by Hy Conrad
This evening was to be devoted to recovery, with an undemanding buffet laid out on a pair of lazy Susans in the middle of a round table set for nine. It was the first time they had eaten family style as a group, and it was fascinating for Barbara to watch the dynamics unfold.
Some of them were considerate sharers, like Laila Steinberg. Perhaps timid would be a better word, Barbara thought as she watched her hesitate over the fried green beans with sesame seeds, not wanting to take too much or leave too little, her hands floating, always wary of the next turn of the turntable. Some were greedy, like Nicole Marconi and, she was embarrassed to note, her own husband. Evan and Nicole sat directly across from each other. The lazy Susans spun back and forth between them as each one tried to fish out the last prawn or clump of lobster meat or the nicest-looking tidbit of steak.
Barbara and Evan Corns stayed on after the bowls of lychee ice cream had been taken away, after their fellow travelers had all yawned their way back to their own villas. They were now thirteen hours ahead of New York. That was what Evan had said, although his math baffled Barbara. How could you be thirteen hours away from anything, if your clock contains only twenty-four hours? She preferred to think of them as eleven hours off—behind or ahead. What difference did it make?
From the next room, the estate’s modest business center, Barbara could hear her husband on the phone, or at least his vocal tone. From twenty-plus years of listening through walls, she could distinguish the subtleties of his voice even when she couldn’t make out the words—speaking to a subordinate, to a superior, to a client, to a call center, to a friend, to a female friend. They were all different. In this case, it was a hybrid tone, speaking to a subordinate whom he was pretending to treat like a friend.
Barbara sat by herself in the dimly lit dining room, listening and watching out of the corner of her eye a waiter doing something that obviously needed doing. It took her a while to finally focus and a while longer before she realized. He was standing at a table covered with red plastic chopsticks, the same ones they’d just used, rolling them between two napkins to remove the leftover oil and bits of rice, then placing them back in the same “hygienic” sleeves they’d come out of. She made a vow then and there never to use anything in this country without personally washing it first.
When Evan emerged from the business center, he was not looking happy. “Let’s go,” he said and grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair. “I have to pee and I want to do it back in the room.”
“You always have to pee. What did Miss Archer say?”
“The police are interested in MacGregor’s apartment,” Evan whispered. They were making their way along the stone path between the main building and their villa. There was no need for whispering, given their isolation. But they kept whispering.
“The police? Why?” asked Barbara. The air had turned cold, but not crisp. In fact, the great outdoors felt a little musty. Another Chinese mystery.
“Archer didn’t know,” said Evan. “My best guess? I think they made some sort of connection between the murder in India and Paisley MacGregor.”
“Oh.” Both of them kept their flashlights aimed at the winding path, although Barbara wished she could see her husband’s face right now. What was he thinking? “Did they search the apartment?” she asked. “Did they find . . .”
“They can’t get a search warrant,” Evan said, delivering the only good news of the night. “Not yet. Not without probable cause. Archer said something about two people disguised as lawyers trying to search the place, too.”
“Disguised as lawyers? Is she sure they’re not real lawyers?” A sign in Chinese and English—FOREST HOUSE—pointed their way up a smaller path. “What did Archer say about your offer?”
“My offer?” In the darkness, without looking, Barbara could tell her husband was annoyed. “You mean my kind offer to race over as soon as we get back, and search the place ourselves?”
“Not search. Help her pack things up for storage.”
“Even Archer’s not that dumb,” he snapped. “People are coming out of the woodwork to search the place, and suddenly we’re volunteering to help her pack?”
“So you didn’t even mention it?”
“I did not mention it.”
“So, what’s your plan?”
There she went again, Evan thought, with “your” instead of “our.” “Your” problem, not “our” problem. Why had he let her talk him out of the bomb? he wondered. If they’d done the bomb, this would all be over. They’d be dead and happy by now, off creating another life instead of facing more complications. Or worse. Horrible shame and a trial and years in prison.
“You need to have a plan,” Barbara insisted. “Maybe Paisley named you her executor. You never know.”
They had been through this before, fantasizing about the odd chance that, without telling him, MacGregor had chosen them to execute the terms of her will. “We would have heard by now,” Evan argued.
“Not necessarily,” said Barbara, maintaining some optimism. “Nothing’s in play until the will is read. And if she made you the executor . . .” It was a soothing thought, for them to have the legal power to go through the dead woman’s things. “You used to do legal work for her. Why not?”
“We’ll see.”
They had come to the top of a ridge. Below shone the lights of their villa, and beyond the big picture windows, beyond and below, lay the shadowy outline of the Great Wall. Much of this section was unrepaired. It was still so enormous, stretching in an uninterrupted line as far as the eye could see. But scrubby trees dotted the roadway on top, where once a team of four horses had pulled supplies and where sentries had kept guard against any barbarian hordes that might want to invade the Middle Kingdom.
Evan eyed the wall and for a moment became philosophical. He was certainly not the first person to wonder which way the wall actually worked. Did it keep trouble out or keep it in? Did it repel invaders or imprison a people? Evan wasn’t even sure which side of the ancient wall they were on technically, Chinese or barbarian.
All he knew was that he was on one side of things and had to get to the other. With Barbara or without her. He could go either way.
CHAPTER 22
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea, playing strip backgammon on the Trans-Siberian Express, barreling over the rails of an Arctic wasteland. But the two of us were snugly happy in my private compartment, decorated in the shabby red tassels of some bygone day, as we rolled the dice and moved our pieces across the board. The night was long and cold, my compartment was overheated, and the bottle of potato vodka was going down smooth.
The train was just grinding to a halt in Mariinsk. I wiped the steam off the small frosty window, and the scene outside was perfect—the cutest little whistle-stop, with the dim spring sun just beginning to melt the icicles over the station doorway. Think Dr. Zhivago, all cozy in the middle of the frozen white. But as much as I wanted to stay and keep playing with my boyish waiter, with his sandy blond hair and his Midwestern good looks . . . Well, my waiter had some “waiting” to do with the other passengers, he said. And I was ravenous. So I threw on my mink and my boots and tripped out into the cold.
The stop was just fifteen minutes, just long enough for me to grab a caviar blini from the blini wagon and duck into the Internet café, where I posted my last, breathless blog. Remember? No, wait. I guess it was more like twenty minutes. Fifteen wouldn’t have given me enough time, would it? Anyway, it was a short stop. That’s what I meant.
TrippyGirl was feeling pretty content right about then. I could hardly wait to get back into my cozy sleeper and ring for my waiter and get on with our backgammon game, which I was determined to lose. Little did I know that my playmate was a professional snitch.
When I returned and opened the door to my sleeper, there he was, Ivan, fully dressed and no longer smiling. Filling the rest of the compartment were two fat thugs from the station, ready to take me in for indecent behavior—or whatever it
is they call it here.
Now I’m sitting on a rock-hard cot in a cell in downtown Mariinsk. They gave me raw cabbage, a whole head of it, and a sliver of soap that looks more appetizing than the cabbage. On the bright side, they accidentally left my bag, so I’m posting this—trying to post this—with a signal stolen from the police station’s Wi-Fi down the hall.
I imagine they’ll let me go as soon as I pay someone a bribe. That’s how things work. But how can this be anything but entrapment? I had no idea it was even against the law. And the waiter came on to me in the first place. Entrapment, right?
Amy looked up from her mother’s blog, pushed her hair back over her ears, and frowned. Fanny had an active imagination and absolutely no scruples about inventing facts. That was probably what had made the TrippyGirl blog so much fun. Hundreds of her fans, maybe thousands, were reading it not as a travel blog but as a kind of outrageous soap opera.
But Fanny was a self-involved woman, and her work always contained elements of autobiography. TrippyGirl’s adventures were peppered with updated details from her honeymoon forty years ago or her last argument with Amy, or with glowing descriptions of a rakish, black-haired boyfriend whom she was always mistreating and who happened to resemble Marcus Alvarez to a T.
Amy scanned the next few paragraphs. Despite the typical, Fanny-like coincidence of having her smartphone, plus a Wi-Fi connection, in a Russian jail in the middle of nowhere, the descriptions had an unsettling ring of truth. The perpetual twilight of the cell. The noises coming from all directions at all hours. The routine and the food.
Plus, Amy noted Fanny’s description of the waiter. It was different from a few days ago, when they had begun their little game of strip backgammon. Back then he was a young Daniel Craig, all craggy and cool. And an albino, if she remembered correctly. Now he was sandy haired, with a Midwestern smile. Fanny must have lifted his looks from someone. And what was this talk about entrapment?
All of this conspired to make Amy try her mother once again. It had been nearly two days since the woman had returned an e-mail or answered a phone. The lack of response was probably due to the time difference, bad phone connections, and China’s limited Internet access. But Amy composed another quick, overly casual e-mail, just to be safe. Hey, Mom. Just checking in. What’s new?
She was just about to press SEND when the gooseneck lamp staring down at her laptop flickered a few times and died, along with everything else in her villa. The view of the Great Wall outside her window had likewise fallen into darkness. The second blackout of the night.
Welcome to China.
Amy figured she would have the next morning to herself. The electricity was back on. And the service was not scheduled until 1:00 p.m., leaving her plenty of personal time, she thought, to hike the wall. To actually hike the wall was technically impossible in this section, not unless you were into climbing and jumping and maybe rappelling. But she had scoped out a nice four-mile circuit beside the crumbling stone, then back through the hills.
But her hike was destined to remain theoretical. That morning, when she arrived at the front desk in her hiking gear for a last-minute check, she found that no preparations at all had been made for the service. No plan was in place to bar other tourists from wandering onto the memorial scene. No chairs or table or champagne seemed to be available. And, she found out almost by accident, that the wall was scheduled to be closed today for repairs, starting at noon. Repairs? Really? Where would they even start?
It took her until 12:55 p.m. to straighten things out.
As the last speaker of the day got further and further into her story, the mourners were no longer concerned about their lukewarm champagne. They had all stopped thinking about the wobbly, uncomfortable folding chairs and the makeshift podium and the lopsided, well-worn photo of Paisley MacGregor staring out at them. Even their own precarious position on top of the slippery stones of the Great Wall had ceased to fill their minds. They were all too focused on Nicole Marconi, the woman at the podium.
“I was just a teenager and—you know kids—I could care less what my parents were fighting about that day. I was mad at them, anyway, for cutting short our vacation. But I remember all the way home on the plane, the two of them huddled in their seats in front of me. Angry whispers back and forth. You know, angry whispering . . .” Nicole adopted a guttural, choked-up voice. “What do you mean . . .? It’s your fault.... If the IRS gets their hands on those records . . .”
Amy had no idea why Nicole was telling them this. It was not the usual feel-good reminiscence of Paisley MacGregor. It seemed to have very little to do with Paisley. Plus, it was way too personal, implying all sorts of illegal activity, even though her parents were dead now and the statute of limitations must be long past.
The Marconi family had owned a popular chain of pizza restaurants in the tristate area, a few dozen cash cows, back in a looser era when people didn’t charge every three-dollar purchase on a credit card. As Nicole rambled on from her selective teenage memory, Amy and everyone else on the wall were silently jumping to conclusions. Tax evasion, certainly. And perhaps some other related crimes. The narrative came to a head when the Marconi family drove in the middle of the night directly from the airport to their accountant’s tiny office in the suburbs, a few blocks from the Cross Bronx.
“As soon as we got off the expressway, you could tell something was wrong. There were sirens and fire engines and a street blocked off. When we finally got there, to the little storefront office, the place was totally engulfed in flames. And the IRS or the FBI was there, too. Some scary official men in suits. It turns out they had been following us from the airport that night, trying to see what Dad would do once we landed. Well, long story short . . .”
Long story short? No! Wait! Why? For once, everyone at the wake wanted the long story. They wanted details. But apparently, there was a limit to how much Nicole was willing to incriminate her late parents.
“The records, or whatever they were, got burned up, the fire got labeled accidental, and my parents were saved by what could only be described as some sort of miraculous intervention. It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when Mother was going through the back of MacGregor’s cleaning closet, that she found the can. It was smelly, like a paint can. I guess, looking back, I knew it was some kind of accelerant.”
Nicole let the implication hang in the midday chill.
“MacGregor?” Laila Steinberg asked in a stunned voice. “How could she have known?”
“How did she know anything?” Nicole answered. “I suppose the authorities questioned her while we were away. After they found the can, Mother and Father never mentioned it to Paisley. And she never mentioned it, of course.”
Laila was unconvinced. “You’re saying that Paisley committed arson? On her own? Without telling them?”
“Would she really do that?” Peter asked.
“I’m not saying anything,” Nicole shot back, her anger echoing over the hills. “I’m just stating what happened. Oh . . .” And here she grinned. “Two years later, when my parents died in a car crash, they left nearly their entire estate to MacGregor. But . . .” She added a smirk to the grin. “I’m sure that was just a coincidence.”
Amy glanced around. All the others looked appropriately dumbfounded. And yet this was totally in keeping with what she knew about the maid—a woman who rearranged your files or redecorated your apartment for your mother’s visit and then refused to ever discuss it. Except this time, with arson and an inheritance in play, her behavior seemed to have crossed the line into an unspoken, unacknowledged version of blackmail.
“To Paisley MacGregor . . .” Nicole toasted, but not with her flute. She toasted with her other hand, with a silver spoon of the chicken charcoal that was standing in for MacGregor. “Who so generously spent my family money in order to give us this trip around the world.” And she sent the charcoal drifting over the Great Wall and into the land of barbarians.
Nicole had positioned herself to be
last. Even if someone wanted to add a toast now, what could he or she say?
It’s not just that she committed arson and risked arrest, Amy mused as she carefully led the silent mourners off the Great Wall and down the uneven stone steps. These people are finally realizing how much power this woman had over them.
Peter stepped down from the wall, and he hung back as the others passed.
“Did you know?” Amy whispered.
“Not a clue,” he whispered back. “But I’m so glad I fired her.”
CHAPTER 23
The Ohio billionaire pushed right past the French couple, with their maps and designer sunglasses and unending questions about shopping. He leaned across the antique concierge desk. “Alvarez,” he shouted, as if the desk were as wide as the lobby. “All set for Monday? Bublé and the band and a camera crew? I want it private, don’t forget. No gawkers.”
“Excuse me,” Marcus said calmly with a subservient smile. “This son of a bitch has no manners. Please wait a minute.” He was addressing the French couple in French. Then he turned to the man from Columbus. “It’s all set, Mr. George. And I asked them to make the spire pink for that night. I believe that’s Calista’s favorite color?”
“Pink?” Mr. Franklin George had to pause and think. “Yeah, I guess it is. How did you know?”
“That’s my job,” said Marcus. “Sunset is at seven-oh-two on Monday. So, we’ll close the observation deck at six fifteen to give us time to set up.”
Franklin George said, “Okay,” which in his vocabulary seemed to mean “wow.” “Glad to see you’re on top of it, Alvarez.”
The concierge desk was around the corner from the elevators, and it was just at this moment that Calista joined her soon-to-be fiancé in the lobby. She was dressed for the weather, an Armani coat with a pink scarf and a chilly expression. Franklin went in for a kiss and got a peck.