The Girl in the Face of the Clock

by Charles Mathes

  But the whole thing made no sense. Why would a Jewish woman have a cross? And Zalman Rosengolts sounded like a Jewish name. Why would a Jewish company choose a cross as their symbol? Why would Sylvie carry a three-dimensional version of the Rosengolts maker’s mark halfway around the world when she was fleeing for her life?

  Jane took the dragonfly from around her neck and examined it closely for the first time. The cross was so heavy because the joined open-ended tubes were solid inside—you couldn’t look through and see light at the other end. The thicker top tube had a square opening; the opening of the bottom tapering tube was slightly striated. You could still see traces of gilding in the subtle details that were etched into the wing-shaped crosspiece. The piercing was probably just decorative, not designed to accommodate the ribbon from which the cross presently hung. There were no markings of any kind.

  Jane replaced the cross around her neck and righted the clock, which stared back, its empty face revealing nothing, not even a time of day. She felt her eyes filling with tears.

  The past week had been a nightmare. Her father’s death, Perry Mannerback’s suspicious behavior, the break-in at her apartment. And now here she was with a new mystery: a brass cross that had something to do with her grandmother’s hideous clock. If only there were some family member she could ask—but of course there wasn’t.

  Fighting back her emotions, Jane returned the clock to its box and placed it back on the ledge. Then she locked the basement and went upstairs.

  Her apartment felt impossibly small. She picked up the telephone and asked for international information. Several minutes later, an English-speaking operator in Belgium made her final pronouncement.

  “No, I am sorry. There is no Rosengolts et fils, no Rosengolts at all listed in Antwerp.”

  “Thank you,” said Jane, hanging up the receiver. If there was no Rosengolts et fils any longer, she couldn’t very well ask them about crosses, could she? That was that.

  But it wasn’t. Jane knew she couldn’t simply leave things this way, couldn’t walk away from yet another unanswered question. The tiny studio suddenly seemed claustrophobic. Jane felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She nearly jumped into the air when the phone rang.

  “I just thought I would call, see how you were doing,” said Perry Mannerback.

  “Not terrific,” said Jane.

  “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Leila Peach was the name of the model in your painting,” Jane blurted.

  “Oh, is that so?” said Perry, his voice suddenly several notes higher.

  “Yes, that’s so,” said Jane. “She apparently was involved with my father.”

  “Never met her.”

  His voice was ridiculously loud. He was lying.

  “Please, Perry. Can’t you just …”

  “You can come back, you know,” he said, cutting her off. “I’d be very happy if you would work for me again.”

  “The police say my father was murdered.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Perry in a lower, more subdued voice. “They want to speak with me. My lawyer told me. They want to know why I went and saw Aaron that night.”

  “What night?” asked Jane.

  “The night he died. They found out I was his only visitor.”

  A chill went down Jane’s spine.

  “You mean, that’s why you didn’t go all the way to Seattle with me? You came back to New York to see my father? That was your urgent business?”

  “That’s right. Wanted to see how he was doing. Poor man. Poor, poor man.”

  “Perry …”

  “Must run, have important things to do. Good to talk with you.”

  “But …”

  The line went dead. Jane sat staring at the receiver. What was the point of kidding herself? It had been Perry who had killed her father. It must have been Perry. He had done it not once, but twice. First eight years ago, when he had pushed him down the stairs despite Aaron Sailor’s last desperate plea, then again on Monday night as her father lay helpless in his hospital bed. But why?

  The walls seemed to close in again. Jane couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stay in the apartment another minute. She grabbed a pair of sunglasses and charged out, down the four flights of stairs and into the brilliant afternoon.

  She walked straight across Ninetieth Street until she came to Central Park. The park was beautiful in the spring, an oasis for New Yorkers any time of year. The sounds of the city suddenly vanished and the brownstones and apartment buildings were replaced with greenery and trees.

  Jane made a winding course down past oaks and blooming apple trees, past the lake filled with rowboating lovers and the platoons of in-line skaters and bicyclists.

  It was Saturday and the park teemed with people, most on foot like herself. As she got closer to the Zoo, the path became busier. Musicians serenaded the tourists with everything from saxophones to Chinese zithers. Jugglers juggled. Clowns clowned. Entrepreneurs on either side of the path offered services ranging from charcoal portraits to backrubs to writing your name on a grain of rice.

  In the rest of the country you drove to the corner to get a newspaper. New York was one of the few places left in America where people could walk for miles and think nothing of it. Jane walked. Her mind emptied. Her spirit was calmed by the crowd and the exercise. At Fifty-ninth Street, the park opened up and disgorged its river of pedestrians into the bustling city.

  Jane walked down Fifth Avenue, part of the moving sea of people, not knowing where she was going, not caring. St. Patrick’s Cathedral passed by on the left. Rockefeller Center on the right. At Thirty-ninth Street, Lord & Taylor tempted her only briefly, the shoe stores and souvenir stands not at all. Suddenly the Empire State Building loomed ahead, surrounded by human walls of tourists and double-decker buses. Jane crossed over to Madison and stopped in front of the business division of the New York Public Library in the southeast corner of what had once been the B. Altman department store.

  Jane hadn’t consciously intended coming here, but now found herself entering the sleek new library and going down the stairs. A vast room full of computer terminals stretched ahead of her. She had been here before to do research on theatres, so she already knew how things worked. She punched in her name at a terminal and was able to get a reservation right away. She sat down before one of the dozens of computers available to the public. An Internet search engine was already on the screen.

  Jane typed the words “Zalman Rosengolts et fils, Antwerp” into the inquiry box and clicked the search box with the pointer of her mouse. Within a few minutes, she had found what she was looking for.

  “Rosengolts et fils have been purveyors of fine china ware since 1921,” read the description in an Internet shopping directory for London. “Originally of Antwerp, Belgium, the firm reestablished itself in England after the Second World War. It offers an outstanding array of fine wares for the discriminating purchaser.”

  Next to the name was a logo: a small castle within a circle, not a dragonfly cross at all.

  More puzzled than ever, Jane printed the page with the phone number and address, then pushed her chair back and stood up. Now she could ask Rosengolts et fils about crosses to her heart’s content. All she needed to do was call. Or she could follow Imre’s advice and take a vacation, go to London, talk to them in person.

  It was a crazy thought, of course, but tempting. Jane ambled back up the stairs and out of the library into the beautiful late afternoon sunshine on Madison Avenue. People didn’t just drop what they were doing and go to Europe. Not people with her bank account at any rate.

  But wouldn’t it be nice to get away from all the pain and sadness of the past few days? Jane asked herself. And while she was there, she could look up Leila Peach. Would Leila Peach be able to tell her what had happened to Aaron Sailor eight years ago? Would she be able to supply the explanation that Perry Mannerback refused to, and perhaps his motive for murder?

  Wasn’t there something e
lse that Jane wanted to do in London, somebody she wanted to see? It was a moment before she smiled, remembering who it was. Valentine Treves.

  Twelve

  The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was a well-kept section of London, known for its museums, embassies, handsome residential streets, and famous shops, including Harrods. Queen Victoria had been born here, at Kensington Palace, and the area had been home to such luminaries as Winston Churchill, J. M. W. Turner, and Oscar Wilde.

  Jane couldn’t believe that she was actually here in England. All it had taken was a credit card, plus a travel agent who was able to get her a last-minute cancellation on a six-day Royal Britannia tour package that had left Tuesday night. She was now the proud possessor of a room with semi-private bath at the Tipplebury Gardens Park Hotel in the Cromwell Road at a cost of merely an arm and a leg.

  Jane was still stiff and sore from the overnight flight. Her economy seat on the plane had been significantly less comfortable than the accommodations on her recent flight to Seattle. She hadn’t slept more than a few minutes, it seemed. The egg sandwich she’d gulped down at the airport after clearing Customs at eleven this morning—six a.m. New York time—had left her both bloated and hungry, and the Cromwell Road turned out to be the seedy underbelly of this desirable area rather than its tenderloin.

  Still, Jane felt better than she had in days. As she left the little hotel and walked into South Kensington proper, past the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum over into Knightsbridge with its smart boutiques and busy storefronts, her problems felt far away.

  According to the foldout map she had gotten at a newsstand near the hotel (run by Asians and complete with a large Coca-Cola sign out front), Rosengolts et fils in Mortimer Street was only a few inches away. London was far larger than Manhattan, Jane knew, but after the cramped night on the plane, she was determined to get there on foot. She had a fair sense of the city, having been here twice before—once for a week when she was in college, the second time for a few days as she passed through on her way to the Edinburgh Festival. Besides, walking was not just the best way to see a city, it was fun. You were supposed to have fun on a vacation.

  It was early afternoon. The day was bright and sunny, for which the Londoners seemed surprised but pleased. The sidewalks were filled with people. Their pace was nearly as brisk as that of New Yorkers. London was a walking town.

  Leaving the bustle of the city momentarily behind, Jane cut through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, a huge area of stately trees and strolling people. As she followed the road indicated on her map, crossing the long Serpentine Pond and heading toward Victoria Gate, Jane breathed in the strangely different air and enjoyed the sights. Men in bowler hats and unwarranted umbrellas. Teenagers with blue hair, tattoos, and rivets through their cheeks. Authentic nannies pushing authentic perambulators filled with authentic English babies (who looked pretty much like babies from anywhere else). Faces from every race and every nation on earth. London was as cosmopolitan a town as New York.

  Oxford Street on the other side of the vast park was another world, a bustling commercial street of department stores and chain outlets pressed together end to end like the downtown of a city in the Midwest. The sidewalks overflowed with pedestrians and window-shoppers. The streets were jammed with buses, taxis, and a few dangerous-looking cyclists.

  Past Oxford Circus, Jane turned up a street filled with offices and showrooms and quickly found herself on Mortimer, a busy but undistinguished thoroughfare filled mostly with office buildings, punctuated by a few Italian cafés and a pub or two.

  When she looked at her watch, she found that more than an hour had passed since she had left the hotel. New York felt a million miles away. Imre had been right. Getting away from her troubles was just what she needed. Jane felt exhilarated and free as she approached the address she had been looking for.

  It was a rather dreary little building, sandwiched between two larger gray edifices. Floral china plates and chargers filled the window. The name “Rosengolts et fils” appeared in discreet lettering on a sign above the navy blue door. Jane took a deep breath, let it out, then entered. As she did, a little bell rang.

  The interior was larger than Jane had expected, a single room packed from floor to its high ceiling with chinaware, everything from demitasses to soup tureens, most of it decorated with old-fashioned floral patterns. Two different ladders were set up to reach the elevated merchandise. Wooden counters stretched the length of the shop on either side, manned by a pair of Dickensian-looking salesclerks, one male, one female, both with equally frozen expressions.

  Jane approached the woman. She was a dowdy individual in her fifties, with dusty-looking hair and the eyes of a mouse. The pasty-faced male clerk stood like a statue in a cheap suit behind the opposite counter, looking on.

  “Hi,” said Jane. “My name is Jane Sailor.”

  “How may we serve you, Miss Sailor?” replied the woman.

  “Is there a manager I could speak with? Or perhaps the owner?”

  “That would be most irregular,” said the woman, looking away. “Mr. Rosengolts does not usually see customers.”

  “I hope he’ll make an exception for me,” said Jane. “I’ve come all the way from America to show him something.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “It’s a personal matter,” said Jane. “Won’t you please ask?”

  The woman stared at her fingers for another few seconds, apparently waiting to hear if there was anything more. Then, still not meeting Jane’s eyes, she picked up a telephone intercom.

  “A Miss Sailor from America wishes to see you, Mr. Rosengolts,” she said.

  Jane studied the rows of plates and shelves of serving pieces. Most of the designs were too precious or overdone for her taste, but a few simpler pieces caught her eye.

  “Yes, sir,” said the clerk into the phone. “Jane Sailor. She says she has brought something for you to look at. No, sir. She said it was personal. Yes, I understand. Very well, sir.”

  With a surprised expression, the woman put the receiver back into its cradle and turned to face Jane. “Mr. Rosengolts will see you, Miss Sailor. Follow me.”

  Jane followed her through a curtain at the rear of the store, down a passageway crammed with stacked crates full of china, some open, spilling their straw packing on the floor. At the end of the passage was a door. The clerk knocked once and entered, ushering Jane into a small, cluttered office.

  “Miss Jane Sailor,” announced the woman in a tiny voice.

  An elderly man looked up from behind a battered old desk. There was an open ledger in front of him with a pencil on top of it, as if he had just stopped writing. He didn’t speak, just stared.

  The mousy clerk scurried away. The old man rose. He was probably in his seventies, Jane decided, tall and thin, with shrewd hard eyes, a sallow complexion, and a few gray wisps of hair. He wore a double-breasted black suit with a garish pinstripe, a blue shirt, and a wildly florid tie.

  “Please, please, come in, come in,” he said in an unctuous voice, waving Jane to the office’s only other chair, a stiff, armless affair. His accent was a bright Cockney with a faint touch of something else, something vaguely Eastern European. “Sit down, make yourself comfortable.”

  “Are you Zalman Rosengolts?” asked Jane, doing her best to comply.

  The man smiled as if Jane had made a very funny joke, then shook his head.

  “Zalman was my grandfather. He died many years ago, as did my father. No, I am Isidore Rosengolts, the fils of the fils. And you are Miss Jane Sailor. From America.”

  “Yes. New York.”

  “Curious place, America,” said Isidore Rosengolts, tapping the tips of his fingers together. “One of my grandchildren lives there. Wants to make a lot of money and thinks America is where you have to go to do that. Selling fine china is not good enough for anyone these days.”

  Jane looked around. There was not a photograph or a picture, not
hing personal in the room. Steel shelving stood against walls stacked with the same wooden boxes as outside. The linoleum on the floor looked as if it had been there since the Blitz. There was a musty smell in the air.

  “So, Miss Jane Sailor,” said Isidore Rosengolts in the overly friendly voice of a salesman. “I understand you have something to show me. May I ask what it is?”

  “It’s a cross.”

  “A cross?” asked Rosengolts, raising an eyebrow.

  Jane dug into the pocket of her slacks and produced the dragonfly cross, entwined with its black ribbon.

  “It was my grandmother’s.”

  She passed the cross across the desk to Rosengolts, who studied it, expressionless.

  “Do you recognize it?” she asked. “I think it has something to do with your company.”

  “How did you come to us?” said Rosengolts, carefully ignoring her question. “How did you know the name Rosengolts?”

  “It was on the bottom of the clock.”

  “Clock?”

  “It’s a rather … unusual … thing, made of ceramic, about this big,” said Jane, indicating with her hands. “There are clockfaces with numerals but no hands on both sides. My grandmother brought it with her from Belgium when she came to America in the forties.”

  “We used to be in Antwerp before the war,” said the old man slowly.

  “I know,” said Jane. “Rosengolts et fils, Antwerpen, is on the bottom of the clock. Along with a mark in the shape of this same dragonfly cross. But actually it’s the clock that I’m more interested in. Anything you can tell me about it would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Do you have this clock with you? May I see it?”

  “It’s back in New York.”

  Isidore Rosengolts stared at her, his face still without expression.

  “It’s hard to know for sure without seeing it, but I would guess that your clock is one of my grandfather’s pieces. He did all kinds of ceramic things back in the thirties. Clocks. Flowerpots. Mirror frames. They are all rather … well, you are being very diplomatic to use the word ‘unusual.’”