The Gold Diggers (34 page)

So Peter could do it if he wanted to. The connections would handle the details of doing it right, and even Peter knew they were talking high finance when they started talking galleries in Beverly Hills and Amsterdam. He and Nick had seen a hundred overnight successes. He'd
been
one. All you had to do was decide to go with the flow and not once wonder if you were any good. And then you spent the next five years trying to get back some say in the matter. Having done it once, he had to think twice—well, Rita and Nick would—about doing it again. He wouldn't say he didn't need the money, in case it might upset the balance of luck, but he'd have to have one good reason besides. And he couldn't imagine anything worth the favors he'd suddenly owe to whichever of the ladies had set him up. Unless the attendant increase in power turned out to be so great it would leave him sailing over everyone's head. In that case, he could close up shop and be a prince full-time. Turn out a painting now and then. The fewer the better.

That's not what you want, Nick and Rita told him when he got that way. Princes, they said, went mad with boredom. He wondered sometimes how they came by their classified information, but he had to believe them. After all, they were the only two people he could be sure of who'd gotten over taking care of him.
They
didn't think so, maybe, but Peter knew it in his bones. They would have referred him to all that thinking they did on his behalf, how it came in time to be second nature. It was the very thing Rita hesitated over before she took the job. And Nick would have added the stores he was assigned because Peter refused, the lies he was always telling over the phone to guard Peter's privacy, the fits of temper he waited out. It was all true. But Peter had done enough thinking to figure
them
out, too, so it wasn't a one-way street anymore. He let them fret and give him advice because they needed to, and in the meantime he was playing his instincts, turning the world to his account. Rita and Nick wouldn't have understood where he was going because thinking had nothing to do with it. It had less to do with putting it into
words
than their lives did. But they must have felt how he'd begun to fight being driven by work, and as soon as they were ready to, they'd see they weren't responsible for Peter any longer. Though he might still seem to need all the help he could get, it had come to be an act, to put up a wall between him and the people who wanted a piece of him.

He parked the truck close up to the green MG Nick had given Rita. The card said it was from both of them, and that was fine with him. He didn't go out of his way to ask questions either. Meanwhile, it was hard for Peter to get too bothered by the pressure of what went on outside, where the clients and the galleries made the rules, now that he and Nick were in phase again. The days they spent together after the snake were all over, of course, but then they knew it couldn't go on indefinitely. They were back to seeing each other mostly late at night. Time itself had changed. Now it was rife with qualities, the clock replaced by a scale that measured only intensities. It wasn't just making love, though they turned to that again as if they'd been released from a vow of chastity. The body was all the soul they might get. But even more, they realized that it was possible to come back to the full flood of knowing just who they were. That is, they both understood what they'd come to themselves because they could see so exactly how the other arrived. Peter knew, for instance, what Nick ended up with after he'd abandoned his six-weeks' love, just as he also knew it was Nick doing the leaving. Then he watched Nick and Rita glance off one another, probably because they'd never met anyone who looked so much like a mirror image—though only Peter appeared to see the likeness. Afterward, he watched them ricochet away to a safe distance. And all the time he was studying Nick, he saw the clearest picture of himself, as if every move Nick made gave him one of his own. Some things didn't fit, like the green MG, because by his calculations Nick had passed that stage with Rita well over a week ago. But it was still all right with Peter. He didn't have to know everything. Didn't want to.

Crook House made no sound when he let himself in, so whatever Rita's surprise might be, it didn't require a crowd and didn't resemble a party. That in itself was a nice surprise. He took the elevator down and would have walked around to the kitchen to see Hey first, but he noticed something funny in the living room. Don't surprise me in here, he thought. Rita knew it had been the main design of his convalescence, and so she knew it had to be frozen just the way it was for a while. Peter had to brood over it, moving everything an inch or two until he'd got it perfect. When he went up close to the opium beds, he could see it was only a few things dropped on the rug going off into the hall toward Rita's room. As if somebody clumsy had had his hands full. And the thing that had first caught his eye was only an envelope propped in the cushions on one of the beds, addressed to him. He tore it open.

“Follow your heart,” Rita had written on a plain white card.

He didn't waste a second on the irony. His eyes darted to the trail of things on the carpet, and then, because they were so strange and dissimilar, he narrowed his look and began at the beginning. First was a pile of coins behind the divan, as if somebody's pocket had sprung a hole. Gold, he could tell right away as he went down on his hands and knees to look, and probably Roman, but he wasn't sure. He didn't touch them, though the note didn't tell him not to, but just in case she wanted things left the way they were. Besides, he'd already decided that when he was done, he'd bring Rita back and go through it again. He stood up and walked two paces, damned if he was going to crawl the whole way. This time it was a piece of jade worked as a belt buckle, carved with a couple of storks. Next, only a couple of feet further on, a pocket watch in a sterling case. Then a powder horn which, if you could believe the inscription, once belonged to Wyatt Earp. And at the turn into the hall, more artful than all the rest, a blue enamel cigarette case with a snake going zigzag across it in diamonds.

The House of Fabergé, Peter guessed right off. He stooped to it and without thinking broke his rule and picked it up. Whatever the crazy thing was that Rita was mixed up in, it had so far produced two pieces of Fabergé. Ever since she gave him the picture frame, he couldn't get it out of his mind that something fishy was going on. He knew how little Fabergé turned up on the open market, and he'd kept the frame to himself, at the back of his desk in the shop, for fear that someone would ask too many questions. The cigarette case in his hand, he knew, had to cost five or six thousand dollars. The other things on the floor weren't cheap, but this was something else. He slipped it into the pocket of his suede jacket. He couldn't just leave it on the floor.

Now
what was he supposed to do? He called back into the living room, “Rita?” As if she might be watching him through a chink in one of the Japanese screens. But there was no answer. She was probably still in the bathtub. He turned into the hall to go to her room, and because his eyes weren't yet accustomed to the dark, he didn't see what was there and banged his knee against something that swiveled around and batted him hard on the hip. He jumped, his hand went out and threw up the light switch, and in the instant before he saw the trail continue all the way to Rita's room, he thought, “But this is too much.” He meant the joke was over. He knew too well what everything cost, and what's more, it was Rita who had taught him. Here was a telescope that probably belonged to Galileo, it looked so venerable. All the fittings in brass, cherry inlaid with ivory. And Peter knew there wasn't an antique store in LA that could handle it without his having seen it. Things like this didn't get priced. They were already all in museums. For good measure, Rita had draped and tied a string of pearls around the lens like a constellation, and he knew she was gilding the lily willfully, as if to say there was no end to this.

The next thing was big. It fell along the hall seven or eight feet, and it had the shape and heft of a railroad tie. A totem pole, in point of fact. And now Peter guessed Rita was in it so deep, she couldn't even be doing it solo anymore. She could never have lifted this herself. She had to have an accomplice. And what if it was Nick? He stopped. He didn't have time, but he had to look at this totem, it was just too beautiful. He peered closely at the worn, cracked wood where a bear stood on top of an elk, and a wolf on a bear, and then a man. No, he thought as he hurried himself along, it wasn't Nick's style to turn it into a treasure hunt. Nick could never be playful with things that came so close to art. He could make a game of giving away a green MG or anything else you could buy off the floor. But something that carried an air of age and values, one-of-a-kind, always left him stone-cold sober. The accomplice had to be someone as unafraid of the beautiful as Rita, who could pick things up and put them down, who had to have a feel of everything.

Further on, just within reach of Rita's door, was another block of wood, sculpted this time in India. A plump figure in a full lotus, with a look on his face that made him seem like the god of compassion. Exquisite, and any other time Peter would have gazed at it long enough to lay a claim, but a corner of his eye had caught the last thing hanging on the door. A Cézanne watercolor of rocks and a tree, hardly finished, the tree hardly begun, and yet it made Peter want to give up everything and go live there, as if he would never need to move from just that random space of a few feet of forest. Peter's continuous process of picking the best wherever he was took a deep breath. Everything else, all the way back to the coins on the living room floor, was nothing compared with this. The snake-lidded cigarette case was marvelous and frivolous and ritzy, but a real Cézanne showed it up as a curious toy. Peter had two thoughts at once—that value was a very subjective thing, particularly in the presence of what was priceless, and that Rita had gone too far for even him and Nick to get her out of it.

Though he gaped at the watercolor, he must have knocked right away, as if he didn't dare spend too long in a rapture when there was so much to get to the bottom of. But as he was dazed, he didn't remember the knocking. All he knew was that he was an inch from the painting one moment, and the next thing he knew, the door was wide open and Rita was grinning as if he'd come to pay a social call. He was hit just then by a crippling sadness. It all seemed to mean he didn't know her at all, and he couldn't afford to lose either of the members of his team. At the same time, he must have panicked at the thought that if he lost Rita now, what little he had of the past went with her. Take care, he told himself. They stood in silence, staring at each other across the threshold. Rita's grin softened when she saw that he was in turmoil, and as the tenderness welled up in her eyes, Peter felt the color coming back to him, too. In a minute, they looked exactly the same, tuned to each other again and ready to sing a duet. Partly, it was a brave front, but Peter realized it wasn't in him to react to anything Rita did with anything like moral criticism. If she'd had to
kill
to get this stuff, she must have had a good reason. All Peter cared about was that she not get hurt. He'd kill, too, if he had to, to keep her safe.

“You're very clever, I see,” she said, pulling him into the room and locking the door behind them. Against whom, he wondered, but let it go. “It would take some men months to follow those clues to the end.”

“Would it?” he asked lamely. The sorrow gripped him again like a cramp. He'd like it better if they got right down to it. He didn't think they'd be laughing once they'd started.

“Oh, at least,” she said. “Most people wouldn't go any further than the gold coins. A bird in the hand, you know. Then, if they got as far as the telescope, they'd have to diddle around with that.” She talked right at him for a bit, but she couldn't seem to stand in one place. She turned to the windows and, starting at one end, went down the row, shutting and locking. “Who ever gets to the good stuff, Pete? And how do they even know when they're there? What percent of the world even knows who Cézanne is?”

“Rita, where did you get all this?”

“You'll see, you'll see,” she said, coming back from the end of the windows and holding out her hand. “Come on.”

“Wait,” he said, his hands stiff at his sides. “None of it's yours, right?”

“I'm trying to
show
you, Pete.” She made it sound as if he was getting in the way of a good explanation. But she saw at last how far off the track he was, and she acted quickly to ease his mind. He wasn't having any fun. “Listen,” she said, “
we
aren't in any trouble. A lot of this is against the law, but all the criminals have run away. I swear it, Pete, if the cops do anything to us, it'll be to give us medals. Do you trust me?”

“All right.” He gave her his hand and let himself be led across the room to the closet. He knew enough now to guess the rest, and it showed what he could do with his mind instead of mere thinking. It had to be Rusty Varda, he suddenly decided, and the stuff must come from a secret cache. Of
course
. It was as if, in some unfocused corner of his mind, he'd always known. There was always something more to Crook House. He understood houses so well that his antennae had at some point picked up the extra space, but he hadn't got around to it consciously yet. Eventually he would have groped his way here, though still it took a Rita to crack the lock. Peter would have had to break through the mirrored door with a hatchet. Now, as Rita ushered him into the closet, he realized that he'd never been satisfied with the Varda story. All that waiting around in Crook House, forty years of it, had to have a purpose beyond forgetting to give away twelve million. Peter used to ask Hey: What did Rusty Varda
do
? Hey didn't know.
Said
he didn't know. Peter abandoned it in the end, but something never ceased to nag at him. Now it came back at full volume when Rita closed the door. Strangely, he felt as if he'd been waiting all his life for this.