The Chelsea Girl Murders (16 page)

This did not sound promising.

“And watch out for Art Break. I hear they're doing something in the park tonight too.”

“We saw their fresh spoor on the trail in,” Maggie said. “They're already here. It's as if they're following us. This is the third time we've been on an operation and Art Break has been here.”

“Keep an eye out,” the head guy said again. “Watch where you step.”

After we assembled our equipment, Maggie and I walked off toward the obelisk, just north of Turtle Pond. It was dark now, and the Victorian-style standing street lamps along the path flickered on with a foggy golden glow. Central Park is a very dark park at night. The big black rocks that jut out of the ground make it seem darker somehow, as do the trees and the gloomy tunnels under the footbridges.

“So Nadia met with Miriam to do what?” Maggie asked, picking up the thread of our conversation.

“Get her blessing, I guess. It's weird though, because she left Tamayo's apartment, said she was going to meet her guy, and she arrived at Miriam's alone.”

“That is strange. The boy got lost on the way?” she asked.

“He's a pretty dim bulb, and spoiled rotten.”

“And Nadia took off when she heard of the murder?”

“Evidently. I hope. The guy with the bad toupee, the man she was supposed to marry, showed up and is after her too. I scared him off and secured the apartment, but it is still very risky having that boy there.”

When we got to the obelisk, we scoped out the area to make sure nobody was watching us. There were a couple of people who had been on the path behind us. Once they walked out of our sight, Maggie squirted the lighting solution in a large circle about six feet in diameter.

“What are we doing?” I asked, suddenly realizing how it would look if I, a respectable-seeming TV executive, was caught starting a fire in Central Park just a few days after my apartment building burns down. It's always in the back of my mind how easy it would be for people to build a totally wrong, circumstantial case against me because of the curse on my head.

“Patience. You'll see. Stand by with the little fire extinguisher,” she said. “Just in case.”

Squatting low to the earth, she took the mini-torch and ignited the fluid. It flared up, then burned out quickly, leaving a sooty, black ring.

“Hand me the clothes, shoes and sock first,” she said.

When I pulled out a shoe, it stuck to one of her Roller-blades. It took me a moment to untangle it and get everything in place.

“Quickly,” she said.

The shoes and socks went down first, followed by trousers with the underwear inside, a shirt, a jacket, and an empty wallet, all in a carefully messed pile. When it was done, Maggie took a moment to admire it, then stepped out and brushed away her footprints in the grass.

“This is the first time we've used the blowtorch,” she said. “We used to just drop full suits of clothes in front of buildings and in elevators. But the torching is just such a nice touch.”

“I've seen that before, a full suit of clothes on the sidewalk! It never occurred to me it was guerrilla art.”

“What did you think when you saw it?”

“Someone was beamed up by the mothership from where he stood,” I said.

“Good, it worked, then. But not everyone gets it.”

This changed the way I looked at her. Anyone who would go to the trouble to do something so devilishly brilliant and meaningless gets major points.

“You're just doing the park?” I asked.

“For tonight. We've already done it this year out in Flushing, Queens, and Madison Park in the Flatiron district. Next time we want to hit Wall Street.”

“You could torch the clothes too, and then people would think it was a case of spontaneous human combustion,” I suggested.

“Hmmm. I like the way you think,” she said with an edgy admiration. “It's so odd that Tamayo has never introduced us.”

“Yes, isn't it,” I said. “But I'm on the road a lot and so is she. I haven't seen her in New York in ages.”

“I have heard about you, I think. Are you the friend of hers in television who once baked her cheating husband's lucky shirt into a pie and made him eat it?”

“I didn't make him eat it,” I said. “I was pissed off. That was the day I found out he was having an affair.”

“It's a bloody good bit of revenge, all the same,” she said. “Let's get out of here. We have to hit the Alice in Wonderland statue at seventy-fifth next.”

So we wouldn't be seen and give ourselves away to Art Break, we took the lesser-used footpaths to get there. Taking this route after dark in Central Park is none too wise, but hey, I figured, who was going to bother one woman with a blowtorch and another with a pearl-handled pistol and a fire extinguisher?

“I'm a big believer in revenge,” Maggie continued.

“Nonviolent, nonlethal, in-your-face revenge is the best revenge, I think. Don't you?” I wanted her to consider this possibility, lest she find out about me and Michael O'Reilly and try to sign me up for the American Nazi Party or forward all my mail to a cult in Texas. “It's honest and harmless.”

“Oh, eye for an eye, I say.”

“Oh, but something that's irritating to the object, and really funny to everyone else is so much better, karmically,” I said. “The punishment should not be as bad as the crime. Not even close. You can't spread malicious lies, or call some guy's wife or girlfriend to tell him you're having an affair with him if you aren't, or—”

“What about burning bags of dog shit on someone's porch?” she asked.

“That's a classic,” I acknowledged. “But it's better to play fair and take the high ground. Taking the high ground is part of the revenge, you see.”

“Interesting. But not nearly as much fun as my way,” she said. “Oh look, Art Break has been here too. Looks fresh. They are so declassé. Their motto is ‘Shit happens.' Watch your step.”

I could barely see the big coiled pile of fake dog crap. It was then I became aware that we were walking through a very dark part of the very dark park, down a path between sloping, tree-lined banks. There was rustling in the brush. I turned to look, and reassure myself, and two men jumped out onto the pathway, one behind us and one in front of us, before Maggie and I could react. At first, I figured it was the Art Break people, but they were wearing ski masks and dark clothes, and they had guns.

I had a gun too, in my purse, as well as the fire extinguisher, and my deadly, brain-freezing shriek. Maggie had her mini-blowtorch. This might all be well and good if we were up against one armed man. But with two, one in front and one behind, we were trapped.

“Where is the girl?” asked the man in front of us, with that same weird accent that Rocky, Nadia, and the man in the bad toupee all had. He was wearing some kind of big cross around his neck.

“What girl?” I asked.

“Nadia.”

“I don't know. I swear to God.”

“Where is the baby?”

“What baby? I don't know anything about a baby. I don't know what the hell is going on, I swear to God,” I said.

“I don't either,” Maggie said.

“What about the boy, Raki?” he said, pronouncing it some-what differently than the Americanized Rocky did.

“Look, we can't help you. We don't know anything,” Maggie said.

The gunman behind us started to speak in another language. The gunman in front of us looked past us to his colleague, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the man behind had one foot stuck in the still-cooling brown foam left by Art Break.

Beyond us all, someone yelled, “Hey, let it set!”

When the gunman in front of us turned to see who was there, I looked at Maggie, nodded slightly, and in a split second we moved. She aimed her mini-blowtorch to the man behind us to hold him at bay. His gun went flying as he dodged the fire. I smacked the one in front of us in the head with the Rollerblades in the garbage bag, then shot him in the face with the fire extinguisher. I hit him again and again. The gunman behind had taken off, half-running, half-dragging the hardening brown foam. His fellow gunman followed. They disappeared into the bushes.

“Hey, where's our shit?” asked a lanky young man in a gray T-shirt and jeans. “Maggie Mason?”

“Kip, I should have known you were involved in this,” Maggie said.

“Where's our shit?”

“Some guys with guns took your shit.”

Another underfed young man appeared behind him.

“They stole our shit?” he said. “Sounds like Erisian sabotage to me.”

“I swear to God, they took your shit.”

“Fuck.” Kip turned on his flashlight and scanned the ground, the light beam crossing a gun. He bent down and looked at it. “It's a real gun, looks like.”

Something else glinted on the ground. It was the cross. I slid it out of their view with my foot.

“Oh, man, what do we do?” Kip asked. “We gotta give the gun to the cops.”

“And tell them what? That gunmen stole our shit?” the other guy asked. “Wipe your prints off that gun and we'll drop it on the security-station doorstep with a note, like an abandoned baby.”

“We're out of here,” Maggie said to me.

Before we beat a hasty retreat to Fifth Avenue to get a cab back downtown, I picked up the cross and pocketed it. In the cab, I took it out and showed it to Maggie Mason.

It was a strange silver cross with a grim-looking face in the middle. It had Cyrillic lettering around the face.

“What is it?” Maggie asked.

“I don't know. I'll ask Rocky. Or Raki, as the case may be. And there's that baby being mentioned again. What is that about?”

“I don't know. How did those men find us?”

“They must have followed us from the hotel.… Maybe those workmen at the elevator followed us out.…”

“We've got to find Nadia,” Maggie said.

Why didn't I think of that? I thought facetiously.

“You probably know more of Tamayo's New York—area friends than I do these days. Maybe you could make a list and start making some calls. Someone else in this area must be part of her underground railroad,” I said.

“You should talk to Edna, the switchboard operator, see if Nadia made any calls on the hotel phone system, or if she accidentally heard anything listening in to phone calls. Edna knows where most of the bodies are buried, so to speak.”

“She told me her secrets die with her.”

“You just need to know how to get to her. Let me work on that,” Maggie said. “What are you going to do?”

“Look after Rocky,” I said.

Security system or no, Rocky was not safe at the Chelsea. I could defend myself, but the manboy couldn't even microwave chili without help. He had to go.

chapter ten

The Sisters of the Wretched Souls convent sits on three bucolic, well-secured acres in one of the back settlements just south of the Hamptons, where many of the finer grocers and tonier celeb eateries stock the cakes and pastries produced by the Sisters. Well before you see the convent, you smell it. The air was full of the smell of hot sugar, vanilla, and chocolate from the bakery operation. The only thing marring this pleasant, sugary vision of peace and love was the razor wire and the electrified fence. The razor wire atop the abbey's high stone walls had gone up after several of the statues in the convent garden were stolen by crack addicts. Lewd, racist, satanic, and antinun graffiti on the stone walls had, the previous year, inspired the electrified fence. Phil and his buddies had installed that electrified fence, and he assured me that this was one of the safest places in the tristate area.

Phil had met us downstairs on Twenty-second Street in a car he'd borrowed to take us out there, so there'd be no record of the journey with a cab or a car service. Meanwhile, I'd hustled Rocky out in the dead of night. Figuring Rocky would not leave without the right incentive, despite the obvious threat, I told him Phil thought he had tracked down Nadia at a house in Long Island.

“Where is it?”

“I don't know. Phil found her. He won't tell me exactly where she is out of concern for her safety,” I said.

The sweet look he got on his immature little mug when he heard about Nadia almost made me feel bad for lying to him. But, you know, it was for a higher purpose, i.e., saving his little hide. Even then, he didn't make it easy for me.

“I'm afraid to leave the apartment,” he admitted. “Maybe you should bring Nadia here.”

“No, we have to go there. Both of us,” I said.

“Can I call my parents and tell them?” he said, picking up the telephone expertly, as if he'd been using it by himself all his life.

“Wait until we actually see her,” I said. “Besides, this phone could be tapped or someone might monitor my cell phone. We have to be extra careful from here on in.”

It wasn't until we drove within the convent walls that I 'fessed up.

“Nadia isn't here, Rocky. Sorry to lie to you.…” I began.

“But how will I find Nadia? Take me home.”

“Home? And where might that be exactly?” I asked.

“I'm leaving,” he said.

“You're going to walk back?” Phil asked.

It was a fair hike just to get back to the electrified gate, then a good mile to a main road and a couple of miles to public transportation.

“But—”

“You're safe here, mate,” Phil said. “And all the cake you can eat.”

“Rocky, I was followed and attacked by men in masks last night and they asked about you, Nadia, and a baby. You are not safe at the Chelsea.”

I showed him the cross. “Does this mean anything to you?”

“Oh my Godt,” he said, in the same way Nadia said “God.” He got even paler, if that was possible.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Saint Michael the Martyr. He's the patron saint of a terrorist group in my homeland.”