Immaculate Reception (22 page)

“Oh, this old thing,” I said, smiling as I fingered the pavé diamonds, the encrusted surface feeling rough against my thumb. “Xavier gave it to me.”

“It's like baseball,” Holly muttered. “You strike three men out and then, next thing you know, it's a new inning and it's like back to the top of the batting order.”

Wes and I looked at her. Since when did Holly watch baseball? Must be Donald. We were none of us immune to the influences of each relationship.

“Did he really kiss you?” Holly asked.

“I'm not going…”

“I told you about Donald's zipper,” she cried, indignantly. “You owe me.”

“I believe he did,” I said. “I believe he would have gone on kissing me if we hadn't been interrupted.”

“Ahem,” Wes said, wanting to make his point. “Interrupted by
the pope
, for crissakes!”

“Hey, I'd been waiting for that kiss for eight years. It better have been interrupted by someone pretty important.” I smiled at him. “Anyway, it released me, in a way. I could finally put some of that old drama to rest.”

“And Xavier…” Holly asked.

“This necklace belonged to his sister. He gave it to me as a goodbye gift. He's gone back to Pennsylvania. He knows what he wants to do with his life. I always thought he'd made the wrong choice. I'd thought if it had been right for him to join the church he should have been able to keep me in his life, too, as a friend. But, now, I don't think things are as black and white as I like them to be.”

“But Madeline Bean does not see gray,” Wes joked.

“We'll see,” I said. “But I do have some news about Monsignor Picca's journals. Xavier has a friend, another Jesuit brother, who is anxious to finish the monsignor's research.”

“But the story of that old pope's assassination! How is Rome handling that bombshell?” Holly asked. “And that missing encyclical. What do they say?”

“No comment,” I answered. “They say conspiracy theories are always popular, and nothing more. Can you believe that?”

“Figures,” Wes said, closing his eyes in a silent protest. “They will neither confirm nor deny. It's standard.”

“It reeks!” Holly said, upset.

“It's the way the real world works. Unless some proof magically appears, my unsubstantiated rambling tale of a story that may or may not have happened sixty years ago doesn't mean spit. Zoda's name will never be connected with his horrible crimes. That old man, Victor Zoda, took a lot of secrets with him to the grave. Only Xavier and I heard him confess the truth. But that is not enough.”

“But Xavier's friend. When he goes public with the monsignor's research…”

“When Xavier's friend publishes this story in a few years,” I said, realistically, “I doubt many will even pay attention.”

“Whoa! That's like the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Big earth-shattering deal, and in the end, it's covered up and tucked away,” Holly said. “Amazing!”

“Wait a minute,” I said, looking across the main dining room at Cucina Paradiso. “Is that who I think it is?”

Wes said, “Where? Who?”

“Oh my gosh!” Holly said. “It's those two women who were on that diet. The ones from our breakfast who gave the waitress such a hard time.”

“They couldn't eat fruit, remember?” Wes said.

“Not until after two,” I said, smiling. “They had a list.”

“Well don't look now,” Holly said, “but their list must say that on Friday night they can scarf four servings of tiramisu. Each.”

We howled. Now that was one diet that I could manage.

And then, my buddy Alex Lombardo came out to sit down with us and sample some of his world famous bread pudding. Just for us, this incredible chef brought out a special treat, a tiny castle which had been constructed out of dark and white chocolate, sitting in a puddle of raspberry puree. I felt the walls suddenly close in upon me.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. The last nagging piece of the puzzle dropped into place. I believed I had just discovered one more secret that Victor Zoda had been hiding all these years. And this one could actually bring the bastard's reputation down to hell where it belonged.

I
t was almost midnight when Lieutenant Chuck Honnett pulled his old Mustang convertible up in front of the dark home in Encino. Wesley and Holly and I had been waiting outside for over an hour. Almost at once, two patrol cars joined us, and everyone got out of their respective vehicles.

“You've got it?” I asked, nervously.

“I got Judge Edward Randell to leave his cigar night at his club. He signed the search warrant but he reminded me we could've waited until Monday morning, what with the suspect being…
dead
.”

“Sorry,” I said, as we walked up the narrow sidewalk that led to the entrance of Victor Zoda's home.

The front door sported a lockbox, the kind realtors use when they want to leave the door keys available for showing a property. With Zoda dead, the house and all its contents had been sealed pending probate.

“Has anyone gone through the house yet?” I asked, as Honnett spun the tumblers on the combination lock and opened the strongbox, which held the keys.

“His probate attorney was out here, yesterday, with some family members,” Honnett said. “Nobody found anything funny.”

“Let's go in,” I said. I led the way toward the back of the house, flipping light switches as I went, remembering the evening last week when I'd first visited Victor Zoda.

“Back here,” I said. The patrol officers stayed at the
door while Holly and Wesley tried to keep up with Honnett and me.

In the family room, nothing much had changed. The brown Naugahyde furniture. The green shag wall-to-wall. I noticed the cookie crumbs had been vacuumed, but otherwise, the room was very much as I remembered it. On the walls, oak paneling featured bookshelves filled with Reader's Digest versions of the classics.

“In here,” I said, trying the handle on a door that was set into the paneling. It was locked.

Honnett stepped forward with the ring of keys he'd extracted from the lockbox. He fitted several narrow keys into the lock, but none of them turned.

“I'll call the officers out front,” Honnett said. “They brought axes. I guess we could go at it that way.”

“Wait a second,” I said. I looked around the room, wondering where an old man would put a key. On the bookshelf, the Reader's Digest novels looked untouched.
Lost Horizon. Great Expectations
. What interest, I wondered, had Zoda shown for literature? And then I saw a volume that interested me. With its creased spine and worn navy leatherette binding, it was the one book that looked like it had been read. I pulled it off the shelf.

“What is it?” Wes asked, moving closer.

“
Treasure Island
,” Holly said, reading the title.

“I think this is it,” I said. “There's something tucked inside.”

When I opened the book, it appeared normal. I flipped a few chapters until I found a hiding spot carved into the body of the book. A rectangular chunk had been gouged out. In that space lay a small bronze key.

We waited in silence until the door was opened. The room beyond was black. Switching on his flashlight, Honnett led the way.

“Watch it,” he advised. There was a step down into the next room, as if this section of the house had been an addition, constructed after the original building was complete.
I felt against the wall to find the light switch, but couldn't find one.

When all four of us had made it safely into that dark room off the family room, our eyes began adjusting to the charcoal gloom. Soon we could make out shapes as we followed the beam of Honnett's lone flashlight. Up above, surrounding the room, I could see blackout curtains hanging over high windows. In the ceiling, the room featured several large concave acrylic skylights that revealed the black of an overcast night.

There wasn't any furniture, but there was a large object in the very center of the room. It was shaped like a box, five feet by ten feet, which was set on a raised platform. The entire unit was completely covered in a shroud of black duvetyn. The beam from Honnett's flashlight disappeared as he circled behind the object and then came around the other side.

“It's not a coffin, is it?” Holly asked.

“Zoda wasn't a vampire,” Wes answered, and then said, “Careful, Holly.”

Backing up, to get a better look at the entire object, Holly had tripped and caught herself. In gripping the side of the doorframe, she'd found the button that worked the lights.

A blaze of bright floodlights flashed on, and at the same time, the sound of a motor, as the black curtains began to part at the high windows, and the large black duvetyn drape covering the object in the middle of the room began to lift.

“What the…?” Honnett said.

We stared, amazed, as the shroud was lifted. Beneath, in the high-watt glow of the floodlights, the dazzling miniature image of Catherine the Great's Treasure Room began to be exposed.

“I'll be damned,” Honnett said, beginning to smile. “Here it is, just like you said. This thing must be worth a fortune. Those jewels are real, you say?”

“I'm sure they are,” I said, staring at the perfect replica of Zoda's passion, the fabled Amber Room of Imperial Russia.

“Hot dog, Maddie,” Holly said, excited. “Is there a rule about finders keepers?”

“Amazing,” Wesley said, walking up and touching the miniature panels inlaid with amber stones. “You said the original room from the tsar's palace outside St. Petersburg was one thousand square feet. So Zoda must have built this thing to a perfect one-twentieth scale.”

While they were marveling over the model, standing in the dazzling reflection of thousands of pieces of cut amber, I was searching the rest of the room.

“What now?” Holly asked me. “Isn't this what you thought we would find?”

“I'm looking for another door,” I said.

Honnett and Wes looked around. In the new brilliance of the high intensity floodlights, there was clearly no way to hide a door. The walls were constructed of wallboard and plaster, with not a detail of molding with which to hide a door seam.

“Nothing else here,” Honnett said.

Holly, who had joined me at the farthest wall, her nose an inch away from the plaster, said, “I think this is all she wrote.”

I turned to the center of the room, where the raised platform held the remarkable model of Catherine the Great's stolen treasure room. I walked up to it and tried pushing. Nothing budged.

“You need help?” Wes asked, and was quickly beside me, putting his muscle into the job. Still, nothing moved.

“It's probably bolted to the floor,” Honnett said. But he, too, came to my side and started to push.

“Nothing's gonna give,” he said.

I peered at the jeweled miniature. The room was duplicated down to the tiniest detail. It was a fairyland castle, with miniature doors and chandeliers.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I put my hand carefully into the scaled down model and turned the tiny gold key that was inserted into the exquisite gold lock on the door of the toy jewel room.

We heard a click.

Then, the platform holding the gleaming amber model began to move. Some motorized apparatus rolled the entire structure to the side, leaving a clearing at the center of the room. On the stretch of dark carpet that had been exposed we could all clearly see a large rectangle of mahogany set flush with the floor. It was a hatch with a silver handle.

Now Honnett was bending over, lifting on the hatch. Now Wesley was shouting he had it, as he held the hatch door open so that Honnett and I could look below. They had revealed a secret staircase that led down to a lower level. Beneath our feet was a hidden subterranean room.

Quickly, we charged down the steps. And in an instant, we saw the real treasure that Victor Zoda had been hiding all these years.

In the basement of an ugly green stucco tract home, in a fifties housing development, in a suburb of Los Angeles, stood the jewel-encrusted grand ballroom which the king of Prussia had bestowed upon the Imperial House of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. Worshipped by the Russians, lusted after by the Nazis, and then, amazingly, missing without a trace for fifty years. The final payoff from some fleeing Nazi criminal to the man who demanded riches in exchange for freedom.

Here, in all its splendor, stood the reconstructed jewel room of the tsars. This twenty-by-fifty-foot rec room, sparkled with dazzling carved amber panels and valued beyond price, would have been the perfect spot, no doubt, to throw a pretty awesome neighborhood Tupperware party.

“You did it,” Holly said, whispering in the shadow of the majesty of the room.

“That old bastard,” Honnett said, looking at me with something I could have mistaken for respect. “When this hits the fan, Zoda's reputation as a great humanitarian and benefactor will be destroyed.”

“You know, Maddie,” Wes said, putting his arm around me and leading me to a glittering corner of the room, slightly away from the others, “this means something. It's
big. And you're the one who did it. Now can't you see that you are here for a reason?”

“You mean, here in the Treasure Room, or here on this planet?”

Wes smiled at me, raising an eyebrow.

“Are you trying to say that…?”

For one clear moment, I was struck by the thought that there might be a purpose, after all, to the random mayhem of the millions of souls that crash into the rocks of their daily lives. Why did Brother Ugo's plea for forgiveness wait all these decades to slip out into my kitchen? Why did I decide to get involved?

“You mean, it was all preordained? I was supposed to help settle this score? Wesley, you're getting all California cosmic on me,” I said, trying to push away the overwhelming sense that a universe I'd considered hopeless might be a little less so.

“I mean, can't you open yourself to the possibility that all events, all actions have a purpose? Even those things, Maddie, that make us sick with grief. That beat us down. Even the most horrible pain we are forced to endure?”

“You mean like Xavier breaking my heart years ago? So I could be on my own now, doing what I love to do?”

“I mean like everything,” Wes said, and hugged me.

“Way too California,” I said, pulling back from him and laughing.

“What do you make of all this?” I heard Holly ask Chuck Honnett across the room.

Eavesdropping, I expected a level-headed answer from a predictably jaded source.

He looked around at the shimmering amber panels and said, “Well, maybe some of us better start thanking God she's on our side.”