The Gold Diggers (25 page)

But a sound like the clatter of poker chips made him stop. It was coming from the walk-in closet across the room, and where he might have thought mice at any other time, he knew without looking that he'd tracked down the wayward bird. Damn it, he thought as he skirted his way among the clothes, you're supposed to be in San Diego. He had an urge to go get it, tuck it under his arm, and fling it out one of Rita's windows. But with his luck, he thought, putting his head around the closet door and peering in, it would settle itself in the garden and wait for Hey and be forevermore out for Nick's blood. He snapped on the light, and there it was, sashaying back and forth along the clothes bar that ran the length of one side.

“Hello, you little fungus,” he said, advancing into the closet and standing eye to eye with it. “Have you crapped all over Rita's clothes?”

“Machu Picchu,” said the bird. He skittered away to the left and out of Nick's range. He stretched both wings in front of him, as if he were adjusting a chieftain's cape, then folded them back along his body and stood up straight and still. Nick had been dismissed. The parrot's forward gaze took on such a spiritual air, he could have been posing for Audubon.

So there's someone for everyone, Nick thought wryly, even the lowliest, and the parrot had Hey, who was more than he deserved. Nick decided he'd bring the cage to the bird and not the other way around, since he couldn't picture the parrot perched on his forefinger all the way back to the kitchen. Better yet, he'd wait till Hey woke up. There didn't seem to be any violence or mess, and anyway, the closet was practically empty. A few things hung on hangers, but most of Rita's clothes appeared to be strewn about in the outer room, as if she were saving the closet for something else. It was because he couldn't
do
anything yet that Nick took such a long look around. He was keeping an eye on things. And the packing box on the floor was pretty conspicuous, even with a sheet thrown over it. Even then, he only meant to lift it at one corner, to get an idea. But what was it? The first, fast glimpse only tantalized him, and before he knew it, he'd snapped the sheet off like a real magician.

There in the box, propped on a bed of shredded newsprint, was a girl's two hands in marble, holding a ball. The rest of her was left behind a couple of thousand years ago. Nick bent down and lifted out a folded paper that lay alongside. It was notes, in Rita's hand, but too disconnected to follow out the train of thought. “Found at a dig at Cnidus, August 1921,” it said at the top. And then a lot of comparing it to other things, but that was all too technical for Nick. “200 B. C.” he understood. But “stolen at site” didn't make much sense because, if it was stolen, what was it doing here? “Who needs it? British Museum?” Well, how was he supposed to know. He folded up the paper and put it back exactly right. He chided himself too late for overstepping on Rita's ground, and he sagged inside with a variety of guilt which threw him, since he was an expert only in the sexual kind. Nick didn't know a thing about art, he always said. He didn't even know what he liked. He left all that to Peter and went his way, and part of the reason he wasn't a curious or gossipy sort was that he didn't much register the price of people's knickknacks. But even he had ideas about the British Museum—big bucks and no bullshit. So Rita had a sideline, good for Rita, he thought, trying to be jaunty. But he couldn't get it out of his head that he'd had the kind of accident that he and Peter and Rita were going to be a long time recovering from. Even if he kept it a secret.

“It's all your fault, you know,” he snarled at the parrot, bringing his hand up menacingly, as if to cuff it. The parrot scooted further away along the bar, blinked once, and went back into his trance.

And then, more or less, the sky caved in. He heard a rustle of packages out in the bedroom and knew he'd been caught red-handed. He had no choice. He held his breath, glared as if to say the parrot was a plucked chicken if he squawked, and determined to wait it out. She didn't use the closet, after all. In a minute she'd probably go out to the pool or something, because it was so hot in her room. Or if she'd just go in the bathroom and take a pee, he thought, he could sneak out easily. Though now he was almost reluctant to go. It was cool in here, and he had to admit, he wanted to hold the hands—because they were old, not because they were art. If she'd only go, he thought. But the next sound let him know how little he knew. She was shutting the windows. One by one, he could hear the casements bang and the locks turn. He knew precisely how long it would take, since he'd done the very same thing ten minutes before, going the other way. He should have known then it was all over. But did he really have no choice? Couldn't he have walked on out the moment he heard her and pointed inanely at the parrot on his shoulder? He would never know now. But he probably would have said, given time, that his hiding was a reflex, and it had to do with leaving Rita alone. He had no right to be there at all, to poke around among the ruins, to involve himself with her in any way. As if he weren't involved already. I don't have to know your secrets to love you, he would have liked to say to Rita. Whatever she told him was all he needed. And if that is how he would have put it, then he must have felt much more than she how well they had made it work in the last two weeks, being together so much. We did it without getting involved, he must have thought. What did he think they were instead? Like brother and sister, maybe?

It didn't matter. When she shut the eighth and final window it began to happen very fast. She must have flown across the room to the closet, because she was standing in front of him, the door slammed behind her, the lock locked, before he could change his tune or whistle a warning. They looked into each other's eyes for an instant, long enough for Nick to see she was feeling caught, just like him. How will we ever get out of this? he wondered. But all in a split second, because the mirror swung open, too, the moment Rita shut them in. The two of them turned at once and stared into the dark, as if someone might step out and save them. Then, when Nick looked back, he saw how her eye was caught by the uncovered box. She studied it wistfully, not as if she regretted its betraying her, but as if the marble hands might be the best way to begin. If she was angry or even surprised, it didn't show. She accepted the new situation as fast as it happened—she and Nick had gone on to the next step, whatever it might turn out to be.

“Where's Cnidus?” Nick asked casually, trying to let her know he'd gotten the lesson by heart, trying to give her a cue.

“I don't really know,” Rita said. “A city, I think. Sacred to Demeter, the goddess of crops and marriages.”

“Is that whose hands they are?” He was so interested. They might have been picking each other up in a museum.

“No. That's Aphrodite,” she said with something like awe, as if the whole goddess were there in front of them, all curves and waves like a Botticelli.

“She plays tennis, I see.” Why, Nick thought, am I trying to make jokes? Perhaps because Rita was still as sad as when they'd split up a couple of hours before. And not about anything here, he didn't think.

“It's an apple,” she said, looking up at last, and smiling at him now as if she'd been longing to show him around and he'd dropped in right on time. “That's how they know. Paris had to judge three goddesses, to choose the fairest, and each of them offered a bribe. Aphrodite won. He gave her the apple of discord.”

“What did she promise him?”

“The most beautiful woman in the world.” Something, Rita seemed to say, that neither of them had any use for. Aphrodite wouldn't have had a prayer if it had been up to Nick and Rita. “Unfortunately for all of them, that turned out to be Helen of Troy.”

“Can I pick it up?”

“Sure.” And when he did, the look on his face as blank as sleep, she said, “You can see the stem end of the apple—see?—between her finger and thumb.”

The hands were heavier than he thought they'd be, as if time were part of the weight, and the surface was slightly rough from the wearing away. The features—fingernail lines and knucklebones and veins—were faint. He hadn't noticed before, but the little finger on the right hand was missing. He flinched when he saw it, he didn't know why. After all, she was missing ninety percent.

“Where did you get it?”

“In there,” she said, not looking, not pointing.

“Oh.” He sounded as if he hoped they'd be able to get through this without going into all of that. He knew it was
his
room waiting in the dark behind the mirror, but he felt just then no wish to explore it. He didn't need to add another thing to his inventory, and though of course he couldn't speak for Peter, he knew Peter could live without it, too. Rita could
have
it, for all Nick cared. Besides, she had some rights in the matter because, for the present, Frances Dean's room was her room, and didn't that lay a claim to everything in it, ghosts and all? Nick was prepared to abandon all logic. If Rita had come upon an old carved ring of Frances Dean's in a medicine chest, or a tortoise comb that had fallen into a crevice, he and Peter would have insisted she keep it. It didn't matter to him what was in that room. If she'd said it was corpses, that she was a vampire, he'd have scarcely taken it in. That was all on her own time, he would have reasoned. He was mad at himself. I am going to do this, he thought, so that Rita feels no crimes, no grief, no lonely nights, and no impediments to whatever it is she's doing in here. When Nick gave people space, he didn't take no for an answer.

“Can I take a look inside?” he asked her.

“Of course,” she said. She understood that she'd been deferred to. “But tell me, why did you bring the parrot? Or did the parrot bring you?”

“You mean, did he give me the secret word? No. I never think to look for buried treasure. I'm more in the market to bury my own. I don't know why the parrot's here, but he came here by himself. Are there things in there that belonged to Rusty Varda?”

“In a way,” she said evasively. “It's a long story.” She was trying to make him more curious. He talked as if the secret room was nothing but a box of souvenirs, a jumble of cuff links and coins and yellowing letters.

“So tell me about it,” he said appealingly, and she answered him with a sigh, “If you insist.” By now they were both in a wonderful mood. She beckoned him along, and she paused at the mirror's edge to light two candles she took from a shelf. They entered the inner room. Close on her heels, Nick watched Rita screw a candle into a holder on a six-branch standing silver candelabrum. “Medieval,” Rita said, and nothing more. “The Bishop's Treasury, Ely Cathedral, 1928,” it said in Varda's diary. But Rita was in a hurry to tell it all, and she didn't have time to identify things as they made their way. She scrambled over the crates and boxes like a mountain goat and slid around the Renaissance stone table and stopped at last in the sitting-room space at the far end, where she waited for Nick. He was right behind her most of the way, intent on her, oblivious to it, like Alice tailing the rabbit. But he was boggled in spite of himself by the sheer amount of things, and he paused to gape at the Chinese porcelains ranged, bargain-basement, on the stone table. By the time, he sat down in one of the great gilt chairs and looked over at Rita sitting at the cherry desk, the candle throwing light on the Varda diary, he was suitably out of breath.

Rita began to talk by talking figures. It surprised her how much she'd filed them away in her head like a story. It was as if, with all the study and putting together and adding up columns, she'd been hearing the story piecemeal for weeks from Varda himself, and now she was spinning it out in the proper order. About the major acquisitions in the twenties, for instance—the Rembrandt, the Assyrian reliefs, the Shakespeare folios, the lion's share of the china. Tailoring it to her audience, she dovetailed the money disbursed on black market art with the Bel-Air land Varda was selling off in lots for a profit of fifteen hundred, two thousand percent. At the same time, she worked in the highlights of the breakdown and long sedation of Frances Dean. It is like this in here, she seemed to say, because of what it was like out there in the house.

And when the story began to be about the people and not the things, Nick could see Rita sifting the human dilemma out of the catalogue. She caught the thread of the other diary Varda never wrote down. And Nick saw for the first time who they were, the ghosts who haunted Crook House. Sometimes, Rita said, the hopheaded Frances was probably well enough to take a turn with Varda through the house. Now and then, leaning on his arm and gliding in the garden, she must have seemed once more the dreamy girl who'd been in movies. He was forever giving her presents, whenever she was alert enough to hold one in her hands. Here, Frances, have a Degas. Have a Tiffany bracelet. A sky blue dish from China. Anything she'd like, just to keep her here in the outside world. And she must have smiled a mile-wide smile from a silent from time to time, delighted by his attentions. To get through to her, Rusty Varda was glad to buy more and more. A daze was better than nothing. Most of the time, after all, she lay in her room, hospital-quiet, whistling through her lips from the bottom of the ocean.

“It went on like that for twenty years,” Rita said admiringly, as if she was impressed by anyone who could stand time on its head like an hourglass, over and over, keeping things the same.

“Why?” Nick asked. He seemed to want to hear a moral purpose, suspecting none at hand.

“Because they loved each other, I guess. Well,
he
loved
her
.”

“But it sounds so sad.”

“Does it? I thought so too, at first, and now I don't.” But she said it quickly, not expecting to be agreed with and anxious to get on. She cares too much, Nick thought. She appeared to believe that what it all came to—the secret room in the hill—was so outrageous it made all the rules. So what, Rita seemed to say, so what if she was drugged up in a stupor and the stuff was all stolen?
Look
at it. But then why was she breaking it up? She got quite grave when she told him the next step, the sending things back to their proper places. In part, perhaps, she was ashamed to be giving away goods that might by law be Nick's and Peter's. As to the contradiction, loving it so much and at the same time taking it apart, it didn't seem odd to her. Varda had reached a romantic pitch as acute as
Anna Karenina
, and now it was time to take down the set. Rita was a great believer in things in their own time.