Herbie's Game (19 page)

“I thought maybe you’d have Ting Ting wearing chaps.”

Stinky’s eyebrows rose without wrinkling his forehead, but then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not during my lifetime.” He went back behind the cylinder desk and brought out a beautifully shaped high-backed wooden chair, undoubtedly made for a nineteenth-century English tearoom. “Please,” he said, turning it so it faced him. “Sit. What brings you here?”

“Well, healing the breach, for one thing.”

“Of course,” Stinky said, thinking he was smiling.

“And, you know, shoot the shit.”

“Ahhh, Junior,” he said, shaking his head fondly. “You know me, business, business, business. I’m hopeless where, as you put it, the shit is concerned. Won’t hold my interest, I’m afraid. No matter how vividly you present your material, I’ll just wander off, and that would be rude. I wouldn’t want to be rude. And I’m sure you have somewhere to go.” He looked at his watch. “My, my,” he said. “Past nine.”

“Okay, piece of business number one. Sit down, sit down.”

He pulled a delicately carved chair, undoubtedly French, from behind the cylinder desk, and sat, very carefully. It creaked once beneath his bulk, but it held.

“I wouldn’t tilt back if I were you.”

“Actually, you probably would.” Stinky said. “Anyone who tilts back in a chair is a barbarian.”

“Okay, now that we’re sitting, piece of business number two. Since I’ve learned that you have connections in the world of commercially arranged death, I’m wondering whether you’ve heard of someone named Ruben Ghorbani.”

Stinky didn’t bother to react, just looked at me. It was one
of his skills, looking at people as though they were objects of no value. After fifteen or twenty seconds, which is a long time to be looked at that way, he said, “And third?”

“Bored already?”

“I’ve never heard of him. Your attitude is a bit strained. Am I incorrect in thinking you’re no longer holding a grudge against me?”

“
Me
?” I put my hand, fingers splayed, in the center of my chest. “Against you?
Zut, alors
,” I said. “It is to laugh.”

He pursed his mouth, about the only moveable feature the Botox had spared, and said again, “And third?”

“You’re about as much fun as you always were,” I said. “
Third
is more in your usual corral—sorry, this living room is affecting my word choices. What do you think of this?” I reached into my pockets and brought out the jewelry box. I opened it, holding it so that the lid hid the contents of the box, and took out the Cartier brooch.

He gave it a quick look, and then his eyes went to the box. “What
aren’t
you showing me?”

“Oh, come on. You practically broke that nice desk closing it when I came in. I wasn’t tiresome about that. How about you return the favor?” I held up the brooch.

He peered at it and then extended a hand. “Give.”

I gave, and he turned back to the desk, slid a drawer open, and came out with a jeweler’s loupe. He offered the brooch three or four unenthusiastic seconds through the loupe and said, “Very nice. Real, of course, liberation jewelry from Cartier. I assume you know the story.”

“Assume away.”

He gave the piece a little toss, straight up and down, and caught it in his open palm, more a way of assessing its weight than anything else. “I’ve seen worse and I’ve seen better,” he said. “It’s
in good condition, but the value is compromised because so many of them were made. Still, for a buyer who subscribes to the emotional miniseries behind it—valiant French countesses, German dueling scars, wartime heroism, and all that—it’s worth a bit.”

“How big a bit?”

“If you could find the right customer, which would be difficult for someone in your position, perhaps fifteen thousand.”

It was the usual Stinky lowball. “And if I sold it to you?”

He shrugged and handed it back. “I’d have to hold onto it until the right person turned up. Or—no. No, never mind.”

“Or what?” I checked the brooch to make sure he hadn’t worked a switch.

“Or I could sell it to a collector of Nazi memorabilia. It would interest some of them.”

“Why?”

“Well, I’d have to tart up the story. Tell them it was bought from the estate of a Gestapo officer who ripped it from the bloody blouse of some brave
mademoiselle
who wore it to her execution.”

“There are people like that here?”

Stinky had enough control of his mouth to produce an unpleasant smile. “Within blocks.”

“I think I’d rather you didn’t sell it that way.”

“I haven’t even agreed to buy it.”

“Okay.” I put it back into the box. “Nice seeing—”

“What
are
you hiding there?”

“Tell you what. Let’s trade. I’ll show you if you’ll show me. Open the desk.”

“This is the point,” he said, “at which my mind begins to wander.”

“Fine,” I said. I got up. “If I get home fast enough I can watch
The Walking Dead
.”

“Twenty seconds,” Stinky said. “In each direction.”

“How much would you give me for the brooch?”

“Well, since you have me at a moral disadvantage, what with my little lapse of judgment about that attempted hit, I could go seven thousand.”

“Mmmm,” I said. “Okay, open the desk.” I went around behind it so I could get a clear shot.

“Not so
close
, not so close.”

I backed up three steps. “Here all right?”

“Look.” He showed me his watch, gold on a black alligator strap with more dials and wheels than a submarine. He did something to it, and it displayed a blinking 20. He pushed a button on the watch and opened the desk.

Beautifully carved ivory chess pieces, probably Chinese, a full set, on an ivory and onyx board; a small vase shaped from a single translucent piece of Imperial jade; and the thing that almost stopped my heart, a partly unrolled painting on paper, women with braided ropes of heavy black hair, sitting bare-breasted beside a stream. I said, “Is that—” and the desk’s cylinder came down again. “The picture,” I said, swallowing. “Is that a Hyewon?”

“Don’t be silly,” Stinky said. He let the silence stretch out like someone savoring a flavor. “No one can get a Hyewon. They’re all in national museums.”

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Hyewon—real name Shin Yun-Bok—essentially reinvented Korean painting late in the eighteenth century. “How did you—?”

“I didn’t,” he said, so smugly that I wanted to paste him. “You didn’t see anything. Your turn.”

“Forget it,” I said. “What I’ve got is nothing compared to that.”

“Allow me to judge. We had a deal, remember?”

We did, in fact, have a deal. So I backed up a few paces, opened the box again, looked at my own watch, and said, “Here,” and held up the handmade brooch.

Stinky squinted and then rubbed his nose, a good, full, four-aces rub. He doesn’t know he does it, and I’ll kill the person who tells him. He took a step forward and I took one back. We did that several times, as though we’d been choreographed, until we were practically in the center of the room. I said, “Twenty seconds,” and dropped it back in the box.

“How—quaint,” he said. “You’re right, of course, it’s nothing much.” He rubbed his nose again and then he cleared his throat. “If you want to toss it in with the other one, I’ll give you eight thousand.”

“Don’t think so,” I said.

“All right.” He held up his hands in surrender. “You have me at a disadvantage, given my halfhearted attempt on your life.

Ten.”

I said, “Halfhearted?”

“An errant impulse,” he said. A vein was beating on the side of his neck. “A two-year-old’s tantrum. I don’t even remember why I was so angry. Twelve.”

“Good thing he missed then,” I said. “Boy that’d be a load of useless guilt, wouldn’t it? Sort of a
Who will rid me of this troublesome priest
situation, huh? Remember? Henry II and Thomas á Becket? A king can’t even think out loud without someone leaping to follow his order. Talk about an errant impulse. A lifetime of regret, hairshirts, crawling in penance on his royal knees, and the guy he killed by mistake gets sainted. Well, Stinky old lad, I’m happy you’ve been spared that. It would have made me feel guilty, even in heaven.” I put the box in my pocket. “Bye.”

“Sell me those brooches. Sixteen.
Seventeen
.”

“I think not. All I have to do is find myself a Nazi, and—”

“You’re not leaving.”

“It’s not polite to contradict one’s host, so I’ll just say, ‘Of course not,’ and find my own way out.”

Stinky shouted, “Ting Ting.”

I turned back to him. “Ting Ting? You’re threatening me with
Ting Ting
?”

“The brooches.”

I shoved them all the way to the bottom of my pocket. “Why? You practically blew your nose, hard as that may be to imagine, on the first one. What’s the deal with the second?”

“It’s not my fault you don’t know your business. Twenty, and that’s extremely generous.”

“I’ll take your word,” I said, and turned to see Ting Ting standing in the archway that led to the hall. He smiled at me again.

“I’m leaving, Ting Ting,” I said.

He smiled again and said, “Mr. Stinky say no.”

“Come on, Stinky,” I said. “It’d be like fighting with a tulip.”

“Then leave,” Stinky said. “Or be smart and sell me the brooches. The sound you hear is hundred-dollar bills being fanned. Two hundred of them. Twenty thousand. You’re not looking.”

“I’ve seen money before,” I said. “Move, Ting Ting.”

Ting Ting said, “Nope. Cannot,” and assumed the pathetic, off-balance, wide-footed stance of Bruce Lee wannabes the world around.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

Stinky said, “Watch his left,” and I figured he was trying to misdirect me, so I watched Ting Ting’s right fist and completely ignored his left foot until it flattened my nose.

Instantly, I was sprawled on my back on the floor, bleeding heavily. Ting Ting reached down to help me up, but I waved him off, pushed myself onto my hands and knees, blew blood out of my nose all over Stinky’s pinto sofa, and let my emotions get the better of me. I got up and charged Ting Ting, who stepped aside with the kind of silent grace you see in slow-motion film of a hanging piece of silk evading a bullet, and then pivoted to bring his right elbow into, of course, my nose.

This time he didn’t knock me down. This time I went to my knees on my own, simply lacking the energy to do anything but try not to drown in the pain, which was sort of a cross between being hit in the face by a streetcar and inhaling a nest of hornets, with just a connoisseur’s hint of having bitten into something that exploded. I stayed on my knees while Ting Ting fussed over me, going
tsk tsk tsk
as I focused on the new discovery that pain could be emitted in concentric circles, like an expanding target, and that the circles seemed to be alternately red and redder, with the occasional thin, jagged perimeter of bright yellow.

“The brooches,” Stinky said from across the room. He waved Ting Ting over, and with a last, anxious look at me, Ting Ting trekked across the increasingly blood-spattered carpet, and Stinky handed him the wad of hundreds. Ting Ting, not even breathing hard, brought it back and, guiltily, extended to me.

Like the seventh idiot son of a seventh idiot son, I tried to slap them away. Ting Ting reacted with what he probably thought was measured violence, bringing his knee up sharply beneath my chin. This had the effect of a) making me bite my tongue harder than I’ve bitten into most steaks, b) snapping my head back, the weight of which c) pulled me over onto my back, on which I lay, watching the ceiling waver through my tears and thinking about
swallowing blood until I came to my senses and turned my head instead so I could spit it onto Stinky’s carpet.

“Mr. Junior,” Ting Ting said, “You stop, please.”

I rolled onto my side to get an arm under me. Over the roar of the pain, I heard Stinky say, “Take the money, Junior, and give him the box.”

It took me a long, watery minute to get to my feet. When I did, I shook my head to clear it, which had the effect of spattering blood in a nice semicircle on everything within an arm’s length. Then I squinted at Stinky—I didn’t have to squint much, because my eyes were trying to swell closed—and said, “You’re not the only one who knows how to hire a hit. I am up to my elbows in contract shooters right now, and I swear to you, if you take these brooches you’ll be dead before you go to bed tonight.”

Stinky’s eyes went sub-zero. “And we’d just made up, too,” he said. “I’m letting you walk out of here, but don’t flatter yourself that it’s because I’m afraid of you.”

There was a large, hard lump of sheer rage almost blocking my throat. I said, “Put your fingers in your ears, Ting Ting.”

Ting Ting put his fingers in his ears.

“If I don’t get an apology from you tomorrow, you noseless sociopath, you’d better hire an Israeli army unit to protect your surgically enhanced ass because I swear to you, I will bring you down.”

The last thing I saw before I made an unsteady turn and wobbled down the hall was Stinky taking an involuntary step back. It wasn’t much but it was my only victory of the evening. Out in the car, leaning sideways to bleed into the street, I took stock: I hadn’t made any progress on Wattles’s chain, Handkerchief was still dead, and I was no closer than before to the solution of Herbie’s murder. On the plus side, I’d learned
that my Bizarro Liberation brooch had some interest value, and a chunk had been sliced off the big black rock Burt the Gut had said was hanging over me. If the good-luck/bad-luck ratio evened out in a timely manner, I had a
great
few hours in front of me.