, May 1978.” In case a trace of that ancient feeling had survived, he placed it next to the zirconium pin on the night table.
An altogether profitable outing, he thought. In less than three minutes, he would be strolling on the sidewalk, mingling with the people, looking as self-satisfied as any of the diners who had just enjoyed a five course four star meal.
Just as he was about to exit, however, Aquino heard voices coming from the adjoining room, a corner suite which because of its romantic vistas in two directions often was reserved for newlyweds. An argument was in progress. Calculating that Frank and Elaine McBride would not have eaten halfway through their crepes yet and being something of a voyeur into the human condition, our thief put his ear to the wall.
He listened a moment to the dispute, sighed, turned away, but then, recalling Dory’s game, stopped. It was against his nature to back down from a challenge, though, as a rule, he avoided futile enterprises. On the other hand, it had always irked him that there might be a large treasure in his vicinity he couldn’t access. Obviously, the reason the gold had never been found despite the efforts of thousands of treasure hunters over a century and a quarter was either that it never existed or someone had made off with the goods early on. Yet, a doubt had niggled him—there was one place he was fairly certain the treasure seekers had overlooked.
He went there once or rather burgled it. Although he didn’t trip over any pot of gold, he found three items, in themselves inexplicable, yet seemed to have possible connections to the treasure: a letter written in French to a gem dealer in Paris, a stiletto sewn into the fold of a nightgown and a veil with a faded blood stain. He now reminded himself that to detect how a magic trick is done, you must pay attention to the hand that doesn’t appear to move. He pressed his ear to the wall and listened intently. Yes, he must consider what doesn’t appear to move, or rather who has not been taken into account? He inhaled deeply and held his breath. She, that is key to the explanation of the three items and the disappearance of the gold, just might be temporarily residing next door in the honeymoon suite.
Postnuptial Disagreement
“Can’t you tell me why, April?” Philip pleaded as he fought for breath because of the injustice of his circumstances had again deprived him of air. “Why? I wasn’t holding a gun to your head when I asked you to marry me. I was down on my knees and so nervous I could barely say the words. I didn’t have much hope, yet I knew I had to try because it seemed you might, and I didn’t want to go around for the rest of my life kicking myself for missing the opportunity.”
Philip stopped to see if his new bride was listening. She stared at her lap, her eyes as blank as those of an idiot. However, a corner of her lip was quivering.
Perhaps the quivering lip was a sign of hope. He continued: “You looked so lovely when you said my proposal touched you deeply but that you wanted to wait a few days to think about it carefully. I waited. You thought, and when two evenings later in your mother’s rose garden, you said ‘yes,’ you also said the reason you needed time to reply was that you wanted to make sure the feelings you had for me were true. Now you were certain, you told me, from the depth of your heart, you were more than certain than you had ever been about anything else in your life. Obviously, doubts must have occurred to you later. I only wish we could have talked them over.”
Philip paused. He had a sense she was about to respond, but then her lips tightened and turned down into a frown. He forged on: “You know April, I wouldn’t be the first husband to spend his honeymoon celibate, but I have feelings, desires, yearnings, and we’re not even speaking, and I need to know why.”
Philip made another attempt to breathe in the air which remained devoid of oxygen. By default, he had won the argument again, and again it was borne on him how irrelevant it was to win arguments by default. “I want to know where I stand. That is not too much to ask, is it?”
April looked up at
him silently from the chair where she had slumped, her eyes welling with tears. It would be hard to imagine a creature more beautiful and vulnerable, yet for Philip, this loveliness had become ashes in his mouth. Then she engaged in that little maddening mannerism, which he had seen a hundred times over the last six days. Shaking her head helplessly, she whispered, “I don’t know.”
“April, we’re husband and wife. Can’t you at least try for me?” He held out his hands hating himself for begging. “If not now, then later, sometime.”
She continued shaking her head.
“Well, I must assume that whatever we have here can’t be fixed!” Philip struggled a moment with his wedding ring, wriggling it off his finger, and then throwing it on the bed. “I’m going out. I’m going to get stinking drunk, and maybe I’m going to get….” He had never used any expression with a whiff of vulgarity in April’s presence—she had seemed too refined—and even now he couldn’t break the habit. “Maybe I’m going to do…” A slight shudder passed through April. “Oh, I don’t know what!” Feeling pompous and unresolved, he left, slamming the door.
April sighed with relief as Philip’s footsteps receded down the hallway. Finally, sweet solitude, her dearest friend these past six days, the only companion to whom her heart could talk.
She noticed the small things now: the slow rhythm of her breath, the last rays of the ocean sunset spraying pink across the ceiling. Turning her gaze towards the balcony’s sliding glass door, she allowed herself the luxury of watching the western horizon glow red hot, then deepen into a dusky maroon. A breeze crept through a chink in the door bearing odors that were a sampling of the enticements of a warm spring evening—barbecues, sweet coastal wildflowers, jasmine vines, juniper trees, and brine. April was aware of the pleasures without really being touched by them.
She slowly stood up to close the curtains across the door and the window, then reconsidered. April decided she wouldn’t shut out the world completely as she had on the previous five nights; she wouldn’t turn out the lights, bury her head in the pillows and cry. No need to hide now. Something of the terror—this word was strong, but there was none other which approximated her state of mind—had passed. She felt empty and strangely distant from her own body. She sat down and stared into the mirror trying to riddle the mystery of the woman in the reflection staring back.