The Pegasus Secret (5 page)

As he remembered, he wondered which was worse: the torture of certain death or the sudden snatching away of his sister and nephew.

At least for the latter, he could dream of revenge, of getting even with the powers that had caused their deaths. That was a satisfaction he would never have for Dawn.

Over the years since his retirement, he had diminishing need to use his former contacts. How many of his old cohorts remained, he wondered as he groped in a desk drawer. His fingers found the false back and he slid a wooden panel out of place. Behind it was a small booklet which he pulled out and opened on the desk. Who was left? More importantly, who was left that owed him a favor?

He dialed a number with a 202 area code, let it ring twice and hung up. Somewhere, Lang’s own phone number would appear on a computer screen. In less than a second, that number would be verified with Lang’s name
and location. That is, if the number he had called still belonged to the person he hoped he was calling.

Within a minute, Sara buzzed him. “There’s a Mr. Berkley on the phone, says he’s returning your call.”

Lang picked up. “Miles? How they hangin’, ole buddy?”

The reply took a split second longer than an ordinary call. The call had been routed through one of a number of random relays scattered around the globe and was completely untraceable.

“Jus’ fine, Lang. How th’ hell you doin’?” Through the years, Miles Berkley had clung to his southern drawl as though it were a prized possession.

“Not so good, Miles. I need some help.”

Lang knew his words were being compared to old voiceprints. Or verified by some technology that had come along since his departure.

Pause.

“Ennythin’ I can do, Lang . . .”

“There was a fire in Paris three days ago, looked like thermite was used.”

“So I heard.”

Miles still read local papers. Anything abnormal, anything that might be the precursor to possible activity of interest, was noted, examined and catalogued. Miles apparently had the same job.

Grateful for that bit of luck, Lang asked, “Any military stores missing? Any ideas where that shit came from, who might have weapons like that on hand?”

“What’s your interest?” Miles wanted to know. “Think it might be a client of yours?”

“It was my sister, her friend’s house. She and my nephew were in it.”

There was a pause that was too long to attribute solely to a relay. “Shit, I’m sorry, Lang, Had no idea. I can see why you’d wanna know but we don’t have zip so far. No breakins
at military installations, no inventory missing, far as we know. ’Course about ennybody could walk off with half the Russian arsenal without the Ruskies knowin’. Your sister into something she shouldna been?”

“Nothing more than her kid, her medical practice and her church. Hardly criminal.”

“That makes it tough to guess at a motive. Say, you’re not thinking of coming out of retirement, are you? Hope not. Whoever these bastards are, they’re likely to be pros. No way you can take ’em on by yourself, even if you knew who they were.”

“Wouldn’t think of it,” Lang lied. “You can understand my interest. Any chance you can keep me posted, you find out anything?”

“You know I can’t do that, not officially, anyway. Asshole buddy to asshole buddy, I’ll see what I can do.”

For several minutes after he hung up, Lang stared out of the window. He had just begun and already he was at a dead end.

Atlanta
Later the same day

Park Place was not a very original name: the developer of Lang’s condo building had taken it right off the
Monopoly
board. There was no Boardwalk nearby. Putting up a high-rise that looked like a stack of square checkers probably was not a new idea, either. Having a doorman in a comic opera uniform was, however, a first for Atlanta and a bit rich for any place south of New York’s Upper East Side.

When Lang got home, Richard the doorman wasn’t as much an amenity as an obstacle. He was inspecting Grumps with the same expression he might have used for
garbage dumped in the building’s marble foyer. The dog’s wagging tail and imploring brown eyes did little to diminish the disdain.

Grumps didn’t much look like a pet of the affluent, Lang grudgingly admitted. The dog could have been claimed by almost any breed, with his shaggy black coat and white face. One ear was pointed, the other folded over like a wilted flower. Straining at the end of his new leash, Grumps was sniffing a bow-fronted boulle chest that Lang had long suspected might have been the genuine article. Had the dog not already anointed the boxwoods outside, Lang would have been nervous about the Abkhazian area rugs.

He figured a fifty would turn contempt to gratitude and he was right.

“He was my nephew’s,” Lang explained apologetically as he handed over the folded bill. “I didn’t know what else to do with him.”

Richard pocketed the money with a smoothness of one accustomed to residents’ largess beyond the Christmas fund. No doubt he was aware of Janet and Jeff’s deaths. Like all the building’s employees, he seemed to know what was going on in the lives of those he served.

He winked conspiratorially. “Looks like he weighs under ten pounds to me.”

The condominium association’s rules forbade pets in excess of ten pounds, a weight Grumps clearly exceeded five or six times.

“The gift is to make sure your powers of estimation don’t deteriorate,” Lang said with a wink.

“Count on it. Can I help you with the package?”

Richard was referring to the wrapped painting Lang had under the arm that wasn’t holding the leash.

Lang thanked him but declined, in a hurry to reach the
elevators before any of his more realistically sighted neighbors appeared.

Once the dog had inspected every inch of the condo, verifying that he and Lang were the only living creatures present, he slumped into a corner, staring into space with one of those canine expressions that is subject to multiple interpretations. Lang would have guessed he missed Jeff.

A good feed would cheer him up. But what to feed him? Lang had neglected to stop by the store for dog food, even had he known what brand Grumps preferred. Guiltily, Lang transferred a pound of hamburger from the freezer to the microwave. His offering received no more than a polite sniff. The mutt really did miss his young master.

“You don’t want to eat, it’s okay with me,” Lang said, instantly feeling foolish for trying to strike up a conversation with a dog.

Grumps’s only acknowledgement was shifting his mournful brown eyes in Lang’s direction. Lang sat on the sofa and wondered what he was going to do with a dog that wouldn’t eat and a painting he didn’t want.

Grumps began to snore. Swell. Nothing like a dog for companionship.

Lang gazed around the familiar space. The door from the outside hall entered directly into the living room. Across from it, floor-to-ceiling glass framed downtown Atlanta. To his right were the kitchen and dining area. On his left was the door to the single bedroom. Most of the available wall space was occupied by built-in shelves loaded with an eclectic selection of books that demanded more space than the small suite had to give. He had been reduced to buying only paperbacks because he could not bear to discard hardbacks but had no place to put new ones.

What little wall space remained was given to oversized landscapes by relatively unknown impressionists, paintings
he and Dawn had purchased together. His favorite, a reputed Herzog, hung in the bedroom where its rich greens and yellows could brighten the mornings.

The art was among the very few things he had kept after the sale of the house he and Dawn had hoped to fill with children. Most of her antiques were too large for the condo, their fussiness too feminine for his taste and the association too painful. He had kidded himself into believing the hurt would be diminished by getting rid of things familiar.

Shedding the furniture had been an epiphany in a sense, though. It had led him to recognize furniture, clothes, appliances as mere stuff, objects rented for a lifetime at most. Dawn’s death had made him acutely aware of the futility of material possessions: they were only things you had to give up in the end. Not that he had become an ascetic, shunning worldly delights. But if he could enjoy the better restaurants, live in the place of his choice, drive the car he wanted, the rest was excess baggage.

Lang had replaced antiques with contemporary pieces of chrome, leather and glass, retaining only two items, both predating his wife: a golden oak linen press, which housed the television and sound system, and a small secretary, the pediment of which bore the carved lazy eights that were the signature of Thomas Elfe, Charleston’s premier cabinetmaker of the eighteenth century. Behind the wavy, hand-blown glass was his small collection of antiquities and a few rare books.

He forgot Grumps’s snores for the moment while he considered the brown paper package leaning against the wall by the door. Might as well have a look.

He found pretty much what he had expected: a canvas of about three by four feet depicted three bearded men in robes and sandals. They appeared to be examining an oblong stone structure. The two on either side held sticks or
staffs while the one in the middle knelt, pointing to an inscription carved into the rock,
“ETINARCADIAEGOSUM.”
Latin. “I am in Arcadia” was Lang’s tentative interpretation, but that left over the “sum.” Why would there be a superfluous word? An incorrect translation was the answer that first came to mind. But he couldn’t make sense of the words any other way.

The fourth figure, a woman richly dressed, stood to the right of the men, her hand on the shoulder of the one kneeling. Behind the figures, mountains dominated the landscape, chalky hills instead of the verdant foliage of most religious pictures. The geography seemed to converge on a single gap, a rugged valley in the hazy distance.

There was something about that gap. . . . He turned the picture upside down. The space between the mountains now resembled a familiar shape, roughly similar to the profile of Washington on a quarter. A small peak made the long nose, a rounded hill the chin. It was a stretch, but that was what it looked like.

The painting had no meaning he could see, Biblical or otherwise. He crossed the room to where he had tossed his suit jacket across a chair and took the appraisal out of the pocket, putting the Polaroid on the secretary.
“Les Bergers d’Arcadie
, copy of the original by Nicholas Poussin (1593–1665),” read the note from Ansley Galleries.

Did that mean the work was a copy of Poussin’s work or that Poussin had made the copy? Had the copy been made between 1593 and 1665 or had the artist lived seventy-two years? Whichever the case, the appraiser at Ansley Galleries had put a value of ten to twelve thousand dollars on the painting which Lang assumed included the two-hundred-buck-plus frame he had paid for. Whether the value was real or merely a feel-good for a customer, he could only guess.

No matter. It wasn’t going to fit easily here. He stepped
back to take another look before moving the painting from beside the door. Where could he put it where it wouldn’t be in the way in the small apartment? Nowhere, really.

He set it on the fold-out desk of the secretary, stood back and stared at it again.
Bergers
—French for shepherds, perhaps? That would explain the staffs or crooks but not the woman who was far too well-clad to herd sheep.
Arcadie
? Acadia? A name given to part of Canada by eighteenth-century French settlers, wasn’t it? He was almost certain. When the English expelled them, they had immigrated to the nearest French territory, Louisiana, where they became known as Acadians or ’Cajuns. Longfellow’s epic
Evangeline
and all that. But the British hadn’t conquered Canada by 1665, had they? And what the hell did Canadian shepherds have to do with anything?

Curious, he searched the bookshelves until he found a historical encyclopedia. The province in Canada had been named for a part of Greece. Great. Now he had shepherds that were Greek instead of Canadian. Lots of help that was.

Leaving the puzzle of the painting on the secretary, he took the appraisal and Polaroid into the bedroom and put them in the drawer of his bedside table, making a mental note to take them to his lock box next trip to the bank. Exchanging his suit for a pair of jeans, he headed back into the living room as he buttoned up a denim shirt.

Atlanta
The next day

When Lang got home from work the next day, he noticed scratches on the brass plate of the lock on his front door,
small marks that an untrained eye would never have noticed. Squatting so his eyes were level with the doorknob, Lang could tell that these were no random marks left by a careless cleaning crew. Each tiny scrape led to the opening of the lock. Someone had tried to pick the mechanism.

Lang stood. He had almost succeeded in dismissing the incident on the Ile St. Louis as a botched robbery attempt. But not quite. Someone from his former life? It was still unlikely they would have waited this long to conclude whatever business they might have had. Besides, he was in America, not Europe. As if that still made a difference.

The more important question was, had they succeeded and how many were “they”?