The Gold Diggers (15 page)

Black market traffic in stolen art.

She took the diary with her to work the next day and glanced at it all the while she was on the phone ordering fabric. She had a table of her own in Peter's shop, and though she'd been there only a week, it was already a half-inch deep in paperwork. So was the leather and chrome chair from Milan, and it meant that she worked sitting on the corner of the table, churning out memos and notes to herself. Rusty Varda's ledger looked surprisingly at home among the figures and the bills of particulars. She gathered that he had a regular dealer who delivered him things four or six times a year. He didn't buy anything a bum might be carrying under his coat. The amount of money paid was staggering when she added it up, but the price for individual things was sometimes bargain-basement. The Rembrandt—April, 1935—was only forty thousand dollars. The Van Gogh—Christmas, 1940—twenty-six. Rita tried to calculate in the margin of her memo what it worked out to in this year's dollars, and as a result she spent the morning disconnecting retail outlets and giving the wrong directions to delivery men.

By noon she'd put the phone on the answering service so she could take a long lunch. She found a fat envelope in the back-leaf of the book. She wondered briefly if the black market had gone the route of giving receipts or trading stamps, but it was clippings from the news about some of the thefts. As she settled down to read them through, she felt everything else turn off. She didn't touch her unwrapped sandwich. When Adele DesRoches walked in, she waved without looking up because she thought it was Peter. Nobody was expected. You had to have an appointment.

“Are you the person I talk to about upholstering a roller coaster?”

“Do I get a free ride?” Rita asked, looking up. Adele was so thin that you could have taken an X-ray of her with a flashlight.

“Not if I can help it. I'm Adele. Do you know who that is?”

“I've seen your floor plans,” Rita said brightly. “More to the point, I guess you know who Rita is.”

But that was as far as they took the shoot-out. They talked about her bedroom curtains, and they talked about New York. They split the sandwich Hey had packed her, and for a while they spoke well of Hey. Adele let Rita know she'd heard about Hey, about Bel-Air and Rusty Varda, the princes in Saint Petersburg and, oh yes, Nick. She asked smoothly what Nick was like. Rita pulled the bolt off the tiger's cage and said she really didn't know Nick well enough to say. In the end they spoke of Frances Dean, trying to recall when she died. A while ago, they thought. And Rita had to admit it was gutsy of Adele to walk in without pretext. Decked out in layers of tweedy Calvin Klein, fresh from modern dance and an hour's Tibetan massage, she apparently couldn't go on until she'd broken ice with Rita.

She's not half as bad as she must be when she's crossed, Rita thought. She'd so far avoided Peter's regulars, who kept him on forever as one project gave birth to the next. Peter laid the ground rule the very first day. He couldn't have assistants assisting too close in some people's houses. And Rita didn't care, at least for now. She took the messages in certain calls—she could tell by how much detail went into the variant of “Have Peter call me”—as if she were just a stock girl making room for Peter to create in. Rita didn't care how low they demoted her. She was busy learning the business, working up a head for figures, and getting things done the day before yesterday. She felt like Joan Crawford in a tailored suit with padded shoulders. Adele DesRoches was an enemy she'd left behind in New York for good. At last she'd found something Adele's set was poor in: big secrets. They shopped and ate lunch, and Rita used to think it took away the sting of time for them. But gossip wasn't secrets. To kill time required an impossible project. Adele looked starved on steak tartar.

By Wednesday afternoon, Rita was proceeding in two different directions. She brought to the shop a tiny Renoir oil, the head of a boy, lifted from a museum in Holland during the war. She wrapped it in tinfoil at home and put it in the bag with her sandwich. Later on, she ate the one and parceled up the other in cardboard and brown paper and twine, addressing it to Amsterdam and putting on a false return address in West LA. She guessed at the postage, slapped on stamps, and dropped it off at the post office on the way home. The same day, she had made a call to the
Times
and talked a clerk into researching the death of Frances Dean, saying she was from NBC and promising him a credit if they got it on the air. He called her back while the stamps were on her tongue. No report of the death had ever appeared in the paper. What, he wanted to know, was the project for NBC? To do with Howard Hughes, she told him, so it had to be kept a secret until everything was in place. Could she count on him? She could.

She spent the evening going through the jewelry. Not in the ordinary way. Not in a mirror. She felt less possessive of what unfolded out of these squares of black velvet than she did about anything she'd found so far. She knew they were erotic, the ones cut and mounted as women's jewels. And she realized how close the parallel was between Carrier gold and enamel and the wonders of King Tut's tomb. She brought them out of a wooden chest by candlelight. A silver cigarette case inlaid in a checkerboard of black and yellow onyx. A pear-diamond ring as heavy as a stone. A bracelet of pavé links, sapphires and emeralds. Erotic not so much because they were worn against flesh as because of the power that crackled between the lovers they were tribute to. Some were beautiful in a way that broke her heart, like perfect flowers that bloomed and died, except here it was the beautiful women who had owned them who died.

Rita let them run through her hands—art deco brooches, Tiffany earrings, a string of gray pearls—and she tried nothing on. But wasn't she being
too
pure? Anyone would have told her as much. Just because she'd passed through the mirror didn't absolve her of all vanity. She owed it to herself, to the war she'd had with love for twenty years, to try them on and feel how a certain class of man kept a certain class of woman. And yet, she thought not. She simply didn't want to be involved. She had beside her the diary list of the people whose vaults and lacquered cases had been rifled for each item. People from Sag Harbor and Hobe Sound and River Oaks and 78th and Park. She felt no welling urgency or sense of mission about returning these to their rightful owners, not the way she did about the art to the museums.

So, in part, the jewelry annoyed her. It was too sensational. Worth so much, it brought up the uncomfortable issue of telling the world outside what she'd discovered. She couldn't just ignore it. She'd hoped to pack everything off, but of course she couldn't. She couldn't mail the Ming plate either, or the crystal mouse. And what was rightful about the owners anyway? The jewels stolen in the forties belonged now to various estates and heirs, Rita supposed, and it wasn't the same as the women themselves. Of course, some of them must be quite alive, and some might be pining even now for their heavy gold chokers, but Rita wasn't in the mood to go out of her way for them. Let them go shop and eat lunch. She would have been quick to point out that her cooled-down attitude here was a form of vanity, too.

She leased a bone white Jaguar Thursday morning early. She couldn't be late for anything today because, for the first time, Peter had taken the whole day off and left no number where he could be reached. He was going painting. Rita had a meeting with the owners of a Continental restaurant in West Hollywood who wanted the Spanish taken out. They wanted it to look as if it had been lifted from soup to nuts out of Harvard Square. She had a bout with UPS about the millionth delay on an order of sisal shipped out of Chicago. A man on Beverly Glen had just found out that the honey-finished cabinet Peter had bought him in Mexico, which had just arrived, wouldn't go up the stairs to the study. What the hell was she going to do about it? She sang him a lullaby of sorts and promised a house call at two o'clock. Then she finished her phoning and figured she had a couple of hours to kill, so she drove back to Bel-Air to pick up a medium-size painting.

It had to be small enough to fit in her overnight bag, because she couldn't just carry it out of the house under her arm. Someone might see it and start asking questions. She couldn't be choosy. She'd about decided on a
Crucifixion
from a monastery north of Florence when, tired of the Italians again, she took the extra time to crowbar the top off a wooden box. She'd still finished only about a third of the inventory, and there were any number of still unopened crates. This one proved to be English. Two Blake illustrations of
Paradise
. A Turner storm at sea. A Gainsborough boy and his dog. And then something that was just the right size: a Constable landscape. A little boring, perhaps. A ribbon of land beneath a swirl of dove gray cloud. There was a time when she could have written a paper about it overnight, a thousand words, and told the ways it was beautiful. Stolen from the library at New College, Oxford. Damn it, she thought, they probably haven't even noticed it's missing. The monks in Florence deserved to get their painting back much more, but what could she do? It was a little too big, and she needed to practice on easy things.

She had gotten so accustomed to locking herself up and setting herself free that she did it automatically, much as Rusty Varda must have done. She always put her head out the closet door before she came out, in case anyone should be looking through the windows from the garden, but otherwise she breezed about, opening and shutting, like a sailor who knows his boat down to the last screw. She went up the hallway, suitcase in hand, and squinted when she came into the brightness of the living room. The noon sun through the skylights pooled in three or four places, and she walked zigzag across the room in order to go through the sunny spots. No reason. She was happy. She was a little afraid, of course, to be so happy, and she hadn't done a thing about getting over Nick. She was still letting that happen in her head. But even so. That day, in the warm spots in the living room, she was at the exact center of her life.

Sam was standing on the spiral staircase, about halfway up. When she first caught sight of him, Rita thought he had just gotten out of bed. The sleep was still in his eyes. Then she saw it differently. He looked as if he'd spent the better part of his life in bed, but none of it sleeping. His eyes had a quality that could fix and stay like a painting, and they were older far than hers. She felt, when he looked down at her, like a fool eccentric who's neglected all the good things in life, doesn't have time for them, and in the end doesn't know what they are and can't go get them. She didn't desire an inch of him. On the contrary. She felt a bristling in her, so strong it shook her by the shoulders. He was sleazy. He looked like he'd given up on people years ago. He was beautiful, she had to admit, but it went no deeper than his tan and his sun-shot hair and carried with it the feel of its own exhaustion, like a Vegas showgirl's beauty. The sex was mean.

“Who are you?” he asked, genuinely confused.

“Rita,” she said. Let him make what he could of that. She didn't like being down below, but she couldn't exactly order him down. She was furious at him for watching her crisscross the living room to stand in the sun.

“I'm Sam.”

“Well, we mustn't be here to meet each other,” she said ironically, “because we don't seem to ring a bell in each other's head. You know Nick and Peter?”

“Nick.”

And she knew in an instant who he was. “Oh, Rita, who knows,” Peter had said the first night at the party, “I think Nick's in love.” And as there was no follow-up—Peter didn't mention it again, and Nick was as normal as could be—she'd dropped the whole thing as unfounded, a way married people had of talking about the wild uncertainties of love. Her wish to protect Nick and Peter both was what had gripped her, and before she was conscious of summoning it. It sprang full-blown, probably because she'd taken such pains herself with Nick and Peter, in the struggle with her own sharp passion. About Nick, she had no expectations, and it made her free to go through the irony, the melancholy, and the tangle of being honest with herself. But not just yet. She hated this boy on sight for being so simple. And so carnal. She wasn't being repressive or righteous, either—carnal was all there was sometimes, and when it was, it often worked. But Sam acted as if there were no other wisdom and no harder meeting. She and Nick and Peter had
done
all that, she wanted to say, even if she didn't know the details. They'd let themselves go, all three, for years. And all the same, they were split off on tangents, every one, and chasing each other around in a ring, trying to perfect a love they could live with. This boy wasn't one of them. He'd been through something else.

“Is Nick here?” she asked.

“He's on his way,” Sam said, but didn't say from where. It was clear, though, that Nick was right behind him. Nick's going to walk in, Rita thought, and we'll both be changed as if by magic, and we won't have had anything to say about it. “Are you the one from New York who's starting over?”

“You could call it that.” Is that how
Nick
would put it? “But it isn't fair. You know who I am, and I don't know who you are.”

“Nobody special,” he said. “I'm a cowboy. Why do you have your suitcase with you? Are you leaving?”

“Uh, no. I broke the handle. I mean the clasp. I'm taking it in to have it fixed.”

“I don't own one.” He came down the stairs now, strutted down, as if he meant to go on doing what he was doing before Rita came in. “I've never been anywhere far enough, I guess. Sometimes I think I'll pack up and go to New York, though.”

“To start over?”

“Sure,” he said, face-to-face with her. “But I'm too lazy. Someone ought to pay me to just sit and drink beer. I'd be a rich man.”