Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “But England. I know now it came from England. I didn’t even know for sure it was a saltcellar until that thief told me. It is not hopeless. We are not nowhere.”

  “Look, I know you have problems at home with what people believe, but no one’s perfect. And so to hell with them.”

  “What are you saying?” She cocked a suspicious brow.

  “This is nice, but … I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you understand what I’ve done here? We’re both working at this from different ends.”

  “I get paid for it.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  Artie could see anger in her eyes, a sense that he had somehow betrayed her.

  “What does that mean?” she demanded.

  “Miss Andrews, all the bag ladies you see don’t sleep in alleys with their belongings in bags. Sometimes they are rich enough to wander through their lives in their own apartments.”

  “Is that your way of saying I’m crazy?”

  “Does your mother bake pumpkin pies?”

  “I don’t know. Why did you bring that up?”

  “Does she bake pumpkin pies?”

  “I think Cissy, the cook, sometimes does. I’m not sure. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Then if you have this nice house with servants, what are you doing running around New York? What are you trying to prove?”

  “I thought you listened to me. I thought you understood, Arthur. I thought in all the world you were the one person who could understand.”

  He saw her fist clenched, he saw just the promise of tears, he saw her turn her head away in anger.

  “I am so disappointed in you, Arthur Modelstein. I am so disappointed. Why on earth did you come up here to say things like that?”

  Artie was about to remain silent, feeling overwhelmed and somewhat guilty for things he was not even sure he had done. But the evening was already ruined, and his mind had already switched to Trudy as the lesser of two aggravations for the night. Whatever made him think there could have been peace with this woman?

  “Can I ask you, Miss Andrews, what the hell is here in New York for you? What is here, lady? What’s here?” said Artie.

  Claire spun around, her face red, her blue eyes flashing. “I am here,” she said.

  They shook hands good night.

  VIII

  And if he gives way to fear, he is not of the company of true knights and veritable champions, who would sooner meet death in battle than fail to uphold the quarrel of their lord.

  —CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES

  Le Conte du Graal, 1180

  Geoffrey Battissen did not care. He had listened to too much logic from too many supposed experts, and he wouldn’t be in this position now if he had listened to none of them. He didn’t care that he was looking at little bags and boxes that had been the cellar, which had been taken apart supposedly in this very room that smelled so of foul eggs that he was forced to keep his handkerchief over his face to prevent his giving up lunch all over the place.

  “We’ve got to give it back. I know we can make a deal,” he said.

  He was told that that was not only impossible but also silly.

  “I have a business that has run quite well for twenty-two years. In that time, I have purchased a condominium on the East Side, provided for myself every summer on Fire Island, and lived a comfortable life. I was assured by you that this was beyond what any local police department would even be able to understand, much less be able to do anything about. I am facing what I was assured was impossible. An arrest warrant.”

  He was told that all of this would be moved to places no local police force could bother with. He was offered a hundred thousand dollars cash for now. He was told not to bother things. He had done his job. Let others do what they were supposed to.

  “I don’t think you understand what’s happening to me. These people are hounding me out of my business. They are taking my life away from me, a life I have crafted for myself. I am not giving it up for some extra money. We can still make a deal, and I’m sorry. If they arrest me, I am going to make sure I will look after myself and that includes, if I have to, pointing directly to you.”

  Battissen nodded to the last large bag sitting on the work table in this foul room. He was told to open it. There was a piece of clay inside, pinkish clay. It looked like a modern ashtray or something from a child’s ceramics class waiting for a glaze.

  Geoffrey Battissen did not see it long. He didn’t even sense the perfect infinite blackness that was upon him the moment the graver thrust perfectly up into his posterior cerebral lobe, making the rest of his body, including that part of the mind that saw and recognized what it saw, lifeless meat on its way to eternal decay. The stroke into his brain was executed with the smooth competence with which the cellar had been dismembered, and with just as much remorse. It was the second death in less than two weeks.

  “Mr. Feldman. I’m so glad I could reach you. My name is Captain Harry Rawson and I’m deeply interested in purchasing a major ruby. I’ve been told you’re a splendid source for that.”

  “Who?” came the voice over the transatlantic telephone.

  “Rawson. We’re the Rawsons of Hereford. I am in London and I shall be in New York within a day or two. I should like to discuss a major purchase with you.”

  “Who?”

  “Would you care to speak with my banker for references, Mr. Feldman?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  The line went dead. Rawson had the operator reconnect them.

  “Yes?” came the voice from New York.

  “I do believe we were cut off, Mr. Feldman,” said Rawson.

  “No. We weren’t,” came the voice.

  And the line went dead again.

  Rawson made a connection again and this time the first thing he said was: “The British Museum said I should get in touch with you, that you were one of the few in the world who would deal in rubies of fifty carats or over, that were exceptional …”

  The line went dead again. A shame, thought Rawson. He had been to a Bond Street jeweler who explained that at the size and quality of gems Captain Rawson was looking for, no jewelry store would be of much help. These great gems were so valuable they even transcended the laws of thievery, timeless in their value, powerful in their worth, and not so much an adornment as an event.

  The British Museum said there were only three men in the world who would deal in a stone that size, and before Rawson had tried to conduct a conversation with Norman Feldman of New York, he had thought how convenient to have one of those ruby dealers in the very city where the Tilbury Cellar was last seen.

  Detective Modelstein heard every morning from Claire Andrews precisely at 10:00 A.M., and precisely at ten he told her the same thing.

  “Nothing.”

  He knew she wanted to talk more, because she tried to explain what she was doing. He didn’t want to hear of it. As Feldman had predicted, Artie’s normal channels of informants were of no use. There was not a hint of any of the stones moving in New York City. And he suspected that this Ohio lady might just phone him every morning at 10:00 A.M. for the rest of his NYPD career. He might even get used to it. However, that would be hard, considering that he would know every time that at the other end of the phone was a beautiful and intelligent human practicing her one streak of madness on him.

  He was surprised that Battissen had not phoned to make a deal. For a man in over his head, he should have done something foolish. So Artie went through with the warrant as a material witness, but when he got to Battissen Galleries he found it locked and empty, and what could have been two days’ mail lying pushed through the slot on to the other side of the door. Several yellow delivery slips showed packages were waiting.

  Nor had Battissen, Artie found out, been home for two days either. With a partner, Artie got a search warrant for both gallery and apartment. The partner kept commenting how antiseptic Battissen’s apartment looked. There was
lots of glass furniture without dust or fingerprints. Even the refrigerator had neat olives and pickles. The only used thing in the place appeared to be two plastic straws in a black and pink china cup, which told Artie Battissen indulged in cocaine, which did not mean much considering many apartments on the Upper East Side had such paraphernalia.

  It was not that Battissen’s apartment was so neat that it looked unlived in. It looked never lived in, like a magazine advertisement for furniture. The bedroom had a wild zebraskin rug on the floor in front of a stark black platform bed. Everything was neat. Everything was put away. Battissen even had neat garbage. Bags to be thrown out were folded before being stuffed into a white plastic liner.

  Artie yanked a burlap sack out of the garbage container and shook it out. Brown dust fell at his feet, probably the first mess this place had seen, he thought.

  He let the sack fall full length. It was about three feet high and wide enough to contain a fat cylinder. He looked inside and then shifted the bag under the kitchen ceiling light, very carefully. But there it was. His eyes couldn’t miss, it, a glint flashing back at him. A speck of gold. Burlap would scratch gold, and when it scratched it took minute particles with it.

  This bag in Geoffrey Battissen’s garbage once held the big gold jeweled thing of a saltcellar belonging to the lady from Ohio. He had taken it and fled. That’s what the pressure had done. The flight warranted grand larceny bulletins to other countries and a visit to Norman Feldman, this time at Feldman’s apartment on the West Side. He brought a whipped cream cake and stuffed grape leaves.

  Feldman’s apartment was hardly better furnished than his office. There was a sofa that probably was worn and ugly the day Feldman purchased it, a cheap formica table surrounded by gaudy plastic-covered chairs that would have looked more natural on a lawn than in a dining room, and a black and white television set with a coat hanger for an antenna. He had a workroom he never let Artie enter, and this probably meant no one entered it.

  Feldman lived in the apartment because he owned the entire building.

  “You said an art dealer like Battissen wouldn’t have anything to do with a major gem. Well I know he had possession of it in his apartment in a saltcellar. He’s flown with it. He’s in that league ’cause he’s got it. Now what is the horseshit about having to be someone special to deal those stones?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Feldman. “You’ve got to listen. I’m not going to go through everything again. And I am going to tell you once. Major stones have a level they live at. They’re sold at. They’re bought at. A natural level. You don’t think kings and queens and millionaires and dictators happen to stumble on these things in some garden somewhere, do you?”

  Artie nodded. He never got insulted, and perhaps that was why he had become Feldman’s one friend, for whatever that was worth. He accepted Feldman as actually being easy to work with because the man never wasted time on what others would call niceties, such as courtesy and politeness.

  “Okay, understanding that, let me tell you that all major gems are found by poor people. Every one of them. Maybe because poor people work in the dirt, or look down a lot, or because there are just more of them. But they are always found by the poor, and they always end up with the rich, very rich. Look, it takes a lot of money to let it sit in one stone. And so even if Geoffrey Battissen did get hold of that ruby, he would not have it long. Doesn’t belong with him.”

  “He’s gone, you know. Not a sign of him. And he had this thing with the ruby in it, last reports.”

  “I guarantee something like the ruby you’re describing will not stay with that person. It’s not just money either. Can you imagine needing a gem?”

  “You mean like a breath or something?”

  “Right. With a great gem, people don’t buy it because they think it will look pretty. They have to know the stone. They have to understand, and then they don’t just want it. They need it. So forget some thieves.”

  “You’re right. I haven’t heard a whisper. Not a whisper of any of the stones and they were stolen in this city.”

  “Right. Stupid. I was telling you that. I’m not going to talk to you anymore. You’re crazy. I’ve been telling you that. Forget it.”

  “There’s this woman—”

  “Why didn’t you say you were talking about screwing? I knew you weren’t talking stones. That I knew.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “It’s always that,” said Feldman.

  Artie ignored the comment. Feldman indulged in sex the way he dined, as a necessity, possibly a necessary biological burden. Artie tried to explain about someone who just might latch on to the stones despite Feldman’s odds against it.

  “Well she’s kind of … she doesn’t … she isn’t bothered by reality. She’s like … like a football coach. Rah rah. Nice, intelligent, lovely lady, and she’s like a football coach. Who knows what she’ll do? Do you know what football coaches are like?”

  “I played for Colorado.”

  “You played for Colorado?”

  “I played guard.”

  “What did you weigh?”

  “A hundred and sixty pounds. Everyone was smaller then.”

  “Even then that was light. They don’t have halfbacks that small nowadays,” said Artie. He tried to imagine Feldman blocking someone. He couldn’t.

  “We had a good team. I wanted to play. I don’t think coaches are crazy. That’s the price you pay for the game you play.”

  “What I’m saying is maybe her enthusiasm and her money will get her to her property.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “If you saw some colored guy with a red stone in his ring, would you think ruby? A big red stone.”

  “Course not.”

  “In that respect, everybody is alike. Nobody is going to talk to her.”

  “But she’s got money. What, is her money no good?”

  “If I went into General Motors to buy the place would they talk to me? No. They wouldn’t because they don’t know me. If Henry Ford calls up, they’ll talk to him. There’s a possibility. Forget that lady.”

  Artie had an idea. “Would you do me a favor?”

  “No,” said Feldman.

  “You don’t know what it is. How can you say no?”

  “No.”

  “Would you tell this lady what you told me? It would make my life easier.”

  “So you can have more sex. You have enough already.”

  “Will you do it, asshole?” asked Artie.

  “Okay,” said Feldman.

  “Why did you say yes?”

  “I want to see who’s bothering you like this.”

  “She may never stop bothering you.”

  “You let yourself be bothered,” said Feldman.

  Detective Modelstein had been surprised that Feldman had played football. But there were always surprises. Like how they had met. Artie was tailing some punks whom informants had set up. The big kids had already promised the informants, who were fences, good-sized colored stones. Their plan was to simply mug one of the carriers they knew near Forty-seventh Street.

  They moved out of an alley at a sixty-two-year-old man, and they stopped moving well thereafter. One of them had his third rib cracked into his heart and the other’s nose was shattered and the elderly man was trying to ram the shards into the mugger’s brain with the heel of his hand when Artie and the other policeman stopped him. With some effort. The man was indignant at being stopped, indignant at being delayed in his evening to file complaints against the two muggers, who would only be released. The elderly man said something like this could never happen in an Arab country, and what was an added surprise was that the man who thought so highly of the Arabs was a Jew. It was Feldman.

  Feldman, it turned out, had worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II in Burma behind Japanese lines, ironically or perhaps most reasonably in the Mogok region of Burma, where the great rubies were mined. As much a
s he knew, Feldman was there first when the war broke out. Artie never knew more.

  They ate the lavish whipped cream dessert quietly, absorbed in the decadent luxury of sugar and cream.

  “You ever kill a man?” asked Artie.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’ve known you what, eight years? Sometimes I don’t see you for a year on end. Sometimes twice in a week. I always find out something new about you.”

  “So why do you ask if I ever killed someone?”

  “I dunno. OSS. Football. I’m wondering who you are.”

  “Someone who does things right,” said Feldman, raising a finger.

  Claire Andrews was stumped. She had exhausted much of the easy literature on cellars and now had been forced to visit art libraries in lower Manhattan looking for an English saltcellar encrusted with jewels. One art historian told her there was no such thing, that it broke form. Weeks before she might have even suspected Dad didn’t really have a saltcellar. But her research had taught her something incredibly important. She had seen so many differing opinions on subjects that she no longer took someone’s word as Bible. Her opinion counted. She could look at an art historian and insist upon seeing certain volumes, even when he assured her she would not find what she wanted. And when she didn’t, she did not feel she had wasted her time. She had proved to herself another road did not have what she wanted.

  It was not that she was calling other people liars or diminishing the value of information from others. Rather, in this dogged process, tempered by the draining repetition of going through files and checking notes, and having to unsort the repetitious tangles herself, she had gained a respect for her own judgment. It was a thing that had come about not by arrogance but by necessity.

  This was not the research for a term paper where so many organized works hung around waiting for her to pick out chapters like convenient and ripe plums on well-worn paths. This was a search that had never to her knowledge been tried before. And the path she found was the path she had to make, from so many people referring to similar things in different ways, and so many contradicting each other. It was a path made by guesses and assumptions, and those demanded that a person make a judgment. She had to become her own authority even to proceed.