The Gold Diggers (47 page)

In the beginning, just after the accident, Nick seemed to intuit that all he could do for Sam from here on in was to wipe out every trace of him. From his bed at home, his feet up in harnesses, salved every hour, he argued over the phone with Hey, who was still in the hospital. Hey was adamant—now that they were all safe, they had to tell the police. But why? Nick reasoned. The publicity would front-page their lives with the sort of ugly gay innuendo that kept away clients and crowded the driveway with ambulance chasers. And why give it both barrels to Sam's unsuspecting friends and family, wherever they may be? Let them keep hoping he'd turned out all right. Hey had the more serious claim, of course, because he had taken the more serious wound. He thought of it as part of what he owed to Varda, as if the public proof that it was murder ten years ago proved also that somehow Varda might have otherwise lived forever. But he waffled for a couple of days, long enough for Nick to decide it was too late—the authorities would want to know why they'd waited at all. So when Hey came home and they began to have the summit meetings every evening in the secret room, Hey agreed to leave it buried, too. By then he'd come up with his own good reason. “It'll be
our
secret, then,” he told them. “We'll give up all of Varda's things, and in return we'll have Sam and the Rembrandt. Just us four.”

They could have gone forward, of course, by simply expanding on Rita's cottage industry, the hand-stringed packages without return addresses. They could have cabled the various owners—museums, town fathers, embassies, and idle rich—claiming rewards where available, using Peter's shop as a conduit so that Crook House never got mentioned. But they didn't. They completed the inventory first, down to the smallest diamond stickpin. They separated out those things whose owners were either unknown, long gone, or thieves themselves. Then they considered divvying up that half, but only Peter would have gotten any use out of medieval silver, Burmese ivories, and the like. There was enough to start their own museum, but none of them ever went to half the ones there already were. Besides, keeping it together would cheat them out of the thrill of dispersal. There was too much inertia pent up in Varda's room. All his booty needed to have the dust of museums shaken out of it.

“I'm not ashamed to admit there are things I'd like,” Peter had reminded them, twirling a gold-headed cane that Commodore Vanderbilt took out to promenade on Cliff Walk.

“When would you ever use that?” Hey asked.

“I don't always use the things I like.”

“I think we have to make a show of it,” Nick proposed, “for Varda's sake. If everything gets siphoned off in bits and pieces, no one will ever know. People ought to know.”

“I can't allow it,” Hey said grandly, not at that point through with his duties to Varda's memory. “He was a great director. We mustn't work it so he's more remembered for being a crook.”

And that led to fruitless debate about one kind of fame and another. Nick said the taste in fame had changed since Varda's death, and the smuggling and hoarding of masterpieces would catch the public fancy. There were already crowds of old movie people. If they could still walk, they were out telling stories, and everyone already had the picture.

“I agree with Nick,” Rita said finally, speaking from the desk, her hand on the catalogue. She exuded the authority of one who knew the story here, at least, from cover to cover. “Let's throw it open. But not just so people hear about a caper having to do with stolen art. We do it for Varda and
Frances
.”

They hadn't had enough of love in life, Rita argued. That was why he'd provisioned so well the journey through to the other side of the veil. And Rita proposed to bring their ghosts together, true to the spirit of Varda's plan, by letting out their story. When Nick and Peter warned her that the press wouldn't tell it in the nicest way, that they'd dredge up the dope story, make it all sound crazy and sad, Rita thought she'd take that chance. “He didn't want to go to Heaven, anyway,” she said, staring at Nick. “The best we can do for Varda and Frances is make sure they're linked and let them go.”

It may have been sentimental rubbish, but it wasn't too pretty for Hey. He loved it. Peter thought it was tacky, but he did like the thought of the fuss being made over
his
house, if only so he could pretend it was a nuisance. You can't
buy
it, he always wished he could tell his clients when they coveted something of his that was fine and wanted one of their own. He had a secret wish to surround himself with a whole Russian prince's worth of artifacts and one-of-a-kind, hand-done pieces. Then he could show the San Marino ladies how out of luck they were. And however darkly he tended to paint the press, he liked publicity quite for its own sake. It didn't so much matter what they said, so long as they spelled the name right. Nick's wish was much more basic. He wanted to see the treasure go through the transformation into cash. He wanted to flood the market, send the bidding through the roof, cash in his chips till he broke the bank. An auction of Varda's things would bring out the real high rollers, and Nick liked to keep posted on how they were wearing their money this year.

So they all agreed in the end because they had to. They each had a trove of sentimental rubbish of their own, and they saw there was safety in numbers.

Five minutes up. Rita wondered now, as she turned from the pool, why she wasn't more nervous. Probably, she thought, because Varda and Frances Dean had stayed at a certain remove from her since the day Sam died. Her sentimental projections aside, she was acting—like Hey—more out of duty than as if she were reading
Anna Karenina
. That phase probably ended on the day she pulled the plug at Desertside. She didn't suffer for the star-crossed lovers anymore. Her pals in Crook House took up the slack and the empty spaces. Just like Hey said. Why was she mad at him for saying so?

“You're missing an earring,” Peter said.

She turned away from the dining room door a second time. He was coming from the direction of her room, carrying a beat-up wooden box. As to the earring, he didn't miss a trick. “Actually,” she said, “somebody else is missing it. I'm just the Lost and Found, as usual. What's that?”

“I don't know. Hey just handed it to me. I think it's the house croquet set.”

“What are you supposed to do with it?”

“As near as I can tell,” he answered brightly, prepared for all eventualities, “it's a present. ‘This ought to go to you,' Hey said, ‘because you have the right kind of rhythm.' What kind of rhythm is that, do you think?”

He set down the box between them on the flagstones. The lid had two hooks, and they each undid one and lifted up the top like a captain's chest. It was the juggler's kit. They stooped to it wordlessly and took it apart. A shelf swung out that was constructed something like an egg carton, with hollows for sets of hard rubber balls. Four balls in red, four in green, in blue, in yellow, but ancient and worn-away with use. They looked like the pale, filtered colors of the sky in a Dutch painting. Presumably, if you got good enough to juggle more than four at once, you had to start mixing your colors. Under this shelf was a toy-maker's grab bag of things to throw in the air. Brass rings, steel rings, cones, and batons. A set of frail ceramic birds that whistled when they flew. And then, in a special steel box at the bottom that reeked inside of kerosene, three weighted sticks all charred at one end—for juggling torches. Peter and Rita laid everything out on the ground around them, silent until they were done and the box was empty.

“This is all he brought with him from Hungary,” Rita said quietly, though of course she had no way of knowing. But she flashed on an image of a young and dark-eyed juggler standing in line at Ellis Island, a box of tricks in his arms, game to find a circus on the Lower East Side. And if a man like that got old and died, she thought with a sudden flutter of grief and fury, then none of them were safe, even here.

“I'm afraid I'm too old to learn it now,” Peter said. He'd have liked billiards better, or bowls or croquet.

“It's a talent, I suppose, like anything else,” she said, revolving a yellow ball in her hands. It made her think of the marble apple the goddess held in the secret room. “Like Hey says, you either have it or you don't. Why not give it a try?”

“Because unlike you and Nick, my darling, I don't always have to be acting out the Seven Ages of Man.” He stood up and held out his hands to her. “Come on, come on,” he said, as if they were on a tight schedule. “Nick must want to show us what Hey gave
him
.”

She got up and hurried along, looking over her shoulder once at the props of the clown show strewn on the terrace. Peter was probably right, but what Peter really had against juggling, she thought, had more to do with gypsies and the tawdry decor of circuses. He couldn't see past the tacky part to the magic. And Rita could. The lovely thing it said about Varda was that nothing at all was tied down to stay. Everything at any moment might begin to frolic in the midday air. A juggler was a man who held out hope.

“Why doesn't Hey give
me
something?” Rita asked as they clattered up the stairs in their fancy shoes.

“You don't need it. You find things all by yourself,” he said playfully. “Every time you look down, there's a cameo there at your feet.” They arrived out of breath at the door, and Peter knocked and opened it. But just before they went in and got lost in the dark, he touched her cheek and added one more thing. “Hey is trying to tell Nick and me that Crook House is finally ours. He's turning over the deeds and the titles. The funny thing is, he's got me feeling grateful.”

“Come sit on the bed,” Nick said when they came in. He was perched on pillows in his bathrobe, Indian-style, with a movie projector in front of him trained on the opposite wall. The blankets dimmed the light, but not so much so they couldn't see. The air was about as thick as twilight. As they kicked off their shoes and sat on either side of him, he clicked it on, and the film rolled. A man in an Edwardian suit ran up and down in a field, driven to distraction by something they'd missed.

“Wait a minute,” Peter said irritably. “Start at the beginning. Explain.”

“Most of it's really bad,” Nick said apologetically. “You haven't missed a thing. Grainy little one-and two-reelers. I can't even follow the story half the time.” Just then, a woman came tearing down the field as if for a touchdown. There was a moment of recognition. Then she and the troubled man danced around for a minute or so, delighted to have met at last. It was about as heavily textured as Mickey Mouse. “I've watched about two hours, and I'm up to 1919, and believe me, he's not a forgotten genius.”

But all the same, it was actually Rusty Varda's work, and they couldn't take their eyes off it. He'd saved it all meticulously. Where a hundred other pioneers, too broke to care, had let their reels rot in the attic, Varda transferred every blessed foot to modern film. He'd spliced it up so they ran in the order he shot them. Then he'd listed them all in a log that he tucked in the lid of the wooden box Hey dragged up the stairs to Nick that morning. A box about the size of the juggler's kit. With a sense of method as sharp and passionate as the plan for the secret room.

“How much Frances Dean has there been?” Rita asked tensely, afraid she'd been cheated, about to beg him to please start over. She didn't care about films much, unless they told a story very like a book's. She only wanted to see that face.

“That's why I called you up. She's about to make her debut.”

The film in the field ended with a kiss. Then the numbers zeroed down from ten to nothing, and the next film began before they knew it. “Varda Cinegraph Presents
A Test of Faith
.” The titles flipped and listed a cast of dozens, and the last line said, “With Frances Dean as The Woman from Paris.” She was more real to them suddenly, in just that line. But the film was awful. About a rich old man who'd returned from abroad with a pretty young wife who spoke no English. It all took place at a party he threw to introduce her around his vast Victorian family. A lot of preparation went on in a great big gingerbread house, and the servants whispered darkly about the way things used to be. The sons and their families gathered and went through aimless footage, with sight gags of dumb family pranks and heavy picnicking. When Frances Dean entered at last on the old man's arm, pale and thin and sleepless, confused by all this American cheer and Fourth of July noise, the rhythm went haywire. Nothing seemed to matter except why this beautiful woman was so sad, and there probably wasn't a film in the world that could say.

“This is terrible,” Peter said. “She looks like a little girl. No, worse. She looks like a little-girl junkie.”

“It's unearthly,” Rita said. Beautiful, she seemed to mean, but out of synch, like Garbo and the Keystone Cops.

Nick didn't notice, one way or the other. As he'd done all morning, he was staring stony-eyed at the young male lead, in this case one of the sons, being primed on one side by his brothers to test the young wife, to flirt with her till she was compromised, on the other side smitten in spite of himself. He was all out-of-place in his morning suit, hemmed in as if by armor. But the look was unmistakable. They were different in every movie, but they always looked like Sam. They walked like workmen, and they slouched like whores. Though his heart was in smithereens, Nick had to wonder for one dispassionate moment how so many men could be the same. His eyes weren't playing tricks. Not a single one appeared a second time. He must have seen twenty or thirty, all told. For some reason, Rusty Varda wanted a new one in every film—in his bed as well, presumably. So maybe Sam was right. Varda had asked him back to Crook House again and again, as if in his old age he'd finally found a boy he couldn't leave alone. Finally found the one. What did it mean, Nick wondered, if Sam was right about that?