The Hunt for Eros

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The Hunt for Eros Page 15

by Hunt, Sam J. D.


  “Do you have what you need, Jane?” he asked, his meaning clear.

  “Yes, thank you both, I was able to get exactly what I needed.”

  “Good, then. We need to get back. I’ll pick you up here at eight, Sharon.” He winked at her before taking my arm to leave.

  “Don’t rush, walk normally until we are out of the museum. George is waiting in front with the car.”

  “But won’t Sean be waiting, too?”

  “Most likely. Let’s hope George can lose him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven.

  It was dark as we exited the columned front entrance of the British Museum, the clue still folded in the palm of my hand. “Should I open it?” I asked nervously. “And I still have that thing from Laura stuffed in my bra strap, too.” He tugged my arm, urging me to hurry, as his eyes searched the line of cars on the curb in front of the museum. It was starting to rain, a chilly mist glossing the stone courtyard. “Don’t open the clue yet, not here, just don’t lose it.” We walked down the stairs, careful to stay with the small throng of tourists milling around. “Where’s your coat?” he asked, noticing my arms wrapped around my shivering body. “All of my stuff, everything but my phone, is in the trunk of that car. Sean has it, even my passport,” I said. He slipped the charcoal coat off his shoulders and wrapped it around me. “There he is,” he pointed, “I see George. Let’s go.”

  We made it to the car, despite me slipping twice on the wet stones in my high heels. “Where to, sir?” George asked as he pulled into traffic. “I don’t know yet, just lose the car behind us. It’s Devane and a hired thug.” George wove through the black London cabs, amidst a cloud of blaring horns and daring pedestrians. “The clue, Jane,” he said impatiently. I ripped open the thick paper and laid it on the seat between us.

  My dear Jane, this is the final clue. I’ve warned you to trust no one on this journey, but pray that with the assistance of Professor Montrose, you’ve navigated the sharks wisely. Now I need to take a gamble and hope that my instincts are correct about one of those sharks. Eros is located where you began your journey, safely ensconced under the watchful protection of Ben Hunt. It is finally home, and so soon shall you be.

  I trust that Mr. Hunt will use his connections and wisdom to protect the Michelangelo, retaining it for your inheritance while allowing countless art lovers to enjoy it in a way I never could. You see, my dear, disease was quickly destroying my mind and my ability to protect the Cupid. I had no choice but to take my own life in a way that will resemble a natural death. Please know that I made this decision carefully and parted this life in peace.

  With Love, Stuart.

  “Oh my God, he killed himself?” I said in disbelief as the pieces started to click into place. I understood his decision, but had Ben known the whole time? I turned on him in anger. “You had my sculpture this whole fucking time!” I screamed as the car swerved and wove through traffic. Ben’s jaw went slack, his mouth hung open in as he shook is head and finally confessed, “No, I…I had no idea. I’d wondered how he timed the search for the Cupid with his death, but I’m as shocked as you are. He hid the Cupid in my house? How…?” His shock was genuine, and even George looked back in surprise before his eyes returned to the road. “Who is this Mr. Montrose the note refers to?” I asked, confused. “Professor Montrose is David Montrose of Trinity College. I’ve gotten to know him better in the last year or so, he’s a respectable man and very knowledgeable about art. I suspect Stuart trusted David to help you find the Cupid as well as keep me in line afterward.” I was puzzled. “Why didn’t he just leave the Cupid with Montrose then?” Ben answered simply, “He doesn’t have my connections or the money to protect it.”

  We sat in silence, our minds reeling, until George interrupted. “Devane’s car has just been pulled over by police,” he said excitedly. I looked through the rear window to see Sean and his bribed driver standing in the rain at the side of their car, a uniformed London policeman putting them both in handcuffs. As George stepped on the gas, Ben’s phone vibrated in his suit coat, still wrapped around my shoulders. I pulled out the phone, a text from Laura bright on the screen:

  I took care of Sean, he’ll spend the night in lockup. You’re welcome ;) Hang on to Jane!

  I handed him the phone, relieved. He tapped out a quick reply while I reached into my dress and brought out the small envelope Laura had slipped into his pocket while we were leaving MI5 headquarters. Nervously, he opened it, staring at the several small photos inside. The photos were of Elizabeth Hope—a very young Elizabeth Hope—shooting heroin with two much older men. “She can’t be more than fifteen here,” he said. “These were taken years before I met her. That’s her father and her uncle.” He shook his head. “Sick,” I muttered, “they all need help.” He slid the photos back into the envelope, leaning back in his seat and pulling me near. “No more blackmail from the Hopes. Now I just have to figure out what to do about Sean.”

  The drive to Cambridge took just over an hour. Ben assumed that the Cupid must be in his attic, the only place where a housekeeper or George wouldn’t have come across it. The car pulled into a wide garage underneath a massive block of Victorian row houses in the heart of Cambridge. “Which house is yours?” I asked sleepily. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “The entire block is mine. They are joined together into one house.” George opened the car door, and Ben slid out and offered me his hand.

  “We’ll need a couple of torches and a bottle of Bourgogne Blanc from the cellar,” Ben instructed George before leading me into his opulent house.

  “Um, torches? Isn’t that a bit primitive?”

  “Torches…you would call them…” he snapped his fingers, trying to remember the American term, “flashlights.”

  As we walked across the gleaming foyer toward a curved staircase, he said to an older woman, “Janice, we’ll be back down soon. George is bringing up a bottle of white wine. I smell chicken?” His housekeeper nodded, blatantly staring wide-eyed at me. “Yes, sir, supper will be ready in twenty minutes.”

  Minutes later he led me toward a second, narrower staircase, flashlights furnished by George in hand. I whispered, “I don’t think your housekeeper likes me being here.”

  “It’s not that,” he said as we traipsed up the uneven wooden stairs toward the attic, “it’s just she’s never seen me bring a woman here when I wasn’t entertaining. That and the fact that I’m combing through the attic myself and not sending someone else to do the dirty work.”

  He opened the door to the attic with a skeleton key, dust particles dancing in the golden glow of the flashlights. “I think there’s a light, somewhere…” Within a minute he’d located the pull switch for the overhead light bulb. “I haven’t been up here in years.”

  “It’s not up here,” I said confidently.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked, looking across the large space at endless shelves of boxes.

  “Dusty floor,” I said. “No footprints besides the ones we just made.”

  He looked at me, his head cocked to the side. “You’re sharp, Jane Andrews. If not here then, where?”

  “Did you send George to a wine cellar? Down there maybe?”

  He did a final visual sweep of the attic before gesturing for me to head back down the stairs. There were several sets of long staircases to navigate in the cavernous house before we reached the wine cellar. “This is more wine than you could drink in a lifetime,” I said in awe of the hundreds of bottles lining the wall racks. “I suppose it’s about collecting fine things, to some extent, but I entertain frequently.” He poked around the area, but found nothing out of the ordinary. “You have parties?” I asked curiously. His lifestyle was so different than mine. The last party I went to, before coming to England, was a candle-selling thing with nothing more exotic to drink than Bud Light. I couldn’t even afford to buy more than the cheapest thing in the catalog. “You like Champagne, Jane—let’s chill this up for after dinner. One of my favorites, a 2000 Krug Clo
s du Mesnil.” He pulled a bottle from a rack, and headed toward the door. I followed, asking, “How much does a bottle like that cost?” As we walked up the back staircase toward the kitchen, he answered, “Around four hundred and fifty pounds or so. Slightly more expensive than your New Year’s Eve libation—what was it…Asti Spumante?”

  Ben’s kitchen was huge. It kept its vintage Victorian charm, but blended in were all the modern amenities one would need to prepare a dinner party for a large group. Ben removed his charcoal tie and loosened his shirt collar. We sat on stools at the end of an oversized marble island, despite his housekeeper trying to shoo us into the breakfast room. “We’re tired, we’ll eat quickly here, it’s fine Janice,” Ben argued. She opened a bottle of chardonnay and poured us each a glass. Ben sipped at his while the housekeeper served us a delicious meal—creamy chicken casserole and crusty French bread. We were starving—neither of us had eaten since that morning at the hotel. It seemed like ages ago. “Where else should we look?” I asked him after cleaning my plate but refusing seconds. “The staff will continue to search, but I find it highly unlikely that Stuart would have been able to stow something of that size here without being detected. The security system would have picked it up.” I was confused—I thought the clue said that the sculpture was at Ben’s home.

  “That was excellent as usual, Janice, thank you. We’re headed up to bed—is the bottle of Krug chilled yet? I’ll take it up with me.” She handed him two crystal flutes from an open cabinet along with the bottle wrapped in a linen towel. I followed him two floors up to his bedroom, really a bedroom suite. There was a sitting room with a television, a second larger room with a huge four-poster bed, and a bathroom so large and modern it must have been renovated from several other rooms. Ben’s bedroom was many times larger than my entire apartment back in Toledo. With a remote, he flicked on soft, romantic music and popped open the Champagne.

  “How many people work for you?” I sipped at my drink, the taste so exquisite I could see why it cost more than my monthly rent.

  “I have a full-time domestic staff of five, but I hire more for entertaining. Janice does the day to day cooking, but a local chef comes in for dinner parties. Then there’s George, a gardener for grounds upkeep, a young maid who helps Janice whose name I can’t remember…I should know her name…” he trailed off guiltily. “I also have an assistant butler, Todd. He helps George with running the house, but also handles security.” He moved closer to me, his hand stroking my back through the silky dress. “Is it possible Uncle Stuart meant the Cupid was at his home?” He refilled my glass with the delicious bubbly Champagne. “I don’t think so. I think he might have meant home in the sense of where the piece belongs—in a museum. I have a hunch we need to poke around the Fitzwilliam first thing in the morning.” He set his empty glass down and ran his hand up my leg, beneath my skirt, and into my silk panties, and growled, “Let’s go to bed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight.

  Ben woke me up early the next morning, eager to get to the museum at eight, when the security guards arrived to turn off the night alarm. As he brushed his teeth, a fluffy white towel wrapped around his waist, I sat on the end of the bed finishing my coffee. All of my belongings were still in my suitcase in the back of a car in London. “We’ll buy you some clothes later, Jane, don’t worry. I’m more concerned about your passport. You can’t fly home without it,” he mumbled into his frothy toothbrush before spitting and wiping his mouth. I hadn’t thought about flying home at all—the very idea of leaving here made me feel sick. Why was he thinking about it?

  After a luxurious shower, I put the green silk dress on again, punctuated by the killer heels, but I didn’t have any makeup to apply. I looked into a long mirror—Plain Jane in a fancy dress. Ben was preoccupied as George drove us the few blocks to the museum, his focus on finding the Cupid. We were dropped off in the back, much less opulent than the columned street entrance. This was their daily routine, the only difference being that Ben was arriving an hour earlier that day.

  The person who ran the shipping and receiving department wasn’t there yet, so we settled into Ben’s eclectic office and drank a second cup of coffee. Being back in that office was surreal to me—it seemed like so long ago, so much had happened between us since I’d first laid eyes on Ben Hunt. I never dreamed that a week later we’d be in love. Well, I was in love, anyway. I still wasn’t sure what he felt for me.

  “I have a text from Laura. Sean has been released and is making his way back to Cambridge. A courier is delivering our bags to my house later this morning. I hope your passport is in them.” There it was again, his concern about my passport—was he ready to ship me back? “What happens after we find the Cupid?” I asked, unable to deny the fact that our adventure was nearly over. He glanced at his watch, annoyed that the staff member from shipping hadn’t called him yet. “Well, we’ll need to get a second opinion that it’s authentic,” he began, perching on the edge of his large desk. “Then we will need to prove that it legally belonged to Stuart Andrews before his death.” He went silent, followed by another nervous glance at his ridiculously expensive Breitling watch. He was wearing blue that day—a dark navy suit with a deep topaz blue tie that matched his brilliant eyes. “You’ll want me to sell it to you if it’s mine,” I said quietly. What I really wanted to ask was if he bought the piece from me, would there be anything left between us? He set his cup down and shook his head. “No, Jane, it belongs to you, to do with as you please. I’m honored and shocked that Stuart trusted me to be involved with it in any capacity. He was right about me, though. I do believe the piece should be shown to the public in a museum. This museum, of course, is what I’ll campaign for. But, after that, it should tour the country and maybe the world.” I was relieved that he wasn’t trying to get the Cupid from me any longer, but confused as to how I would make any money if I didn’t sell it. He explained further, “You’d authorize a caretaker of the sculpture, hopefully me, who would oversee its safety and display. The museums will pay a fairly high fee to feature a lost Michelangelo, so you’d see a significant income while still retaining ownership.” I was relieved he was still talking about us working together—a future.

  “I feel at home here in Cambridge. I don’t know that I want to go back to Toledo. Do you think—” I was interrupted by the phone on his desk ringing. “Ben Hunt,” he answered crisply. After a moment, he said, “No, Ken, we’ll come down there. I want to have a look myself.” He hung up the phone and gestured for me to follow him. “The quest is back on, Jane.” I followed him, my heels clicking on the shiny floor. “Ben, what I said about staying, I meant get my own place, of course. I wasn’t trying to…” I felt like I’d pushed too far, and now needed to backpedal. He stopped and turned to face me, his arms wrapping around my waist. “Nonsense. I have plenty of room. We’ll talk about it later, okay?” His words were a relief, but there was something behind his eyes that worried me—something that I suspected was fear. He leaned in to kiss me, not bothered by the many museum staffers scuttling through the busy hallway. There was no fear or trepidation in his kiss—I thought I’d misread him as his lips explored mine.

  In the dark basement of the museum, a thin man in an ill-fitting tan suit was sitting at a small desk pouring over a stack of papers. He looked up at us as Ben opened the door. “Mr. Hunt,” he said, “I’m honored to have you visit my humble subterranean abode.” Ben ignored the man’s greeting, instead pointing at the papers fanned out on the desk. “Did you find it, Ken?” The man nodded. “Yes, three weeks ago a crate was delivered to you, the sender listed as S.A. You should have been notified, but for some reason it appears an email never went out.” Ben’s hand ran through his hair—he was excited and annoyed at the same time. “Why the fuck not? And where is the parcel now?” Ken’s hands shook as he rolled his chair to another desk—one containing a very old computer. He logged on to what looked like an outdated Unix system, and said, “I wasn’t here that day, Miss Stark was filling in
. She noted that the sender had phoned and requested you not be informed of the delivery, saying it was a surprise for your birthday and to notify you then.” Ben took a deep breath, the details of Stuart’s plan unraveling in his head. “When is your birthday?” I asked, astounded that I felt so close to him yet didn’t know his birthday or even his age. “Next week,” he answered. “Stuart thought the search would take longer.” I winked at him, joking, “We’re just that good.”

  “Where is it now?” he prodded Ken, ignoring me.

  “It’s down in storeroom three. I’ll help you locate—”

  “No,” Ben snapped. “And make sure we’re not disturbed.”

  He left the small office and tore down the hall through the basement of the museum, his pace so fast I couldn’t keep up without taking off my heels.

  It took him several minutes to locate a security guard to open the door, but once inside, we were alone. He locked the door behind us. In the corner of a room full of packages and crates sat an ordinary wooden shipping crate. The object we’d been searching for was hidden in plain sight, amongst a dozen similar objects. It was large, but not as large as I’d imagined. The shipping label on the front was addressed to Jane Andrews, Care of Benedict Hunt, Curator of Fine Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. “I need a crowbar,” he said, frantically searching along a shelf until he found one. He pulled his jacket off, carelessly tossing it across another crate. The lid of the box came free of its nails with several hard pulls from the crowbar. Inside, the box was full of sawdust. An envelope floated on the top, barely visible. Ben pulled it out—it was addressed to me. He handed me the envelope and rolled up his sleeves. “The moment of truth,” he said with a whistle, plowing into the messy sawdust up to his elbows. “It’s heavy,” he huffed, reaching for the crowbar. He dissembled the rest of the box, sawdust spilling out as the wooden sides fell.

 

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