The Clairvoyant Countess (25 page)

“That bad?” he said lightly. “Actually I can come right now, I’m leaving in a minute and will be passing your street. Serious?” he added in a lower voice.

“Not precisely a criminal matter—not yet,” she explained.

“Be there in five minutes,” he said, and hung up.

In precisely five minutes a police car drew up to her building and Pruden was at her door. Entering her apartment he gave a quick glance around the room and then a look at her face as she brought out the tray of Turkish coffee and placed it on the table. “Thank you for stopping, this won’t take long,” she told him.

His level brows lifted over his slate gray eyes. “I thought
at the very least you were being held captive here. Margolies said it was important?”

She nodded. “I think so,” and pouring out the lavalike brew she handed him a cup and began describing to him her experience on the subway train. “You see,” she explained, “when Georges first moved to go—and then didn’t—he was very definitely showing me that he was being followed. When he did leave at the next stop”—from beneath the table she drew out the attaché case and handed it to Pruden—“he threw this to me just as the doors closed behind him.”

He looked at it, frowning. “Nothing too unusual about it. You say you recognized this man?”

“His name is Georges Verlag,” she told him, “and I believe you will find at least a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds in this case.”

His brows shot skyward again.

“No, I’m not being clairvoyant now,” she said, smiling. “Georges I knew in Europe. You may recall that I was married once to a diamond merchant in Antwerp. Georges was a young diamond salesman then, and I have few doubts that he still is. This is how diamonds are often carried for delivery.”

“This casually?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “but you mustn’t think there is anything casual about their travel arrangements. Diamond salesmen have to be very clever and very, very cautious, never staying at the same hotel twice, often making a reservation at one place and then going to another, never announcing where or when or how. They would equal in deception any CIA agents.”

“I’ve never known either,” Pruden said, his eyes on the case. “I do see that it has three locks and is made of steel. You realize that if these are diamonds, then your friend placed you in some danger by tossing the case to you?”

“The danger is negligible,” she told him with a shrug. “How could that man in the trench coat learn who I am?”

Pruden said dryly, “By catching up with your friend Verlag and insisting, not too gently, that he identify you.”

She nodded, smiling. “I did hope that might not occur to you. There is, however, no certainty that Georges knows my present name, since it was Von Domm at that period in my life.”

Pruden grinned at her. “If I’ve finally gotten it all straight I am speaking to—let’s see—the Countess Marina Elena Provotchnichet Gaylord Von Domm Karitska?”

“You say it very musically,” she told him.

“But I still don’t like any of this. Who does Verlag work for, do you know?”

She shook her head. “I’ve no idea, but there used to be only two very large dealers in this country: Winston and the Zale Corporation. And I should like you please to take them away with you and place them somewhere very safe.”

He nodded. “Of course, but we’ll have to open the case to verify its contents, you know. The chief wouldn’t care to tuck away an attaché case full of hashish or cocaine. Look, you’re sure about this? Your friend Verlag could be on your doorstep in an hour or two wanting this back, you know.”

“I would be most happy if Georges does appear on my doorstep inside of the hour,” she told him, “for I am more than a little worried about him; I did not at all like the look of the man following him. But if Georges should arrive, he will have to visit headquarters for his case, for I refuse to keep anything of value on Eighth Street.”

Pruden nodded and put down his cup of coffee. “I’ll leave you with a receipt for one leather-covered steel attaché case with three locks and a scar on one corner, presumably
the property of one Georges Verlag, and in turn you’ll let me know the minute you hear from him.”

“Agreed,” she told him.

With a glance at his watch he nodded. “I’ll just have time to drop this off at the station, I’m due to interview the parents of a young girl killed by a hit-and-run driver over in Ardsley, her funeral only three days ago.”

“So young! Poor child!”

He turned at the door to give her a thoughtful glance. “Poor child, yes, but something …” He frowned.

“Yes?”

“Something about it troubles me and I don’t know what. Do you suppose …” He reached into his pocket. “I’m to deliver this gold cross to her parents, found by the Ardsley police on the street, after—well, it was there when the ambulance came. They’ve washed the blood from it. Do you suppose you’d have time to … to … I could return it to them tomorrow or by mail.”

“Of course,” she told him. “There’ll be time for that after my next appointment—to see what impressions I can receive?”

He placed the gold cross with its torn thread of a necklace on her table. “Thanks,” he said, and hurried out, leaving Madame Karitska to turn her attention to devising a message for Georges Verlag, and with haste, since her two o’clock appointment loomed.

With a pen she scribbled a few lines on paper, crossed them out, and then clarified them until she had reached a message too oblique to enlighten anyone but Georges—if, of course, he read the newspaper personals: G, she wrote, and in block letters,
IN MEMORY OF ANTWERP TRY KARITSKA, NOT M. VON D.
” She then phoned the classified section of the newspaper and asked that it be inserted in tomorrow’s newspaper, and for three more days, and after writing out a check she mailed this
at the corner postbox. When this had been done she cleared the coffee table of cups and carried them into her tiny kitchen, where a
tajine
was simmering on the stove. She had time only to stir it when her two o’clock appointment knocked at the door. She opened it to a young woman with an anxious face, who simply stared at her, apparently not expecting a tall, distinguished-looking woman with oddly hooded eyes and a kind smile.

The girl promptly burst into tears.

“Oh my dear, you are much too young to cry,” said Madame Karitska gently. “Do come inside.” For her, she decided, a cup of rich cocoa with a fillip of whipped cream. “You shall have some hot chocolate, which will make you feel better,” and drawing her inside she returned to her kitchen. When she entered the living room again, tray in hand, the girl was seated on the couch, staring at the wall of books, at the intricately carved Chinese coffee table, and at the sun streaming through the window.

She blurted out, “My name’s Betsy Oliver,” and then—again startled—she added, “I didn’t expect you to look so … so … I thought you’d look more like a gypsy fortune-teller.”

“Life is full of disappointments, is it not,” said Madame Karitsky humorously, and leaning across the table handed her the cup of steaming cocoa. “You are feeling better now?”

The girl nodded, and Madame Karitska gave her a brief but thorough glance, noting the anxiety in her eyes and the air of helplessness she projected. But although the helplessness might be real to her, thought Madame Karitska, it was either self-imposed or imposed by others, for she was
not
the little brown wren that she believed herself, dressed as she was in colorless clothes. Her face was too strong, and her jaw too firm.

“It’s my husband,” Betsy Oliver said, and reaching into her purse she brought out a large signet ring. “Mona told me you hold things—”

“Psychometry, yes,” said Madame Karitska.

“Mona’s the friend who recommended you. So I brought Alpha’s ring. My husband’s. He thinks he mislaid it, but …” She flushed. “I’ll tell him tonight I found it behind the sofa cushions or somewhere.”

“An interesting name, Alpha,” said Madame Karitska.

“Well, actually it’s Arthur,” the girl said with a vague motion of her hand. “We’ve been married seven years, but lately—well, he’s joined this group a year ago and they gave him that name, you see. I guess he likes it, so he’s kept it.”

“Alpha,” mused Madame Karitska. “A religious group?”

She looked uncertain. “It must be; he brings home all these pamphlets about righteousness and not wearing jewelry, and the meek inheriting the earth, and the evils of—And I have to braid my hair, not let it hang loose.”

“Perhaps a cult?” suggested Madame Karitska.

Tears came again to the girl’s eyes. “Whatever it is I can’t understand how it changed him. We can’t go to the movies anymore, or play card games, and he used to love playing cards and movies.”

“Does the group have a name?”

She nodded. “Guardians of Eden. They have a big place out in the Edgerton section—an estate, he says—and
now
 … now he wants us to go—all of us, me and our daughter, she’s five—wants us to go there to
live.
” Tears were running down her cheeks now. “He’s out almost every night and—” She burst into tears. “I’m scared.”

“Yes,” said Madame Karitska. “Yes, you would be. May I have something of yours to hold?”

“Mine! But it’s Arthur—I mean Alpha—I hoped you could explain.”

“In a moment, yes,” she assured her. “But it helps me to know you as well.”

With some effort the girl removed the ring on her left hand with its tiny diamond, then brought out a handkerchief and blew her nose.

Closing her eyes Madame Karitska stilled her mind and opened herself to the vibrations and feelings that the ring had accumulated from its years of being worn. She rejected the negatives one by one—the emanations of dreariness and monotony and routine—and was surprised and pleased to reach below these to something so promising. “I wonder,” she said, opening her eyes, “if you realize you have a very real talent in art. Do you sketch? Paint?”

The girl turned scarlet. “Oh, Alpha doesn’t allow—” She stopped, flustered yet looking pleased. “Do you really think I have
talent
for it?”

Madame Karitska nodded. “You do sketch, then.”

Looking frightened, and then defiant, the girl brought from her purse a small sheet of paper. “I burn them usually but I can’t stop, it’s what keeps me going. It doesn’t look like much,” she said, and handed it across the table.

Madame Karitska looked at it, and to her surprise tears rose in her eyes. It was a simple line drawing of a child’s face, very free, very spontaneous and fresh, the nose, brows, and lips only suggested, the eyes luminous and wondering. “Oh my dear,” she said, deeply touched.

The girl looked at her in surprise. “You think it’s good?”

“Exquisite. You have the gift of rejecting the unimportant and seeing the essence, a gift that comes naturally to only the best. And the way the lines flow …” She smiled at the girl. “I’m delighted to have met you.”

“You really think—But Alpha …”

She was not ready for it, of course, realized Madame Karitska; her attention was concentrated totally on her husband, it had been demanded of her, and she was not accustomed to thinking of herself. Madame Karitska handed back the ring and picked up Arthur’s—or Alpha’s, as he preferred to be called now, and she sighed a little, wondering how women could so rashly turn their selves over to such unpromising men. There was really nothing unpleasant about Alpha, she found, her eyes closed, but she received no sense of real character or stability, a man loosely held together by rules, compulsion, the needs of wife and children, ambitious but lacking the discipline to fulfill those ambitions: a dreamer … some charm, of course, but weak. He so obviously dominated his wife that she would be shocked to learn how malleable he really was.

She opened her eyes, very serious now. “I can tell you very little of what you want to know, except that I feel very strongly that you face a very, very difficult decision.”

“What?” the girl asked despairingly.

“Your husband, I feel …” She hesitated and then, “No, I must be blunt. I feel that you will lose your husband whether you go with him to this Guardian of Eden home or not. I don’t mean to be melodramatic—perhaps you cannot even understand it, or why—but he has already given himself over to them. His sense of self, perhaps even his soul.”

“You mean … he’ll insist our little girl and I must go?”

“I feel that you will have to choose,” Madame Karitska said gently. “Choose between the Guardians of Eden and your husband. You will need all your strength.”

The girl stared at her helplessly. “But I have no strength, not without
him.
”

“If you think that, then of course you must join him—but I do not think you realize what strength you have, or what talent. But the answer has to come from yourself—inside—not from others.” She rose from her chair and placed both hands on the girl’s shoulders. “Think,” she told her. “Think and feel. I’m sorry to have upset you, but I have, frankly, feelings not very good about this group of your husband’s.”
Or your husband either,
she thought, but did not say.

Betsy nodded. “That’s what I didn’t
want
to hear, isn’t it.” She sighed and stood up, looking miserable. “What do you charge?” she asked, opening her purse.

Madame Karitska had a vision of the wallet, very thin and worn, with its few dollars, its grocery lists. She said, “I would prefer—would love to have that little sketch of the child—your daughter, isn’t it? If you could spare that, it would be far more meaningful to me than any money.”

“Spare it!” she said joyously. “But how wonderful, I’d only be throwing it away.”

“
Don’t,
” said Madame Karitska with passion. “
Don’t
destroy your work, do
more
of it. Sketch everything that pleases you, whenever you have a free moment. Hide your work if you must, but never,
never
throw it away.”

The girl looked at her, torn by doubt. “It’s very small in size,” she said, handing it to her.

“I will frame and hang it and I shall cherish it,” Madame Karitska told the girl warmly. “Come back and see it framed in a week or two if you’d like.”