“I don’t want to go to Rocky,” she said.
“Why not?” Maggie asked.
“Does he know I’m here? Oh my Godt.”
“No, but he knows we were coming to get you,” I said.
“You idiot!” she screamed. “Rocky is the boy I ran away from! He’s the one my parents wanted me to marry. He’s why I didn’t come back to the Chelsea—because I saw one of his henchmen lurking about, and when I called Tamayo’s apartment, Rocky answered. I’ve got to get out of here. Are all Tamayo’s friends IDIOTS?”
“Rocky is the boy you ran away from? He’s not the guy you came here to marry?” Maggie asked, ignoring Nadia’s rude question.
“No!” She got angry, red-faced, spitting angry. “I came here to marry Gerald. That lying bastard!”
“How did you know Gerald?”
“I met him through Tamayo when I was visiting her last year.”
“You didn’t know he was living with Grace Rouse?”
“Not until I called her about a safe house, and she mentioned him,” Nadia said.
“Who are the guys with the bad toupees?” I asked. “One of them wasn’t the man you were supposed to marry?”
“No, you idiot,” she said. “Those are Rocky’s bodyguards.”
“You thought you were going to marry Gerald?” Maggie said.
“He promised to marry me,” she said. “I brought the icon, as I promised, and he was supposed to run off with me after we got the money, to get married.”
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know. My family, Rocky’s family, his crazy girlfriend …”
“Or maybe the terrorists of Saint Michael the Martyr?” I asked.
“You know about the Knights of Saint Michael?” she asked.
“Had a run-in with them, me and Maggie, the other night. They were looking for you, for Rocky, and for an icon called the Baby. You’ve got some explaining to do.…”
“Were you followed?”
“No. Why—”
“Where’s Rocky?”
“At a convent with a bunch of nuns,” I said. “Shit. By now he must know that we know that he’s not your groom. I’d better call the Mother Superior and let her know there’s a problem.”
I turned my cell phone back on and as soon as I did, it tweetered.
It was Rocky, calling me.
“Bring Nadia here. Tell no one. If you do not do as I say, I will start killing nuns. I will kill Mrs. Ramirez first,” he said, and hung up.
After I relayed this to Maggie and Nadia, I said, “I’m calling the cops.”
“If you call the cops, it will make all sorts of trouble for me. It will cause an international incident, and the nuns will die,” Nadia said. “I need to get back to the Chelsea to pick up something from Miriam.”
“The icon you sold to Miriam Grundy?” I asked.
“If you sold the icon to Miriam Grundy, how come you couldn’t just take off with the big bag of unmarked bills?” Maggie asked.
“I have no money! Miriam insisted on having the icon appraised before she paid me, and Gerald had said she was trustworthy. I had no choice but to leave it with her and trust her, stay an extra day at the Chelsea. I was to go back the next day with Gerald to pick up the money.”
“Miriam told us she didn’t have it,” I said. “Her assistant told me you didn’t have anything with you …”
“He didn’t see it. I hid it under my sweater when I went in to meet Miriam. It isn’t very big, I must go back to the Chelsea Hotel …”
“No, first we have to go free the nuns,” I said. “Jesus, Nadia. You can go back to the Chelsea later.”
“All right,” she snapped. “I can go talk to Rocky. I’ll get him to free the nuns.”
“Then we call the cops and turn him in, right?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re sure you can convince him?”
“Yes. Rocky is mad for me. I’ll … What will I do, Maggie?” Nadia asked.
“Yes, what would Man Trap advise?” I asked. “I don’t think this is covered.”
“It isn’t covered, but I expect he’s going to want to think that you’ve seen the error of your ways, and you realize you love him,” Maggie said.
“He’s very much in love with you,” I added.
“Vomit,” Nadia said. “How could you believe I’d want to run off with him?”
“He’s the boy who showed up before you did the night you arrived,” I said. “He’s the one I sent away. He had pictures of you two together. How was I to know? If you’d been more forthcoming with information, maybe I could have called it. But all you were willing to tell me was that you were escaping an arranged wedding and running off with some dreamy guy. Now you’re going to have to make things right.”
“I’ll play the part. I’ll pretend I love him,” she said, flashing what looked like a sincere look of love and contrition. The girl was good.
“Grab your stuff, Nadia, and let’s go down to Phil,” I said.
“WHEN WE GET TO THE CONVENT, drop me outside the electrified fence,” Phil said, “and drive in without me. I’ll break in and—”
“That’s awfully risky, Phil,” I said.
“Remember, luv, I helped put in that security system; I know how to disable it, I know the layout of the convent, and I have my gun with me.”
“I have Dulcinia’s gun,” I said.
“The lad’s outgunned then. We can take him,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “Robin, you spoke to Rocky, so you go in with Nadia, but leave the cell phone with Maggie. Maggie, you’ll stand guard outside the main gate.”
He talked for a while about the layout of the convent. After he disabled the security system, he would enter through the back, where a small hill made it easy to climb the wall. Nadia and I were to keep Rocky talking, and loudly, so Phil could follow our voices and find us in the convent complex. He would try to sneak up behind Rocky and disarm him and anyone else with him.
In the backseat, Maggie sat with Nadia, who hugged her suitcase to her chest.
“Start talking, Nadia,” I said. “First, where is Plotzonia? Rocky said it is Chechnya but he probably lied about that too.”
(She said the name of the country, and it wasn’t Chechnya—that little pisher Rocky had lied to me—but another smallish republic nearby. To prevent hard feelings, it shall be known by Nadia’s nickname, Plotzonia, as I have offended enough people in the world and don’t want native Plotzonians and Plotzonian-Americans mad at me for my comments about their country. I’m sure many of them are decent, free-thinking, good-hearted people who are simply powerless in the face of their dictatorial government. Most Americans haven’t even heard of the place and couldn’t find it on a map, I expect, but some may know it in connection with the Vlada, that terrible little subcompact car that had enjoyed a certain détentish vogue in the United States in the 1980s, until it was discovered that the cars wouldn’t run in heavy rain.)
“How do you know Rocky?”
“We’ve known each other since we were children,” she said.
Though Nadia was not in love with Rocky now, she admitted she had been in love with him. Rocky and Nadia had been childhood sweethearts, when their fathers were both members of the Plotzonia delegation to the United Nations. Plotzonia wasn’t really a separate country at the time—it was firmly under the Soviet thumb. The Soviets just called it a sovereign country to give it another vote in the United Nations General Assembly. When the Soviet bloc broke up, Plotzonia declared its true independence and the reigning Communist puppet, Nadia’s grandfather, quickly consolidated control through the army and became a “savage capitalist,” though not a democrat. Things were relatively calm for that part of the world, until grandpa died. Nadia’s father and Rocky’s father both returned to Plotzonia, where a power struggle broke out between Nadia’s father, the North Plotzonian clan chief, and the South Plotzonian clan chief.
A year of civil war ensued, putting a
crimp in Plotzonia’s economy, which is largely based on the vices of others—drugs, guns, other smuggled goods. The civil war drove Nadia and Rocky apart. A third faction, which had split off from the North Plotzonian forces, the Knights of St. Michael the Martyr, went to war with North and South Plotzonia, vowing to return the country to the One True Church. The South Plotzonians—Rocky’s clan—were winning the civil war when the Knights came in and mucked things up for both the North and the South.
In order to fight the Knights of St. Michael, the forces of the North and the South decided to make peace. As part of the peace deal, it was agreed that Nadia and Rocky would marry, formally uniting the two clans and the country. Nadia wasn’t sure if she still loved Rocky—their year apart had given her time to reconsider—and she knew she hated Plotzonia, but she was resigned to her fate as an overmedicated consort of a dictator-to-be. In exchange for marrying the boy, she demanded a trip to New York to buy her wedding dress and see Tamayo.
“That was about six months ago,” Nadia said.
A chaperone went with her, but Nadia ditched her and went to stay with Tamayo at the Chelsea, and there she met Gerald Woznik and fell under his spell. They talked about art, and Nadia mentioned that her family had quite a lot of art, including a legendary icon believed to have been painted by Andrei Rublev.
“You were in love with Gerald,” Maggie said, shaking her head. “Did you sleep with him?”
“No. I’m still a virgin,” Nadia said with pride. “We kissed though.”
“And when you went home to Plotzonia?”
“We E-mailed. I told him I loved him, and wanted to come back to him. He had a plan. I’d run away, bring the icon, we’d sell it, and use the money to start a new life in South America.”
“He was conning you,” Maggie said. “He would have dumped you as soon as he got his share of the cash. Gerald would never leave New York.”
“I didn’t know. He told me not to tell anyone about us. It was a secret romance, until my father’s secret police intercepted our E-mail. After that, we wrote in code.”
On her way down from Miriam Grundy’s apartment, she’d heard that Gerald had been killed, and she’d gone straight to the basement and sneaked out. She hopped a cab to the Bus Stop Bar & Grill. It wasn’t until the next day, when she saw the newspapers, that she learned what kind of boyfriend Gerald Woznik was.
“I was fooled,” Nadia said bitterly.
“Aw, luv, we’ve all been fooled,” Phil said. He’d been quietly thinking up until now. “You’ll be wiser next time.”
“Yes, next time maybe you’ll see through the bad man, and past him to a good man,” Maggie said. “I did.”
“Tamayo didn’t know it was Gerald? Or about the icon?” I asked.
“No. She just knew I was in love and running off to elope. I saw her about a week before I left, in Plotzonia. She was on her way to Kazakhstan with her boyfriend, Buzzer.”
“I’ve never been to Plotzonia,” Phil said. “What’s it like?”
“The most boring place on the planet,” Nadia said. “And the people there are really stupid.”
In the next half hour, we learned more about Plotzonia than you ever wanted to know, our heads filling with facts that no doubt displaced important things like poetry, fond memories, and the names of friends’ children. Plotzonia has a population of seven million, less than New York City, with slightly more than half the population residing south of the Malo River, in North Plotzonia. Here’s an interesting tidbit: Some of the earliest known condoms had been made with the bladders of a large river fish, the blue-speckled carp that had lived in that river. The blue-speckled carp, alas, was long extinct.
The main industrial products were tractors and the Vlada automobile; the main agricultural products were potatoes, turnips, and pork; the main natural resources iron ore and salt. But since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Plotzonia’s location, between Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, made it a popular transit point for guns, drugs, and the white-slave trade, bringing a great deal of money into the region. The people of North and South Plotzonia were ethnically almost identical—Caucasian Christians of the Eastern Orthodox variety. Due to the Great Schism of 1304, they’d belonged to two different sects of the Plotzonian Orthodox Church. They squabbled constantly and only knew peace under the iron hand of foreigners—the Ottoman Turks, Napoleon, the Russian czars, and after World War Two, the U.S.S.R.
“The most popular Plotzonian singer is Irina Illyishum, known as Plotzonia’s Celine Dion. She blends pop music with the balalaika and a local wind instrument known as the fimpin. It’s torture to listen to it, and they play it everywhere, from loudspeakers, in the tea houses, in the bazaars, at parties, in music videos on TV. TV! The government, my father, controls the television and radio, and we only have two old American TV programs, Highway to Heaven, and Little House on the Prairie. Michael Landon is almost a god in my country. The most popular Plotzonian TV show is called Nation and Destiny …”
“An uplifting drama about a family of smelters,” I said.
“You know it?” Nadia said.
“Plotzonia TV tried to sell it to my network, and that’s how they promo’d it—an uplifting drama about a family of smelters. It was one of the most depressing shows I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Funny, all I would have had to ask to know the country she and Rocky were from was “What is the most popular TV program made in your country?” One simple question, and I hadn’t thought to ask it.
“I had satellite TV, but the common people do not, and so they are very stupid,” Nadia said.
We could smell the convent now. Phil stopped the car and insisted we go over the plan. When he was satisfied we were all in sync, he handed the wheel over to me. I dropped him and Maggie off outside the range of the main gate’s video cameras, Nadia put her suitcase into the trunk of the car, and she and I proceeded to the gate.
After pushing the buzzer, Rocky’s voice said, “Nadia?”
“Yes, I’m here, Rocky,” she shouted out the window.
“Who else is with you?”
“Just Robin.”
The gates opened, and we drove up the curved driveway to the front of the convent. Before leaving the car, I took the safety off Mrs. Ramirez’s pearl-handled pistol, and slipped it into my blazer pocket.
When Rocky opened the door, he was standing there with Mrs. Ramirez, who was gagged with duct tape, a gun to her head.
“Nadia,” he said, softly, when he saw her. But the softness didn’t last long. “Go into the parlor—that way. Move!”
In the parlor, some of the Sisters were leaning against one wall, their arms linked, their hands cuffed behind their backs in a human chain. Where did he get handcuffs? I wondered. They were all gagged with duct tape as well, and their legs were bound. On the floor by the nuns, I saw Señor, his feet tied calf-roping style with red cake-box ribbons, his mouth muzzled with a rubber band. He was growling through his muzzle. Rocky had shown the dog enough mercy to remove his little habit and throw it onto a chair, thus restoring a modicum of dignity to him.
“Where are the other Sisters?” I asked.
“I locked them in the chapel,” he said with a bit of pride. “Throw down your gun.”
“What gun?” I asked.
“The pearl-handled pistol,” he said.
“I left it at home.”
“Throw down your gun or I’m shooting Mrs. Ramirez.”
In a situation like this, you have to stop and think like a NATO general, weigh the potential collateral damage against the greater, utilitarian benefits. Mrs. Ramirez was very old, she’d lived a long life and was looking forward to going to Jesus. If it would save the lives of the five nuns, a Plotzonian princess, a chihuahua, and me.…
But I couldn’t do it. I took the gun out of my pocket and put it on the floor.
“Kick it away,” he said, and I did.
“Nadia, cuff Robin with the nuns,” he said.
&nbs
p; “Rocky, this isn’t going to help,” Nadia said. “Let’s just go.”
“Tie her up, woman!” He then said something in Plotzonian, she said something back in the same tongue, and then she complied and cuffed me. I was arm in arm with the nun chain, right next to the Mother Superior, Nadia cuffing my hands while Rocky supervised.
“Gag her,” he said, throwing Nadia a roll of silver duct tape.
Nadia complied with this request a little too quickly, in my opinion.
Well, smart girl, I asked myself, how are you going to get out of this one? I was chained to five nuns, my hands tied, a gun to Mrs. Ramirez’s head. My feet were tied too, so I couldn’t kick anything at Rocky to distract him so Nadia could grab the gun. In any event, the nearest kickable object was the trussed-up Señor.
“Okay, Rocky, let’s go now,” Nadia said.
“Not until you get on your knees and beg my forgiveness for running out on me,” he said.
“On my knees?” she said with a snort.
“On your knees, woman.”
Where was Phil, I wondered, and tried to send a telepathic message to him—“Hurry!”—then tried to send a longer one to Nadia—“Use those damned feminine wiles and tricks of yours, girl! Bat those eyes at him, lick your lower lip, invite him to kiss you, and when he does, grab his gun and knee him in the balls at the same time! If that doesn’t work, turn on the waterworks and soften him with tears!” But she did not pick up the signal.
As Nadia knelt, Rocky said, “Did you have sexual intercourse with that man?”
“Rocky, this is insane …”
“Did you?” he asked, jamming the gun hard into Mrs. Ramirez’s head.
Nadia hesitated before answering, and there was a glint of defiance in her face. But she said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I still love you, Rocky,” she said. “Deep down, I always loved you.”
“You swear?”
“I swear. There wasn’t time for anything to happen. I found out what a devil he was in time. He put me under a spell, that man,” she said, and added something in Plotzonian. They moved back and forth between English and Plotzonian, as if they weren’t even aware they were doing it. It made it hard to know what was being decided.
The Chelsea Girl Murders Page 19