He awoke to Claire’s lips kissing his forehead. The pad was filled, and getting off the couch Artie almost stepped on the .38.
“Let’s go out for some breakfast,” she said. She had that no-sleep energy she used in Bologna, only this time, her eyes were considerably redder.
“Yeah,” said Artie. “Lemme shave.”
“Oh, you can do that later. I’m just hungry, that’s all.”
“Good,” said Artie, and they went out into the quiet streets, with the new red sun over nearby Queens Boulevard, hearing their leather soles on empty concrete, Claire holding her coat where Artie had seen her stuff the pad, and Artie with his gun in his unbuckled holster under his jacket ready to shoot at footsteps.
“Arthur, I wrote everything down because I think best on paper,” she said. “It will be all right.”
“How you gonna get rid of your notes? You got to get rid of them somewhere, and if you get rid of them, they can be found. You can’t even burn it without them reconstructing the writing nowadays. Even a police department can do that and you got Grail and empire on those pages. I saw. They’ll know and it’ll be all over. Even having the bowl may not be as final as those notes.”
“It will be taken care of, Arthur. I’ve worked it out. Also, darling, if I could have figured out some way to get you safely away from this thing, a way you would be safe, I would do it. But Arthur, once they killed me, they would kill you.”
“I’m not leaving, so go ahead.”
She had calculated like a geometry formula. Given that they were up against the British government, and that it would never stop looking for its Grail until it had it, and that it had already killed in that quest, how could Claire and Artie assure their survival, considering that because the bowl was sent to them the British were probably on their way already.
If they did absolutely nothing, they were waiting to die, probably soon. Feldman had been tortured, it was clear now, not to find the ruby but to find the bowl. Feldman might not even have known about the bowl, but the man he got the ruby from would have. Feldman was tortured to reveal that name. It was that person who had sent the Grail. And the reason he did so obviously was to make Claire the sacrificial lamb. That person must have realized what he was up against and probably thought Rawson could find him.
Considering how Rawson so easily found the sapphire in a gray world where thievery was hardly even noticed, considering how he had cornered Feldman, a person even Arthur’s colleagues couldn’t tail, the man who sent the bowl had undoubtedly made the right decision.
Which brought up the question, could they just keep their mouths shut and drop Britain’s Grail in the first Dempsy Dumpster they saw at a construction site?
“I don’t think so,” said Claire. “Maybe that man was counting on me to be stupid enough to talk about my strange package. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve seen nothing from the way Harry Rawson operates to lead me to believe he would not find that man also. And make him talk if he has to make him. And when he talks, he will tell who has the bowl. It’s not a question of whether, really. It’s when. To assume otherwise is self-delusion.”
At this point in the early morning street, with every car heard distinctly even blocks away, Claire brought up what she called the very crucial facts of what they did not know. They did not know that Rawson would not kill them if they contacted him and gave him the poorish bowl sent from Geneva with the wrapping, claiming the receipt of the bowl was a mystery to them. They did not know that they would not disappear some night if they sent the bowl to the British Embassy or the Queen herself. In fact, given how everyone had died, it was probable that they would die. To know was to die.
There was a possibility of some short-term protection, this from going to the news media and announcing all their suspicions, laying out all their facts. At that point, Britain would probably sit back, righteously scoff at the whole thing, and then, after many years had passed, make sure Arthur and Claire, who would by then be known as certified nuts, disappeared on some boat trip somewhere, as Rawson or someone else took the poorish bowl back to Windsor and England. That is, if Rawson were not waiting for them at the house now. Which was more probable than their reaching a press conference alive. Time now was so crucial. They had to assume Rawson was close on the heels of that bowl.
What they needed was for Britain to get its Grail and to know that they would have to pay a dear price for killing them. It had to be in Britain’s self-interest to keep them alive.
For this very dangerous transfer, she was going to need two safe days. And there was only one way to get them.
“You have to make Rawson believe he is getting the poorish bowl. As long as he thinks you are getting it for him, you’re safe. I am probably safe.”
“How do we make him believe that? I mean this guy’s gone in and out of countries, buildings, everything, like a zip code. This is not some little fence somewhere, the guys I’m used to dealing with.”
“Since he’s been around, Arthur, he will more easily recognize greed than any other motive. Look at yourself and your colleagues at One Police Plaza. The last thing they would look for in suspects is heroism, love, nobility, a sense of honor, even though they might have it themselves.”
Artie knew the weight of logic was falling on Claire’s side. Still his stomach said run, his stomach said yell the whole thing from the rooftops and circle the wagons as well as the New York Police Department. He never altogether trusted logic.
He felt cold this spring morning, with the traffic picking up on Queens Boulevard and the smell of freshly brewed coffee coming from a luncheonette down the street. But she was right. Rawson would believe Artie was setting up a buy for her, trying to make some money on Great Britain, possibly even sure Artie felt safe because he was a policeman. That would hold him, and she was right. But not for long, of course. Even down to the maximum of two days holding off Rawson, she was right.
She was right.
“Shit,” said Detective Arthur C. Modelstein of the New York City Police Department, looking up and down Queens Boulevard for the charge of the light brigade or the redcoats or the Royal Air Force in the person of a British gentleman who knew how to take the flesh off people. “Good. Okay. Yeah. What are you going to do?”
“I’ll be all right. I’ll be in Carney, where they tried and did not succeed in running a check on me without my knowing. Bob Truet, who owns the newspaper, told me. So did our police chief, Frank Broyles. They’re all friends of the family. I’ll be safer there. I wish you could have the same protection in New York City.”
He didn’t know how long they had to live, and there was something he had to say if he were going to be the one not to make it.
“Look, I want you to know that if I knew everything was going to turn out like this at the beginning, I was thinking this morning that I would have done it even sooner, no matter what. That’s what I was thinking, Claire.”
Claire’s jaw stiffened, her lips trembled, and she was crying.
“Arthur, don’t say that. Not now. We have work to do. Don’t say that.”
“But I love you.”
“That’s what I don’t want you to say. Not now. I know you love me. Let’s keep our heads about us. All right?”
“Okay,” said Artie, and seeing her cry, he was crying, and they were both crying in the middle of Queens Boulevard, like two idiots, ready to take on the British Empire.
They embraced and kissed, and he tasted the salt from her tears, and he too was a lunatic, because despite it all he was the happiest man in the world.
She hailed a cab for herself, and he asked where she was going.
“To the airport,” she said. “I told you he might be waiting for us back at the apartment. If he is, he probably has broken in, in which case he will see the empty box and the Geneva postmark.”
“You’ve got it?”
“You don’t think I’d leave it with you in New York. You’d be dead. The most dangerous time is when he thinks h
e has it in his hands. Make your phone calls to where he might be. It’s better that he thinks you’re on the make for dough. Good-bye. I love you,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Oh, if he’s at the apartment, don’t shoot him, but don’t let him near you; start talking deal.”
“Wait. Like that you’re going to Carney? No bags, nothing?”
“Safest way to leave an apartment. Good-bye, Arthur. I’ve got to run. I’ll be phoning you as a Mrs. Donaldson. That’s my message that I’m home.”
“When?” he had asked.
“Noon,” she had said.
And she had driven off at 6:45 A.M., with Artie realizing she had solved the problem of disposing of the notes also, very cleanly and logically taking them with her. She had achieved a solution based on a ruthless analysis of the facts they knew. He had seen in a few hours the transformation that had taken months, from the time Claire was a distraught and helpless woman at her father’s death to when she became the woman whose powerful mind had broken a four-hundred-year-old secret.
Artie had made the calls and had gotten one back from Rawson, and now in his squad room the clock minute hand went past twelve, taking his heart with it.
If she were dead, he was going to shoot Rawson in the face. Right out in front of the British Embassy. For Claire. For Feldman. Even for the damned cat. Right out there, unloading the gun very close, where he couldn’t miss.
But he didn’t even want that. He wanted Claire safe, and when the second hand made it 12:03 and forty-seven seconds on the clock on the wall, and a woman, not Claire, said she was Mrs. Donaldson reporting the switch of her engagement ring stone by a local jeweler, Artie felt his life was handed back to him again. He had enough discipline not to thank the woman over and over. Now to push back lunch to supper, giving Claire her first full day.
“You’re not in trouble, are you, dear?” asked Claire’s mother, adjusting the daffodil bouquet she always kept in the main parlor on the cherrywood end table that the original McCaffertys had brought with them to the Ohio Territory in 1702.
“No. Everything is all right. Thank you. It’s fine.”
“You’re not selling drugs, are you, dear?”
“No, Mother. It was just a way I can reach Arthur. He is on special assignment now. They know I’m his girlfriend there, and he’s not supposed to take calls from me at this time.”
“Because if you are somehow caught up in drugs, there are wonderful programs I have been reading about.”
“No, Mother. Thank you for making the call,” said Claire. The house was as light as she remembered; the white curtains were the same, covering the same tall windows over the yard where now crocuses had bloomed and tulips pushed up green through dark earth laden with the water of the melted snow. The white Victorian house on Maple Hill was home, the home of memories, the place you went when you needed a certain kind of safety even though it was no longer the kind of home you would live in. That had left with her childhood and should have left many years before it really did. Before New York. Before Dad’s going. Before everything.
Claire borrowed one of the family cars and drove to Ohio State, where she had a small conference with the head of the archeology department, and then drove back to Carney, where she had coffee in Bob Truet’s office. He asked her about her life and about the detective he had heard she had fallen in love with.
“I’m sorry, Bob, I have.”
“To be honest, Claire, I don’t know why you didn’t fall in love with me,” he said in that tepid way of his. He was so comfortable in the soft tweed jacket and the oxford shirt and the paisley tie, being the most secure man in Carney, and keeping it that way. Everything about him was rounded and balanced. There was not a corner in the man. Placid lips. Placid brown hair.
“It certainly would have made life easier,” she said.
“You use more makeup now in some places and less in others. It’s attractive. More attractive. But I like you the other way better, I must say,” said Bob.
Funny, she could hear his twang now and realized, because of that, that her own Ohio accent had to have softened. She had been afraid that perhaps Bob Truet might seem awfully attractive now, with that patina of safety, the old times. But she had to agree with Arthur, even if she knew everything were going to turn out this way, she would have done the same thing, but maybe sooner. And possibly stop the research a bit earlier.
“I want a favor, Bob,” she said.
He leaned back in his large swivel chair in the largest office in Carney, and did not say, as he had always said before, that all she had to do was name it.
“I would like to borrow your office tomorrow or possibly the next day,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I want to meet an Englishman here in a newspaper office. It adds a certain authority.”
“About what?”
“Private business,” said Claire.
“I’m afraid, Claire, that the Carney Daily News engages in a public trust of providing the news. Even if I knew what your business was, I don’t think I would give over this office to you.”
“This is the most important thing in my life, Bob. It will in no way cause any harm to your newspaper, which I might add was extraordinarily discreet with the stories concerning my father.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t buy your public trust when it serves me only when you think you have a chance with me. But let me be more specific. I would consider your denying this thing I need, which will cause you no harm, an attack on me. Understand this now. This is not a game, and there will not be years of gossip. This is a matter of life and death, and I have got to have it.”
“No.”
“I can’t believe you said that, Bob.”
“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” said Bob Truet, at the door of his office.
Claire did not answer him.
It was a short ride home, interrupted by hellos from old friends who had to be greeted.
By the time she got to the great white house with its large yard and the new dog running in the back, Claire had asked herself just how much did she need to have a local newspaper. It was an awful lot.
Her mother answered the door herself and grabbed Claire’s arm immediately, pulling her inside.
“I just spoke with Bob Truet. He said you came to him, desperate for the use of his office, and said you were in trouble. He said he had turned you down.”
“He’s hurt, I think.”
“That worm isn’t hurt. You’ve got an office when you need it. And he’ll have it cleaned if you want. The place is never dusted. He’s got all those silly awards that are just magnets for dust, actually his protection against someone saying he is a sniveling little worm. Did you really tell him your life depended on it?”
“In a way, yes.”
“You’ll have it,” said her mother. “Come, you need a stiff drink.”
“I could use some sleep,” said Claire.
“You’re home, dear. You’re among your own.”
“I know,” said Claire, who hugged her mother, and found perhaps she knew her for the first time.
When Claire awoke before supper, she found out her mother had told Bob Truet, and by implication all the Truets, that if any harm came to Claire, the McCaffertys, every one of them, would consider Bob Truet responsible. He would be starting a feud in this small town that certainly would not end in his lifetime, at least.
“Now, dear,” her mother said. “What sort of trouble are you in?”
“It’s not trouble like you think it’s trouble. It’s something I have to do that is dangerous, because if I don’t, I could be killed.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
“I would decidedly not like to. Trust me.”
“You sound like your father.”
“No. I think things through a bit more carefully.”
“That’s our side,” said her mother and did not bring up the subject again, except to assure
Claire that if she wanted to store a package in Bob Truet’s safe, she most certainly could count on him. For just about anything.
They had a long talk that evening, and Claire realized she had never known her mother, even though she could spot most of her reactions in advance. She had never known her mother as a woman.
And she discovered this as she described Arthur, and her mother asked questions about him, some quite knowledgeable for someone Claire thought had been just a guilt-dispensing overseer of the past.
It was a hard conversation because Claire was worried about Arthur. And her mother spotted this.
“He’s a policeman, but he really drifted into that job because it was easier than pressing on in school,” said Claire.
“Lacks ambition?”
“He doesn’t want trouble from the world.”
“I don’t know what world he thought he was born into,” said Lenore McCafferty Andrews, who poured a white wine for Claire and a double martini for herself.
“I love him.”
“I can see your face, Claire. You know, you really couldn’t come back here to live if you married him. I don’t think he would feel comfortable.”
“Him or you?” asked Claire.
“Him. I already love him,” said her mother.
“He is a doll. He gets so excited about things,” said Claire, shaking her head. “And over the wrong things.”
“Men always do. You know, I think I will visit you often in New York. I may get an apartment there … No, don’t worry, I’m not going to be a mother-in-law close by. I have been thinking about having an affair.”
“With whom?”
“I don’t know yet, but I’ve seriously been thinking about having one for quite a while.”
“How long?” asked Claire.
“Twenty years,” said her mother, laughing hysterically, and Claire joined her.
Artie checked the chambers of the “tulip” he had given Claire for Christmas. It looked good. There were no obstructions. Besides, he always had his own gun for backup.
He was not going to let Claire face Rawson alone. There was going to be no Harry Rawson. He was too dangerous. He would try to use the tulip to kill Rawson, and if that failed, if the gun did not fire well, he would use his own pistol and drop the .38 he had picked up off the kids near Houston Street on Rawson’s chest and claim the British agent tried to kill him. Or beat him to death with his hands. He was not going to let Rawson near Claire.
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