The Chelsea Girl Murders (25 page)

“You were in love with Gerald,” Maggie said, shaking her head. “Did you sleep with him?”

“No. I'm still a virgin,” Nadia said with pride. “We kissed though.”

“And when you went home to Plotzonia?”

“We E-mailed. I told him I loved him, and wanted to come back to him. He had a plan. I'd run away, bring the icon, we'd sell it, and use the money to start a new life in South America.”

“He was conning you,” Maggie said. “He would have dumped you as soon as he got his share of the cash. Gerald would never leave New York.”

“I didn't know. He told me not to tell anyone about us. It was a secret romance, until my father's secret police intercepted our E-mail. After that, we wrote in code.”

On her way down from Miriam Grundy's apartment, she'd heard that Gerald had been killed, and she'd gone straight to the basement and sneaked out. She hopped a cab to the Bus Stop Bar & Grill. It wasn't until the next day, when she saw the newspapers, that she learned what kind of boyfriend Gerald Woznik was.

“I was fooled,” Nadia said bitterly.

“Aw, luv, we've all been fooled,” Phil said. He'd been quietly thinking up until now. “You'll be wiser next time.”

“Yes, next time maybe you'll see through the bad man, and past him to a good man,” Maggie said. “I did.”

“Tamayo didn't know it was Gerald? Or about the icon?” I asked.

“No. She just knew I was in love and running off to elope. I saw her about a week before I left, in Plotzonia. She was on her way to Kazakhstan with her boyfriend, Buzzer.”

“I've never been to Plotzonia,” Phil said. “What's it like?”

“The most boring place on the planet,” Nadia said. “And the people there are really stupid.”

In the next half hour, we learned more about Plotzonia than you ever wanted to know, our heads filling with facts that no doubt displaced important things like poetry, fond memories, and the names of friends' children. Plotzonia has a population of seven million, less than New York City, with slightly more than half the population residing south of the Malo River, in North Plotzonia. Here's an interesting tidbit: Some of the earliest known condoms had been made with the bladders of a large river fish, the blue-speckled carp that had lived in that river. The blue-speckled carp, alas, was long extinct.

The main industrial products were tractors and the Vlada automobile; the main agricultural products were potatoes, turnips, and pork; the main natural resources iron ore and salt. But since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Plotzonia's location, between Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, made it a popular transit point for guns, drugs, and the white-slave trade, bringing a great deal of money into the region. The people of North and South Plotzonia were ethnically almost identical—Caucasian Christians of the Eastern Orthodox variety. Due to the Great Schism of 1304, they'd belonged to two different sects of the Plotzonian Orthodox Church. They squabbled constantly and only knew peace under the iron hand of foreigners—the Ottoman Turks, Napoleon, the Russian czars, and after World War Two, the U.S.S.R.

“The most popular Plotzonian singer is Irina Illyishum, known as Plotzonia's Celine Dion. She blends pop music with the balalaika and a local wind instrument known as the fimpin. It's torture to listen to it, and they play it everywhere, from loudspeakers, in the tea houses, in the bazaars, at parties, in music videos on TV. TV! The government, my father, controls the television and radio, and we only have two old American TV programs,
Highway to Heaven
, and
Little House on the Prairie.
Michael Landon is almost a god in my country. The most popular Plotzonian TV show is called
Nation and Destiny
…”

“An uplifting drama about a family of smelters,” I said.

“You know it?” Nadia said.

“Plotzonia TV tried to sell it to my network, and that's how they promo'd it—an uplifting drama about a family of smelters. It was one of the most depressing shows I've ever seen in my life.”

Funny, all I would have had to ask to know the country she and Rocky were from was “What is the most popular TV program made in your country?” One simple question, and I hadn't thought to ask it.

“I had satellite TV, but the common people do not, and so they are very stupid,” Nadia said.

We could smell the convent now. Phil stopped the car and insisted we go over the plan. When he was satisfied we were all in sync, he handed the wheel over to me. I dropped him and Maggie off outside the range of the main gate's video cameras, Nadia put her suitcase into the trunk of the car, and she and I proceeded to the gate.

After pushing the buzzer, Rocky's voice said, “Nadia?”

“Yes, I'm here, Rocky,” she shouted out the window.

“Who else is with you?”

“Just Robin.”

The gates opened, and we drove up the curved driveway to the front of the convent. Before leaving the car, I took the safety off Mrs. Ramirez's pearl-handled pistol, and slipped it into my blazer pocket.

When Rocky opened the door, he was standing there with Mrs. Ramirez, who was gagged with duct tape, a gun to her head.

“Nadia,” he said, softly, when he saw her. But the softness didn't last long. “Go into the parlor—that way. Move!”

In the parlor, some of the Sisters were leaning against one wall, their arms linked, their hands cuffed behind their backs in a human chain. Where did he get handcuffs? I wondered. They were all gagged with duct tape as well, and their legs were bound. On the floor by the nuns, I saw Señor, his feet tied calf-roping style with red cake-box ribbons, his mouth muzzled with a rubber band. He was growling through his muzzle. Rocky had shown the dog enough mercy to remove his little habit and throw it onto a chair, thus restoring a modicum of dignity to him.

“Where are the other Sisters?” I asked.

“I locked them in the chapel,” he said with a bit of pride. “Throw down your gun.”

“What gun?” I asked.

“The pearl-handled pistol,” he said.

“I left it at home.”

“Throw down your gun or I'm shooting Mrs. Ramirez.”

In a situation like this, you have to stop and think like a NATO general, weigh the potential collateral damage against the greater, utilitarian benefits. Mrs. Ramirez was very old, she'd lived a long life and was looking forward to going to Jesus. If it would save the lives of the five nuns, a Plotzonian princess, a chihuahua, and me.…

But I couldn't do it. I took the gun out of my pocket and put it on the floor.

“Kick it away,” he said, and I did.

“Nadia, cuff Robin with the nuns,” he said.

“Rocky, this isn't going to help,” Nadia said. “Let's just go.”

“Tie her up, woman!” He then said something in Plotzonian, she said something back in the same tongue, and then she complied and cuffed me. I was arm in arm with the nun chain, right next to the Mother Superior, Nadia cuffing my hands while Rocky supervised.

“Gag her,” he said, throwing Nadia a roll of silver duct tape.

Nadia complied with this request a little too quickly, in my opinion.

Well, smart girl, I asked myself, how are you going to get out of this one? I was chained to five nuns, my hands tied, a gun to Mrs. Ramirez's head. My feet were tied too, so I couldn't kick anything at Rocky to distract him so Nadia could grab the gun. In any event, the nearest kickable object was the trussed-up Señor.

“Okay, Rocky, let's go now,” Nadia said.

“Not until you get on your knees and beg my forgiveness for running out on me,” he said.

“On my knees?” she said with a snort.

“On your knees, woman.”

Where was Phil, I wondered, and tried to send a telepathic message to him—“Hurry!”—then tried to send a longer one to Nadia—“Use those damned feminine wiles and tricks of yours, girl! Bat those eyes at him, lick your lower lip, invite him to kiss you, and when he does, grab his gun and knee him in the balls at the same time! If that doesn't work, turn on the waterworks and soften him with tears!” But she did not pick up the signal.

As Nadia knelt, Rocky said, “Did you have sexual intercourse with that man?”

“Rocky, this is insane …”

“Did you?” he asked, jamming the gun hard into Mrs. Ramirez's head.

Nadia hesitated before answering, and there was a glint of defiance in her face. But she said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I still love you, Rocky,” she said. “Deep down, I always loved you.”

“You swear?”

“I swear. There wasn't time for anything to happen. I found out what a devil he was in time. He put me under a spell, that man,” she said, and added something in Plotzonian. They moved back and forth between English and Plotzonian, as if they weren't even aware they were doing it. It made it hard to know what was being decided.

“Beg for my forgiveness.”

“Forgive me, Rocky. Forgive me. Forgive me.”

He said something in Plotzonian. It sounded like “vizhee co tebya” something something something …

Nadia caught my eye, looked back at Rocky, and said in English, “I don't know how to get the Baby back. I sold it.”

“You sold it? Who to?”

“A woman.”

“Where is she?”

“I don't know.”

He walked over to me, dragging Mrs. Ramirez by the scruff of her dress. “Do you know?”

I shook my head.

Behind Rocky, Phil appeared in the doorway, and my spirits lifted, until Phil lurched forward and I saw his hands were cuffed behind his back and he was being pushed by the brown-eyed man with the bad toupee, now sans the AstroTurf. Behind them came a heavier-set man with blue eyes, pushing Maggie.

Bad Toupee spoke in Plotzonian, gesturing to his prisoners with a gun. Rocky barked out something, and the two men took Phil and Maggie away at gunpoint.

“You're locking them in the chapel?” Nadia said. “You're not going to hurt them, are you?”

“No,” Rocky said, though he was probably lying. “Not if we have no more trouble.”

He and Nadia argued in Plotzonian about the Baby.

Finally, Nadia blurted out in English, “All right, all right. I sold it to Miriam Grundy. She has it. Talk to her.”

“We must go get the icon,” Rocky said. “If she won't give it back, we'll force her to give it to us. Where is she?”

“At the Chelsea Hotel,” Nadia said.

chapter sixteen

There's always that point, in the middle of a jam, when the usually dormant voice in the back of my head suddenly awakens and asks, “Where the hell are we and how did we get ourselves into this one, Robin?”

You probably know that voice. It's the voice of reason. Sometimes events carry a person away, and the resulting clamor drowns out that voice until it's almost too late.

In the past, I've heard it ask, “Robin, why are we beating that woman with her own comatose grandmother?” “Why are we locked in a cage like a lab animal?” “Why are we in black leather slave outfits and why are we being chased by a man with a sofa glued to his back?”

Now it was asking, “Robin, why are we chained to a bunch of nuns in the back of a cake-delivery van speeding its way into Manhattan to try to recover a legendary holy icon, and how the hell did we get here?”

Rocky and his two Plotzonian henchmen had this bright idea. They took me and the five nuns and joined us in a circle, with Rocky and Nadia in the center. On the upside, they untied our legs so we could walk in this awkward knot of nuns as one, like the crew of WJM in the group hug scene on the last episode of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
except that we were facing outward, not inward.

We formed a human shield around Rocky and Nadia. We were Rocky's insurance policy. Bad Toupee—whose name, I gathered, was Pavli—was driving. The guy with the blue eyes had been left behind to watch Phil, Maggie, Mrs. Ramirez, and the nuns who were locked in the chapel. I'd managed to talk Rocky out of taking Mrs. Ramirez with us, pointing out that as a frail old woman (ha!) she would only slow him down. Nadia then pointed out that with five nuns, me, and a smattering of firearms, what more protection did they need?

Now that I was in the jam, the question was, How do I get out of it with minimum loss of life? Clearly, we knew too much and there would be considerable incentive to kill all of us once we were no longer needed, all except Nadia, who would either escape again, or get dragged back to Plotzonia to marry Rocky. Did Plotzonia have an extradition agreement with the United States, I wondered? As a haven for criminals and gunrunners, it was unlikely. If we all died, who would be able to tell this story, implicate the future dictator of Plotzonia, and see justice done? Lucia? She didn't have much of the story, and wasn't all that credible, being a scandalous exile who drank cocktails for lunch. Miriam Grundy knew about Nadia and the icon, but she didn't know Nadia's country or anything that didn't seem to pertain to the icon itself. The Zenmaster wouldn't get involved. Carlos the bullfighter had been gored in the head and had a short-term memory problem. The others who had come in contact with Nadia had only the tiniest pieces of the puzzle. With no witnesses left, what would the police think when they found a bunch of dead Sisters and a few dead laypeople in a convent on Long Island? What possible motive would they find for the mass murder of cake-baking nuns? Would a link be made to the profane and satanic graffiti on the convent walls the year before?

It wasn't hard to see how this would play out. The public outcry would force a massive police investigation. With no witnesses or real clues, a witch hunt for satanists, wiccans, and New Age flakes would ensue, until some grandiose, recently released mental patient was arrested and either railroaded or induced into confessing to a crime he didn't commit. A crime like that can't remain “unsolved.”