by S. P. Hozy
“Angela Stone, Dinah Stone, you’re under arrest on suspicion of smuggling endangered animal parts into Singapore and attempting to export them illegally.” It was Simon Lam who spoke. “Confiscate everything in this room,” he told the two officers. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this gallery is closed until further notice.”
Maris knew her mouth had fallen open but she made no attempt to close it. “Axel,” she said, “what’s going on?” His expression was grim as he turned away from her and signalled to Angela that she should go with him. Lam took Dinah’s arm and began to lead her out through the gallery.
“Axel,” said Maris, annoyance, anger, and frustration all collecting in her voice to make it sound harsh. “What are you doing? I told you nothing was going on.”
Axel just shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, Maris, but I’m afraid you’re wrong.”
Dinah turned to Maris and said, “I don’t understand. Did you know this was going to happen?”
Maris shook her head. “No. Dinah, I swear I didn’t know. I’m sure this is some kind of mistake.” She looked at Axel, but he was already putting Angela into the back of a police car. Simon Lam was leading Dinah to a second car. Maris looked back at Angela. Her head was down and she hadn’t said a word. Had she known this was going to happen?
Chapter Forty
Maris went to Axel’s hotel later that night. She had waited for him to call but he hadn’t. She had stayed in the back room of the gallery trying to figure out what to do. Finally she had called Peter’s lawyer, Henry Fong, the one who had read the will and given her the trunk of Peter’s things. He was as shocked as she was about what had happened. “I don’t believe Peter would have been involved in such a thing,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He called her back in a couple of hours and said they were holding Angela and Dinah for questioning and would not be releasing them for at least forty-eight hours.
“Can they do that?” she asked.
“Apparently, they can,” he said. “This case involves Interpol and so there are a lot of players outside the Singapore police. I’ll do what I can, but for the moment, that doesn’t seem to be much.”
“Can I see them?”
“Not tonight,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
When Axel didn’t call or answer when she called, she locked up the gallery and headed for Raffles. She would not leave until he told her what was going on.
Axel was in his room and appeared to be expecting her. He had ordered room service, and there was food and a bottle of wine on a cart that was covered with a white tablecloth.
“Come and eat something first,” he said. “And have a glass of wine. This has been a terrible day for both of us and I think we need to step back for a minute before either of us says something we might regret.”
“Are you going to tell me you were just doing your job?” she said.
He didn’t answer her but started to uncork the wine. He poured her a glass and handed it to her. She took it but her hand was shaking and she had to put it down. He removed the silver covers from the plates of food and she saw that he had ordered sandwiches. She realized she was hungry; she hadn’t eaten since lunch. She had sent Lim home right after the arrests and had asked her not to say anything, although she knew that word would have spread pretty fast already. The police had not been discreet; they had taken Dinah and Angela out the front door and put them in police cars in full view of everybody.
“I actually don’t know what to say to you,” Axel finally said, “except that the investigation led right to the gallery and we had to act fast. Obviously, I couldn’t warn you. We had to have the element of surprise on our side.”
“You mean the element of shock, don’t you?”
“Look,” he said. “We did it as quickly and as quietly as we could.”
Just then, Axel’s mobile rang. He looked at the call display and said, “I have to take this. Excuse me.” He went out into the corridor, closing the door behind him. Maris picked up a sandwich and took a bite. It was roast beef with horseradish, but it might as well have been sawdust.
Axel returned after ten minutes, turning off his phone. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We won’t be disturbed again.”
“Who calls you at this time of night?” she said.
“My boss,” he said. “There’s a time difference and he waits until the end of his day. I had to give him an update.”
“Why don’t you just call him instead?”
“He’s hard to reach. And it’s easier this way. Besides, he’s the boss.” He smiled a half-hearted smile and shrugged. “How are the sandwiches?” he said, taking one.
“Fine,” she said. “Why are you holding Dinah and Angela?”
“It’s necessary,” he said, taking a bite of his sandwich. Maris understood that chewing on the sandwich made it impossible for him to say anything. It gave him a chance to think up a plausible answer. “Look,” he said, “this is a serious crime. We’ve been trying to crack this ring for two years now. We think Angela, and maybe Dinah, might be able to tell us something that can lead us to the bad guys.”
“And for this you had to arrest them?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he said, taking another bite of his sandwich. Maris sighed and took a big gulp of her wine. This was going to take a while.
“They’re being held for questioning. If they’re involved — and I’m not saying they are — then they could be a flight risk. We have to hold them.”
“Where would they go?” she said. “I don’t even think Dinah has a passport.”
“She does,” said Axel. “And Angela has lots of places to go.”
“You think she’d take Dinah with her?”
“It’s possible.”
“You’re nuts,” she said. “Angela wouldn’t do that. Not even if Dinah’s life depended on it.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Well, I know it,” she said, defiance creeping into her voice. “Dinah’s my friend and I know she doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“And what about Angela?” he said.
“Angela is not my friend, but I’ve known her a long time. She’s not the nicest person in the world, but I can’t imagine she’d be involved in a crime.”
“See, that’s something you can’t know,” said Axel. “If she is involved, then she’s good at keeping secrets and being circumspect. Of course you wouldn’t know.”
“But Peter …”
“Yes, Peter,” he said. “Peter may have suspected but, unfortunately, he didn’t say that. It might be what got him killed — this whole secret operation.”
“So you don’t think he was involved?”
“I can’t say for sure, but he was killed for a reason, and it was probably connected to this. It all depends on who killed him. And we may never know that.”
“Gee,” Maris said, sarcastically, “maybe Dinah did it. His own sister. Or Angela, his ex-wife. Or maybe they did it together.”
“Don’t, Maris. Don’t make light of this. I’ll do everything I can to find out what really happened. And if Dinah and Angela are cleared, I’ll be the first one to break open the champagne. I don’t want this to be happening any more than you do.”
“Why do I have trouble believing that?” she said. “It would be a real feather in your cap to break up this smuggling ring. This is the perfect solution to the crime.”
“Please, Maris, don’t do this,” he said. “I don’t want this to destroy what we have.”
“And just what do we have?” she said.
“I love you,” he said. “I would have given anything for this to turn out differently.”
Maris didn’t say anything. She wanted to believe him but there was just too much stacked up against him. Obviously, his job came first. And, apparently, he didn’t trust her enough to tell her there would be a raid on the gallery.
“If I had told you,” he said, as if reading her mind, “would you ha
ve kept quiet and not told Angela and Dinah? Can you honestly say that?”
She took another drink of her wine. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I really don’t know.”
“Then maybe you can understand how torn I was about this. I wanted to tell you, but the policeman part of me knew it wouldn’t be wise. None of us knows what we’d do in such a situation. What is right? To tell your friends or to do as the police say? Where does our loyalty ultimately lie?” He shook his head as she stood to go. “I never wanted to come between you and your friends.”
A Comfortable Marriage
A Short Story
by
E. Sutcliffe Moresby
This is a tale of infidelity and betrayal, something that none of us would openly condone. Yet, who among us can say that, faced with these circumstances, we would not have done the same?
It is the story of a married man, a happily married man, in fact. I will call him Robert, but that is not his real name. The events of this story happened a long time ago and were told to me by Robert’s wife, whom I will call Grace. Robert and Grace had been married for ten years when they decided to go to France for a holiday. They chose Nice because it was a pretty place and affordable. They would go for three weeks because that’s what their budget allowed. If they had gone for two weeks, they could have lived quite well; four weeks would have meant they had to be extremely frugal; so they settled for three weeks, which would allow them to eat out and drink wine every day, and to stay in a nice hotel with a shared bath. They agreed it was a reasonable compromise. They could not know it would change their lives.
Robert and Grace considered themselves collectors of art on a small scale. They enjoyed discovering young artists who had not yet made a name for themselves. They would buy a painting or two and fancied they were patrons, helping out a struggling artist whose work they might not be able to afford some day in the future. They never thought of selling the art they purchased, for they were true collectors. No collector willingly gives up the things he collects. One of the reasons they had decided on Nice for their holiday was that there were a lot of painters in Nice and you could buy their pictures from them right on the street, no need for a middle man. That way, Robert and Grace knew that the artist got all the money. They felt good about that.
As soon as they arrived and checked into their hotel, Grace and Robert went out to look for the painters. It was a Sunday, so they knew the streets would be lined with artists displaying their pictures. It was a feast for an art lover, and the prices were extremely reasonable. Robert and Grace could buy anything they wanted. They felt like millionaires.
One artist whose work they particularly admired was a young woman named Celeste. She was very young, probably twenty-four or -five, with long, straight black hair, pale skin, with a seductive mouth and wide hips (remember, it was Grace who related the story to me). Celeste had talent and a passion for her work. “She had an inner fire,” said Grace, “and she smouldered, all the time. I’ve never seen such energy. You could feel it coming off her, the heat of it.”
Predictably, Robert felt it more than Grace. Grace knew it was there, but she didn’t succumb to the ardent charm of it the way Robert did. Grace didn’t know it at the time, but Robert was falling in love with Celeste. “She was everything I’m not,” said Grace, “and I guess that appealed to him. I don’t know. Who knows how men think in these situations?”
I suggested that perhaps they didn’t think. Or they thought with something other than the brain. She nodded. She had never inspired such thinking in Robert, even though they had a happy, comfortable marriage. They certainly loved each other and had everything in common. But Robert must have been missing something. He didn’t know what he was missing until he recognized it in Celeste.
Grace wasn’t suspicious at first. Robert often went out walking at night by himself. She preferred to put her feet up and read a book or write a letter. They were comfortable with each other and didn’t mind sometimes doing things separately.
“You must think me awfully naive,” she said to me. “I should have guessed something was going on, but I hadn’t a clue. I trusted him completely. We were happily married. I thought that was enough.” But clearly, she admitted, it wasn’t enough.
The affair came to light two days before they were to leave Nice. Grace had been wrapping and packing their acquisitions — they always brought an empty suitcase to carry them in — and she noticed that Robert was unusually pensive.
“What is it, dear?” she said. “Are you feeling all right?”
When he looked up, she saw tears in his eyes. “Robert,” she said. “What on earth is the matter?”
“I’m so very sorry, Grace,” he said, choking back a sob. “But I’ve fallen in love.”
“In love?” she said. “With whom?”
“With Celeste,” he said. “I’m mad about her.”
It took Grace a moment to remember who Celeste was. They had encountered her on their first day in Nice, and had gone back a couple of more times to view her paintings, but that was over two weeks ago. Then Grace remembered. The long black hair, the pale skin, the smouldering brown eyes, the luscious red lips. (I think perhaps Grace may have embellished her memory for my benefit, knowing I was probably going to use it in a story some day.)
What were they to do? Although at first she was stunned, Grace soon had the presence of mind to suggest that perhaps this was just an infatuation and that Robert would get over it in time. These things happened to men in middle age in strange countries, except not usually when their wives were along. Grace was certain their marriage was strong enough to withstand Celeste’s charms. It never occurred to her that Robert might have other ideas.
“Grace, dearest Grace,” he said and she suddenly knew what was coming. Don’t, she thought, please don’t say it. Please. But say it he did. “I can’t bear the thought of leaving her. She’s … she’s … I don’t even have the words to describe what she means to me.”
Grace had a few words in mind but she kept them to herself. As she was telling me the story some years after the fact, she was able to inject an irony and lightness of tone into it that I’m sure she did not feel at the time. I occasionally caught a glimpse of her sorrow as she related the events to me.
Robert did not return to England with Grace. He didn’t want to deprive her of anything, he said. She was the best wife a man could have and she shouldn’t blame herself for anything. She could divorce him if she wished. Grace couldn’t believe he was saying such things. She was still certain that this was a middle-aged fling, an infatuation, and she had no intention of doing anything permanent. She would not divorce him.
Robert returned briefly to England to resign from his position as office manager for a shoe manufacturer. He called Grace and asked if she would pack a few of his things for him. He would stop by and pick up the suitcase when she wasn’t there. He supposed she wouldn’t want to see him. Grace was relieved. She wasn’t ready to see him yet. Although she had convinced herself he would be back, Grace was hurting badly. She spent most of her days in a kind of fog. Her own reality was running parallel to the rest of the world’s. She wasn’t quite connected.
Robert, for his part, was living a bohemian life in Nice. It was all crusty bread and smelly cheese and red wine. And sex. Celeste was a voracious woman, deeply passionate, and endlessly needy. Her artistic self was volatile and unstructured. One day she would be wildly ecstatic, the next deeply despairing. Robert had never known such a woman, except perhaps for his mother. But she did not have an artistic temperament; she had merely been moody and unstable.
What neither Robert nor Grace had considered was that Celeste would become pregnant. When she gave Robert the news, he knew he should feel joy, but instead he felt a tiny pang of distress in the pit of his stomach. What had begun as a wild ride into an open-ended future was now turning into a four-walled structure with a roof on it; something that felt a lot like a cell or a cage. Suddenly Celeste’s pas
sionate nature didn’t seem so carefree and thrilling to him. The other thing was that Grace had refused to divorce him and Celeste was starting to talk about marriage, about being a family. She was demanding things of him. Material things: a decent place to live, furniture and clothes for the baby. Her needs were different now, she said.
So Robert panicked and did a runner. He went back to England and to Grace. He was ashamed of himself, he admitted, but he couldn’t face a future with Celeste and a child. He just wanted it all to go away. But when Grace heard about the child, she wasn’t so keen to take Robert back. Like Celeste, all she could think about was the baby: what it would need, how it would be looked after. She told Robert to go back to Celeste and face up to the life he had chosen. She would give him a divorce so he could make an honest woman of Celeste and give his baby a name. Grace said she could never live with a man who had abandoned his child. That was the end of it. She could manage without him. Celeste and the child could not.
Now it was Robert’s turn to be stunned. Go back? Marry Celeste? Be a father? He hadn’t asked for any of this. Celeste was being unreasonable and Grace was being unfair. It was as if nobody cared about him, about how he felt. It was all too much.
Grace went with him on the train and put him on the ferry at Dover. She wished him luck and told him she was sorry it had ended this way for them, but he had a responsibility to Celeste and the child and he must face up to it.
“It was the hardest thing I ever did,” she told me. “I knew he was going to be deeply unhappy, that he wasn’t suited to being a parent (nor was Celeste, for that matter), but it had to be done. I went straight home and took all the paintings we had bought and burned them in the backyard. I couldn’t bear to have them around any longer.”
Two weeks later she learned that although Robert had got on the ferry — she had watched him walk on and he had stood by the railing watching her as the ship backed away — he never got off at Calais. It wasn’t until his body washed up on the beach in France that anybody even realized he was missing.