Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Volpe had risen to come and stand behind her chair, his knotted hands pressing deeply into its upholstered back.

  “It wasn’t murder, then,” Temple said.

  “Oh, yes!” Madame Olga’s eyes surfaced from behind her hands. “I murdered his illusions about myself. I was the Sugar Plum Fairy, the good sister lifted twice daily by the prince in white tights. Pure Russian. Innocent! Andrei was no prince, and we both knew it. Until I tried to force him against his . . . his own honesty. Which humbles mine, in the end. Andrei! I not only let you fall, I let you take the blame for your fall. It was I. I was the snake in Eden and he was a better Adam than there ever was.”

  Temple’s knees were shaking. She’d hoped . . . she had to . . . clear up a few mysteries, not peel back the top layer of human souls.

  Old souls. Old wounds. New perfidies.

  She was doing this for Max. One last obligation. He was the odd man out in all of this and shouldn’t have to swing for it. She saw his rueful grin even as she thought that two-edged phrase.

  If she convicted someone else, Max would be exonerated, even if only in her own heart. And she knew that this was where it would matter most to him, to her.

  “Why did you have to persuade Andrei to take the scepter?” Temple asked the old woman. Gently.

  The words came sharp and bitter. “Because my masters demanded it.”

  Volpe’s hands moved from the chair back to her frail shoulders with a white-knuckled grip that shouted “Silence!”

  Madame Olga had been used to commanding audiences, not being commanded. Not even by a confrere. She lengthened her swan’s neck, hardened her fading features.

  Temple decided to let that intriguing matter go for now.

  “So with Andrei dead, who replaced him? Who was recruited next to steal the scepter?”

  “You saw him,” Volpe said. “We all did. “The man in the mock–Cloaked Conjuror costume. He played Andrei’s part: swooped down in masked disguise, disabled the installation case, and grabbed the scepter, escaping the same way he had come, from the magic show flies and wings high above. We don’t know who he was, we don’t know where they got him.”

  Madame Olga pressed her thin lips together. Temple knew that Count Volpe was seizing on Max’s unexpected appearance to end these unsettling explanations.

  “The police,” Volpe added with a haughty glare at Detective Alch, “haven’t any clue to who he is. I suppose with so many Cirque du Soleil shows in town, the place is crammed with unemployed world-class acrobats. Andrei had been unfit for such a caper, anyway, and too old.”

  “He could have done it!” Madame Olga said, her pride pricked again.

  She was the one who would confess, because she was the one most offended by whatever forces had pushed them into this scheme gone wrong.

  “The man who actually took the scepter,” Temple said, “was obviously a last-minute hire. So much went wrong. It was a wonder he escaped with the prize. No, Madame Olga, there was someone much closer to the exhibition who was the ideal substitute for Andrei. Someone your ‘masters’ spotted and snapped up. Someone you, and Count Volpe on your behalf, felt obligated to protect, so that even Andrei’s death didn’t free you to wash your hands of the affair.”

  “A handy substitute,” Wayans asked, sitting up. “Not the guy in black?”

  “Were you aware of his participation?” Temple asked Madame Olga and Count Volpe.

  He began to shrug, but she said No most definitely. “I’m tired of play-acting and lying, Ivan,” she told him over her shoulder. “It’s obvious we will not leave this room with our reputations intact. I see no reason to spare anyone else’s.

  “He was a complete surprise,” she went on, addressing Temple and the room at large, “and he was completely surprised by the breakaway set pieces up there. He obviously saved the Cloaked Conjuror’s life, and almost, almost—” She broke down in sobs, as Volpe knelt beside her.

  “She’s been through so much,” he accused Temple. “You are putting her through more for no purpose.”

  “For the purpose of an answer so the show that you’ve all worked so hard on can go on and justice will have been done.”

  Pete Wayans was looking frankly puzzled. “You seem to know who this mysterious accomplice was. Why don’t you just tell us?”

  “Because I have a point to make and it’s always better to let it be made by the suspects. This case is like, and very unlike, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, where everyone did it. No one in this room is a murderer.”

  The silence was complete, and Olga let her iron control dissolve as her head sank onto Ivan’s shoulder.

  Wayans nodded. “This Andrei guy obviously died during an argument in a place where he shouldn’t have been, a place way too dangerous for civilians. No one is allowed up in that performance area but the performers.”

  “And mysterious men in black,” Randy put in.

  Temple wished he hadn’t. The less they thought about Max the better.

  Time for her to exercise some iron control.

  “Exactly, Mr. Wayans. Nobody was allowed up there but performers, and once Andrei was dead, the theft’s masterminds had no literal fall guy.

  “Except for a piece of wild luck and coincidence.”

  Olga and Ivan were now regarding her with mutual alarm. Temple knew they were involved, but she didn’t know why yet. Or how deeply. Olga already carried her brother’s death on her conscience, but something else deeply personal was still tormenting her.

  Everyone in the room was quiet and still, as if any noise or movement would draw unwelcome attention. Dimitri and his twin bodyguards were as stolid as the red marble statues in the Red Planetary Restaurant (although they would look a lot less interesting nude).

  The lawmen at the door were stone.

  At the conference table, the elderly White Russians made a pair of rather frail mated doves. (And why had they concealed their obviously long-standing relationship until now?)

  Temple had a few answers and they weren’t pleasant, but she still had so many more questions that had to be answered before anybody here could move on from last week’s events. So she spoke again.

  “There was one person, already on the scene, who could substitute for Andrei. The perfect solution to the problem. So obvious yet hidden that only one careless moment was needed to give someone the awful answer to a criminal dilemma that led to grand theft and disaster and death.”

  Randy looked up at Temple with clear, disbelieving eyes. He glanced at Olga and Ivan. He saw where she was going.

  “Shangri-La!” he said. “That twirling stunt right on top of the onion dome! She was perfectly positioned to knock off the scepter and bungee cord out of there. Of course, her performing career would be over—”

  “As Shangri-La,” Temple pointed out. “She already was a conundrum, as disguised as the Cloaked Conjuror in her own way. She could always have reinvented herself.”

  “Still,” Randy said. “On a Las Vegas level? Comebacks are almost impossible.”

  Temple winced on Max’s behalf but Randy was right.

  “Why would she do it?” Wayans wanted to know. “This is a major venue. The money is princely.”

  Against their venal speculations, Olga’s sobs were soft and continuous.

  Temple looked over her shoulder at Alch. “Detective, would you mind telling everyone who Shangri-La really was.”

  He stepped forward. “Sure. Hai Ling. Member of a Chinese tumbling troupe that defected here in Las Vegas several years ago. They do that. Artistic types from Communist countries. Want the artistic freedom of the West.” He stepped back into position at the doors.

  “We defected,” Olga said, her quiet voice clogged with tears. “Ivan. Myself. Andrei. All years ago, when that was the only way to leave Russia by free will. Andrei, he became drunk on Western freedom and destroyed his career, almost himself. Ivan and I met in Paris while I toured with the Russian Ballet. When Andrei and I defected, Iv
an joined me in helping other defectors. After the Cold War ended, Russians could come and go, but not the Chinese or the North Koreans.”

  “We helped them,” Ivan said, “the younger generation of defectors. Covertly, of course. We didn’t want to cause international incidents. With Hai Ling, she had family back home she feared for. She wanted to work anonymously. We helped her in the beginning. Later, we’d lost touch. We didn’t know her stage name. We didn’t know Shangri-La was Hai Ling until she approached us, very discreetly, after we were all here preparing for the exhibition and show opening.”

  “She thanked us,” Olga said, “for helping make possible her participation here. For helping to ensure her continuing career, so that she could perform as a star at this magnificent hotel in America . . . and because of us she was here to be coerced into becoming a thief and to die in a stupid accident caused by such a petty motivation as greed!

  “She told us she’d been careless,” Olga went on bitterly. “She was so eager to see the exhibition space going up she darted into the area without her constant concealing makeup on. The area was filled with workmen. How could she have known that our masters immediately spotted her. Defectors—their own or other countries’—were their business. They knew her instantly.”

  Temple was as speechless as everyone in the room. She had thought that only she remembered the few moments a barefaced Shangri-La had shown herself. And it wasn’t due to bedazzlement at the White Russian exhibition, or any other naive girl reasons she had given to her long-ago sponsors.

  It was because she had wanted to taunt Temple. She was already a thief, she had brazenly taken Temple’s Tiffany opal-and-diamond ring from Max onstage. She was no shrinking lotus to quail at someone’s suggestion that she steal a priceless artifact. She’d had some unsolved connection to designer drug dealers. She could turn on her persona as easily as she could spin on a bungee cord, and probably would, for a big enough cut.

  Temple could have mentioned all that, but she didn’t want to expose a personal life that led right back to the Mystifying Max Kinsella and the real thief of the scepter.

  And she didn’t want to disillusion a pair of heroic old people who revered their heritage and probably regarded Hai Ling as a foster daughter.

  Hai Ling, aka Shangri-La, had likely laughed up her scalloped sleeve when she realized that showing herself to Temple had earned her a cut in a major heist. She at least had the grace, or balls, to make her former sponsors feel they had done a good thing all those years ago, and that she was an exemplary graduate of their school for defectors, and someone worth mourning.

  Temple would leave her those two true mourners.

  Pete Wayans was disrupting the silence by see-sawing a pencil on the lever of his fingers, one end and the other tapping against the tabletop like a metronome.

  “So, just who are these ‘masters’ behind all this? As far as I know, these people don’t have ‘masters’ anymore.”

  “You don’t know much,” Randy muttered into his double chin.

  “Exactly,” Temple said. “Who was putting the pressure on everyone to dance to their tune?”

  Ivan eyed Randy. “Sometimes ‘masters’ are czars, or political functionaries, or CEOs. And even if one defects and is safe in another country—or one’s family fled decades ago—the pull of power is a long and deadly one. You have your own masters to account to, Mr. Wayans, and you know it.”

  Pete cleared his throat and choked off the pencil.

  “And sometimes,” Temple said, “masters are mobsters.”

  “Wait a minute here!” Pete Wayans stood up. “That is such an old charge for enterprises in Las Vegas. Maybe the mob was a factor in founding Las Vegas. Maybe it ruled the roost in the fifties. And the sixties.”

  “And seventies,” Detective Alch put in.

  The other, unidentified man at the doors was unnervingly quiet.

  “The mob has gone corporate,” Randy said, “for the most part. It has to answer to . . . folks. It would never endorse a high-scale heist at a major hotel. Bad for business. Everybody’s business.”

  “Agreed,” Temple said. “But I’m talking about the Russian mob.” She smiled at Boris and Natasha, who did not smile back.

  Ivan pulled Olga off her chair and to the floor.

  Wayans gulped, grabbed Randy’s arm, and pulled him down too.

  The men at the door remained at attention.

  Boris and Natasha pulled two ugly black guns with nasty long barrels that Temple didn’t know what to call.

  She did know enough to punch one button on the computer keyboard in front of her that was set to operate the gray flannel blinds that wore mirror shades on the other side.

  The sound of them remotely being opened was enough to draw Boris and Natasha’s attention in the same split second that the blinds reflected an infinity of Fontana brothers in off-white ice cream suits with black Berettas, all in copyrighted James Bond pose, legs planted and guns aimed and braced in both hands at Boris and Natasha’s most precious bodily organs.

  It was an infinitely split-screen stand-off.

  Boris and Natasha lowered the firepower as the Fontana brothers to the ninth degree circled in on them like well-tailored sharks.

  Dimitri sat still. “I am not a defector,” he said, “but I am requesting the protective custody of the U.S. government. These are my guards, but not my bodyguards. I have been their prisoner since arriving in this country. They are mobsters intent on robbing the exhibition and I would like them extradited to my country for . . . proper punishment.”

  Temple sank onto her chair, her knees shaking, as the Fontana brothers wafted the two Russian mobsters to the doors, which opened to reveal the boys in buff (officers of the LVMPD) ready to cuff ’em, read ’em their Mirandas, and cart them away.

  Pete Wayans was patting his forehead with his silk pocket handkerchief and sitting on a chair again.

  Olga and Ivan were joined at the hip, although pale.

  “Can we go?” Ivan asked.

  “It’s pretty clear,” Alch said, “that a lot of folks were coerced here. We’ll need a statement, but you two need to rest up a bit first. We’ll call.”

  Temple was nearly putting her neck out of joint to see, but no Molina seemed to be lurking in the hall.

  “So the only criminal still at large,” Wayans was saying, “is the fellow who actually took the scepter. Do you think those Russky bozos will say who he was during interrogation?”

  Alch smiled slightly at the paper tiger Wayans had become.

  “Who’s to say, sir? This is a pretty murky case, even with Miss Barr’s masterful extraction of the facts from the victims of this scheme.”

  He quirked an eyebrow at her, and left.

  “Great job,” Wayans said, gathering up his automatic pencil. “The show will go on without the scepter. Too bad,” he told Templer, “I like your spin that maybe someone took it to save it from these mobsters. Randy, do me a press release on all this. All’s well that end’s well. International scheme uncovered by the staff of the New Millennium and me. The regular.”

  He left briskly, except when he came up even with the remaining man at the door, and then he stalled a little.

  The guy smiled like a shark. Maybe it was the sleek, gray sharkskin suit.

  Wayans scooted through the door as Randy patted Temple on the shoulder.

  “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I would never have remained standing with the Fontana brothers and their Italian tailoring and designer Berettas the only thing between me and those Cro-Magnon mobsters.”

  “You didn’t, Randy,” Temple said, laughing.

  “So this tangled web of theft is pretty much untangled, except for how all the magic show rigging turned into breakaway props. You can’t tell me anyone up there was expecting that, not even Shangri-La.”

  Randy was right: Temple couldn’t tell him most of what had happened up there, especially Max’s involvement, or suspicions that the Synth had been
trying to kill him. She had to come up with a good reason to overlook that issue.

  “It’s possible that Shangri-La rigged some of it to fail as a distraction, but was taken unawares by the extra rigging set up for the fake Cloaked Conjuror.”

  “Two forces working in secret opposition?”

  “Something like that. The police will be working overtime to ID the thief and find him, believe me.”

  Especially Lieutenant C. R. Molina, she added mentally.

  “Right. Well, I’ll tell the press the equipment failed because the thief or thieves tampered with it. And I’ll do as much for your role in resolving this situation in the press release as Wayans’ ego will let me. Semper fi.”

  Still, Temple’s ankles wavered a little on her to-die-for Stuart Weitzman/Midnight Louie high-heeled pumps covered in solid Austrian crystals with a black cat image on the heel. They were way too dressy for this occasion but somehow it felt good to have Louie backing up her ankles, at least.

  The only person left in the room was Mr. Stone Face in the gray flannel suit at the door. Obviously a Red State Republican. Obviously Law and Order, but whose?

  Temple walked over.

  “Nice shoes,” he said.

  “Thanks. I think I know you but I’m a little hazy just now.”

  “You should be.” He took pity on her lack of instant recall. “Does Elvis Presley ever cross your mind?”

  “Right! That Elvis impersonator competition. You’re . . . Matt’s FBI friend.”

  “Frank Bucek. We do want a go at those two Russian mobster guys. That’s why Molina called me in.”

  “Molina?” Temple felt like cringing but didn’t.

  “She’s peripheral to this. So. About you. Matt’s Las Vegas friend.”

  “Right.”

  “Friend kinda doesn’t cover it, does it? Not with Matt.” “Um, no.”

  “You’d never pass the physical, but I’d want you in the FBI anytime. That was a nervy little act you did there.”