by Paul Monette
The blank look on his face looked awfully shy to Rita, and it gave her a first inkling that he didn’t have a clue what the room was about. Already he looked as if he’d been tricked. It wasn’t that he’d never seen rare and costly things before and thus felt clumsy, a beggar shuffling his feet in a mansion. He’d had his dose of baronial taste all the while he was growing up, and in fact he was probably the only one of the four who’d had a Cézanne in the library face to face with a gilt and ormolu mantel clock from Fontainebleau. But that in a way was the problem. Because he used to live like this—not so splendidly, of. course, except it all seemed the same to him—Rusty Varda’s secret room looked like the attic of a swank town house. He was silent and tense as he held the candle up and squinted into the warehouse gloom. This couldn’t be the right place.
“Where is it?” he asked, turning to the light of Rita’s candle.
“Where is what?”
“The money,” he said sharply. “Stop playing it like a game, Rita. I already won it ten years ago.”
Rita frowned. “But there isn’t any money here,” she said. “I don’t understand what Varda told you.” She stepped forward, leaving Peter standing next to Hey. She came up close to Sam, so that they stood candle to candle. His calling her Rita helped. He isn’t so bad, she thought, as we want him to be. “These are his things,” she said, “and some of them are worth a fortune, but not to us. You couldn’t sell them, because they’re hot. And if you took away something to hold for ransom, who would you get it from? We don’t have that kind of money.”
She spoke so gently she might have been about to ask for a donation. She saw what Peter and Hey didn’t, that Sam really had imagined a vault knee-deep in silver dollars. Rita had waited forever for a room like this, and so had Sam, and Rita got just the one she wanted, and Sam didn’t. It made her feel generous and wise. She felt like a runner safely across the finish line, arms wide to comfort the losers. What else could she do? Somebody had to come in second.
“He used to tell me about it,” Sam said, still as if something was funny. “Of all the boys he ever had, I was the only one he told. He said so. He used to say he had the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow all locked up in his house.”
Rita felt a shiver of something electric passing close to her heart. She suddenly knew she had to get Sam’s gangster act behind them. She realized for the first time she had someone here who’d actually heard Varda himself on the subject. Heard it in bed to boot. So Rita worked to alter the tone in the secret room, to have it seem like a normal day so Sam would talk. Because it was the closest Rita would ever come to what it was like when Varda sweet-talked the moon and stars to Frances Dean. She didn’t know where to begin, the gun and the break-in having sent them off on the wrong foot. If she could have had it her way, she’d have sent Hey and Peter out to the kitchen to eat the avocados stuffed with steak tartare. Then she would have sat Sam down in her office to cross-examine him. But nicely, and not so he’d feel he was being grilled by a caseworker. It was amazing how much she’d figured out of his story already. She didn’t have a clear picture of the relationships with Varda and Nick, and she wasn’t much struck by the cold-blooded connection between the two liaisons. Mostly, he’d arrested her with the hint of a ten-year wait. And Rita wrote the book on waiting.
“How did he sound? Happy?” she asked, as blithely as if they were holding cocktails instead of candles, and nobody had a gun.
“No, it wasn’t so much that,” Sam said, but fishing for it, trying to get it right. “He sounded safe. Like he was so high up, no one could reach him.” And when he saw her nod as if it fit like a glove, he found he felt safer himself. Sam was more cautious than Rita, from years of no one to trust, and he wasn’t ready to let the mood go nice just because she wanted it to. He knew the balance of power was with him right now. And he knew she wanted it back. At the same time, though, he could tell she had all the answers to this place. She was the one who could help him redirect his plan, which he had to do in the next few minutes or else. He didn’t waste time on having been wrong for the whole ten years. If the getaway car isn’t there, then you run. If the clerk wakes up, then you hit him again. Crime didn’t pay unless you had an alternate route set up at every dead end.
“Did he say it was a room set aside by itself?”
“I thought it must be a walk-in vault,” Sam said, “like a bank.” They paused a bit after every exchange, as if to study their positions. He had to admit it would do him good to talk it out about Varda. Though Sam had gotten in at gunpoint, the talking didn’t seem odd because Rita didn’t. He would have to make a private arrangement with Nick after all, he was thinking, maybe work out some regular payments. He had to exert some control in this house. He’d never really need money out of it, any more than Rita did, or, in any case, not to buy things. The Varda treasure was never meant to let him retire from hustling and settle down in a house in the hills with a view of the downtown smog. Security didn’t interest him. He only wanted to walk in in the middle of a very big deal, stay long enough to put his mark on it, and split. If it had been silver dollars or stacks of cash, the way it was supposed to be, he might have thrown it all out like confetti from the open door of a helicopter. Or bought up something crazy, a half dozen Cadillacs maybe, and sent them one by one over the bluffs at Santa Monica. He couldn’t figure out what was going on in here instead, but he had the suspicion that Rita was feeling around for a deal of her own, a separate peace, or else why didn’t she just shut up and let him get nowhere. It might be they could work something out, he thought, something a little more creative than armed robbery. The break-in turned him on, the pushing Hey around and talking surly, but he was just as amenable here as he was in bed to trying something new. Whatever worked.
“Why don’t you make me an offer?” he said, breezy and open, and for once the humor didn’t seem misplaced. They had to fashion a compromise, and lightly was the safest way.
“This is what you ought to do,” Rita said, as ready to deal as she would ever be. “Take something out of here, a little painting or something, and that establishes your credentials. It’s like having a share of stock in Varda’s company. Then you have to work it out with Nick. Like I say, we don’t have the big bucks to pay out for ransom, but there are rewards for a lot of these things. The rest we have to fence somehow, because there isn’t any owner to return them to. See what I mean? We’re going to have money coming in. What you do is ask for a cut of it.”
For a moment, then, they were gliding along like Bonnie and Clyde. Had Rita somehow forgotten the torn and stepped-on watercolor lying out in the hall, its price plummeted to nothing? It was in her, she knew, to get so infatuated with the process of giving a briefing that she neglected her own best interests. But she was gambling here on his innocence, evident to her in the loose, unfocused way he held the gun. His protests aside, games were clearly his strong suit. All his previous crimes, she could see, were a whore’s crimes, victimless and brief. He’d stayed a kid by fucking day after day and letting the rest of life go by. That was what it amounted to: He was still a kid, and he needed to hear a kid’s story. Nine parts plot to one part character.
“Screw that idea,” he said. “You’d have a roadblock up before I got out of Bel-Air.”
She talked fast: “Oh, but you’re wrong. We can’t have the police involved in any of this. We’ve all been in and out of this room for weeks. I think we’re accessories after the fact, but it’s very technical, so I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. There’s millions of dollars worth of stuff in here, and to get it they can always think up charges you never heard of.” Then what? She took up the tongue of a small-time hood, since no one had ever had to say such things in the drawing rooms of Gothic novels, and thus she had no tradition to tap. “We’ve got to wipe out the serial numbers, or whatever it is that labels them. Then we get them placed in little old lady antique stores, and then we discover them. It’s going to take a long, long time.”
/> “I don’t want to do a deal with Nick,” Sam said, and she could see his pen was poised above the dotted line. He wasn’t fussy about the fine print. He was just protecting his access route to the top man. Which in this case was Rita. “I work for you. I take a cut from you.”
“You’re absolutely right,” she said, nodding so vigorously her candle shook and guttered, “It’s the only way to keep things straight.” And now that we’re in it together, she thought, I wonder what it is. She was making it up as she went along, and now she had to come up with a job that would satisfy him. It was all a play for time, time being the game she played well.
“So what do you want me to do?” he asked, just half a step behind her.
“Well,” she said, and she looked away as if to mull it over. She and Sam had gotten turned slightly sideways from the others, so as to talk in privacy. Now her breath froze in her throat. She saw the next thing happen an instant before it did, but not in time to stop it. Peter lobbed a Persian bottle across the darker side of the room, and it smashed against the bust of Hadrian close by Rita’s office. Sam whirled and fired at nothing, the oldest trick in the book, and Hey came down on top of him before he got the joke. They fell to the floor together, Hey around his neck, and the noise of the gunshot thundered around the room, beating on the walls to find a way out. The candles were snuffed and dead on the floor. They had to make do with the dim, faraway light from the closet. Peter was at Rita’s side now, and he tried to draw her off. She wouldn’t leave. Sam was face-down in front of her. Hey was perched like a monkey on his back, but he didn’t know what to do next. He’d done a dazzling dancer’s leap in perfect time to Peter’s bottle ploy, but he couldn’t seem to get rough. The seconds passed, and Sam heaved his shoulders and squirmed and shook. It was all Hey could do to stay on.
“Hit him!” Rita shouted, digging her fingers into Peter’s arm. But even as he broke away from her to pick up something heavy, she saw Sam’s gun hand struggle free from under him. Before he could use it, he still had to throw Hey off and turn over. She took two steps and stamped her heel hard on his wrist, but because she was barefoot, it didn’t do anything but make him madder. He pulled loose, and the arm swung back and forth in an arc. The spurt of rage shuddered through his body. He rolled, and she saw his face. For an awful moment, as Hey lost his balance and fell and Sam was on his side with the gun free, the barrel swept across her body. Her stomach muscles locked. She opened her mouth to beg for something—if they could only start the last part over—and in his eyes she watched the moment pass when it could have been Rita he shot. Then the gun rolled with him all the way over. At last he and Hey were face to face, lying on their sides like a freeze at the end of a dance, and it happened. The fire flashed. The blood fountained out on the front of Hey’s jacket. And again the noise. It roared like the blooming flower of a bomb.
Sam leapt to his feet, and Rita dropped into a crouch beside Hey. Sam shrieked, “Don’t touch him!” But Rita wasn’t any more scared now than she was before the shots. Horrified and maddened and sick, yes, but except for the slow second she was looking down the barrel, not bodily threatened herself. It was just a meaningless accident. Though she would have killed Sam now with no regrets for what he’d done to a man like Hey, she knew it was the game gotten out of hand. And her anger was endless in the face of things that got evil by being stupid, like the final years of Frances Dean. “I told you,” Sam barked twice, “I told you.” But she wouldn’t even look at him. Hey’s eyes opened, and he gritted his teeth and took the pain. If they did this right, she thought, he’d make it. The hole was in his shoulder, not his heart, and the blood had slowed to a seep.
“Peter,” she said, like a rock inside, “get help. Then bring me some cold towels.” When she looked up to get a confirmation, she saw he was holding, cradled like a baby, the Jacobean mace, a wood and silver club that had once belonged to a Scottish lord. Victoria and Albert Museum. It was what he’d picked up too late to bash in Sam’s head, but he looked right now like a sad-eyed herald walking in front of a luckless king. He let it down on the floor and turned to go.
“Don’t move,” Sam said, brandishing the gun to catch his eye. Peter stopped. Rita turned on Sam so sharply that he jumped away, and for a couple of seconds the gun swung back and forth at Rita, then at Peter, like a pendulum.
“When the hell are you going to let it go?” she demanded. “Don’t you see? It’s over.”
But he did the very thing she’d done to him. He didn’t even look at her, and he went ahead as if she wasn’t there. He approached Peter, aiming the gun at his belly with both hands. When they were close together and it was just between the two of them, Sam put a hand to his back pocket and pulled from it a set of handcuffs. He held them out. “Left hand,” he said to Peter. “Very slowly.” Peter reached over and took the cuffs, but then it took him a minute to open the hinge because his hands were trembling. Rita made as if to stand up, her fury so high she meant to snatch the gun herself, and Sam said, “I’ll kill him, Rita. Stay where you are.” So she didn’t dare move, but she said in return, “No you won’t. You go too far, and we have to let you win, so go ahead. Take what you want and get out. But you didn’t kill Varda, and you won’t kill us.”
“Shut up, Rita,” Peter said. He snapped the cuff tight around his hand. Then he held it against his stomach as if he was hurt and had to keep it in a sling. He waited for the next order, with nothing to do now but stay alive. He could tell that Rita was as angry with him and Hey for attacking as she was with Sam, though she wouldn’t admit it. But Peter had sensed, as soon as they were all locked in together, that Rita was safe and they were in trouble. Sam’s eyes glittered with hatred. Peter and Hey both saw it and started to hatch the plot the moment Rita began to deal. They did it with a glance here and there and a couple of pointed fingers, because they could trust the rhythm they already had from running the house together. They both knew the gun would go off. One of them might get in the way. But it seemed to Hey and Peter worth the risk, since Rita was dead wrong about Sam. He didn’t kill her way, out of what she would have seen as an excess of passion. He’d do it for nothing at all or not at all. And Hey and Peter were as meaningless in the way of victims as any he could wish for.
“What’s the most expensive thing you’ve got?” Sam asked, as if he was an oil tycoon on a shopping spree.
“The Rembrandt,” Peter said, and he could feel Rita flinch from where she knelt next to Hey. She would have tried to tell a lie even here. Tried to palm off a cracked Ming jar or a dusty tapestry.
“Get it,” Sam said.
Peter moved very deliberately among the crates and boxes. He didn’t want to make Sam nervous, and though the painting was so heavy in the frame that he couldn’t imagine lifting it, it wouldn’t do to begin by protesting. Hey moaned, as if he’d tried to shift positions, and Rita bent over close to him. Sam retrieved a candle from the floor, but he couldn’t put the gun down to strike the match. He looked to see if anyone noticed, and when they didn’t, he let the candle fall again. By now they were all accustomed anyway to the near-darkness—their eyes had patiently adjusted while they were busy clamoring for power. Slowly, Peter rocked the Rembrandt and balanced it on one corner. Then he dragged it over the concrete until he could seesaw it onto a crate where Sam could take a look at it. He undid the sheet that covered it, which fell aside like a veil, and the clear-eyed Dutchman stared at them all and didn’t move a muscle.
“Now get over next to her and cuff yourselves together.”
Peter let down the painting beside the crate and propped it sturdily. Walking away, he was strangely shaken by Sam’s not looking at it. For Sam, apparently, there was no such person as Rembrandt. Peter had to wonder, when he went down beside Rita and gripped her hand in one of his and somehow got the feeling Hey was dead, whether the painting was worth a thing anymore if Sam should have it.
“It isn’t going to be much longer,” Peter whispered close to her ear as he shut he
r up in the other cuff.
“Why doesn’t he run?” she whispered back. “He can’t get anywhere with a Rembrandt now.” But she didn’t expect an answer. Peter was right, she thought, to shut her up. It had all gotten out of her range, and if it had gone the same way for Sam, the two of them together might have found the way back to where they were, even in spite of the gunshots. But Sam had cut his losses and gone on, and she was too much overwhelmed at last by the disarray to keep up with him. Hey looked at her when he was conscious with an agony that turned him into a stranger. Anything she could have done to cool him or pillow him, any news she had of an ambulance, would have restored him enough to be recognized. But as she wasn’t free to try, she began to be something of a stranger herself. She’d always said she’d been through it all, and yet the suffering she’d done for love was the only kind she knew, and now she knew it had all been in her head. Hey with a blood-soaked shirt was insupportable. She felt like a lone survivor of the kind of disaster that sweeps away men like ants, and nothing is ever going to be the same again.
Peter stared at Hey for half a minute, willing him alive. He could hear Sam pulling at the painting, his energy draining into rage because he couldn’t move it any more easily than Peter. Where Rita had fallen so fast from wheeling and dealing and wild defiance to a state where she felt brutalized and worn—as if Peter’s “Shut up” had done the reverse of the slap in the face that stops hysteria short and makes a man cool and feisty again—Peter himself grew wilder and more alert as the time passed. He knew what the next step was before Sam even thought of it, and he didn’t have much time. Hey would just have to cease looking dead so Peter could go ahead and hold out hope. He didn’t know how bad it was, but he refused to believe it was fatal. The snakebite taught him how far he could go on a wound that looked awful.