Raiders of the Lost Corset (6 page)

Lacey skimmed through the English translation again at her desk. She could imagine the awful chaos of the scene that Akmentins described. After the first rounds of gunfire directed at the family, the Bolshevik executioners were amazed to find the Romanov princesses still alive in that smoke-filled hell of a basement. Their corsets, filled with layers of imperial jewels, had virtually become bulletproof vests. The jewels protected them from the first onslaught of bullets, but this brief respite from death simply ensured that more brutal means were employed to finish them off: bayonets, rifle butts, pistol shots to the head. Later, after it was done and the bodies were stripped, the drunken soldiers became obsessed with touching the bodies of the dead imperial family, perhaps to convince themselves they were really dead. They pocketed small souvenirs of their blood-soaked task. The executioners seemed torn between shame and pride in their deeds even before the bodies were cold in the ground.

The diary claimed that several corsets on the bodies of the imperial princesses were found to be filled with hidden jewels. Empress Alexandra wore a heavy pearl belt beneath her clothes. Each new discovery momentarily drew everyone’s attention away from the other bodies. But Juris Akmentins paid no attention. He had also found a corset on the body of an imperial princess. He didn’t know which one she was; the body was too disfigured. Bloodstained, torn by bullets, pierced by bayonets, her corset leaked jewels. Surrounded by greed and madness, Juris saw his chance and kept his mouth shut. He stripped the corset from the small body, and the Latvians looked out for each other. While the other assassins slipped and stumbled around him on the floor slick with blood, Juris shoved the garment deep inside his long coat, then made a show of tossing a petticoat and other garments from the girl’s body into a pile of clothes growing in the middle of the floor.

She wore no corset, he told them, adding he knew nothing of women’s underclothes. The soldiers were threatened with execution if they stole anything from the Revolution. Frightened for their lives, several of them tossed small valuables into a pile, items they had taken from the bodies as souvenirs, a watch, a ring, a medal. Akmentins threw in a gold button he said he had found on the floor. They were not searched. The officer in charge was satisfied his threats had ended the stealing. But Juris Akmentins had seen so much slaughter that death had no power to frighten him.

A decade later, when he fled what was then the Soviet Union to emigrate to France, Juris wrapped the stained and tattered corset, its burden of jewels still intact, around his infant daughter beneath her dress and blanket. None of the border guards cared to inspect the squalling child’s diapers, and they left her untouched in her parents’ arms.

The corset eventually became a badge of shame and remorse for Juris Akmentins, a burden of sins he didn’t know how to deal with. He hid the garment away, but he wrote about it obsessively, leaving clues to its whereabouts in the slim leather-bound book.

Perhaps he hoped it would be cleansed of its shame by years and distance, and someone among his descendants might claim it with innocent hands.

The diary of Juris Akmentins came into Magda’s hands after the death of her mother, Juris’s daughter, who had unknowingly worn the corset as an infant. The diary’s contents led Magda to believe the corset was hidden at a farmhouse still owned by a member of her family. If she was right, it was in France near Mont-Saint-Michel, several hours’ drive west of Paris.

If someone knew the diary was the key to a treasure, Lacey thought, it was a more convincing motive for murder than Magda’s cheap broach. Had Magda told anyone else about her grandfather’s diary and the corset? She had assured Lacey that it was their secret, but Lacey had seen how much Magda relished telling a good story.

Broadway Lamont was right: There were no drive-by poisonings. She called the detective’s cell phone and left a message. She didn’t have to wait long for his call back.

“Yo, Smithsonian, you got it all solved, wrapped up in a big present for me? ’Cause I love listening to reporters tell me how to do my job.”

“Thanks for calling back, Broadway.” She ignored the jibe. “I just thought of something.”

“Better be good.”

“There’s a diary. It belonged to Magda’s grandfather. You might want to locate it. Should be in her apartment somewhere. She said it had information that was priceless.”

“You want to be more specific?”

“Small brown leather-bound book. She showed it to me once,”

Lacey said, ducking the issue of exactly why that information might be priceless. “And it’s in Latvian.”

“Latvian.” She could hear him snort. “I hear there’s a hot market in Latvian diaries.”

“I only know what Magda told me. She wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”

“Yeah, I’ll put it on the list. Missing ugly broach, missing Latvian diary. Anything else missing?”

My sense of humor.
“There’s a French translation of it too, in Magda’s own handwriting in one of those school composition notebooks.”

“Oooh la la, a French diary! Now that’s really hot.”

“You’re a scream, Lamont. You got anything on the poison or the dagger or the cause of death yet?”

“Gimme a break, Smithsonian, it only happened a couple hours ago. Takes longer than that for the morgue to type up a toe tag.”

The detective hung up and Lacey breathed a sigh of relief. Now she couldn’t be accused of not telling the police what she knew, or at least some of what she knew. She returned Magda’s papers to her file drawer and locked it. Nobody paid any attention. She started to gather her things to go home.

Other reporters around her were still involved with their own stories, and a few were hanging around after hours. Lacey could see one determined reporter heading for the LifeStyles section of the paper right now. It was Harlan Wiedemeyer,
The Eye
’s reporter on the “death and dismemberment beat.” He was headed her way, and it was too late for her to run.

“Exploding toads! Can you believe it, Lacey? In a pond in Germany. A thousand toads just exploded.” Wiedemeyer’s eyes gleamed with pleasure, not so much at the fate of the toads, but at the joy of a new and strange phenomenon to report, the weirder the better.

Lacey rubbed her head. She felt a headache coming on. Her head suddenly felt like an exploding toad. Wiedemeyer thrilled to impart news of the strange, the grotesque, and the gut-churningly disturbing. He filled his round cheeks with air, then expelled it quickly in the manner of an exploding toad, or at least his cheerful impression of one. “Kaboom! Ribbit!”

“Oh, Harlan, that’s terrible,” food editor Felicity Pickles cooed at him, with a love offering of freshly baked goodies. Felicity was a large woman with a face that looked innocent at first glance, big round blue eyes, porcelain skin, long auburn hair. She looked rather like a deranged china doll. Wiedemeyer, her love-struck suitor, was a round little gnome of a man with a receding hairline and a wide mouth. “Those poor little toads. Have a gingerbread man. Aren’t they cute? ”

“Poor little bastards,” Harlan agreed. “Kaboom!” He took today’s fresh baked carbohydrate bomb from his indulgent angel of the food beat. “Kaboom! Ribbit! Kaboom! Ribbit!”

Felicity had few social skills, but she knew how to cook. At
The
Eye Street Observer
, that was enough to make her Miss Conge-niality. Reporters of all stripes found a reason to hover around her desk across the aisle from Lacey’s whenever Felicity was trying out a new recipe. This week she was testing desserts for an up-coming Thanksgiving section. Her fattening food of the day was spicy gingerbread men slathered in cream cheese icing with eyes and noses and buttons of crystallized ginger. More evidence to feed Lacey’s theory that Felicity lived a secret life as a Gingerbread Witch, lurking deep in the forest in a gingerbread house with a fluffy cream cheese roof, tempting all who entered to eat a tasty shutter or two so she could fatten them up for her larder.

The zaftig food editor never liked the svelte fashion writer, and the feeling was mutual. But Felicity now found herself happily dating exploding-toad reporter Harlan Wiedemeyer, and it was all thanks to Smithsonian. Lacey had recognized telltale signs of in-fatuation in the chubby would-be lovebirds hovering incessantly near her desk, admiring each other in love-struck awe, and she had found it unbearable. Wiedemeyer was also known to be the office jinx, but he made Felicity blush all the way down to her round little toes. And Felicity Pickles made Wiedemeyer lose the ability to speak coherently.

They were driving her crazy. Much to her own surprise, she had recently reached a breaking point and brazenly put the two of them together, face-to-face, hand in hand, brownie to doughnut, blowing the cover on their secret crushes on each other. Wiedemeyer thanked Lacey profusely nearly every time he saw her.

Lacey did not believe that Harlan was a jinx, exactly. However, as Mac had observed, “Bad things happen when Harlan’s around.” To blame the exploding toads of Germany on Harlan Wiedemeyer was probably going too far, but Felicity’s minivan had been blown up outside the office by someone who mistook her for Smithsonian, and Felicity decided that having lost her transportation, there was nothing more to lose if she dared to date Harlan. Putting the two of them together had seemed to lift a mysterious cloud of misfortune from Lacey’s shoulders. Coincidence?

Lacey didn’t think so.

Felicity politely offered a gingerbread man to Lacey. It looked delicious. Alas, Lacey had to be thin to enter France; it was a matter of French law. So she resisted. But Wiedemeyer dug in with gusto, gingerbread lighting up his pleasure centers. He and Felicity made little “um-um” noises at each other. Lacey had to turn away to keep her stomach from turning, only to see the gloomy visage of the paper’s editorial writer, Cassandra Wentworth, mo-rosely making her way from the staff kitchen. Cassandra held a steaming mug of herbal tea that smelled like swamp sludge. The terribly thin and careworn Cassandra said a world-weary hello to Felicity, then desolately lifted a fat piece of gingerbread onto a napkin to nibble on later at her desk. She eyed Lacey with reproof.

“I read ‘Crimes of Fashion’ this week, Smithsonian,” she moaned. “All the misery in the world and you scribble on about clothes, clothes, clothes.”

“That’s my job,” Lacey said, laughing. “Misery is your beat. But Harlan’s got a great story about exploding toads. You’ll love it.”

“Exploding toads are an early warning sign of grim environmental disasters about to engulf the earth. Everyone knows this.

You think everything’s funny, don’t you, Smithsonian?”

“Everything but pointed shoes. Nothing funny there. I think they’re a travesty, a health hazard, and they’re ugly.” Lacey looked down at Cassandra’s feet, encased in thick gray wool socks and Birkenstocks. “However, your shoes are eminently, um, sensible. No laughing matter there, either.” The woman was also wearing rumpled mud-brown pants and a pilled pavement-gray sweater several sizes too large. Lacey refrained from commenting on the mismatch, or on the way the dreary, soul-destroying colors sucked the life out of Cassandra’s face.

“You just don’t get it, do you?” Cassandra’s murky brown eyes almost seemed to gleam with a passion for disaster. “People are hungry. People are dying. Toads are exploding.”

“Then I suggest you eat that gingerbread right now, before chunks of exploding toad come flying through the windows.”

Cassandra averted her eyes in disgust. “Laugh while you can.”

“And look on the bright side, Cassandra,” Lacey said. “Maybe we’ll all be wearing chic new toad-skin pumps. How big are those toads, Harlan? Big enough to make a ladies’ size six sandal?”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Giant exploding toads, Lacey! Ribbit! Kaboom!” he said with an explosive gesture. Cassandra was not amused.

“Writing about fashion is just a drain on humanity in these times of dire emergency. Clothes should be functional and protect us against the elements. And against deadly solar radiation from the hole in the ozone layer created by Western civilization’s short-sighted reliance on fossil fuels. That’s all.”

“Sounds like an editorial to me.” Lacey yawned extravagantly.

“Will we see that in the paper tomorrow?”

“Being flippant. That’s your little specialty, isn’t it?”

Lacey smiled at her. Why the defiantly plain Cassandra particularly liked to rain on Lacey’s parade was a mystery to her. There were other beats that were just as frivolous. “Why don’t you go harass the sports section, Cassandra? They’re big-time flippant.”

“At least organized sports help keep dangerous felons off the streets during games.”

“That’s true. Most of the dangerous felons are
in
the game.”

Cassandra took her storm cloud and her gingerbread man and left. The fashion pages apparently weren’t keeping anyone off the streets. They were just a waste of newsprint in Cassandra’s time of emergency.

Lacey looked down at her latest “Crimes of Fashion” column, clipped out neatly on her desk. It was entitled “What Were You Thinking?” and she wondered what on earth
she
was thinking. Not about her clothes, of course. Lacey was wearing a long emerald green skirt, matching blouse, and suede belt, an ensemble that complemented her expertly highlighted hair, her blue-green eyes, and her petite curves. She topped them with a green-speckled black wool jacket from the 1940s, with broad shoulders that meant business and a beautifully tailored waist that fit her own perfectly and combined business with pleasure. In the breast pocket, she wore an emerald green silk hanky secured with a vintage pearl pin.

She also wore black leather boots, not too high and not pointed.

No, her clothes were fine. She was thinking about her life.

There was a dead woman with a dream who had been a friend of hers, an unknown killer with unknown motives, mystery, and danger lurking all around this story, yet the thought of going to Paris to begin the search for the lost corset called to her like the Pied Piper luring children from the safety of their homes. She was mentally dancing down the street to the tune of “An American in Paris.” Unlike nearly everyone she knew, Lacey had never been to Europe, and she wanted to go there so badly she could taste it. Her quirky Washington version of a fashion beat had made many unexpected little adventures possible, but it would never send her to Paris if it weren’t for Magda’s story.