The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  Hey responded to Peter’s stubbornness as if it were treatment. He quivered and came partly awake. He opened his eyes and looked at each of them a moment and then seemed to sigh back into sleep. It was enough for Peter, and he hoped like hell. Unlike Rita, he determined that everything would be the same again. Exactly the same. It was what kept Russian princes in exile going.

  “I can’t do it,” Sam said. He sounded at once upset and a trifle conciliatory, as if he might convince someone to jump up and come give a hand. Rita and Peter had the brief satisfaction of sticking to their little group and letting him stew. There was a pause in which Peter felt Sam begin to figure out the risks of going one step further. Then Peter squeezed Rita’s shackled hand with his shackled hand, and murmured, “He’s going to split us up. Tell Nick not to get mad. I’ll leave a sign in the house to let him know you’re here.”

  The whole three sentences came out in a monotone, and Rita heard it as a string of one-liners, like the comic remarks made at wakes, meant to evoke the irony of everything compared to death and not to make anyone laugh. We’re caught in a bad cliché, Peter seemed to be telling her, and we’re forced into speaking lines out of comic strips. As the crime widened and fed on itself like a mountain fire, they were less and less allowed to talk like themselves, compelled by the tenor of events to be rather formal. It went through Rita’s mind in a melancholy way, and the part of her that never stopped grappling with life and what was meant to come of it began to see the scene from very far away. It was an existential event. The great fight to get on with it filled her mind like blood, but it was as if she couldn’t speak around the broken teeth. She never dreamed Peter was giving her the orders to get her through the next several hours in Hell. She’d begun to think they were only waiting for Sam to go. It was all she could do not to tick the seconds off, drumming the fingers of her free hand. So when Sam came over and knelt between them and said, fiddling with the key in the lock, “Peter, you’re coming with me,” Rita drew a blank the size of a movie screen. But wait. Someone had got to repeat the three things he said, she thought in a panic. Because she didn’t know what to do at all.

  The steel bit into her flesh, her wrist got yanked, and her watch stopped, all while Sam was struggling to get them apart. She prayed the cuffs were broken. Though she couldn’t attach a meaning to Peter’s instructions, even as the phrases filtered back, she did still remember “Shut up.” So she made no protest when Sam cuffed her other hand. She put on a brave front for taking her last look at Peter. At least he was smarter than Sam, she thought, trying to calm down. She telegraphed to Peter with her eyes that she and Nick would comb the earth to track him down.

  Just at that moment, though, he was pretending to Sam to be simple and subdued, so he couldn’t very well start winking at Rita. He stood up and, as he went with Sam to the painting, licked and blew at the raw spot on his wrist. The two of them lifted the Rembrandt without any trouble. Rita thought when she watched them carry it out to the closet that they were gone for good. Calm down and count to fifty, she said to herself. And then she’d follow along and get to a phone, peeking around the corners all the way, the receiver clenched between her cuffs. Sam was a dope. If she’d been Sam, she would have cuffed her hands behind her and put in a gag. What was the worst that could happen now? Nobody in his right mind would harm a Rembrandt. If Sam laid a finger on Peter, Nick would kill him. She would kill him. Hey appeared to be a grudge from the far past, and Sam was taking Peter along only to further defuse the crackerjack team of Peter and Rita and Hey. In the weird quiet that fell for a bit on Varda’s room, she groped to get back her limitless capacity for stories that turned out well in the end. She must have counted to twenty or twenty-five. It’ll be okay, she thought. The wrecked Cézanne seemed to fly from her mind a second time, and the hole through the blasted shoulder below her on the floor was a notch less fatal. She was almost high again, ready to fight and win.

  But the sounds of things outside the secret room were always cut off—as if, inside, the hills held their hands over everyone’s ears. So Rita heard nothing, and it was all a trick of the house. Peter and Sam were in her room the whole time, working out the best way to get the picture to where Sam’s car was parked. Peter cooperated impeccably, with all his skill as a mover in space, for the sake of the priceless thing between them. Even Sam knew right away, when he heard Peter out, that he was kidnapping his very own museum director to go with the painting. He understood how great the painting must be from watching Peter try to protect it. He went back into the closet to close up the mirror, and he knew he could leave Peter all alone out in the bedroom. Peter wouldn’t run from the Rembrandt. He wouldn’t even risk a scuffle if they were near it. Sam decided with some relief that Peter was a hostage with a built-in gun at his head.

  Rita thought at first that it must be help arriving. When Sam slipped through the door again to take a final look, he was there so suddenly that she didn’t think. The light was behind him, and her heart leaped up. It was Nick! Because nobody else would have known so soon where to come. And when, the next moment, she saw her mistake, the breath went out of her yet again. The back of her neck prickled with the start of a dead faint. Nothing would have shut her up now, except she couldn’t think what to say, as she sometimes couldn’t cry out in a nightmare. She knew his hand on the mirror’s edge meant he was locking them in, and no one would ever hear her screaming. The trick to the sound worked both ways.

  “Tell him I’m going underground,” Sam said across the room to her. “There’s no use trying to find me. I’ll call him tonight.”

  And then he pulled the mirrored door shut with a click behind him, and Rita was thrown into total darkness. Her voice came back like lightning. It may have been that soundproof walls were just what she needed. She started to scream, and she threw herself at the lost light until she was beating the back of the mirror with her fists. She didn’t need to do it long. In a minute she was listening to her own noise, and the fall into consciousness brought her up short into silence. Dying away, the echo of the scream sank into the hills like water out in the sun, with only the faintest tremor. It never went so far as to shake things in their frames, but there was a shiver to the room for a moment more before the silence took a grip. Rita didn’t even know what the next hysteria was that came after screaming. She sank against the door on one shoulder, and in the pitch dark an image went through her mind of a woman much like herself on the mirror side of the mirror. Pretty and thin and taking time at how she looked. Never the wiser about the treasure there for the taking on the other side.

  It would be too much, though, to say she wanted to go back and start over with a suitcase full of the wrong clothes. She only felt how much more she’d chosen over a mirror that stayed in one place, with just one side. She stood in the dark now and saw nothing. If none of it ever happened, she could have stood all she liked instead at the three-way mirror. She had to wonder which way gave her back the most true picture of herself. Maybe neither. But she started to think about it, just as if she was lying by the pool and stirring Campari and soda with a finger. Sealed in the hills with a wounded man, no help in sight till sundown, her oldest friend abducted, she started to imagine what she could have done differently. That was the next hysteria. When Hey said her name, she was already so caught up in speculation that she wasn’t even shocked to hear him strong enough to speak.

  “Rita?”

  “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” she said absently, and then, to be polite, “are you?”

  “I think so. Come here. I want to see if I can sit up.”

  And suddenly she realized. She stood up straight, and her eyes widened. Hands out in front of her, she made her way like a sleepwalker back to her nurse’s station. He’d sounded so clear, so matter-of-fact, that it might have been nothing more than a sprained ankle. Just like Peter, she’d refused to entertain the notion Hey would die. And look what happened. He was practically
as good as new, up on one elbow already by the time she knelt beside him. She’d do well, she thought, to refuse whatever she could of agony and evil. It might just all go away.

  “Get me over to the sofa,” Hey said, and he talked through his teeth as he gripped her around, because at first the bones in his shoulder jiggled like sticks. Rita held him up, and they took little steps and said nothing till she eased him down among the pillows.

  “It won’t be long,” she lied.

  “Have you got the lamp?” he asked, as if the darkness they were in was after all a cave from Arabian Nights. All they needed was a genie. Rita turned to the desk and groped at the drawer pull. She thrust both hands deep inside, much as she’d done day after day for weeks, always certain what she’d find. One hand grasped the lamp, and the other took hold of the diary. It was only a half hour since she’d put them back in place, when she and Peter stopped to eat the lunch they never got to.

  “Here,” she said. She held it out, but of course he couldn’t see it, so she snapped it on. He grinned into the light.

  “Now put it on,” he said. “You’ve got work to do.”

  “How come you’re so much better, Hey?” She slipped her head into the lamp the moment he told her to, though she knew it was a waste of time. He didn’t seem to understand they couldn’t do anything now but wait. They had to save their breath. Not use up all the air. “Are you a Christian Scientist?”

  “I’m not a bit better,” he said. If he’d left it at that, she would have had the horrors, but he was only being precise. She thought: He’s the one realist we’ve got in this house. He’d monitored his own vital signs since the first shock passed and the pain went into a rhythm. He went on, and he was as tough as the tough guys that turned up to put things right in Rita’s stories: “But with him here, I thought I better play dead or he’d empty the gun in me. Now, the first thing you have to do is find something good to stand on.”

  “We shouldn’t move around too much,” she said, faintly saying no. “It gets very stuffy in here very fast. We have to wait for Nick.”

  “Nick won’t be home till tonight, and you know it.” It was as if she didn’t understand how tough he was. “We don’t have time. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

  “Just try to hang on,” she said, putting his urgency out of her mind. He couldn’t see her eyes for the light, but she saw his. He wanted something. No matter what it is, she thought, I can’t. She tried to sound caring and solicitous, and the words tasted awful and cheap. “Let me make you comfortable,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m comfortable as hell. It’s a goddam country club in here.” He laughed, short and bitter, and it fell over into a cough that went on and on. Suddenly it sounded like his last breath. He strangled the next words out. “Listen. Please. I’m trying to tell you. There’s another way out of here.”

  9

  The dirt rained down on Rita’s face, but she ducked her head quickly, and it fell on the helmet. The hatch above her head was as heavy as a manhole cover. It hadn’t been touched in years, and the ground and the roots of hillside plants had all crept over it. There was a time, Hey said, when Varda would send him up the ladder every couple of months to test the locks and raise the lid—long after it was of any use to Varda himself, who could scarcely climb regular stairs and had no one to make a getaway from anymore. When he built the house, it was meant to give him an alternate route on the day the art cops caught up with him at last. Then he knew he would have to choose just one thing—the Scythian breastplate, solid gold, or maybe the papal crown—and roll away the Roman stone from the entrance to the tunnel behind the screen. And up the iron ladder through the hill, in a space hardly as wide as a well. The going was slow because the tunnel was narrow and timbered like a mine shaft. But it all had a crazy sort of logic for Rita. She thought: if you entered a room like Alice through the looking glass, you might as well leave in the end by a rabbit hole.

  And then what? Where did he expect to flee to? Rita wondered as she wedged one foot where two beams crossed. She heaved her shoulders up against the hatch, butting it at the same time with the helmet so that it moved a few more inches. Rusty Varda planned to run away with nothing more than a souvenir of his vast accumulation. That, the clothes on his back, and the money in his pants pockets, like a charlatan run out of town. What was it that turned him on in that? Did he have a second secret room somewhere else? A place to hide in, Rita thought, bare as a monk’s cell, quite the opposite of this. When the dirt stopped falling, she pushed again. The dust was deep in her lungs. Her teeth gritted together with a grinding sound, like sandpaper. She decided not. A man wouldn’t have more than one secret room. Nevertheless, she knew she was right about how Varda dreaded the day when he’d have to run. Unlike Sam, for instance, he wasn’t ever in love with mere running. His own great passion was for putting down roots, even though he knew time came and tore them all up. He wouldn’t have been surprised if life turned out to be a passage from a treasure room to a room full of nothing. After all, it was just what happened to Frances Dean. He’d lived long enough to believe it more the more he denied it:You didn’t get to keep what you’d got.

  “I can’t do it,” Rita shouted down the tunnel. “I’m going to suffocate!”

  “Just do it,” Hey hollered back. “It’s not that hard.”

  It was hard as hell and he knew it, she grumbled to herself, and heaved and groaned until it gave another three or four inches. This time, when the dirt stopped pouring down, she caught the glint of daylight here and there around the lid. She almost shouted again. She wanted to. But she knew how dumb it would sound so soon after all her complaining, and Hey would think it was his insistence alone that got her through. And she hadn’t really thought she couldn’t do it. She’d only called to him so as not to feel alone. She didn’t want a shred of help, once she knew the room was built to provide her with a second chance.

  She struggled up another rung on the ladder and suddenly found she could lift the cover free of the hole. She peered out and squinted in the fiery sun, thrilled to find it still the middle of the day. She could feel a tangle of roots that held firm along one side, trying to keep her underground. Any other time, she might have had to climb down and search out a knife to cut her way through. Now she just got mad and pulled the cover loose. She couldn’t exactly fling it away, even so. She had to teeter up the last few steps of the ladder, the disk of cast iron above her head. It was the pose of Atlas, and she knew it. She felt like she was holding up the front end of a car, but she could tell in these final moments that it wasn’t heavy enough to beat her. She did it. By the time she let the cover crash into the bushes that hid the hole, she was waist-high back in the real world, and the lid that sealed the secret room was scrap.

  “I’m out!” she cried, though no one was around to hear it, much less applaud it. She had to duck her head back in the hole to shout it down to Hey, but the rest of her was scrambling out before she said half a dozen words. And when she came to her feet and parted the branches, she found she wasn’t Rip Van Winkle at all. Everything was the same. She was smack in the center of a patch of desert scrub above the house, away to the right of the cars. With the lavish garden around the pool and the shaded arch running down to the house, it was the part of the hill they never looked at, all overgrown and dusty green. But the view was as lovely as any she could remember. Crook House held its mountain seat. Over the roof, the water in the pool lay still as a pond in the woods. And she could see how the city was strangely intact when she looked away downtown. Bright, with a million shadows. Not a wisp of smog.

  She set off down the hill, sliding a foot with every step. She stubbed a toe and didn’t stop. To get to the stairs leading down to the house, she grasped two trees, one in either hand, and hoisted herself through. She took the whole flight down in three good leaps and reached the door. Which was locked. But she didn’t miss a beat. She moved to the left along the roof, and at the corner she dropped through the bushes above th
e kitchen garden. The hill was straight down. She went too fast. But there she was—she landed on the terrace floor, and though the parrot rattled the cage as if he was caught in a cockfight, it sounded to Rita as sweet as a speech from Hamlet. She could have kissed him for being where he ought to be.

  She called the Bel-Air Patrol and not the LA police. The patrol would probably call the police the moment they hung up from her, but that was up to them. She wondered if she was trying still to keep it in the family. She said send up an ambulance, but she didn’t say a gunshot wound. She said a robbery, but not a word about who did it. Yet in spite of something that felt like shyness, she didn’t think she was out to protect Sam. It was more that she couldn’t handle right away the pace and tone of police. They’d be tough and plodding and humorless, and Rita wanted the kid-glove treatment, at least for the rest of the day. She’d had her fill of brute force. Besides, it ought to be Nick’s decision. Peter’s safety was on the line, and anybody might be better than cops. Just now, her own work stopped at getting Hey to a doctor.

  When she’d finished the call, she couldn’t even remember if she’d given the right address. As she went headlong through the swing door into the dining room she thought she may have just told them “Crook House” and left it at that. But why would anyone know the name of Varda’s house anymore? There probably weren’t ten people who knew who Varda was. You think too much, she told herself. She shook the worry off, rounding the corner into the living room, because it stood to reason that the luck should swing her way again. And there, as if to illustrate the point, was Nick himself, sitting on the low stone wall that edged the garden of sand. Rita shrieked and flew across the room. Before he could jump to his feet, she threw her arms around his neck. She’d had a running start, and she wasn’t taking care, so of course she tipped them over. They pitched back into the sand.