Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “No, they’d strip you of your belongings,” said Artie. He wondered what she would sound like having an orgasm. Would she be a yeller? Would she groan? Would she complain that she didn’t want to? Complaining could be very exciting if they really didn’t mean it.

  She always kept coming back to her father.

  “It doesn’t matter what the odds against you are, it matters how you make them work for you, Dad always said. That’s why I know we are going to win.”

  “Uh huh,” said Artie, digging into his steak and spaghetti.

  “You are only beaten,” said Claire, “when you say you’re beaten.” The harsh twangy voice seemed to go with something like that. So would a Texas linebacker coach. To boot, she stressed how retiring she ordinarily was.

  “But you are going to get hurt anyway even if you stay in your room and do nothing. You might as well go out and face the worst of it. That’s what I learned from Dad’s death.”

  She started sharing his spaghetti.

  “You’ve got to learn from everything. That’s what Dad said. You can always learn. His death taught me.”

  “Can I get you an order of spaghetti?”

  “No. I’m not hungry.”

  “Sure. You ate mine.”

  “Did I?” said Claire, putting a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry. Sometimes I just pig out. You’ve got to let me pay for it.”

  Artie refused. He had a better idea. Why not get some rich dessert and eat it at his place with some good coffee and brandy? His pad was two blocks away on Nineteenth Street.

  Claire looked at her watch.

  “Oh my god. I missed my plane. I didn’t make a reservation at a hotel. I don’t know what to do.”

  Artie offered his apartment.

  “No. Thank you,” said Claire. “I’ll get a hotel, but I love talking with you. I appreciate your interest. I really couldn’t expect caring like this in New York from a policeman.”

  Artie dismissed it as nothing, but restaurants were not a place to talk about such things. Apartments were better. And he knew a wonderful bakery for dessert.

  “You don’t have to do that,” said Claire.

  “No. I want to,” said Artie.

  “You are really kind,” said Claire.

  “Nah. I’m not that kind,” said Artie.

  “You are. You don’t know it. I know people. I can tell. You think maybe you’re slick and all that, but I know a kind person when I meet one.”

  Artie bought two large whipped cream-topped pastries even though Claire said she didn’t want one. She said she found New York City less frightening with Detective Modelstein. He said she didn’t have to feel obliged to go to a hotel that night. She still preferred one.

  “Just so that you’ll know it’s here for you if you should need it,” said Artie, hanging up her jacket and getting them both brandies to go with the whipped cream pastry. She sat on the sofa in front of his large color television. That was good. There was space there for him.

  Coffee was supposed to be involved in this sort of thing, too, but for Artie two out of three was more than good enough.

  With a smooth motion, he emptied an ashtray with lipsticked cigarette butts behind his back and sat down next to her. To discard evidence of another woman was not a lie, but simply removal of something that would lend a bad atmosphere.

  Artie was the atmosphere. He moved close. She put a hand on his. Good.

  “They may think they’re getting away with this. But what they don’t know is they’re not,” said Claire. “What they don’t know, and what’s going to defeat them in the end, is that we’re not giving up. They have not counted on us. They have counted on the normal way business is done. You see, that’s our strength. That they would think like you had thought,” said Claire.

  “Well,” said Artie, who wanted to get away from insanity and back to body as smoothly and as quickly as possible.

  “Do you think I’m wrong? Say it if you think I’m wrong. I’m not wrong, you know. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking you’re beautiful,” said Artie.

  “Thank you. What do you think about our position?”

  “Wished it were as attractive as you,” said Artie. She thought that was funny. And then the door to the apartment opened and a handsome woman in her twenties with auburn hair, and a face set for combat, entered with her own key.

  “Am I interrupting?” she asked.

  “No,” said Artie.

  “He’s working on a case with me,” said Claire.

  “Trudy Gerson, this is Claire Andrews. Claire, Trudy Gerson.”

  “Artie, we had a date tonight.”

  “You can still have it. We’re just having dessert that he was kind enough to get. It’s a complicated case,” said Claire.

  “Excuse me, miss,” said Trudy, her voice barbed with venom. “I’ve never heard Detective Modelstein carry work one second past quitting time. If he can’t eat it or screw it, he is generally not interested in it.”

  “But that’s not so. He has been every bit a gentleman with me. He has restored my faith in the decency of people. I was alone here, and friendless, and he left work hours ago.”

  “Oh Artie, you’re so good to the girl,” said Trudy.

  “It’s true,” said Artie, cloaking himself in nobility. He knew he couldn’t sell that one to Trudy, not with this blonde’s good looks.

  “Artie, you haven’t had a nonsexual thought since you found out you could do more with it than wet your diapers,” said Trudy, loosing a final bitter laugh. She threw the keys on the floor and left, slamming the door with all the force of a woman who wished it were closing on the head of Arthur C. Modelstein.

  “I hope I haven’t damaged your relationship. Were you living together?”

  “No. I don’t believe in living together. People get on each other’s nerves. I believe that everyone is free to do what he or she wants. It makes life easier, you know.” He glanced at the door.

  He knew it was a nice try, but the evening was really over on two fronts. Trudy was gone, and by vicious circumstance he had been trapped into a posture of decency he had to carry through.

  Two hours later they shook hands good night.

  “I hope I didn’t ruin anything between you and your friend.”

  “Nah,” said Artie. “That’s okay. Remember, stay in the cab until you reach the hotel, and you’ll be fine.”

  “You’re a dear, Arthur,” she said and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. He washed it off before he went to bed.

  In the morning, when normal people were still struggling to adjust to the day, to accept the cold of the morning, to ease eyes to sunlight and the body to the necessary movement of work and remorseless society, when coffee was a labor and juice too cold for a warm tongue nurtured properly in hours of rest and comfort, Arthur C. Modelstein encountered at the front door of his Nineteenth Street apartment a boisterous and happy yellow-haired woman, ready for a touchdown cheer.

  “Arthur, I found the way. I found the way we’re going to get this criminal and proof of my father’s ownership. Everything we want is in here.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  “No. I had trouble with that. But look. This is it,” said Claire. Artie stared at the bound notebook, the kind schoolchildren used to use in New York City. The cardboard cover had phony imitation marbling on it for a reason so ancient in the school system no one could remember it.

  “How’s that gonna do anything?”

  “Maybe the trail is faint. Maybe the trail is long. But I am going to record everything. Everything leaves a trail. And if you write it down, and never give up, you’ll find that trail.”

  She opened the book for Artie. He noticed, of course, she had a neat handwriting. Artie would have been surprised if it weren’t. There was yesterday’s date, and there was the time and place of the cellar exchange, and Geoffrey Battissen’s name, and his gallery address, under the title “stolen from the Andrewses this date.”
<
br />   Vindication gleamed in the lady’s blue eyes.

  “I’m going to find out how and when Dad got it, how and when it came into being. Who sold it to whom, and when. You may not be able to arrest Geoffrey Battissen for a long while, but I am never going to let this go, and that is why we’re going to win.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Artie. “Good. I’ll let you know everything that happens here. I’m going to stay on this, I promise. I’ve got a couple of ideas of my own. No guarantees, but I’m with this for you.”

  “You are decent, Arthur. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

  “It’s my job. What flight do you have? I’ll take you to the airport.”

  “I don’t know if I should leave now without things settled.”

  “I think you shouldn’t stay here,” said Artie.

  “Are you going to speak to Geoffrey Battissen today?”

  “Sure,” said Artie.

  “You didn’t say it like you meant it, Arthur.”

  “I mean it,” said Detective Modelstein, noticing that it wasn’t even nine A.M. yet and this major promise had been extracted from him.

  “Well, if you really mean it, I can go home.”

  “I mean it,” said Artie. “I mean it.”

  “Good, then I can go home. Honestly, I never really wanted to stay here in the first place,” said Claire. “I’m really quite relieved to know I can leave everything in good hands.”

  “Good hands,” said Artie, thinking coffee, thinking chair, thinking, perhaps later in the morning, a cherry danish and coffee with cream, and thinking what price he was going to have to pay Trudy Gerson if he were to make amends.

  IV

  “If it were not the Queen, Sir Anthony, we would have ended this little talk at the beginning,” said the little man in the stuffy car. Word had gone out discreetly to the proper quarters of government that Her Majesty had a serious situation, which needed a special solution, all of the utmost confidentiality and dispatch. No middle level government clerks need apply.

  The answer to the crown plea, came in a large black chauffeur-driven car with darkened windows that picked up Witt-Dawlings on a crowded London street corner. The dark-haired little man apparently did not need to verify who Sir Anthony was, nor would he introduce himself.

  They rode south of London in aimless circles in the countryside, making peculiar turns and stops and twists without any discernible reason. The chauffeur could not hear their conversation and could only be reached by a little intercom in the back seat. The windows cast a greyish tint over lane and highway. People could not look in. They could also not eavesdrop on this sedan with modern electronics, the dark-haired little man assured Sir Anthony.

  “I suppose all this precaution is necessary,” said Sir Anthony. The car looked plush on the outside. But the upholstery felt tinny in a way, with severe ribbing that made sitting definitely uncomfortable. The little man smoked a foul pipe.

  Sir Anthony coughed.

  The man ignored that.

  “Would you be so kind as to please open the window?” asked Sir Anthony.

  “No,” said the little man.

  This, nowadays was what defended England at the highest levels of Intelligence, Witt-Dawlings thought.

  “Sir Anthony, the precautions correspond to the demands of the Crown. You do not wish Her Majesty in any way to be associated with this. So we did not discuss this anywhere near Buckingham Palace, and picked you up on a street corner. If you don’t wish the Crown involved in any way, as I was instructed, then you don’t meet at Buckingham Palace or at any other royal residence. It’s not complicated. Now, the more you tell us, the better we can help.”

  “We are looking for something which I do not have the authority to disclose to you at this time.”

  The little man put the tar-smelling pipe into Sir Anthony’s hands.

  “There. That’s something. If you’re not more specific, then I feel our group has done its work. We have given you something.”

  Sir Anthony put the pipe firmly back into the little man’s hands.

  “It’s not a pipe,” he said.

  “Is it bigger than a bread box?” asked the man.

  “I would appreciate less ridicule, thank you,” said Sir Anthony. What could he tell the man? That Her Majesty’s first question when informed the Tilbury was lost again, was not whether they could recover it but whether it had become common knowledge the Crown was after it in the first place?

  Gratefully, he had told her no. Gratefully, he had been able to tell her that at no time was the Foreign Office informed it was the Tilbury. In fact, he had been forbidden to rely on American help, lest another party even know Britain was looking for a jeweled cellar.

  Granted, it was almost inconceivable that despite her most generous willingness to pay any price for the saltcellar, they had not been able to secure it. But that was because middle-level clerks were sent on an errand that needed firmer and more resourceful stuff, he had said.

  The Foreign Office had been the wrong choice. Sir Anthony had taken the blame for that, although it had been through the Foreign Office that the first report of a jeweled saltcellar had come to Buckingham Palace. A wealthy British subject had heard of a great jeweled saltcellar for sale under questionable circumstances in New York City. He believed he might have read something about such a cellar in connection with the crown, but could neither place the cellar nor where he had read about it, this despite an entire afternoon he had spent personally trying to look up such a reference in the great New York Public Library.

  On the chance he might have been correct, he notified the embassy in America, which routinely forwarded the information to Buckingham Palace. It was on that day that Sir Anthony Witt-Dawlings became the first nonroyal to learn the real secret of the Tilbury Cellar in four centuries, and then only because he had to know.

  From that moment on he had thought of little else, and had twice mentioned to Her Majesty on different occasions that perhaps it was more than coincidence that the Tilbury resurfaced at such a time of despair in England’s history.

  Now it was lost again, and Sir Anthony had to explain to a cold Intelligence sort, without telling too much, that keeping a secret was possibly even more important than getting the object itself back.

  “All right, you cannot tell me what you’re looking for, but you want a whole organization to look for it.”

  “We will tell the person you select, and only him, what he has to know. And that, I am afraid, has to be all,” said Witt-Dawling.

  “There are many different kinds of people with different talents, and abilities. Do we need an electronics engineer?”

  “No,” said Sir Anthony.

  “Do we need someone daring?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the importance of what we’re looking for. But even more important, he must be discreet.”

  “Why not you?”

  “If I were younger, I might.”

  “So we need someone young, possibly athletic.”

  “Yes, I would say that might be called for.”

  The little man lit his pipe again. Sir Anthony coughed. The little man inhaled deeply. The whole backseat tasted of rotted tar.

  “All right, but let me warn you, in the real world, systems find things, secure things, protect things, get things. One man alone, despite all fairy tales, ancient and modern, has got to be considered severely restricted, possibly even to the point of uselessness. Are you sure it must be one man?”

  “That is, I believe, the most certain way to discretion.”

  “Yes. I agree. Information is at risk in geometric proportion to the number of people who know about it.”

  “Then one person has to do, preferably one who treasures England and what we are and have been. We want one person alone.”

  “Ah well,” said the little man. “I sense I could be more help if I knew more. I do so feel I am doing the wrong thing for Her Majesty, but
if that is what she wants, and you are her secretary and you do know, then I will comply.”

  “It most certainly is Her Majesty’s desire.”

  “Then I will provide you your lone knight,” said the little man, who now that the topic was done, rolled down the windows allowing in cool moist air.

  And on hearing the word “knight” Sir Anthony wondered if he somehow hadn’t told too much already.

  There was a message for Harry Rawson back at the English consulate. The radio operator on the cutter of the sultanate of Banai brought the word to the commander, who said Captain Rawson should be given the message.

  The operator folded it over as though he had not read it. These were after all British messages, and he knew it was a bad thing for the British to see others reading their mail. So with an air of someone who had respected privacy, he delivered the message folded, with his eyes straight ahead, his feet stamping on the floor in proper salute, his right hand quivering adjacent to his forehead.

  “Sir. Message for you, sir,” said the radio operator.

  Captain Rawson sat on a lounge chair in front of the main cabin, an Uzi machine gun in his lap. He had not left this door since Ahmadabad in India, and now they were almost a day out into the Arabian Sea.

  “What is it, Hamid?” said Rawson, a campaign hat over his eyes.

  “It is confidential.”

  “Read it to me anyhow.”

  “Sir, I cannot do that, sir. It is for your eyes only.”

  “Very good,” said Rawson, and without taking the hat from his eyes, held out his hand for the message. The Royal Navy had trained Hamid just as it had trained his captain, just as the Royal Air Force had trained the two fighter pilots who made up the Banai Air Force and the British Army had trained the two regiments that made up the Banai Defense Forces.

  They had learned their salutes very well, their weapons modestly, and when British officers were about they could be counted on not to run or, if things went the other way, not to pillage and rape. They were mostly bedouins hired by the Sultanate, an old trading family that had moved pearls and slaves across the Arabian Sea for three centuries. Only in this century did anyone think to call the family’s city and the surrounding desert a country. Her Majesty’s government had always considered Banai vital since it was a good port on the trade routes to western India. When the Empire lost India, the British advisors stayed. The excuse then was oil, even though the world was awash in it. Harry Rawson suspected it was a chance to still play empire.