Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  One of the British sailors heard about the winnings and wanted to sell something for “every penny you got, mate.”

  It was the first time Vern saw Lucky. She was in a seaman’s duffel, under a bunk. The sailors crowded around him, shielding sight of the duffel from the rest of the hold. She looked like some sort of tall footstool on which somebody had thrown designs and jewels without thinking.

  “There she is, mate. Solid gold, and them stones gotta be real too.”

  “How do I know?”

  “Just lift her.”

  “So she’s heavy. Lead’s heavy.”

  “Mate, this is a fortune. It’s real.”

  “Where’d you get her?”

  “’Ey, c’mon now, mate.”

  “What am I going to do with it? Gold’s illegal in America. Where could I sell it?”

  “You could break her down. Sell off the gold alone for a bloody fortune. Save the jewels. Cut the jewels.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “Cause we can’t agree as to who gets what. There’s been hard feelin’s since before Liverpool.”

  “Since bloody Cheltham,” said one sailor, who got a dirty look.

  “She’s too big for us. We ain’t used to somethin’ like her,” said another, and still another said they were all assholes and shouldn’t sell her at all. There was a bit of shoving even then, and Vern backed off from the deal until just before they docked in Bayonne, New Jersey, when he heard one of the sailors had been found with his throat slit. That was enough of a gold assay for Vern Andrews.

  He bought it for almost every dollar he had and stuffed it into his duffel, and as the band played “Stars and Stripes Forever” Vern Andrews debarked with a rifle, a helmet, and a fortune he didn’t as yet know what to do with. He didn’t know how he would sell it. He didn’t know who would buy it. All he knew was that it was something great, something a boy like him from Carney, whose father had never been more than a janitor with a drinking problem, could never aspire to. It represented things that were beyond Carney. Eighteen thousand dollars had been money. You could buy the best house in Carney for that.

  But this great gold thing was more. To own it was to dare beyond anyone in his world. He had seen the value of gold as he had trudged through a ruined Europe. It outlasted the mere paper money. It was wealth, and in daring he separated himself from everyone he had known.

  He had to go AWOL to avoid surrendering illegal gold at mustering out. He knew this would mean a court-martial of some sort. He would pay that price. It was just too much wealth not to have. If worse came to worst, he could always melt down pieces of it and sell it to dentists, or take it into Canada or Mexico.

  But he never had to take it apart, and his luck seemed to begin right there. The court-martial he expected when he returned to Fort Dix never materialized. In an army disbanding itself after a victorious war, everyone wanted to go home, especially his company commander, who would have had to stay in order to testify against one of his men, a man who had gone through the same hell with him without one previous bad mark.

  Perhaps it was his first experience trusting himself on such a large scale, but it came to represent his luck to Vern Andrews himself. And believing it, he had it. So that when he stood in that bank vault ready to sell Lucky, he was a wealthy, powerful man, who only needed immediate cash, a man who by this time found pushing for more to be second nature. And when he got his first demand, he shook his head and put a pained expression on his face, and in his most hayseed manner allowed as how things were kind of different now.

  The British gentleman, his hand on a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills as thick as a historical novel, looked up startled.

  “Sorry,” said Andrews. “Three million was the price before I had other bidders. I’m thinking these stones will sell better separately, know what I mean? I got bidders now.”

  “I see. And what is your new price?” asked the man.

  “Well, I want to sell this thing stone by stone now. People are bidding like that, you know,” said Vern Andrews, as happy as a pebble tinkling around inside a tin can. He liked this. He would rather be doing this than being dragged through some museum by Claire or eating at the best restaurant in the world.

  “I am only prepared to offer on the entire piece.”

  “Well then, I’m real sorry. I stopped thinking of her as a whole.”

  “Yes, well, try, if you would, please,” said the Briton.

  “Sure will. I’ll just find what the stones are bringing. I sure was surprised to see how valuable these little fellers are. These things are worth fortunes,” Vern said, pulling up the burlap and lifting Lucky back into her box.

  “Well, I’m not sure our offer will still be here. Just how much are you asking now?”

  “I’d have to say five million now.”

  BRITISH FOREIGN OFFICE

  SOURCE: NEW YORK CITY

  CLASSIFICATION: MAXIMUM SECURITY, FOREIGN OFFICE, RATE ONE

  ESTABLISHED CONTACT WITH SELLER VERN ANDREWS, 62, AMERICAN CITIZEN, HONORABLE DISCHARGE US ARMY JUNE 1945, SGT. FIRST DIVISION. IRS AUDIT 1984, PAID $57,000 TAXES ON INCOME OF $2.8 MILLION. PASS AUDIT. PIECE VERIFIES. NEW ASKING PRICE $5 MILLION. SUSPECT PRICE WILL RISE WITH AVAILABLE OFFER. WHAT PROCEED?

  NEW YORK

  SOURCE: FOREIGN OFFICE—LONDON

  CLASSIFICATION: MAXIMUM SECURITY, FOREIGN OFFICE, RATE ONE

  APPARENT YOU USING US GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE. DESIST IMMEDIATELY. NO ONE BUT YOU TO KNOW. ACCESS NO ONE NOT EVEN EMBASSY STAFF NO MATTER WHAT CLEARANCE. FUNDS NO PROBLEM. TIE HIM DOWN TO A PRICE. BUT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES AND AT ALL COSTS DO NOT LET CELLAR GO TO ANYONE ELSE.

  BRITISH FOREIGN OFFICE

  SOURCE: NEW YORK CITY

  CLASSIFICATION: MAXIMUM SECURITY, FOREIGN OFFICE, RATE ONE

  DEFINE ALL COSTS, PLEASE. DOES THIS INCLUDE RISKING EXPOSURE, USE OF FRIENDLY ASSISTANCE, FORCE, WHAT? PREVIOUS MESSAGE CONTRADICTORY.

  NEW YORK

  SOURCE: FOREIGN OFFICE—LONDON

  CLASSIFICATION: MAXIMUM SECURITY, FOREIGN OFFICE, RATE ONE

  REPEAT AS GIVEN TO FOREIGN OFFICE: OBTAIN CELLAR AT ALL COSTS, AVOID EXPOSURE AT ALL COSTS. SORRY, COULD NOT GET ONE OR THE OTHER AS PRIORITY.

  “I think five is a bit much for me,” said the man.

  They met in Central Park. The wind played uncomfortably through the man’s hair. Vern Andrews suspected the man rarely went without his bowler. They sat on a park bench looking at a stone bridge over which joggers puffed and lovers strolled and a vendor with a pink wagon sold large salty pretzels and peanuts.

  “All right, let’s try six,” said Vern, cracking open a peanut. The man was trying to dicker, and he really didn’t know how. If he expected Vern to come back and ask how much would be all right, he had to be a total stranger to business.

  “Do you really want to sell it?”

  “Course,” said Vern.

  “I’m trying to establish a price you’re going to live with. I wish to buy your piece, but I gather if I say ten you say eleven and so on. So what is your real price?”

  “Six,” said Vern.

  “I’ll give you four.”

  “Hell, I got it sold already. Don’t bother bidding,” said Vern.

  The man jumped up from the bench.

  “Wait. Wait a minute. You didn’t say you had it sold. I’m bidding on it.”

  “I’ve got a six million bid and I’m going to sell it this afternoon. I just can’t wait any longer. Bye,” said Vern and the man actually ran after him.

  He actually followed him down several blocks, and Vern just kept tightening the screws, and with every demand that was met, Vern kept adding on a condition. It was like running through an open field. Everything he asked was met. So he kept pushing.

  And to excavate the absolute ultimate, the final offer, he stopped in the middle of one of those crowded side streets of New York City, where cars were parked three deep, only barely distinguishable from the slow traffic, and sai
d to the man, now red-faced and on the verge of frothing: “I not only want my price. If I don’t have it in a half an hour, that baby is gone and sold, and good-bye.”

  “You can’t do that,” said the man.

  “Good-bye,” said Vern. He was standing in front of an alley. And, hysterical, the man went at him.

  Claire Andrews wondered why Dad was knocking instead of using his key, when she answered the door and saw a policeman who asked her who she was and then told her father was dead.

  At first she thought he had told her that Dad was dead, and she asked him to say that again. And he told her that her father had been stabbed to death in an alley off Fifth Avenue, and would she identify the body.

  “No,” said Claire. She had been in the midst of reading a book and Dad was expected back any minute. And now someone was saying Dad’s body had been found in an alley.

  “No,” she screamed. The policeman and a policewoman stood there in the doorway, repeating this, and no matter how angry she got, they refused to admit they had made a mistake. She hated their telling such a horrible lie, and only when they told her they had already been in contact with people in Carney who had offered to fly to New York to identify the body did she understand that they really meant Dad was dead. It was not a mistake. She apologized for being rude to them, and they kept saying she had done nothing wrong.

  Dad had been stabbed to death. His pockets had been turned out, indicating he had been robbed, and yet, the killer or killers had left his wallet and, strangely, his expensive watch and a good deal of cash. Did Miss Andrews feel capable of identifying the body.

  If not, there were others in Carney who could do it. She could get a sedative, and perhaps find someone to take her home.

  “No,” Claire heard herself say. “He’s my father. I’m his daughter. I’ll take him home.”

  Was she really saying that? Did she know what it meant? Was she really going to go to a morgue and see Dad, and take him home by herself? She didn’t even go out in this city alone. She never traveled alone except driving to Columbus or around Carney.

  But she knew the world couldn’t do anything worse to her now. There was nothing out there to harm her now. The harm had been done.

  And maybe they had made a mistake about Dad, and then he would be alive, and seeing him alive, she would cry and tell him the horror she was going through now.

  She grabbed any dress and put on a coat and made sure her hair was combed because that was what she was supposed to do and if she combed her hair, it would be that much time before she would know whether Dad was really dead.

  And then there was nothing else to do but go with the police to a large building that was a morgue, and there in a room that wasn’t as cold as people said morgues were was Dad, on a pull-out shelf with his face so twisted in pain she thought it didn’t look like him, that maybe it wasn’t him. But it was.

  And then she cried, and people were giving her a sedative and telling her there were folks back in Carney who would come out for her. They had been in touch with her hometown.

  “No. I don’t want to leave him here. He’s got family, you know. We’re from Ohio. People love him, you know. I’m taking him home now. We’re going home.”

  And then she was on the plane going home, and someone, not Dad, of course, sat down next to her. The very strangeness of the person told her Dad would never be there again beside her, going somewhere, seeing the world. And when the person asked her if anything were wrong, she found herself saying “nothing” and turning away into her own tears, because if she started to tell anyone about Dad, she would come apart. There would be nothing left of her. There was nothing left of her, she knew. It was just that if she didn’t talk about it, she could keep that nothing together until she got home.

  Mother and Bob Truet met her at the airport, saying they would take over, telling her how brave she was. But she wasn’t brave. She just didn’t know what else to do.

  They drove her from the Columbus airport back to Carney, with the black hearse following along the autumn roads that she had once traveled with Dad and that he was now going home on.

  The large white Victorian house with the great wrapping porch on Maple Hill was not the same when she got there. It was home without Dad. The whole house without him. Every room was without him and something he had done or said in that room. Every moment was without him.

  He was buried in the McCafferty lot just outside town, and there, finally, Mother cried with her.

  Bob Truet, who owned the Carney Daily News, could assure them that his reporters wouldn’t bother them, but he could do nothing about the Columbus papers. He sent over an assistant to help them handle the outside press because the New York murder of the wealthiest man in Carney was a big story in the state.

  Ralph Caswell, the funeral director, brought something over to the house that the police had missed in New York City. Inside Dad’s sock was a key. It was an old army trick for keeping valuables, Mr. Caswell explained. He did not say what he told Frank Broyles, the police chief, or Bob Truet, that the trick was used when soldiers wanted to protect something while visiting places where they took off their pants.

  At first, Claire thought the key might have been to their Waldorf suite, but it wasn’t. Those keys were labeled. This key had only a number.

  A New Yorker called to give his condolences. His name was Geoffrey Battissen and he sounded like a flagrant homosexual. He really wasn’t interested in condolences, of course.

  “Your father and I were working on a business arrangement, and while I know how painful it must be to think about such things, I know he was most interested in pursuing the sale of an item I was brokering for him.”

  “Yes,” said Claire. She didn’t know how much she should tell him. She didn’t know if she should let him know how little she knew of what Dad was doing.

  “We were about to conclude our business when the unfortunate event happened,” said the New York art dealer. “If I didn’t love this city, I would leave. It is so dangerous. The nicest people get killed in this random violence for no reason. It’s awful.”

  “Yes,” said Claire.

  “I would like to make the sale, at your convenience of course.”

  “Then go ahead. Bring me back an offer.”

  “I need you. Your father kept the piece in a safety deposit box. He kept the key.”

  Looking at the yard where the golden leaves had covered the tulip beds, and where the white lawn furniture was still out waiting for Jed the handyman to put it back into the garage until spring, Claire wondered why Dad had hidden that key. Her hesitation carried all the way to New York.

  “I am Geoffrey Battissen of the Battissen Galleries in New York. I am on Fifth Avenue. Please do come in to my gallery and let me show you that your concerns are unfounded. I know how tragic your father’s loss is. I am aware of the circumstances. I don’t wish to appear especially cruel, my dear, but the random senseless violence that took Vern’s life is unfortunately most commonplace in our city. We New Yorkers transcend it if we are to survive. That is the truth. You may contact me whenever you wish. I will be here as Battissen Galleries has been here on Fifth Avenue for twenty-two years. You have my deepest sympathies.”

  Claire had the key, and Dad was not here to finish what he had started. She decided to go to New York City and do this last thing that Dad wanted done. Everywhere was painful. New York didn’t matter anymore.

  “Claire, we have lawyers to do those sort of things,” said her mother, Lenore McCafferty, a statuesque woman of high cheekbones, soft brown hair, and dark eyes that seemed young for middle age.

  “What else am I going to do? Attend the garden club? Shop? Play tennis? Dad’s dead. He’s dead. He did everything. I never did anything. I’m going to do something, Mother. And I’m going to do it now.”

  “Do you think you should, in the state you’re in?”

  “It’s the only state I would go to New York City in. Yes.”

  “I’m g
rieving, too, dear,” said her mother, and Claire was furious at that and didn’t know why.

  Bob Truet came over offering to go with her to New York. Mother had obviously phoned him.

  “Bob, thank you, no. Please,” she said.

  “I have contacts in New York. I can help.”

  “Yes, I know, Bob. Please.” She didn’t want to be angry with him. He was older by four years. She had known him since high school, when he had come back from college to take her to the senior prom, and everyone thought they were going to be married—the local newspaper to the local fortune. Everyone thought it would have been right, including her. Except when she compared Bob Truet, decent Bob Truet, to Dad, he just seemed so much like a boy. He was good-looking, too. Clean features, brown hair, and soft brown eyes, jogger, tennis player, golfer, publisher of the Carney Daily News and a boy with his daddy’s money and his daddy’s paper, and Claire just thought she could do better. There had to be better. Even though he was so damned nice, so damned nice all the time.

  “I’ll be in New York as briefly as possible,” she told him. “I’m just going to sell something and be back.”

  “I’m here for you. I want you to know that. I’ll always be here for you.”

  She kissed him on the cheek, thanked him for being so supportive, and left for New York City alone in a gray suit with a simple pearl brooch her grandmother had given her. The suit was the most businesslike thing she had.

  New York was every bit as dirty and harsh as she remembered it, cold and drizzly. The Battissen Galleries seemed quite impressive, with a window from floor to ceiling and elegant benches and lighting throughout.

  Mr. Battissen himself seemed suitably high art, and his somewhat officious and delicately precise manner reassured Claire that business would be done with the least amount of unpleasantness.

  Apparently, Mr. Battissen knew where the bank vault was and that too was reassuring. Blake Comstock, Dad’s lawyer, had said Dad’s affairs were so tangled at this point because of heavy borrowing that he couldn’t imagine what Vern Andrews might be selling or which New York bank. And of course Mother didn’t know. She kept her business affairs separate with McCafferty lawyers. What made this even more curious was that Dad was selling this thing through an art dealer. She knew Dad never dealt in art. He only bought paintings when she liked them.