Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  “Just kidding, Artie,” said McKiernan.

  “Why lie, Denny?” said Modelstein bitterly.

  Artie left the morgue quickly and went home to change his clothes and bring his suit right to the cleaners. The sweet stench of death, as every detective knew, stayed in the clothes. He wanted to get away from it, all death. Arthur Modelstein knew it would happen to him one day. He didn’t like the idea of it, had never become quite reconciled to it, but hoped that since it had to happen it would occur while he was busy doing something else, sort of come up on him when he wasn’t home. Then he would be gone and he wouldn’t know it had happened anyway, sort of a best conclusion to a bad situation.

  In a way, he felt he had to warn Feldman and the girl, Feldman because Claire had all but proved he was probably going to be a traffic point in some way for the ruby, and Claire because now there was a second death involved. This meant her father’s death might not have been accidental. And she might by extension be in some real and serious danger now.

  “Norman, I want you to know there is now blood attached to that ruby. If you should deal in it, you will be an accessory after the fact.”

  “That’s like telling a furrier minks suffered to make a pelt,” said Feldman. “Wonderful warning.” The pouch of a face was now drawn up in an exquisitely joyful grin.

  “What’s so funny? I’m talking about murder one. You can tell your friends in the big deal gem business that there is a murder charge associated with every stone in that cellar,” said Artie.

  Artie, standing beside the desk, dropped a copy of the Scotland Yard report Captain Rawson had given him. Feldman, his feet up on the desk between the many phones, with surprising agility, picked it up, glanced at it, took the paper clip holding the pages together off the document, opened his right drawer, dropped the clip into a white lacquered box the size of an English muffin, and handed the report back to Artie.

  “There are laws in this city and this state and this country,” said Artie. “Stolen gems. Accessory after the fact. You can go to jail. Anyone can go to jail.”

  “Go play with the Hassidim, will you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m busy. Go ask that pretty lady. She’ll figure it out.”

  At least, thought Artie, she might leave now that there was real danger. He wondered why he even cared anymore, but he did stop off at her place that evening. Was he still interested in her? He didn’t really know, nor did he know in what way he might be interested in her. She was like some puppy he had gotten stuck with and was trying to find a right home for. Of course, he had never wanted to drape himself over a puppy.

  He was not prepared for what he saw when she opened her apartment door, and it almost knocked him off his feet. Claire Andrews was dazzling. She wore a black sheath that clung to her body like glistening paint, revealing one bare white shoulder, setting off her fine blond features. Her hair was drawn back in a French braid, intertwined with pearls. She carried white gloves, and when she smiled, she shamed diamonds. Claire Andrews was going out for the evening.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, extending a hand.

  “Sure,” said Artie, realizing his mouth was open. What was he going to tell her—that he had always known she was beautiful, but he never knew she could be absolutely stunning?

  “I came on police business,” he said, and as he entered he saw that the gentleman with her in a perfect tuxedo was Harry Rawson, certainly born to evenings like this. He smoked a cigarette and looked as though he were posing for a men’s magazine. Both of them did. They could run off together to rich-people land.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Artie.

  “No, no. Please,” said Claire.

  “I see you two got together,” said Artie, looking at the British captain.

  “I phoned Captain Rawson. His London office told me he was at the Sherry Netherland. We share a common interest, as you know.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Reasonable,” said Artie. The words were hard coming out, and he didn’t know why he felt quite so embarrassed. What had he been protecting? At this moment he felt very much like the fool, and as quickly as possible he told them both about Battissen’s death.

  “How was he killed?” asked Rawson.

  “Knife wound like … Claire’s father.”

  “I hope this doesn’t bother you, Miss Andrews, but may I ask Detective Modelstein more questions about these deaths?”

  “It does, but do. Please,” said Claire.

  And so Artie told the elegant British captain that Homicide said Battissen had been killed with a thrust above the ear into the posterior cerebral lobe. And of her father’s death Claire could elaborate.

  “I got to leave, sorry. Thank you. By the way, Captain, Homicide is in charge of this case now. In America, life takes precedence over property. Good day, both.”

  “Are you all right, Arthur?” asked Claire.

  “Sure,” said Artie. The word was hard coming out. Somehow he felt betrayed, and her very concern was offensive. But what was he feeling betrayed about?

  And even asking that question told him that night that this lady was not good for him. She had him talking to himself. It was a discomfort and a sense of ill being he had seen in others and learned to avoid. The operative word here was avoid. Applicable totally. And with ferocity he enjoyed Trudy and dinner that night at his place, cooking kosher hot dogs and telling Trudy several times how comfortable it was to be with her.

  Less than two miles from Artie’s Nineteenth Street apartment, Claire Andrews dined on salmon mousse, fillet of guinea hen with a wonderful Haitian salad, and wine from a vineyard Captain Rawson personally assured her would never allow an intolerable year.

  It was dinner in a way she had never known, with Captain Rawson explaining how certain dishes differed around the world. He was a gracious guide to fine dining without being overbearing, rather like an exceptional wine. She noticed he used the waiters effortlessly where her father would order them around. And the waiters seemed to appreciate someone who knew how to dine. And they were a beautiful couple, too. She sensed the restaurant was glad to have them there. She felt important in a way she had never known before, important just by being elegant. She wished she smoked because she knew she could do it so graciously now. She laughed at his dry humor.

  He talked of England with the deprecating charm of the truly secure. He talked of Arab sheikdoms and the friends he had met and ways he had learned among them, and of sharing a blood red sun setting over scorched dry rocks like a mantle of the desert. He knew the streams of history and the absolutely fascinating rivulets that fed into them, so that for a man of his education and breeding the world was a tapestry of unending threads. And this tapestry he spread before Claire Andrews as the real feast of the evening.

  “I suspect America may be unique among countries. You’re a land of beginnings, and that is a wondrous thing. The rest of us on this planet live on platforms of the past. Tradition, custom, continuity, whatever we can get of it. It supports us, but really it keeps us down,” said Captain Rawson. “I guess that’s true of all supports, what?” It was not a question to be answered but to be enjoyed.

  Captain Rawson allowed the good brandy to heat to the warmth of his hands in a snifter. One of them had been injured by many tiny little cuts that looked so painful. He had gotten them gardening and said only that they healed better in the air.

  She wondered what sort of tool could do that sort of damage.

  “If I knew what it was, do you think I would have made hamburger of my palm?” And that was so funny. What a beautiful answer. They laughed. The world was laughing with them.

  It was all so elegant, people stealing glances at them, the maître d’ sending over courtesy drinks, the scent of orchids about them in little silver vases, and the perfect darkness in the corners, with the food arriving in the white-gloved hands of courteous waiters.

  It was absolutely a shame even to ruffle the mood, but when Cap
tain Rawson brought up the cellar, Claire took out her notebook and pen from her ever-so-delicate silver purse.

  “In your claim you didn’t say whether your family purchased it or had it made. Which?” asked Claire.

  “Why do you ask?” Rawson inhaled the aroma of the brandy.

  “We’re competing for ownership, aren’t we? I have to prove my father innocent.”

  “Has it occurred to you that your father in all good conscience purchased it from someone who might have stolen it from the Rawsons?”

  “That among many things, but it doesn’t really get us to the bottom of things and I am not looking for a whitewash of my father. I know him to be an honest man, and the truth of all of this can only help. So please, if you would be so kind as to answer my questions. Did you buy it or have it made?” The pen poised over the notepad.

  “Had it made,” said Rawson. He stopped warming the brandy.

  “Who was the goldsmith?”

  “I don’t know, my good woman. This was a few centuries ago.”

  “Well, you see it does matter, because my father’s cellar to the best of my recollection had no maker’s mark. Ever since King Edward established the London Assay Office in the fourteenth century, every piece of gold had to have a maker’s mark. You can tell just by looking at it who did it.”

  “It’s just possible it wasn’t made in London,” said Captain Rawson. His voice was steel. Claire did not let it bother her.

  “If it was made in England, and if it was gold and did not have a maker’s mark, it could be a capital offense at the time. Killing a peasant wasn’t, but playing with gold was. Your laws.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t made in England. Perhaps my ancestors bought it in Italy.”

  “This is not an Italian cellar. They would not use this much gold. My father’s cellar was a trunk of gold. It was English. You see, what we are discovering is that there are some possible discrepancies in your claim.”

  The captain laughed with warm tolerance. Claire continued.

  “Moving on toward something more recent, why aren’t you providing a picture of the cellar?”

  “I doubt it is still in one piece.”

  “It certainly was in one piece in 1941 when the gem prints were made. Why not a photograph, then?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rawson. He killed his cigarette in the ashtray with a crush of a thumb.

  “Now, while you don’t have any sort of picture of the cellar, besides modern gem parameters, I see here a ‘poorish bowl.’ What’s that?”

  “The interior, I believe. Waiter.” Rawson leaned back, clicking his fingers loudly.

  “Is something wrong, sir?” asked the waiter.

  “No. All fine, thank you,” he said.

  “Because if anything is wrong …”

  “It’s fine. The check.”

  “I hope I haven’t spoiled the dinner,” said Claire.

  “Not at all,” said Rawson. He gulped the last of the brandy and drummed his fingers.

  “Because if I have, I’m sorry. Would you let me pay for half of the dinner?”

  “No. This is a business expense. As you know, I am only here to reclaim family property.”

  “I feel awful,” said Claire. “This was a lovely dinner and I spoiled it.” Of course she did not mention that she probably would not have gone out with him if he hadn’t suggested it instead of a business meeting.

  “You haven’t spoiled a thing,” he said graciously. In the cab back to her apartment, she went on about the poorish bowl, noting, too, the amazing number of jewels on the cellar. It was the use of these jewels, so different in form from other cellars, that posed what she considered the ultimate question.

  Riding up in the lift to her flat, Rawson learned with horror that she had only acquired her research techniques over the last two weeks. She hadn’t even known it was a cellar until the thief Battissen told her. She was new to all of this, and who knew how extraordinary she would be a month from now. Could a chance footnote in history lead this rapacious mind to tear away four centuries of British silence and discover, in ways Rawson could not fathom now, that this cellar indeed covered what Britain held as the Holy Grail?

  It was cause for concern, but not panic. There were still four centuries, four centuries in which it was a kept secret. If he could not have unraveled it without that inscription in the Round Tower, then she certainly couldn’t. Still, he was unnerved at how far she had come.

  At the doorway he used all the power of the charm he knew he had in abundance to create an atmosphere of romance. He would seduce her and then with no more than a simple misdirection get her going into one of the infinite vast areas in which historians had lost their lifetimes.

  He certainly had done worse for Crown and country in Banai. This would be far more effective than anything he had done there. He smiled down at the pretty face and lowered to her lips.

  The red lips beneath whispered: “I was wondering, Captain, you never mentioned royal blood. Weren’t saltcellars the province of the Crown usually?”

  “No,” said Rawson.

  “Which of your relatives wrote ‘poorish bowl,’ and how did he know about it? It seems like sort of an odd thing for a family to pass down unless it was important.”

  “My good woman,” said Rawson wearily, “they may have passed it down, but not to me. And I will make a deal with you. I will tell you whatever I find, and you tell me whatever you find.”

  “I can’t promise that,” said Claire.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure our interests are the same,” she said. She did not invite him into her apartment, and if she had, Rawson was not sure he would go. She said again she really did hate to spoil such a lovely dinner.

  The real problem was in the New York City morgue, and Rawson prevailed on Detective Modelstein to give him access to the body of the slain art dealer.

  “Okay with me. It’s homicide anyhow,” said Detective Modelstein.

  Rawson detected a faint hint of frost. Was something going on between him and the woman? Still, that was minor. He had to make sure of what he had heard from the detective in her apartment. He wanted to see for himself the thrust into the posterior cerebral lobe.

  “You know this guy?” asked a Detective Marino.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Rawson as the sheet came down over the death-darkened face already decomposing.

  “Yes, or no?” asked Detective McKiernan.

  “No,” said Rawson, looking at neither of them. With a gloved hand, he lifted the head, until he saw the mark just under the hairline, a dark encrustation the size of a dime. The pathologist apparently had cleaned away part of the wound, and Rawson could see the weapon made a hole the diameter of a pencil.

  It was a thin instrument, and the thrust was alarmingly impeccable. It was perhaps the cleanest death blow he had ever seen. The art dealer was dead in an instant. The person who delivered it was a far cry above any of the New York hoodlums with bombs and machine guns that Americans liked to consider professional killers.

  The person who had done this to the corpse was far more dangerous than anyone Rawson had expected to find on this side of the Atlantic.

  “You sure you don’t know him. You looked like you knew him,” said Detective McKiernan. “You sure as hell recognized something.”

  Rawson smiled and shook his head.

  “Sorry, no,” he said. He was sure none of these detectives even suspected what they were all up against.

  XI

  Not only would he yield no inch but his strength never failed nor flagged.

  —High History of the Holy Grail, ca. 1200

  It was a joy. It was a blessing a thousandfold, and Mordechai Baluzzian almost praised Allah in a Farsi phrase so common in Tehran bazaars that Iranian Jews like him used it, too.

  The Ashkenazi had made a mistake, and not just any Ashkenazi, but a dealer in diamonds, and not just any dealer in diamonds, but a rabbi’s son, and not just any r
abbi’s son, but the son of the leader of the Linzer Hasidim himself.

  Baluzzian, recently arrested by Detective Modelstein, now had something against that detective’s beloved Ashkenazi, those prideful Jews who would not share a market with their Iranian Jewish brothers, so arrogant with honor of honesty, their famous “word” on their famous “street.” So much for their word and their street.

  Cut diamonds of gem quality had come into New York for a sale, but they were not being marketed on the street. “Why?” asked Baluzzian and other Iranian dealers. They had to be stolen. But the asking price was virtually that of the market. These were not prices of stolen merchandise. Why? The Iranians not being fools, and also never being invited into the market for stones of this quality, four of which were supposed to be blue-white flawless, took some reasonable precautions before making an offer.

  They had people followed. And one of those people kept stopping off for visits at the house of the Ashkenazi rabbi’s son, who was a dealer on the street.

  Suddenly the good fortune in dealing such stones paled before the prospect of such delicious revenge. Now to be certain of their good fortune, Mordechai and two other Iranians made complicated offers of payments, on inspections, on sales—different prices for different deals. And before an answer could be given, always one of the negotiators stopped at the rabbi’s son.

  The answer was simple. The rabbi’s son knew they were illegal in some respect and thought the Iranians would never discover that fact. This was evidence. Only one question remained.

  How best to make the Ashkenazi pay? And the answer was public humiliation. Make them go into the courts and be tried in front of the world, in front of Gentiles no less. Show the Ashkenazi to be the basest of thieves so that they could never look down their noses again at Iranians who did business as they had always done it in the Tehran bazaar, living up to those codes a thousand years before America was even discovered.

  What was needed was a public arrest. But could one trust the New York City Police to pursue justice against an Ashkenazi rabbi’s son as it would against an Iranian?