The Missing Piece (20 page)

“It doesn't matter,” Andreas told his brother, then turned to Ivan. “Yes, she was our mother.”

“I played in your kitchen,” said Ivan. “I remember your pictures on the refrigerator. I…” He went no further.

Matyas invited Ivan to sit beside him on a bench and told Andreas to stand behind them and keep watch.

“For who?” said Ivan.

Matyas pointed two fingers at his own eyes, tapped one against his ear.

“We need your help,” he said.

He explained that their older brother, Luca, had been obsessed with finding Roman artifacts in the countryside around Polgardi. As a boy, Luca filled glass jars with coins, chariot nails, shards of painted pottery. On Saturdays, he would ride with their neighbor Grotzky to a flea market in Budapest and sell these trinkets for forint coins. Later, around the time he took a job at the quarry, Luca convinced himself that a large Roman settlement once stood in the forest at the edge of town. Studying the land, he identified the footprints of ancient buildings and dug test holes inside the largest of these until his spade struck the lid of a bronze cauldron. It took days for him to dig around it, a full day to lift it out, another day to haul it on a draft cart borrowed from Grotzky to a shack that had been a wine cellar. There he pried off the lid and found fourteen pieces of beautifully wrought urns, bowls, and trays, all solid silver. Later, much later, after the Yugoslav soldiers came, pieces of what was called the Salvus Treasure began to appear on the Middle Eastern antiquities market.

“A trial over the ownership of the treasure starts next week,” said Matyas. He handed Ivan a piece of paper showing a judge's name, a room number, and a date. “One piece of the treasure will be on display. We are going to steal it.”

“Why?” said Ivan.

“Because it is ours,” said Matyas. “Because our brother was murdered over it. Our mother, too.”

“Bastards,” Andreas snarled above them.

“What is your plan?” said Ivan.

Matyas explained it, stressing the need for an inside connection. Someone just like Ivan.

“And you steal the piece. Then what?”

“We sell it to whoever wins the trial. Get back some of what is rightfully ours,” said Matyas. “It is worth millions.”

Andreas snorted. Ivan looked back and forth between the two brothers, saw the tension there.

“I need to think about this,” said Ivan.

“See?” Andreas told his brother.

Matyas raised a hand. “There is no time to think,” he told Ivan.

“Five o'clock,” said Ivan. “We meet right here.”

Ivan went back into the courthouse and shut himself in his supply closet. He lifted the coffee can off the shelf and sifted through his many losing lottery tickets. He already knew he would help them. He owed them that much after what he had seen as a helpless boy in the kitchen where he played. But their plan was too stupid and too obvious to succeed. And he wanted it to succeed because he would demand a cut of whatever they made selling the treasure piece. It would be his lottery.

He spent the afternoon dry mopping the corridors on the courtroom floors. But in his mind he was calculating sight lines and escape routes. At five o'clock he met the brothers in the park and redrew their plan, erasing the weak parts and inserting his own ideas. The brothers agreed. Willingly, thought Ivan, though he supposed they had no choice.

On Friday, Ivan stuffed his duffel bag with the warm-up suits the brothers would put on after they entered the courthouse. On Monday, he lugged in the two guns, waving pleasantly to the officer at the first-floor security desk before veering off to swipe his ID card at the time clock in the corner of the lobby.

They met at one thirty that afternoon in a little-used men's room half a flight up from Ivan's supply closet. The brothers pulled the warm-up suits over their gym shorts and T-shirts. Ivan, wearing gloves, handed over the guns. At two o'clock, Ivan climbed the A stairway to the 3M level, unlocked the door to the plenum, then returned to the third-floor landing. At five past two, he heard a gunshot. A few seconds later, Matyas and Andreas burst into the stairwell. Matyas handed over the burlap sack that held the treasure piece. Ivan ran up to the plenum. The brothers stripped off their warm-up suits, flew down the stairs, and exited by the back door before the courthouse locked down.

Ivan spent the entire afternoon in the plenum. He sat on the floor, cradling the treasure piece in his arms. It was an urn with a round bottom and a long neck that ended in a thin spout. He rubbed the urn with his thumb, feeling the low-relief detail through the scratchy burlap.

He heard shouts in the stairwell, footsteps climbing, descending, pounding on the landings. Once he heard the door handle jiggle and he expected next to hear a key sliding into the keyhole. But that was it. No one returned to the plenum door for the rest of that long afternoon.

When it was time, Ivan crept carefully toward the dim outline of an old wooden desk. He eased open a drawer, angled the urn crossways inside, then eased the drawer shut. He let himself out of the plenum and locked the door behind him. He returned to his supply closet, quietly but not stealthily, in case he was spotted. He stayed in the closet long enough to compose himself and change out of his coveralls and into his street clothes. He pulled on his jacket and shouldered his empty duffel bag. He took the elevator down to the rotunda. There were court officers everywhere and police and men who looked like detectives.

Several employees gathered at the revolving door. A police officer frisked each one as a court officer searched whatever they carried. Ivan waited his turn. He wanted to ask what happened, what the gunshot meant, whether the brothers had gotten away. But he dared not ask; he simply let himself be frisked and searched and then he pushed through the revolving door.

 

CHAPTER 23

Ronan Hannigan jumped out into traffic and waved the truck to the curb along the west side of Thomas Paine Park. The driver rolled down the window, then tore an invoice from a clipboard. Inside the park, Damien Wheatley lifted a foot onto a bench and leaned backward to stretch his spine. The protestors had dwindled to six people, all of whom stood on the other side of the park, directly in front of the courthouse. Their banners drooped, the lettering of their signs ran with the moisture of a heavy morning dew.

Hannigan folded the invoice into the waistband of his running shorts. The driver and a helper got out of the truck and lifted the rear gate. Hannigan took a quick look inside before wandering over to Damien.

“This is the masterstroke,” he said. “I got this idea during yesterday's run. I get all my good ideas when I run. It's like ideas get shaken out of deep corners of my brain.”

“You have six people,” said Damien. “I can't find you any more.”

“You will,” said Hannigan. “I'm changing the context.”

The driver swung into the back of the truck and pushed a long cardboard box into the hands of his helper.

“A tent?” said Damien, reading the print on the box.

“Not a tent,” said Hannigan. “A tent city.”

Damien closed his eyes and shook his head. Hannigan grabbed his arm.

“I thought, hey, I have the injunction allowing me the use of the park,” he said. “Why not use it to the max? So I'm running, and the ideas are tumbling like glassware in an earthquake, and suddenly it comes to me. This is all about housing, so I'll give my people a place to live while they protest. At first, I thought one big tent, like a revival meeting. But there are too many trees for one big tent, so I thought a few smaller ones. Then a few more, then a few more after that, and it became a tent city in my head. I talked to my lawyers…”

“You have lawyers?” said Damien.

“Of course I have lawyers. You think I'm doing this on my own? I talked to my lawyers, and they reviewed the language of the injunction and said it was broad enough to include the use of nonpermanent structures; in other words, tents.”

“How many?”

“Six for now. They each accommodate twelve people.” Hannigan turned to look at the six sorry protestors across the park. Then he handed Damien a thick stack of single-ride MetroCards. “You got a lot more to offer now, so work your magic.”

*   *   *

Across the park, Ivan walked slowly toward Andreas with his hands deep in his coverall pockets. Andreas sat leaning forward on a bench, a thick fist propping his chin. He looked like that statue, Ivan thought, which was kind of funny because Andreas was the brother who always seemed to react without thinking.

“Where is Matyas?” said Ivan.

Andreas looked up. He took in Ivan for a moment, then leaned back and sighed.

“Matyas is not well,” he said.

“But wasn't he doing better?”

“He was until the last chemo. He always feels bad for a day. But this is the third, and he is still…” Andreas held a hand flat out. “So, what is this about?”

Ivan sat down beside Andreas, his hands still in his pockets.

“Someone is on to us,” he said.

“Who?”

“A court officer.”

“Why do you think he is on to us?” said Andreas.

“Because he is not just any court officer. He was one of the officers in that courtroom. He was the one you slugged, the one guarding the front door.”

“He was not much of a guard,” said Andreas. “So, did he come to you and say, ‘I know you have the urn'?”

“It was not so clear,” said Ivan. “He told me to let him into the plenum.”

“The what?”

“The plenum. It is a storage area. Most people in the courthouse don't know about it, even people who have worked here for many years. All the custodians have keys. It was where I hid while you and Matyas escaped.”

“Why did he want you to let him in?”

“He said he was looking for something.”

“Did he say it was the urn?”

“No.”

“Then he could have been looking for something else.”

“That is true,” said Ivan. “But earlier that day, the lawyers on the case were in the courtroom with the new judge. He was in the courtroom, too, not working but watching. He found me after the conference ended. I asked him why he needed to get into the plenum, but he wouldn't give me a straight answer. I tried to follow him inside, but he told me to hold the door. I could see from his flashlight that he went as far as the place where I once hid the urn. Then a rat chased him out.”

“Some brave guard,” said Andreas.

“Later, I followed him down to the subbasement,” said Ivan. “There are many storage rooms there. He looked in each one.”

“So?”

“I kept the urn down there for a time, too,” said Ivan. “It was like he was reading my mind.”

“Where is it now?”

“Back in the plenum. He won't go back there again. He's afraid of Bors.”

“Bors?” said Andreas.

“My name for the rat.”

Andreas shook his head.

“Don't worry about the guard,” he said. “It won't be much longer that you'll need to keep him fooled. What about the other guard?”

“Still in a wheelchair,” said Ivan. “Paralyzed from the waist down.”

Andreas clapped a hand on Ivan's shoulder.

“I will be in touch,” he said.

*   *   *

The courtroom was deathly quiet. Foxx sat in the front row of the gallery, his posture perfectly straight, his hands cupped on his lap and his eyes closed. The court reporter straddled her steno machine, thumbing through a fashion magazine. Arthur Braman had ducked out a few minutes earlier to take a phone call, which left only Billy Cokeley at the counsels' table. The clock built into the back wall of the courtroom clicked, and the big hand lurched forward another minute. Robert Pinter was now half an hour late.

Inertia, coupled with an unpleasant fatigue and an upset stomach, kept Linda on the bench. She surreptitiously broke a saltine cracker and slipped half past her lips, the gesture reminiscent of a priest snapping a large, newly consecrated host into three pieces to fit into his mouth. Similarities between the church and the courts, between the ecclesiastical and the legal, had dogged her all morning. They went beyond equating altar with bench, pulpit with witness stand, choir with jury box, and sacristy with robing room. Instead, they settled on how the courts, like the church, had no standing army, no physical manifestation to enforce their rulings, but relied on a shared understanding with their respective flocks.

She glanced at Mark, who sat in the clerk's box, reading a motion file he had brought down from chambers. He had offered, again, to sit in on the conference, and she, for two intertwined reasons, had agreed. For one, Bernadette needed a solid day in her cubicle to draft the pretrial decision and, once that was done, work on the homeless stipend case. For another, Arthur Braman had requested the conference for reasons that were still unclear, and with a case like this prudence dictated that another set of eyes and ears be present, even if those eyes and ears belonged to Mark. Smart he wasn't, but honest she felt he always would be.

Braman returned to the courtroom and noisily took his seat at counsels' table. In the gallery, Foxx opened one eye.

“Mr. Braman,” said Linda. “You did notify Mr. Pinter of the conference, correct?”

“I spoke to him directly,” said Braman. “I told him ten o'clock sharp.”

The clock on the back wall clicked off another minute: 10:32.

“And can you give us a hint about why you needed this conference?”

“With all due respect, Your Honor, I prefer to wait until all counsel are present.”

Linda considered that for a moment, then whispered to Mark.

“Call Pinter's office and find out what's keeping him.”

Mark went into the robing room and came out a minute later to crouch beside Linda.

“His paralegal says he was called away on an emergency. He'll be here as soon as possible.”