The Gold Diggers (41 page)

And though at the moment Hey was the worst-off, he was also the one who was just about to be stabilized. He was down as far as he was going to go. He came out of the house feet first, and the two men at the stretcher talked across him in a workers' shorthand. She saw that they'd strapped him on at the knees and hips, presumably so they could stand the stretcher up in the elevator, but Rita shivered as if it were a straitjacket. Then the rest of him passed by her, and she saw his face all colorless and sick. Worse than she thought. She didn't even understand how he could have gone so long and kept so alert, only to fall apart in the last ten minutes. But he managed a slit of a smile when he saw who it was. He reached toward her with his good hand. While she stood there dumbly, the stretcher went on upstairs, and she had to scramble to catch up. She got crushed against the branches because the rescue operation took all the room, but finally they reached the top, and she was able to bend down for a bit and talk in his ear.

“I'll go with you if you want,” she said, though she hoped he'd say no and leave her free.

“You stay here,” he said gently. “I can't stand the sight of you looking as if I was already dead.”

“Tell me where Nick went.”

“I don't know.”

At that point, somehow, they pushed her aside and lifted him through the back door of the ambulance. One of the men climbed in after and reached to close the door, while his partner went around the front. Rita regathered her forces and grabbed on tight to the handle. “You wait a minute,” she said, as roughly as she could. Then she swung one knee up and pulled herself in. The attendant dropped back to the head of Hey's stretcher, assuming she'd decided to go after all. But she stayed on her knees at the edge, ready to jump back out. The motor started up. “But, Hey,” she called, “didn't you
tell
him where to go?”

“No. I only told him what Sam said.”

“What was that?” she asked, and the ambulance started to roll, backing out of the drive. The attendant shouted to the driver and then snarled at Rita to make up her mind, so she didn't catch Hey's answer. “Wait,” she said again, but the attendant was bearing down on her. She didn't have any more clout. She pushed herself off, but she summoned up a last pleading look and lobbed it at the man in white, just as he reached to pull the door closed.

“Please,” she begged, “I didn't hear what he said.”

“I'm going underground,” the attendant snapped, and the door slammed shut. She had to leap out of the way of the turn. It was a moment before she connected it up: The attendant was quoting Hey, and Hey was quoting Sam. The ambulance lurched off the gravel and onto the road. The siren got louder and louder as it sped away downhill.

Underground where?

She couldn't remember, but she thought he'd said something simpler, like “I'm going into hiding.” “Underground” sounded so odd. Not having heard the original, the attendant made it sound like two words when he said it to Rita. Under ground—as if it were a cave. Rita knew she was oversensitive about anything that smacked of a secret place. Sam meant it the other way, of course. For “underground,” read “out of sight.” It was only to be expected that Sam had all the right connections to the underworld and the cover of darkness. It was only a manner of speaking. And yet, she thought, if that was so, then where was Nick running to? If Sam wasn't being specific, he and Peter could be anywhere, and no one person would ever find them. Nick should have told her. Not so she'd tag along, necessarily, but he ought to have a backup man if something went wrong. As it was, all of them could disappear into thin air, and she'd never be able to trace them. Not a soul would be left but Rita and Hey. That is, if Hey didn't die. And then where would she be? She'd have no claim on Crook House, certainly. Maybe a piece of it would go to Peter's grandfather, but then again it was probably in Nick's name, and a hundred of his cousins would come out of the woodwork and fight for it. She'd be back on a plane to New York before she knew it. Dead-broke and all alone.

She turned from the driveway and headed slowly down the stairs again to the house. Had she always been so close to the brink of irreversible disaster? She'd never given it a thought before. And she wondered now if that wasn't why disaster had struck at last. She'd built up these years and years of false security. On the other hand, was it seemly for her to get superstitious at her age? Nick was the fatalist, much more than she. But that might explain why he was ready to jump when the time came, while she'd ended up left in the lurch. Some people know where the guns are kept. Some others at least know the way to the fire doors and lifeboats. Rita wasn't either sort, she decided. She let herself in and stood once more on the balcony. Now what? Sit by the phone for a call that wasn't going to come? She couldn't even pretend to be standing guard, since the one danger they had to guard against had come and gone.

But whatever else, she thought as the silence swarmed about her, she'd be double damned before she'd do woman's work. She wouldn't keep house or the home fires burning. Fuck that, she thought. But it was only another tune to whistle in the dark. She was talking back to the rapid knocking in her heart. She wanted them all home safe, and she wanted the day wiped out. If only this or that were different, she began to think. And she always spit on that kind of whining and waffling, swore at it and snubbed it. One thing she knew, she couldn't weaken now. She'd better put her mind to it hard, she said to herself as she drifted down the spiral stairs, and come up with the way they'd all gone.

Underground, underground. If they were anywhere else but here, it might be a subway. Or a trapdoor, perhaps, through the floor of a hollow tomb. She walked across the living room and out the French windows to the garden. The angle of vision—through the lush garden shade, down to the toy shop city—was as unreal to her as it had been the day she arrived. She didn't know the half of LA yet. How could she figure out the hiding places? She would have had no trouble at all if they'd been in an English country house. But here she stood by an unruffled pool, the whole world before her, and hadn't the least idea where to start looking. She'd read her way through all manner of underground chambers. In the vast and orderly mansions she used to imagine, the secret room was always just where it ought to be. She shouldn't have been surprised that it wasn't the case out in the world. And though she was probably better at being here than there, just like Rusty Varda, somehow she'd thrown in her lot along the way with her friends in Crook House, and she needed them now more than it.

If she could crack one puzzle, she could crack two. An underground something, off by itself. She could almost see it already, cut right out of the earth. Not a cave. Somebody'd actually dug it with their hands. She stooped and looked at herself in the water. Well, well, she thought, so Crook House wasn't sufficient to be the world. She made a couple of faces, happy and sad like theater masks, and she let go a string of country houses without a backward look. She didn't know why, but she didn't need them. Too much upkeep. Hard to get good servants. Drafty. People who needed the world between their fences ended up driven like Rusty Varda, and just as lonely. Not me, she thought defiantly. All she wanted was Peter and Nick and Hey. Now she could see it was a tunnel, with a room like Varda's at the far end, only not attached to a house. She patted her hair and gave herself a slit-eyed look to see how she looked at a distance. Not bad, not bad. There was really only one kind of place that had the right feel and the right dimensions both. It must be a mine, where the secret room is made by scooping out a treasure. The walls are streaked with veins of gold, and here and there the glimmer of uncut stones comes through, like bits of mosaic.

She could see how it might appeal to Sam. It had a very immediate relation to money, for one thing. Cash on the line. It was tough and ornery, and desperate men tended to throw away their lives to it, digging deeper and deeper. Rita much preferred, if she had to pursue an obsession, a phantom like Rusty Varda's, if only for its craving after the beautiful. And Peter was going to
hate
it down in a mine. No style. No civilized talk. All the more reason to get him out of there fast. She put her hands in the water and threw off the image. Then she cupped up some and splashed her face. She felt better just knowing what it was out there. And she'd needed a time of rest and quiet to sort her thoughts. She was just as glad to be working alone. Let Nick play out his own leads, because she'd get there in her own time. The hard part was over, she thought, swinging on a new mood as if it were a rope over a gorge. All she had to do now was find it.

The afternoon was almost gone by the time Nick turned in at the gate to the ranch. The sun was making a final stand on the westernmost ridge, and the grass was full of a dusty purple. He didn't feel at all as if he owned it. He'd been here only twice, and the course of a whole day had never happened to him on this land. It was purple like the surface of the moon. He hadn't
thought
about it since the day the paintings of the bunkhouse disappeared off the walls of the bedroom and got stacked in Peter's closet. And yet somehow he'd known right off, as soon as Hey laid out the clues, that this was where Sam would take Peter. No other place was bordered so completely by Nick and Sam. In fact, it was already as distant to him as the view in a tourist photograph, or even as Nick and Sam themselves. Nick would have sold it before six months was out, or he would have palmed it off on Charlie Burns and let him sell it. Nick couldn't be bothered driving back and forth to the mountains with clients. Couldn't be bothered being reminded how far he'd gone to strip a cowboy naked.

And when he left Hey's side, promising to bring Sam back alive, and made his circuitous way to the car, he drove breakneck down to Sunset. He had every intention of heading them off before they ever got this far. How much of a start could they have on him? Twenty minutes? But then on the way to the freeway he started thinking. Hey had only had time to give him the headlines of Varda's fatal fling with Sam, but Nick heard enough to lose his faith forever in the niceties of chance. Sam had tracked Nick down to get back in the house. Period. Nick, who was famous for being the guilty party, was suddenly cast in retrospect as the innocent victim. So it didn't just happen that he was stopped at the light that day on Wilshire, when Sam appeared on the crosswalk and caught the wander in his eye. All it was was a plot spinning out. And as it turned out, the most insignificant thing about it was Nick. What with all the years and the people it encompassed, it read like a tale of revenge that passed from father to son, on and on. And for once Nick was the naive one—naive in the shallow, unlikely way of the young man who believes he's loved for himself and not his Lancelot face. Since he'd been so dumb so long, he thought, maybe he'd better not rush right in till he'd figured what it was Sam wanted. When he got to 405, he took it south instead of north. There was only one place where he did his serious thinking, and it didn't seem out of the way.

He took the Venice exit and made for the beach. Headed for the rickety outdoor café where he and Sam had passed a bad hour on the afternoon Rita landed. Had the others known he was going there, they probably would have given up on Nick. What got him into this mess was a lethal dose of out-of-focus sentiment, so it wasn't a very good sign if he had to touch base at the marginal places he'd shared with Sam. But Venice belonged to Nick long before he'd succumbed to the momentary impulse to show it off. He went back to it often, just to remember what he used to want as a kid. None of the others gave the time of day to the wanton children they'd left behind. Peter and Rita and Hey were a good deal offended by the drama and gilded dreams they all grew up on. Very, very tacky. But Nick was unswervingly loyal to the boys he'd been. He didn't sweat the tacky part because he took such care to keep it to himself. Whenever he had a big decision to make, he landed in Venice, all choked up and carrying in his head an armload of 9 X 12's from his past and a lot of beach shop souvenirs.

He drove down an alley beside the café that ended at the sand. It was his habit to spend an hour or two by himself, not finishing sentences, a cup of coffee getting cold in front of him. Or if it was money he had to mull over, he might buy a quart of ice cream instead, and eat it sitting high on a lifeguard's chair. His whole life, he'd looked for reasons to go to the beach. But he didn't actually
think
in Venice. He was like a photographer taking a dozen shots with a fast camera, and one would come out right. Today he was only looking to hold back an hour or so, just so he wouldn't go off half-cocked. Making a stop in Venice was his way of kissing a good luck charm. Like patting the Buddha's stomach. He didn't even need to get out of the car.

If Sam had never cared about Nick from the first, he wondered, what was the use of drawing him close again, unless it was more revenge? And for what? He couldn't very well blame Nick for the fact that Varda's treasure turned out to be non-negotiable and difficult to fence. Or was it in the nature of Sam's revenge that delivering pain was no fun unless the victim knew his face? Nick could already see he was wrong about being the throwaway character who had no point in all of this. That was just hurt pride. It was maybe true till this afternoon, but not anymore. The money Sam planned to recover in Rusty Varda's treasure house had fattened like a savings account—in his mind, anyway—and the bank went bust without warning and lopped off the future as it fell. So Sam must have thought of getting revenge only now, this afternoon. Against Varda through Hey. And then, for good measure, against Nick for trying to love him.

Nick didn't need five minutes in Venice before he had it figured out. What might come in handy to understand was that neither Peter nor the Rembrandt had anything to do with it. They were no less in danger right now, perhaps, but they'd be out of the line of fire once Nick was face to face with Sam. And Nick didn't think he had to worry about getting shot himself. He had to worry in a much more general way, he decided as he slipped the Mercedes into reverse and went back the way he came. Sam may have already dreamed up a plan that would put the lien on Nick's life for years to come. Blackmail of some kind. It had to be damned good to cheer up Sam on the day his ten years went up in smoke. But if it was only money, Nick was all ready and would count himself lucky. When he got to 405 again, he found he couldn't wait to be going north. Like Hey, he'd come to view it on reflection as a bloodless round of negotiations. In spite of the blood-soaked body he'd left behind in Crook House.