The Gold Diggers (38 page)

Sam leapt to his feet, and Rita dropped into a crouch beside Hey. Sam shrieked, “Don't touch him!” But Rita wasn't any more scared now than she was before the shots. Horrified and maddened and sick, yes, but except for the slow second she was looking down the barrel, not bodily threatened herself. It was just a meaningless accident. Though she would have killed Sam now with no regrets for what he'd done to a man like Hey, she knew it was the game gotten out of hand. And her anger was endless in the face of things that got evil by being stupid, like the final years of Frances Dean. “I told you,” Sam barked twice, “I told you.” But she wouldn't even look at him. Hey's eyes opened, and he gritted his teeth and took the pain. If they did this right, she thought, he'd make it. The hole was in his shoulder, not his heart, and the blood had slowed to a seep.

“Peter,” she said, like a rock inside, “get help. Then bring me some cold towels.” When she looked up to get a confirmation, she saw he was holding, cradled like a baby, the Jacobean mace, a wood and silver club that had once belonged to a Scottish lord. Victoria and Albert Museum. It was what he'd picked up too late to bash in Sam's head, but he looked right now like a sad-eyed herald walking in front of a luckless king. He let it down on the floor and turned to go.

“Don't move,” Sam said, brandishing the gun to catch his eye. Peter stopped. Rita turned on Sam so sharply that he jumped away, and for a couple of seconds the gun swung back and forth at Rita, then at Peter, like a pendulum.

“When the hell are you going to let it go?” she demanded. “Don't you see? It's
over
.”

But he did the very thing she'd done to him. He didn't even look at her, and he went ahead as if she wasn't there. He approached Peter, aiming the gun at his belly with both hands. When they were close together and it was just between the two of them, Sam put a hand to his back pocket and pulled from it a set of handcuffs. He held them out. “Left hand,” he said to Peter. “Very slowly.” Peter reached over and took the cuffs, but then it took him a minute to open the hinge because his hands were trembling. Rita made as if to stand up, her fury so high she meant to snatch the gun herself, and Sam said, “I'll kill him, Rita. Stay where you are.” So she didn't dare move, but she said in return, “No you won't. You go too far, and we have to let you win, so go ahead. Take what you want and get out. But you didn't kill Varda, and you won't kill us.”

“Shut up, Rita,” Peter said. He snapped the cuff tight around his hand. Then he held it against his stomach as if he was hurt and had to keep it in a sling. He waited for the next order, with nothing to do now but stay alive. He could tell that Rita was as angry with him and Hey for attacking as she was with Sam, though she wouldn't admit it. But Peter had sensed, as soon as they were all locked in together, that Rita was safe and they were in trouble. Sam's eyes glittered with hatred. Peter and Hey both saw it and started to hatch the plot the moment Rita began to deal. They did it with a glance here and there and a couple of pointed fingers, because they could trust the rhythm they already had from running the house together. They both knew the gun would go off. One of them might get in the way. But it seemed to Hey and Peter worth the risk, since Rita was dead wrong about Sam. He didn't kill
her
way, out of what she would have seen as an excess of passion. He'd do it for nothing at all or not at all. And Hey and Peter were as meaningless in the way of victims as any he could wish for.

“What's the most expensive thing you've got?” Sam asked, as if he was an oil tycoon on a shopping spree.

“The Rembrandt,” Peter said, and he could feel Rita flinch from where she knelt next to Hey. She would have tried to tell a lie even here. Tried to palm off a cracked Ming jar or a dusty tapestry.

“Get it,” Sam said.

Peter moved very deliberately among the crates and boxes. He didn't want to make Sam nervous, and though the painting was so heavy in the frame that he couldn't imagine lifting it, it wouldn't do to begin by protesting. Hey moaned, as if he'd tried to shift positions, and Rita bent over close to him. Sam retrieved a candle from the floor, but he couldn't put the gun down to strike the match. He looked to see if anyone noticed, and when they didn't, he let the candle fall again. By now they were all accustomed anyway to the near-darkness—their eyes had patiently adjusted while they were busy clamoring for power. Slowly, Peter rocked the Rembrandt and balanced it on one corner. Then he dragged it over the concrete until he could seesaw it onto a crate where Sam could take a look at it. He undid the sheet that covered it, which fell aside like a veil, and the clear-eyed Dutchman stared at them all and didn't move a muscle.

“Now get over next to her and cuff yourselves together.”

Peter let down the painting beside the crate and propped it sturdily. Walking away, he was strangely shaken by Sam's not looking at it. For Sam, apparently, there was no such person as Rembrandt. Peter had to wonder, when he went down beside Rita and gripped her hand in one of his and somehow got the feeling Hey was dead, whether the painting was worth a thing anymore if Sam should have it.

“It isn't going to be much longer,” Peter whispered close to her ear as he shut her up in the other cuff.

“Why doesn't he run?” she whispered back. “He can't get anywhere with a Rembrandt now.” But she didn't expect an answer. Peter was right, she thought, to shut her up. It had all gotten out of her range, and if it had gone the same way for Sam, the two of them together might have found the way back to where they were, even in spite of the gunshots. But Sam had cut his losses and gone on, and she was too much overwhelmed at last by the disarray to keep up with him. Hey looked at her when he was conscious with an agony that turned him into a stranger. Anything she could have done to cool him or pillow him, any news she had of an ambulance, would have restored him enough to be recognized. But as she wasn't free to try, she began to be something of a stranger herself. She'd always said she'd been through it all, and yet the suffering she'd done for love was the only kind she knew, and now she knew it had all been in her head. Hey with a blood-soaked shirt was insupportable. She felt like a lone survivor of the kind of disaster that sweeps away men like ants, and nothing is ever going to be the same again.

Peter stared at Hey for half a minute, willing him alive. He could hear Sam pulling at the painting, his energy draining into rage because he couldn't move it any more easily than Peter. Where Rita had fallen so fast from wheeling and dealing and wild defiance to a state where she felt brutalized and worn—as if Peter's “Shut up” had done the reverse of the slap in the face that stops hysteria short and makes a man cool and feisty again—Peter himself grew wilder and more alert as the time passed. He knew what the next step was before Sam even thought of it, and he didn't have much time. Hey would just have to cease looking dead so Peter could go ahead and hold out hope. He didn't know how bad it was, but he refused to believe it was fatal. The snakebite taught him how far he could go on a wound that looked awful.

Hey responded to Peter's stubbornness as if it were treatment. He quivered and came partly awake. He opened his eyes and looked at each of them a moment and then seemed to sigh back into sleep. It was enough for Peter, and he hoped like hell. Unlike Rita, he determined that everything
would
be the same again. Exactly the same. It was what kept Russian princes in exile going.

“I can't do it,” Sam said. He sounded at once upset and a trifle conciliatory, as if he might convince someone to jump up and come give a hand. Rita and Peter had the brief satisfaction of sticking to their little group and letting him stew. There was a pause in which Peter felt Sam begin to figure out the risks of going one step further. Then Peter squeezed Rita's shackled hand with his shackled hand, and murmured, “He's going to split us up. Tell Nick not to get mad. I'll leave a sign in the house to let him know you're here.”

The whole three sentences came out in a monotone, and Rita heard it as a string of one-liners, like the comic remarks made at wakes, meant to evoke the irony of everything compared to death and not to make anyone laugh. We're caught in a bad cliché, Peter seemed to be telling her, and we're forced into speaking lines out of comic strips. As the crime widened and fed on itself like a mountain fire, they were less and less allowed to talk like themselves, compelled by the tenor of events to be rather formal. It went through Rita's mind in a melancholy way, and the part of her that never stopped grappling with life and what was meant to come of it began to see the scene from very far away. It was an existential event. The great fight to get on with it filled her mind like blood, but it was as if she couldn't speak around the broken teeth. She never dreamed Peter was giving her the orders to get her through the next several hours in Hell. She'd begun to think they were only waiting for Sam to go. It was all she could do not to tick the seconds off, drumming the fingers of her free hand. So when Sam came over and knelt between them and said, fiddling with the key in the lock, “Peter, you're coming with me,” Rita drew a blank the size of a movie screen. But wait. Someone had got to repeat the three things he said, she thought in a panic. Because she didn't know what to do at all.

The steel bit into her flesh, her wrist got yanked, and her watch stopped, all while Sam was struggling to get them apart. She prayed the cuffs were broken. Though she couldn't attach a meaning to Peter's instructions, even as the phrases filtered back, she did still remember “Shut up.” So she made no protest when Sam cuffed her other hand. She put on a brave front for taking her last look at Peter. At least he was smarter than Sam, she thought, trying to calm down. She telegraphed to Peter with her eyes that she and Nick would comb the earth to track him down.

Just at that moment, though, he was pretending to Sam to be simple and subdued, so he couldn't very well start winking at Rita. He stood up and, as he went with Sam to the painting, licked and blew at the raw spot on his wrist. The two of them lifted the Rembrandt without any trouble. Rita thought when she watched them carry it out to the closet that they were gone for good. Calm down and count to fifty, she said to herself. And then she'd follow along and get to a phone, peeking around the corners all the way, the receiver clenched between her cuffs. Sam was a dope. If she'd been Sam, she would have cuffed her hands behind her and put in a gag. What was the worst that could happen now? Nobody in his right mind would harm a Rembrandt. If Sam laid a finger on Peter, Nick would kill him.
She
would kill him. Hey appeared to be a grudge from the far past, and Sam was taking Peter along only to further defuse the crackerjack team of Peter and Rita and Hey. In the weird quiet that fell for a bit on Varda's room, she groped to get back her limitless capacity for stories that turned out well in the end. She must have counted to twenty or twenty-five. It'll be okay, she thought. The wrecked Cézanne seemed to fly from her mind a second time, and the hole through the blasted shoulder below her on the floor was a notch less fatal. She was almost high again, ready to fight and win.

But the sounds of things outside the secret room were always cut off—as if, inside, the hills held their hands over everyone's ears. So Rita heard nothing, and it was all a trick of the house. Peter and Sam were in her room the whole time, working out the best way to get the picture to where Sam's car was parked. Peter cooperated impeccably, with all his skill as a mover in space, for the sake of the priceless thing between them. Even Sam knew right away, when he heard Peter out, that he was kidnapping his very own museum director to go with the painting. He understood how great the painting must be from watching Peter try to protect it. He went back into the closet to close up the mirror, and he knew he could leave Peter all alone out in the bedroom. Peter wouldn't run from the Rembrandt. He wouldn't even risk a scuffle if they were near it. Sam decided with some relief that Peter was a hostage with a built-in gun at his head.

Rita thought at first that it must be help arriving. When Sam slipped through the door again to take a final look, he was there so suddenly that she didn't think. The light was behind him, and her heart leaped up. It was Nick! Because nobody else would have known so soon where to come. And when, the next moment, she saw her mistake, the breath went out of her yet again. The back of her neck prickled with the start of a dead faint. Nothing would have shut her up now, except she couldn't think what to say, as she sometimes couldn't cry out in a nightmare. She knew his hand on the mirror's edge meant he was locking them in, and no one would ever hear her screaming. The trick to the sound worked both ways.

“Tell him I'm going underground,” Sam said across the room to her. “There's no use trying to find me. I'll call him tonight.”

And then he pulled the mirrored door shut with a click behind him, and Rita was thrown into total darkness. Her voice came back like lightning. It may have been that soundproof walls were just what she needed. She started to scream, and she threw herself at the lost light until she was beating the back of the mirror with her fists. She didn't need to do it long. In a minute she was listening to her own noise, and the fall into consciousness brought her up short into silence. Dying away, the echo of the scream sank into the hills like water out in the sun, with only the faintest tremor. It never went so far as to shake things in their frames, but there was a shiver to the room for a moment more before the silence took a grip. Rita didn't even know what the next hysteria was that came after screaming. She sank against the door on one shoulder, and in the pitch dark an image went through her mind of a woman much like herself on the mirror side of the mirror. Pretty and thin and taking time at how she looked. Never the wiser about the treasure there for the taking on the other side.