The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  The knife wounds in her arm and hand placed pools off­limits, though, and just knowing she could not swim for several weeks knotted the muscles in her neck even tighter.

  On the radio, the anxious drive of a Bach harpsichord concerto was starting to affect her like fingernails scraped across a blackboard.

  Abruptly, she shoved the paper aside and went and changed into jeans and a bulky blue sweater.

  “I’m going to walk along the river,” she told Roman. “If anyone calls, tell them I should be back around noon.”

  “If you pass a deli, pick up some water biscuits,” Roman said, without looking up from a fascinating article on a recently published Sumerian dictionary which could probably be understood by less than three hundred scholars worldwide. As the Bach concerto tinkled to an end, he began a reminder to himself on a notecard—“Where have all the Sumerians gone?”—and hesitated, his cluttered mind puzzled. Now what made him want to add “long time passing” to that question?

  The city of New York began as a seaport and it remains an important gateway to the country, but at one time the Hudson was as clogged with traffic as Fifth Avenue at lunchtime. Tugs, ferries, fireboats, garbage scows, excursion boats, police launches, yachts, and barges jostled beneath the bows of huge freighters and sleek-lined passenger ships like the Nieuw Amsterdam, the Liberté, the Michelangelo, the Queen Mary, or the Independence. Weekly listings of arrivals and departures once filled many column inches of newsprint.

  In those days, champagne corks popped while streamers, balloons, and brilliant confetti swirled down from railings to piers. Whistles blew, gangplanks lifted, and the great ships moved majestically out into the channel past flags from every seagoing nation in the world. A hundred busy piers had lined the West Side of Manhattan Island from the Battery up to West Fifty-ninth Street.

  Now those piers which remained lay rotting and abandoned, fenced off with warning signs. The glamour and excitement of travel had shifted to LaGuardia and Kennedy. Instead of days on the Queen Mary the rich and clever crisscrossed the Atlantic in hours on the Concorde.

  Sigrid’s street led straight down to the river and was lined with commercial buildings whose declining fortunes matched those of the docks. Until recently the elevated West Side Highway had stood here, speeding cars above the trucks that serviced the piers and jammed the intersections of West Street below. Time had taken a toll on it, too. Declared unsafe for vehicular traffic, huge sections of the highway had been pulled down and hauled away, opening up a wide, if not exactly lovely, vista of the docks and terminals of Hoboken and Jersey City across the river.

  City planners had hoped to create Westway here eventually, a massive four-mile landfill with an underground highway and a riverfront esplanade of parks and high-priced residential and commercial buildings. But the project had bogged down in the courts and at present, the area was surprisingly deserted.

  A young black artist sat with watercolors and sketchpad on one of the pilings, and an elderly man stood with a dog leash in his hand while his beautiful Labrador frisked along the edge of the pier. Otherwise, except for a handful of joggers and Sunday strollers, Sigrid had the place to herself.

  The wind still blew from the north-northeast and the cool pungent air held a tang of salt mixed with creosote. Taking deep breaths, Sigrid headed upriver into the wind.

  A hundred blocks north, Pernell Johnson finished his early morning cereal, quietly rinsed his bowl and spoon, and left them in the dishrack to dry as his aunt had taught him. He folded his blanket and sheet and closed up the couch he slept on. It folded with a loud screech of hinged springs and he glanced at the closed door apprehensively. There was still no sound from the bedroom where his aunt slept.

  It would be another hour before Quincy Johnson rose for church. As an assistant housekeeper at the Maintenon, she no longer had to work Sundays except in short-handed emergencies. Pernell hoped to be gone before she was awake enough to make him promise he’d get home in time for Sunday-night services.

  God’d been mighty good to him lately, he thought, as he eased the front door open and hurried down the dark hall to the elevator, but God knew a man needed a little fun, too, and there was that foxy little gal that took her break the same time he did. A couple of years older and going to college full time, but the way she’d been looking at him all week, he just knew she’d say yes if he asked her to the movies tonight. Movies were all he could afford right now, but soon, very soon, there was going to be a lot more jingle in his jeans, he thought, happily pushing through the outer doors and into the sunlit Harlem street.

  Wrapped in daydreams of innocent lust and avarice, Pernell Johnson loped toward the nearest subway station, unconsciously whistling jazzed-up snatches of the one tune that always bubbled up through layers of rock, soul, and rap whenever life seemed particularly blissful—“Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?”

  In her penthouse atop the Maintenon, Lucienne Ronay sipped the last of her breakfast tisane and placed the fragile porcelain cup back on her bed tray. As if on cue, the maid returned from the pink marble bathroom where she’d filled the tub and sprinkled special bath beads over the warm water.

  With a ritual “Will that be all, ma’am?” she lifted the breakfast tray from Madame Ronay’s lap and silently exited.

  Lucienne Ronay stretched luxuriously between the pale silken sheets, then threw back the down-filled comforter and drifted over to the windows that looked out over a breathtaking array of midtown skyscrapers. It was a view of which she never tired and one of the reasons she’d coaxed her husband into letting her take over these hotels he hadn’t wanted to bother with.

  Maurice! She still missed his strong presence.

  Since his death, other men had wanted to spoil her, adore her, use her. Occasionally she even let them. How unimportant they were, though. How infantile. Maurice Ronay had bullied her with his power, laughed at her tantrums, then taken her breath away with grand romantic gestures. Yet they both knew he had not loved her as much as she loved him.

  She found herself thinking about Leona Helmsley, a rival hotelier with whom she was often, to their mutual displeasure, compared. Leona was wealthier. Was she also more fortunate in her marriage?

  Madame sighed and resolutely put away the self-indulgent tristesse that Maurice’s memory always evoked. She was Lucienne Ronay now, La Reine, with a kingdom to guard and administer.

  That explosion Friday night could have been a disaster, she knew. Fortunately, there was no structural damage and once the mess was finally cleared away today, they would know better what would need doing. Perhaps it was time the d’Aubigné Room were completely refurbished anyhow?

  Allowing a cribbage tournament had been a lapse of judgment she would never repeat, but order would soon be restored and thank heavens the public had short memories of where disasters occurred.

  She loosened the ribbons of her negligee, felt the lacy folds slip along her ripe body to the floor, and walked naked to her bath.

  Her complacency would have been shattered had she but known what the day held in store for the Maintenon.

  Eighteen floors below the penthouse, in the suite Graphic Games had booked for the use of tournament personnel this weekend, Ted Flythe knotted his tie, then leaned across the bed to smack the bare rump that protruded from the tumbled covers.

  “Up and at ’em, sunshine!” he said briskly.

  “What time is it?” came the sleepy mumble.

  “Time to haul ass.”

  She rolled over and struggled to look cute and pouty and seductive all at the same time. “Come back to bed, Teddy.”

  Flythe repressed a sigh. Why did these stupid cows always act as if one night changed all the guidelines?

  He slipped on his jacket and said, “Rule one: Don’t call me Teddy. Rule two: No fraternization during business hours. Rule three: When I say haul ass, I expect it to be hauled. Subito!”

  The girl’s brown eyes widened and for a moment, Ted Flyth
e thought she was going to go sulky on him. Instead, she gracefully rolled onto the floor, sashayed across the room to gather up her clothes, and with a hip-swinging, exaggerated shuffle toward the bathroom, said, “Yessuh, Mr. Bossman! Coming right up! I’se haulin’ jest as fast as I kin haul. Yessuh!”

  As her sassy little round bottom disappeared behind the door, Flythe grinned appreciatively. He might just have to add her name and number to his rotary file. Let’s see now, was she Marcie or Trish?

  The windows of Vassily Ivanovich’s efficiency apartment overlooked the United Nations complex. With the sashes thrown wide, the big Russian was puffing through his daily exercise routine, a variation of the Royal Canadian Air Force plan with a dozen deep knee bends thrown in for good measure. Not bad for an old man, he thought, as he duck-walked back and forth in the cool morning air.

  On the dresser was a long message from his son back in Moscow. Ivanovich accepted philosophically the evidence that his friendship with an American naval officer was under scrutiny and the subject of communiqués back and forth, but he did think his son would have more understanding of what he’d intended this trip to be. Alexei’s message was almost schizoid in its effort to admonish and exhort without giving anyone any ammunition to use against either of them.

  Ah well, thought Ivanovich. The boy is yet young.

  He closed the windows but lingered for a moment to contemplate the gleaming buildings of the UN, buildings that hadn’t even existed when he and his old friend roared into port near the end of the war. Already there were those who said it should be torn down, moved to another country, that nothing good had come from the millions of words spoken there these forty years.

  The year was beginning to turn. Perhaps even now snow was falling on the Valdai Hills above his village. Perhaps it was time to go home.

  But first there was one thing more to be done.

  The efficient Miss Vaughan had left several sheets of messages neatly stacked on Zachary Wolferman’s gleaming desk in the study. Breakfast over—despite Emily’s coaxing, he’d only wanted tea and a few bites of toast—Haines Froelick turned the pages slowly, mechanically noting each name. Many of them recalled fleeting memories of times past; of weekends, dinners, long-ago parties or committee meetings.

  A longish message from Zachary’s lawyer caught his eye. It would appear that at some time in the past, his cousin had prepared detailed instructions for his own funeral. Mr. Froelick read them carefully. As far as he could tell, the arrangements he’d begun yesterday were in accordance with Zachary’s wishes: the correct church, the desired undertaker, even the pallbearers. Entombment would, of course, be in the family vault in Greenwood. As a final request, Zachary had asked that two small objects of sentimental value be entombed with him. One was a gold locket containing the picture of a girl who died of influenza in 1939; the other was an Austrian schilling that he’d carried as a good luck piece.

  Emily and Miss Vaughan had located the locket, and Mr. Froelick opened it to look at the sweet young face inside. Zachary always said Maria’s death robbed him of the only girl he could ever marry, but Mr. Froelick privately believed that even had Maria lived, she could not have gotten him to the altar.

  The schilling, however, was another matter. He and Zachary were mischievous lads climbing upon an equestrian statue in Graz one rainy summer day when Zachary found the coin tucked beneath a massive hoof. As soon as he touched it, the sun came out and Zachary declared it was an omen. After that, he carried the schilling all the time.

  Zachary was not exactly superstitious, Haines had decided, but certainly that schilling had taken on certain quasi-mythical proportions over the years.

  It had given him the confidence to do his best on school examinations and turning it between his fingers seemed to help him focus on the right decisions at work; so it was only fitting that Zachary should face the next world with his schilling in his pocket, thought Mr. Froelick.

  According to Miss Vaughan’s tidy memo, the housekeeper had been unable to locate it, so Miss Vaughan had spoken by telephone to a police sergeant in charge of personal property and learned that while the police were holding Mr. Wolferman’s wallet, wristwatch, rings, and other small items found upon his person Friday night, they had no schilling.

  She had then taken it upon herself to call the undertaker, who disavowed any knowledge of the coin’s existence. Her call to the Hotel Maintenon had been equally unsuccessful, she wrote. Could Mr. Froelick suggest further places to look?

  Mr. Froelick could not. Unless perhaps it had been flung under a table Friday night and lay hidden among the debris? Possibly it was still in that room. He seemed to recall that premises were often sealed by the police in cases like this. But surely not for very long when they were part of a public hotel? Even now, the Maintenon’s personnel might be sweeping or vacuuming or whatever they did. He could telephone, but messages relayed through a third party would not convey the urgency of the situation.

  Surely he owed this much to Zachary?

  Sighing, he touched an intercom button on the desk and spoke to the kitchen. “Emily? Would you ask Willis to bring the car around, please?”

  With her three-inch heels tucked inside an attaché case and scuffed sneakers on her feet, Molly Baldwin dashed for her bus as the driver eased off the brake.

  The Sunday morning was still too fresh and sunny to have eroded the driver’s temper, so he kept the door open and let her hop on instead of grinding away from the curb as he might have on a busier or rainy weekday.

  “That was awfully nice of you,” Molly smiled, dropping her coins into the meter. She always exaggerated her disappearing Florida drawl for busdrivers and cabbies. It usually made them more helpful, she’d found. She hated to be snarled at, though goodness knows she’d had to learn to take it since coming to New York.

  Not that Madame Ronay snarled, she thought, taking a seat near the middle of the lurching bus; but she certainly could make life miserable when she was displeased about anything. If she knew about Teejy—

  Molly shut her mind to that avenue of thought. Madame Ronay didn’t know. And neither did Ted Flythe. And all she had to do was keep a firm grip on herself and remember that this cribbage tournament would end tonight and, with it, all her problems.

  CHAPTER 17

  By the time Sigrid had walked up to West Twenty-third Street and back down again, her headache was gone and color had returned to her thin cheeks. She even slipped her arm out of the sling and went to look over the shoulder of the artist who sat on the rotting pier at the foot of her street. The artist looked up, gave her a friendly smile, and kept sketching.

  A horn tooted along West Street. Sigrid paid no attention until it tooted again and someone called, “Lieutenant? Lieutenant Harald!”

  She turned and saw Alan Knight loping across the traffic lanes to join her. His driver, the same bewildered yeoman, pulled gratefully alongside the empty curb and cut the engine.

  “I’ve been all the way down to Battery Park looking for you,” Knight called as he neared her. “Your friend said you were walking along the water but he didn’t know what direction.”

  “Up,” Sigrid gestured.

  “Down’s right nice, too,” he drawled, matching her long strides. “They’ve got a real pretty park there.”

  Sigrid observed the crisp crease in the trouser legs of his dark blue uniform. “Are you on duty today or has something come up?”

  “Both. I had a report waiting on my desk first thing this morning.” There was an embarrassed look on his face.

  “And?”

  “You know those pictures Vassily Ivanovich showed us of his sons yesterday? Remember that nice boy who pulled a few strings so his sweet old papa could enjoy a vacation in America?”

  Sigrid nodded.

  “KGB,” Knight said bitterly.

  “Well, he did tell us his son was something in the Party,” Sigrid recalled.

  “Go on and say it.”

  “Say what?” />
  “I told you so.”

  “I never said Ivanovich was connected with the KGB.”

  “No, but you said he might not be as innocuous as he looks.”

  “Yes,” Sigrid admitted.

  “You were right. We’ve just learned that Ivanovich was the Russian equivalent of an EOD during the war.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Explosive Ordnance Demolition.”

  “Someone who dismantles bombs?”

  Lieutenant Knight nodded. “Among other things.”

  “Then he’d know how to put one together.”

  “I don’t see how we missed it. Or how Commander Dixon ever got a security clearance with what amounts to a Russian godfather in her background.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know,” Sigrid suggested reasonably as she paused to let three joggers pass. “Her father died over twenty-five years ago and if the two men hadn’t corresponded since forty-eight or forty-nine—well, she was just a child then. She didn’t try to keep him secret when he contacted her last spring, did she?”

  “No.” Lieutenant Knight glanced at her with disappointment. “I thought you’d be excited to hear that Vassily might be our bomber.”

  “I’m interested,” Sigrid agreed, resuming her pace, “but it may not pertain. John Sutton seems the more logical target to me.”