by Davis Bunn
Which could only mean one thing. “Treasure.”
“Ah. And what precisely is the nature of your business, Ms. Syrrell?”
“We are dealers in art and antiques.”
“I see. Should we require further details, will you be reachable at this number?”
Storm swallowed a sudden lump. “For another three days.”
She was still staring at the notebook’s page when the phone rang twenty minutes later. A man said, “I owe you one, Ms. Syrrell.”
“Mind telling me how you got my name?”
“Sean told me to get in touch. Who got to him in the end?”
“He had a heart attack.”
Harry Bennett huffed what might have been a laugh. “Old Sean didn’t just happen to drop down and play like fertilizer.”
Hearing this stranger express her own thoughts with such confidence left Storm wanting to share her discoveries. Instead, she asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m the guy who’ll be in touch,” Harry said.
The line went dead.
SIX
ON THE FLIGHT FROM LONDON to Miami later that day, Harry Bennett tried to decide if his future involved Sean’s granddaughter. Sean had been Harry’s backer and best friend, almost but not quite to the end. But how far did Harry want to go for a woman he’d never met?
Then again, there was the little matter of treasure.
On the one hand, the Second Temple hoard had managed to remain lost for almost two thousand years. If it existed at all.
On the other, old Sean had apparently discovered something interesting enough to get himself seriously dead.
Harry took a taxi to one of Miami’s original South Beach hotels. In the high season, New York wiseguys still drank espresso in the downstairs café while their honeys decorated the poolside. But now the late spring doldrums had set in, and the hotel lobby was full of old women with big jewels and bigger mouths, all of them complaining at once. Harry showered and slept, then bought beachwear in the downstairs boutique and took off.
The sidewalks were full of young people doing happy things. He walked the nighttime streets to a steak place he remembered. Harry let himself be guided to a table by the side wall, away from the patio crowded with laughter and shiny eyes. Glances slid off him, just another loner relegated to the sidelines. Harry felt like the last two years had stained his skin.
He finished dinner, then flagged another taxi and took it to Overland, two miles and a universe removed from South Beach. Overland was where Miami riots began. Cops patrolled in flank formation. Salsa music and ganja smoke drifted through Harry’s open window. Harry paid the driver to wait, because there was no way he’d find another taxi in Overland after dark. Harry entered a place he remembered and bought a Browning pistol so decrepit he’d have about as much chance of doing serious damage if he threw the bullets. But it was the best the guy had, and after the situation in London Harry wanted to travel armed.
The next morning Harry checked out of his hotel, rented a car, and took the turnpike north. Beyond the Miami confines, the highway opened up and Harry found real pleasure in the drive and the sky’s tropical stain. Wind blasted through all four open windows. The concrete ribbon was empty enough to let him sort through the London data, the researcher’s heart attack, Sean’s similar demise, the cold English rain, the locked cubicle at Scotland Yard, the hard questions and harder cop gazes. Like all treasure hounds, Harry Bennett had several places he couldn’t go back to. But it had always taken more than a day and a half for a country to pull up the welcome mat.
ON MOVING MORNING, STORM DRESSED with fastidious care. She selected an outfit neither grey nor black, an in-between dress too somber for her normal moods, which tended toward a state of perpetual excitement. Even on her worst days, she could still remind herself that she held the position of her dreams, living above the shop where her life had really started, doing the work she’d been born to do. But today required a dress she could drop into a Dumpster with the packing lint and the unrequited dreams.
The movers were due at ten. Storm was outside the bank when it opened at nine. Downstairs she had the guard open Sean’s vault, revealing Sean’s mysteries.
She spent an hour making a careful inspection and listing the vault’s contents but came up with no clear answers. She left Sean’s notebook in the vault and carried her list and her questions back to the shop.
The movers were impersonal and efficient. Syrrell’s used the same bonded company for the transport of every major piece. The team included three security officers and three white-uniformed loaders. One guard camped inside the shop, another remained by the truck, and the third moved back and forth with the movers. They stripped the walls and emptied the display cases with the stealth of professional pallbearers.
When the distress began eating at her insides, Storm left the shop and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom. She washed her face and mashed the towel hard against her features until the sorrow was tamped down. Then she pulled out the sheet of paper listing the vault’s contents.
Her list was twelve items long.
There were seven paintings, all from her grandfather’s personal collection. Four had hung in her grandfather’s office and three in his apartment above the Alexandria shop. There had been no separation between Sean’s work and his private life after the death of his wife when Storm was two, the same year Storm lost her mother. Storm had not learned of her grandmother’s death until Claudia told her, twelve years later. Nowadays Storm referred to that period as the lost years.
The seven paintings were all religious, reflecting her grandfather’s intensely spiritual bent. One was Spanish, two French, four English. All by midtier artists, the sort of canvasses that might interest an informed collector or a provincial museum. Total value: four hundred thousand dollars. On an extremely good day.
But still.
Next was a shallow gold dish, possibly a chalice, definitely ancient, possibly intended for temple incense. Storm had never seen it before, which was strange. Sean had sold off almost all his personal treasures and used the funds to try and save the company. The dish was oval and stood fourteen inches. The gold base was hollow and filled with wax, often done to strengthen ancient items shaped from raw gold. The dish had no markings that she could find. Normally anything as valuable as a gold dish would have been ornately decorated.
Then came an illuminated manuscript, yet another item Storm had never seen before. Sean had never shown any interest in antique texts, and Syrrell’s rarely carried such items.
Next on the list was Sean’s old Bible.
Sean’s notebook.
And finally, his briefcase. And the briefcase’s contents.
Forty-three thousand dollars. Cash.
This from a guy whose company was entering bankruptcy. And who had not even mentioned her in his will.
Storm lifted the sheet of paper and held it next to her face. She said to her reflection in the bathroom mirror, “Sean gave you all he had. You have a future.”
PALM BEACH ISLAND HAD ALWAYS struck Harry as a Disneyland for billionaires. The superrich could cross the causeway, get their ticket stamped, and play pretend at life. Everything was safe here, orderly, manicured. The only people who smiled were the schmoes hustling for tips or for women or both. Harry parked off Worth Avenue and walked the last three blocks to the shop.
A truck from the bonded movers Sean used was parked directly in front of the passage leading back to Syrrell’s. Harry stood on Worth Avenue and checked out the security guard eyeing the foot traffic from behind mirrored shades. Harry fitted coins into a slot and bought his first paper since getting outside. The headlines shouted news that only made him feel more excluded. Harry tucked the paper under his arm and strolled across the avenue, just another tourist wishing he could afford to belong.
The passage leading to Sean’s shop had been redone in the Mizner style. Mizner was the architect whose Spanish Renaissance gave Palm Beach much of its unique
style. The corridor’s beamed ceiling was lined by carved Spanish arches. Nowadays a Mizner private estate went for upward of twenty mil and seldom actually hit the market. The passage opened into a broad courtyard, paved in rough-cut marble with a sparkling fountain in the middle.
Harry claimed a table at the upscale Caribbean café opposite Sean’s shop and watched white-uniformed movers haul out the old man’s treasures. The movers were not there to take away some recently sold item. They were stripping the cupboard bare.
Harry stretched his coffee out over a couple of hours but spotted no one who might have been Sean’s kin. When the security guard started giving him the eye, Harry refolded his paper and followed his nose to a sidewalk eatery. When he returned with his steak sandwich, the moving truck still flanked the passage entrance but the movers were gone. A lone security joe leaned in the truck’s shadow. The guard’s expression said being bored at twenty bucks an hour was fine by him. Harry had met a lot of guys like that inside, and more still in the navy, guys to whom ambition was as foreign as Arabic. Personally, he couldn’t understand the mentality. A few hours of that job and the truck’s shadow would become just another cage, every paycheck just another iron bar. Harry wondered if the guard had done time, he was that good at killing hours in the heat.
Harry took up station on a bench just down Worth Avenue across from the courtyard passage. That corridor was the only way in or out, another reason Sean had liked the location. Harry was wiping steak sauce off his chin when the cop passed.
The cop was wearing a beige suit and trailing a distinctly female scent. But there was no doubt in Harry’s mind.
She wore shoulder-length dark blond hair clenched by clips above her ears. Her open suit jacket flapped away from a very shapely frame. She came close to being extremely attractive, except for the expression cops liked to call their game face. Wraparound shades could not mask the compressed tightness to her features.
The cop cast a single glance in Harry’s direction, enough to freeze him solid. Harry had no doubt the lady could now describe him right down to the toenails. She swept into the passage and vanished.
Harry unlocked his chest. Maybe someday he’d manage to take an easy breath around cops.
He raised the sandwich. His belly wasn’t much interested in food anymore. But prison reflexes pushed him to eat while he had the chance.
The wax paper masked the lower half of his face just as the little tan man appeared.
As in, the same guy Harry had last seen slipping into a taxi on a rain-swept London street.
The man stepped out of the passage leading to Sean’s shop. He turned away from Harry, slipped past the security joe, and vanished around the front of the moving truck. There and gone in the space of two heartbeats.
“STORM? MS. SYRRELL?” THE AFTERNOON light fashioned a stylish silhouette of the woman standing in the doorway. Emma Webb lifted the bag she was carrying. “I assumed you would forget your need for food.”
“I’m really not hungry.”
“I can imagine.” Emma Webb walked over and set her satchel on the countertop. “But as legal counsel, I advise you to give food a chance.”
Before Storm could frame a response, Richard Ellis entered the shop. The pastor of Sean’s old church hugged Storm, shook Emma’s hand, then traced his way around the empty rooms. Richard wore a pastor’s collar over a black shirt and black pants. He was a traditionalist only when it suited him, which meant that he was either coming from some official event or felt like he should treat this visit as a funereal occasion. Richard watched the movers carry Sean’s desk out the door and asked, “You have somewhere to go tonight?”
“They’re leaving me a mattress and my clothes. The exhibition starts tomorrow.”
“That’s not what I meant.” As the movers packed the contents of the last display cabinet, Richard stepped around the counter. Blocking her vision and ensuring she heard him. “Why didn’t you call me back?”
She shifted her position enough to watch the movers fold a ruby-studded chain into a moving blanket. The gold chain had been lifted from a treasure hulk off Manila Bay. The knowledge that no one would ever appreciate those items like she did left her speechless.
Richard said, “I lead a group tonight. It’s called Fresh Start. I want you to come.” When she shook her head in silent protest, Richard touched her wrist. His fingers probed like a doctor’s, down where the pain lurked just beneath the surface. “Storm, I was not making a request.”
The pastor turned to Emma and asked, “Are you a friend?”
Storm managed to say, “She’s a lawyer. She represented Sean.”
“Did she now. Represented him in what?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss that,” Emma replied.
“Well, you certainly have the look of strength about you. Storm needs that just now.”
The crew’s supervisor walked over, clipboard in hand. “We’re all done. You want to check?”
Storm reached for the forms. “I’ll take your word for it.”
When she had signed, he tore off her copy, watched her stow it away unread, and said, “Me and the boys, we just want to say, you know, sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“This town will be poorer tomorrow.”
When the movers had left, Richard said to Emma, “I want Storm to come to a class I’m giving. It begins in just under an hour. Will you bring her?”
“Where is it?”
He nodded as though everything was settled. “Storm knows.” He patted her hand once more. At the door Richard turned back and said, “When it’s over, we really need to talk.”
SEVEN
AFTERNOON SHADOWS CLOAKED HARRY’S RETURN to the courtyard. Harry chose his seat so the fountain’s waterfall partly blocked the shop entrance. The courtyard café was filling up now, the after-work crew winding down with overpriced drinks and chatter that reminded him of South Beach. The movers were long gone. The pastor from Sean’s church had stopped by and left carrying the same sorrow that lurked around Harry’s gut. Harry sipped a drink he didn’t want and argued with the empty seat across the table. Something had caused Sean Syrrell, the most professional dealer Harry had ever met, to pursue a treasure unto death. There was only one thing Sean Syrrell had valued more than his trade and his allies. Harry thought of the pastor and knew for certain Sean had been after more than old gold.
As soon as the ladies came out, Harry knew the younger woman belonged to Sean Syrrell. She had Sean’s incredible power, only in a distinctly female form.
The word that came to Harry was smoking.
Storm Syrrell wore a rumpled suit of dark grey silk and a day’s worth of dusty smudges. No jewelry, not even a watch. Long fingers and strong hands, golden tan set off by raven hair. She was into something seriously athletic, Harry was certain of that. The lady cop was maybe ten years older and carried a world of grim experience, but Harry figured Storm might still take her in a pinch. Storm had a rangy strength, like somebody comfortable with testing her limits, over and over and over. Harry put Storm’s age at midtwenties and her station as completely out of his range.
The cop was intent on saying something to Storm through the doorway. Harry gave the cop another inspection, which was easy duty. Storm locked the door and keyed the remote for the store’s alarm system. She slipped the keys and the alarm remote back into her purse. Then Storm stood and stared at the awning with the name in Gothic gilt, SYRRELL’S. Storm looked bereaved. Harry was tempted to walk over and introduce himself. Then he thought again of the man who had vanished before his eyes. Harry stayed where he was. Off the radar screen. Watching.
The ladies walked to the cop’s car. Harry dogged them until the cop chirped off her alarm. He then hoofed it back to where his wheels baked in the late afternoon sun. The vinyl seat threatened to blister his back. He floored out of the space, gunned through the stop sign, and took the turn overwide. He missed an oncoming Caddy and a plumber’s van by inches, and left a chorus of ho
rns in his wake.
He was afraid he’d lost them. But when he came to the first major intersection, Harry spotted the cop caught by a traffic light. When the light turned green, Harry crawled forward, two cars removed from the cop and Storm. As far as Harry was concerned, people in Florida drove like they were swimming through congealed grits.
Harry hung back when they turned into the parking lot of Sean’s church. The last time Harry had been here, he and Sean had argued. It was the only argument Harry had ever had with Sean, and things had gotten out of hand. The next day, Harry had left for the Caribbean. It was the last time he had ever spoken with his late best friend. Harry had spent a lot of time in prison reflecting on their quarrel. Three times he had started to write Sean and apologize. But he’d never finished the letter. Other times he wished he had clocked the arrogant bugger. One good punch. Boom. Out and gone.
The church was another of those Mizner structures, a Palm Beach landmark set in acres of immaculate gardens. Sean had once told him it was modeled after some cathedral in Spain, mammoth grey stone and neo-Gothic and flanked by royal palms. The ladies left their car and joined others heading for smaller buildings clustered behind the church. The crowd was an odd mix for a town this well groomed. Some of the people climbing the stairs with Storm bore the subtle stain of living rough. Harry joined the next crowd of arrivals and entered a hall that was neither full nor empty. He saw a lot of smiles and an equal number of hard cases, but Storm and the cop had vanished. Harry settled into an alcove by a glass-fronted office. The corridor gradually went quiet. The place obviously saw duty as a school, because the walls were lined with paintings of sunshine and boats and fishermen and happy houses.
Because Harry was studying the artwork, he almost missed the flitting shape.
A small man slipped past, wearing clothes that matched his complexion, one shade darker than beige. The guy was fast. Harry remained in his alcove for a tick, not longer than a few accelerated heartbeats. But when he emerged, the corridor was empty.