Cut and Run

by Carla Neggers

  “There are doormen—”

  Hendrik laughed, and she regretted her lapse into naiveté. He went on, “If Bloch finds me here, he’ll kill me. Then I’ll hardly be in a position to help.”

  Wilhelmina shrugged. “It seems to me he’ll kill you anyway at some point.”

  “Maybe so.” He grinned at her. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Willie? But revenge never feels so good as we think it ought. Hating me keeps you alive.”

  He started toward the door. Wilhelmina touched his arm, but not to stop him. He seemed to know this. His eyes were as blue as she’d remembered and had seen in the dreams she’d never been able to control and will away. Who was she to change what had been? He was a devil, yes, but she’d not always thought him so. That, too, was a part of what had been.

  She asked quietly, “Did you ever touch her?”

  “No,” he said, “never.”

  Then he ran. As before.

  The old Dutchwoman spoke no English, which pissed Bloch off, but he figured the younger sister could translate—and he had no trouble getting through what he wanted her to do. A .357 Magnum reduced the need for a common language. He waved it around and told her to get her fat ass out the door, and, sure enough, she did.

  He let himself relax, cutting down slightly on his guard—and that was when she whipped around with a goddamn knife that could have sliced an elephant in two with one swipe. She had it at his throat before he could shoot the silly bitch. Like a damn fool, he’d hesitated that fraction of a second because he didn’t want to cause any more ruckus than he already had in busting past the doormen. Now if he fired, the old woman’s last act would be to shove her fucking knife in his throat. And even if it weren’t and he could manage to blow her fat butt across the hall, there’d still be the noise and the mess.

  There was also the chance she had the diamond. He wanted Wilhelmina Peperkamp alive.

  “Achh,” she grunted, cursing him in Dutch. She threw down the knife and proceeded to the elevator.

  Jesus Christ, Bloch muttered to himself, glad none of his men had been around for this one.

  He refused to meet her eye on the ride down in the elevator. He decided she’d made her point.

  They collected his man in the lobby; he’d done a fair job of convincing the doormen they shouldn’t call in the cavalry just yet. Their car slid up to the Central Park West entrance, and they jumped in, Bloch giving the stout old Dutchwoman a good shove. Henson, the guy posted across the street, had joined them. He didn’t look too happy, and within a block, the sergeant found out why.

  “Stark was here,” Henson said.

  Bloch swore. He should have taken care of Matthew Stark himself when he was in Washington. Hell, he should have taken care of him twenty years ago in ’Nam.

  “Tell him anything?”

  “No.”

  Bloch didn’t believe it. Time he and Matt Stark finished things, anyway.

  “Think the doormen’ll call the police?” Henson asked.

  “Worry, worry,” Bloch said derisively. “What do you care if they do? We’re free and clear.”

  But Henson sat back, not reassured, and Bloch wondered if the guy had scruples or was just scared. Either one didn’t sit too well with him. Mostly his men were shit. Not all of them, but enough. But that would change soon, and it was another problem for another time.

  He told the driver to speed it up, he wanted to be at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey as soon as possible. Then he told the two women, who were yapping in Dutch, to shut the fuck up. The younger one was a nice-looking woman with real manners, but pale and sweating from her busted arm—and Jesus Christ, did she hate his guts. The old one called him a Nazi. Bloch was just as glad she hadn’t known about her sister’s arm before she’d thrown down her knife.

  “Well, ladies,” he said, downright jovial, “I hope to hell one of you can lead me to the Minstrel’s Rough. Otherwise I’m going to have to find where de Geer stashed pretty little Juliana Fall. Then we can have a nice family reunion.”

  He knew he’d have to find Juliana Fall at some point, regardless of what her aunt and mother did. She knew too much as it was, and she could identify him. A loose end. But he saw nothing to be gained from telling them that, and at the moment he thought the best strategy was to get back to camp and reassess exactly where he stood. If he were lucky, the girl, the Dutchman, and Steelman himself would come to him.

  If not, he’d go to them.

  Twenty

  The tiny, antique cape house stood on a hillside overlooking the winding Batten Kill River in southwestern Vermont. Three inches of light, dusty snow glistened in the moonlight on the gravel driveway. Juliana plowed Shuji’s Mercedes right through it and went in through the back, into the country kitchen, turning on lights and ignoring the pounding in her head and the tugging at the back of her eyes that told her she needed sleep. She stumbled into the common room and started a fire in the huge center chimney fireplace, using more matches than usual because her hands were shaking with cold and fear. Finally, it caught.

  The crackling of the flames and the soughing of the wind were the only sounds. She listened to her footsteps on the wide pine floor as she went into her small bedroom off the common room and found some warm corduroys and a sweater and heavy socks and put them on. She left her city clothes in a heap on the floor.

  The fire didn’t take long to get going, and Juliana soon added another log. Then she sat cross-legged on the round hand-braided rug in front of the hearth. Everything about the house was soothing. There was a basket on the floor filled with the needlework she only did when she was here; for the past four years she’d been working on a sweater made with wool from a farm nearby. There was a stack of unread books on the Shaker candle table. Bundles of herbs she’d dried last summer. Reference books on bird watching, gardening, jam making. The women who came here and exulted in simple domestic chores, she thought, was as different from the Juliana Fall who had just completed another highly acclaimed European tour as she was from J.J. Pepper.

  She rested back against the Duncan Phyfe sofa, trying to ease her tension, to think. Just a few minutes, she thought. If she just closed her eyes and emptied her mind for a little while, she would be better able to deal with the problems of her mother and the Minstrel’s Rough. She could feel the fire warm her feet. The Chopin sounded in her head. She listened to it, hearing it in a way she’d never heard it before. Closing her eyes at last, she let the sounds envelop her, then seep in, becoming a part of her.

  After a while she became aware she was no longer alone in the house. She hadn’t heard anyone come in. Although preoccupied, she hadn’t been asleep and was certain an unusual sound—a door, a car—would have alerted her.

  Very close to her a sandpaper voice said, “I don’t know why I don’t just wring your neck and be done with it.”

  She opened her eyes, and when they fell on the solid figure of Matthew Stark, her heart skidded; she’d been missing him, she realized, wanting him here while she was hurting in so many different ways. “Matthew.” Could he hear the longing in her voice? “How did you get here?”

  He glared down at her, his dark face lost in the shadows of the room. “I came through the goddamn kitchen door that you left unlocked.”

  “If I hadn’t,” she said noting the socket wrench in his right hand, “you’d only have broken in. Then I’d have had to buy a new door. How did you find me?”

  “Your Aunt Willie. She guessed you’d come here.”

  “She did, did she? I didn’t think she had that much imagination. I’ve just been sitting here humming Chopin,” she said. As if to prove it, she hummed some for him. “That’s the one I’m supposed to be working on. Frederick Chopin’s Piano Concerto Number One. My uncle’s dead, Rachel Stein is dead, my mother’s been kidnapped, my aunt’s muttering about onderduikers and Nazis, I’ve been knocked around and have met a Dutchman who betrayed my family and the Steins to the Nazis—and I’m humming goddamn Chopin.”
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br />   Matthew let his gaze fall on Juliana and saw the wild, scared, determined look in her dark eyes, and he felt his heart leap as he thought, this lady’s getting to me. “So you ran into Bloch,” he said.

  “Yes. A charming individual. His man Peters flattened me, but that’s okay because he didn’t hurt my hands. When I was in junior high and high school, I’d go to fine arts camp, and the keyboard people would all be on the same volleyball team. We consistently had the worst record because we were all so terrified of hurting our hands. We’d hit the ball with our forearms, elbows, shoulders, heads—anything but our hands. This was probably about the same time you were trying to stay alive in Vietnam. Silly, isn’t it?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Matthew said, and couldn’t help himself. He was envisioning a bunch of piano players on a volleyball team, and it was so damn crazy, so ridiculous, that he started to laugh, Bloch or no Bloch.

  “Damn you—”

  Juliana reared back to smack him one, and he caught her hands and pulled her to her feet. Then she was in his arms and he stopped laughing and his mouth was on hers. They just couldn’t stop. She had on a gray turtleneck sweater that had come untucked from her pants, and she reveled in the feel of his hands on its softness, her softness. She slid her arms around him and brought him even closer.

  “I’m becoming very attached to you, you know,” she whispered, her mouth close to his, and she wondered if she’d started this or if he had, but she didn’t care.

  “Feeling’s mutual, although if anybody had told me a month ago I’d be in Vermont kissing a crazy, internationally famous pianist and chasing the world’s largest uncut diamond…” He grimaced at the thought. “Jesus.”

  He let her go and watched her stumble back on the couch, and suddenly in the firelight he could see the swelling along the side of her neck, below her jaw. Bloch’s handiwork. Matthew felt a hollowness inside him—and a seething anger. “Tell me what happened.”

  At first she said nothing.

  “Juliana.” He spoke her name softly. “Talk to me now or I’ll leave you here and go find Bloch my own way.”

  “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you,” she said. “I’m not trying to be an ass—but it’s difficult to talk…My mother…”

  “Tell me, Juliana.”

  It wasn’t a command, but more of a plea, not to tell but to share, not to throw the burden onto him but to transfer some of the weight of it to him. Juliana nodded, and in a surprisingly clinical manner recounted what had happened in Catharina’s Bake Shop. She held together because she had to. If she was going to help her mother, there was no choice. She couldn’t fall apart.

  Matthew stood through the whole thing, pacing in front of the fire. When she’d finished, he said, “That’s not everything.”

  Her ice-emerald eyes widened as she glanced up at him. “What do you mean?”

  “The Minstrel’s Rough,” he said. “You have it, don’t you? That’s why you came here.”

  “Is that why you did?”

  His eyes held hers. “No. I came because of you.”

  Looking into his face, reading what perhaps no one else could see, she believed him. “What about Aunt Willie? What have the two of you been up to?”

  Matthew dropped the topic of the Minstrel for the moment and without preamble or sugarcoating told her. “We should give her a call,” he said.

  “Can’t. I don’t have a telephone here.”

  “Charming, but I doubt it’d make any difference. She feels a responsibility toward your mother, I gather, and if it comes to it, she’ll go with Bloch.”

  “Are you going to tell me about him?”

  “Are you going to tell me about the Minstrel?”

  She jumped up, going into the doorway to the bedroom. They were at an impasse, she thought. Up against a brick wall. She wasn’t sure she was ready to tell him about the Minstrel. Four hundred years of tradition were at stake. She tucked in her sweater, wincing at the sudden stab of pain down her neck and into her shoulders. She felt woozy and confused, fleetingly guilty. She didn’t like stonewalling Matthew, didn’t like his black gaze on her like that, searching, wanting. It’d help, she thought, if he took off that damn leather coat.

  “There’s a bed upstairs,” she said. “The room’s unfinished, but you’ll survive. It’s ridiculous to think either of us will be able to accomplish anything tonight.” Her entire body felt as if it were ready to turn to liquid and seep into the cracks in the floor. “Good night, Matthew.”

  She went into the bedroom and, although she never did when she was alone, shut the door behind her.

  The fire had died, and she hadn’t turned up the thermostat. It was chilly in the house as she padded upstairs in her bare feet, guided only by the starlight and the reflection of the night sky off the snow outside her windows. The stairs were as old as the house, and they creaked. Her parents didn’t like her coming here alone. If she didn’t have a husband, they thought she ought at least to have a dog.

  She came to the upstairs landing. The ceilings were low, lending to the cozy atmosphere. On stormy days, she liked to flop in the bed up here and curl up under the quilts and read while listening to the pitter-pat of the rain on the roof. Sometimes she just liked to lie and daydream about not always being so alone. And yet she didn’t mind solitude. At least, not always.

  There was no door to the small bedroom on the right. The old plaster walls had crumbled, and the floors were covered with layers of ugly linoleum, and there were no curtains on the one small window. Restoring the room was in her “one of these days” plans; it wasn’t something she worried about. She’d picked up an iron bed at a flea market, several quilts, and a big old trunk, and that was the furnishings.

  She could see only the foot of the bed from the door, a darker outline against the general darkness. Holding her breath, she took a step into the room.

  An iron shaft clamped down around her middle and catapulted her across the room onto the bed. The old springs creaked madly, and she bounced hard, the wind knocked completely out of her. Adrenaline flooded into her bloodstream in such a rush it hurt, and she gulped for air as the weight came off her, slowly, as if not quite sure it was the proper thing to do.

  The dark, male silhouette stood upright. “Hell of a time to be sneaking into a man’s room,” Matthew said.

  She sat up halfway, leaning back on her elbows. “I thought you might be awake.”

  “I was.”

  “What the devil did you think I was?”

  “Act first. Then find out.”

  As her eyes adjusted further to the darkness of the room, she realized he was in nature’s best. Quite nude. And magnificently so. “I didn’t expect…I thought you’d be…”

  “Didn’t think to pack my jammies,” he said sarcastically, making no attempt to cover himself.

  She herself was clad chin-to-toe in an L.L. Bean flannel nightgown. “Well, you could have worn something.”

  “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “I guess I get what I deserve.”

  “I guess you do.”

  “Matthew, I—” She stopped herself. “I can’t very well talk with you standing there like that. Aren’t you cold?”

  He grinned. “Freezing.”

  There were no heat vents upstairs, and it was even colder than downstairs. Even with her flannel nightie, she was chilly herself. But instead of putting on his clothes, Matthew pulled back the covers and climbed into bed. He stretched out, forcing her to sit up straight, but even so she could feel his calves through the quilts, touching her behind.

  “Not what you imagined?” he asked at her stricken look.

  “I thought we could go downstairs. I have some instant cocoa I could fix.”

  “Perish the thought. No brandy?”

  She shook her head. “No alcohol whatsoever. I hate to drink alone.”

  “A nasty habit. But I’m afraid instant cocoa isn’
t worth the effort of putting on my pants and traipsing through this refrigerator of a house. Is your room nice and cozy?”

  “Well, it’s better than this.”

  “At least there’s no damn hay up here.” He leaned back against the pillows, a shaft of moonlight catching his dark chest. She noted the muscles, the scars. “What did you want?” he asked.

  She curled her feet up under her in a tailor squat and covered them with the flannel nightgown and, facing him, leaned back against the footboard, its iron bars frigid.

  Matthew laughed. “Don’t you want to crawl under the blankets with me?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Freeze, then.”

  “I came to tell you about the Minstrel’s Rough.”

  That cut off his laugh. He said seriously, “Go on.”

  She shivered; it was so damn cold. But she knew if she went under the covers with him, she might not come out again. “I’m so used to not talking about it—to pretending it’s just another hunk of rock and not the Minstrel. Uncle Johannes brought it to me in Rotterdam seven years ago. I never took him seriously. In fact, I thought he was a little crazy; I discredited his story because it was easier that way.”

  “Where is it now?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve been using it as a paperweight.”

  “Jesus.”

  “For jam recipes,” she said.

  “Why not? It’s only the world’s largest uncut diamond.”

  “If you’d seen Uncle Johannes that night, you might have done the same.”

  “I don’t make jam.”

  Ignoring him, she recounted the night at the little stone church in Delftshaven, when her uncle had presented her with the crumpled bag and the stone wrapped in faded velvet.

  When she’d finished, Matthew asked, “How did the Minstrel come into your family?”

  “According to the legend, the Peperkamps provided safe haven in Amsterdam to Jews driven first from Lisbon, then Antwerp. Those were the major diamond centers at the time. The Peperkamps helped them settle into Amsterdam, where they were able to establish themselves as diamond merchants. They were always voices for tolerance and religious freedom.”