The Palace Guard (20 page)

Bittersohn picked the phial up gingerly inside a gaudy nylon kerchief and stuck it in his pocket. “I’ll give this to Fitz and Fitz. Ten to nothing it’s arsenic, and there won’t be any fingerprints.”

“Sh-h. Don’t wake him again.”

Bittersohn looked down at the peacefully slumbering Bill, rubbing his own chin, on which stubble was beginning to appear. “You’re like the rest of them. Every woman who meets Bill wants to mother him, and the next thing she knows—”

“I know, thank you. I shouldn’t dream of wanting to mother him. He’s like one of those little cock sparrows you see around the streets, isn’t he? Cute and tough and no doubt an egg in every nest. Can you tell me why we didn’t spot that Murillo when we were here with the two detectives?”

“Because it wasn’t here, naturally.”

“That’s what Nick Fieringer had been doing when we saw him leaving the building, wasn’t it? Do you suppose Mrs. Tawne phoned and told him about the countess? Or could he have learned some other way? Maybe Mr. Hayre had a spy outside the house and saw us take her to—no, that’s pretty silly, isn’t it? Most likely he came here to plant the arsenic and Bill told him she was already in the hospital and he rushed off to wherever the copies are being done and got the painting, thinking to make her the scapegoat because she was probably going to die anyway.”

“Possibly. Let’s go ask him.”

“You mean wake him up and say, ‘Sorry to bother you, but do you happen to be a murderer?’”

“Why not? It’s just up around the corner.”

Fieringer lived in one of those grim apartment houses whose unclean foyers are floored with chipped tiles in fancy patterns and shut in by heavily varnished doors that are supposed to be kept locked but often are not. Inside was the usual scary little elevator that smelled of urine. People had scrawled initials and indecent suggestions on its walls with magic markers and the sharp ends of door keys. Bittersohn pushed the button for the fourth floor. The cage wobbled upward.

“Shouldn’t we have rung his doorbell at least?” Sarah whispered.

“I thought we might as well try shock tactics.”

Nick’s door, unlike Lydia’s, was locked. Bittersohn pounded on the panels. After a longish time they heard the shuffle of slippered feet and a sleepy voice calling out, “Who is it?”

“It’s me. Open up.” Bittersohn’s voice was a fair imitation of Bernie the pianist’s.

There was a rattling of chains and bolts, then the door opened. In his pajamas Nick Fieringer was unspeakable. The rumpled pants sagged below his great bare belly, the unbuttoned coat revealed a sparsely haired chest with breasts that sagged like an old woman’s. His longish hair stuck up in greasy spikes around the bald spot on top. His yellow face was sunken, his jowls dropped. For a moment he stared at them. Then he pasted a tight-lipped grin on his face and ran a hand over his hair to slick it down.

“Excuse please,” he mumbled. He partially closed the door and returned a couple of minutes later decently covered by a bathrobe, his hair carefully combed over his bald spot and his toothy grin in full radiance.

“He’s put in his dentures,” Sarah thought. She wished she didn’t find the man so pathetically disgusting.

The airless one-room apartment was neat enough except for the rumpled studio couch on which Fieringer must have been sleeping. What made it feel so unbearably cluttered were the pictures. Everywhere: thumbtacked to the walls, crowded on the table, the bureau, the imitation marble mantelpiece with no fireplace under it were photographs of the well-known, the lesser-known, the unknown. Many of them were inscribed: To Nick with love, To Nick with Best Wishes, To Nick, To My Good Friend Nick, To Nick from some unfamiliar name scribbled too large. In a few the impresario himself appeared smiling his jack-o’-lantern smile with his arm around some cringing shoulder or his paw clutching some reluctantly extended hand. It was true. He did know everybody.

Bittersohn wasted no time on amenities. “I suppose you know Lydia’s been poisoned.”

“Lydia who?”

“Knock it off, Nick. Third from the left on the mantlepiece.”

Sure enough, there was a photo of the two taken in some nightclub years ago. “To my darling Nickie” was scrawled across the cardboard mount in red crayon. Fieringer waddled over and took a long look at it. Then he turned around.

“Yes, I know.”

“Who did it?”

“She did, playing crazy games with her stomach pills.”

“Do you believe that?”

The fat man swallowed twice and hitched the cord of his bathrobe tighter around his pendulous abdomen. “I have to, don’t I?”

“No.”

“Maxie, you don’t understand.”

“I think I do.”

“Then why do you come bothering me now? Why not let an old man get a little sleep?”

“What were you doing at the Fenway Studios about half an hour ago?”

“Looking for Bernie. He plays in concert tomorrow, I want him sober. Sometimes he stays with Lydia. Tonight I find only Bill Jones. Ask Bill.”

“What did you take with you?”

“Take? What should I take with me? What’s to take?”

“Where did you go before you wound up at Lydia’s?”

“Everywhere. Is no job for an old man.”

Bittersohn didn’t respond to Nick’s nervous smile. “Did you see Lupe?”

“Lupe who?”

“Didn’t he give you anything?”

“Lupe give? Believe me, my friend, Lupe only takes.”

“What were you wearing this evening?”

“Wearing?” This one really puzzled Nick. “Naturally my suit. On the chair.” A pair of gray trousers lay neatly folded across the chair seat, the matching coat hung over the back. “In the morning I press before putting on,” he apologized to Sarah.

Bittersohn picked up the clothes and went over them inch by inch. Sarah tried not to watch. The immense trousers with their baggy seat and the wrinkles radiating from the crotch, the cheap jacket with perspiration stains under the armpits were too obscene. This was the same suit he’d worn when he sat sweating and swilling beer in her private sitting room. It was, come to think of it, the only one she’d ever seen on him and likely the only one he owned. What on earth was he doing with all the money he must be getting?

“Where’s the shirt you had on?” asked Bittersohn.

“Hanging in the bathroom. I wash every night. Drip-dry, is very convenient,” he explained again to Sarah.

She was mortally ashamed to be there. This gross creature trying to keep up appearances, trying to convince himself the whole world loved him, trying to catch a few hours’ sleep after a night no man his age should be putting in for any reason good or evil was enough to tear one’s heart out. She suspected Max Bittersohn was feeling what she was, but he kept doggedly on, inspecting the damp shirt, the crumpled underwear, finally the man’s fat hands. At last, thank God, he was satisfied.

“Okay, Nick.”

“Thank you, my friend,” said the impresario with about the same degree of gaiety Rigoletto had to display before the jeering courtiers after they had kidnapped his daughter. “Even if I don’t know what’s okay I’m glad it’s okay.”

“When you were in Lydia’s studio tonight, did you notice an unfinished painting?”

“In a studio is always an unfinished painting. Should I notice?”

“This one was on the floor near the stairs, propped against a little table.”

“In Lydia’s studio is wall-to-wall little tables. No, my friend, I did not notice.”

“Nick, you’d better tell me what you know.”

“What should I know?”

“Shove it, Nick. Two guards from the Madam’s have already been murdered. Lydia will have been, too, if she doesn’t pull through. You know damn well she’d never feed herself anything more poisonous than cheap booze and lousy food. Somebody’s trying to frame her as the artist who faked about ninety-seven per cent of the paintings at the Wilkins Museum and sold the originals out of state. I think it could be you.”

“Me?” Fieringer’s yellow face turned to dirty ivory.

“You were in the right places at the right times. You know the museum setup and routine. You knew Witherspoon and Brown. You’re an old boyfriend of Lydia’s.”

“Who isn’t?” shouted the impresario. “Max, I swear to you on the sacred memory of my mother I had nothing to do with stealing the paintings. I had nothing to do with the murders. With Lydia yes. I help her to sell her pretty icons. Is it so terrible to keep an old friend from starving to death?”

“Where do you help her sell them?”

“I fixed up a connection with Jack Hayre on Charles Street.” The sweat was pouring down over Nick’s flabby jowls. “Only this and nothing more I do. She is the only beautiful woman who would ever go to bed with me.”

“Did C. Edwald Palmerston go to bed with you, too? You fixed up that Ruy Lopez deal for him.”

“Max, what could I do? Palmerston comes pussyfooting to me and starts beating around the bushes. At last it comes out he wants the thefts hushed up to save his face. He doesn’t want Palmerston the great philanthropist to become Palmerston the stupid jackass who lets a museum be stolen from under his nose. It is not brave, it is not noble, it is not gentlemanly, but”—he shrugged—“it is human. Palmerston wants a phony expert to make Bittersohn look like the fool, not him. A Jew who didn’t even go to Harvard, to him you are expendable. So I think of Lupe because”—he shrugged again—“for a crooked deal I think of Lupe.”

“I see. I’m expendable to you as well as to Palmerston.”

“Max, I am also expendable. I kid other people a little, maybe. Myself I don’t kid. Am I Sol Hurok? Am I Boris Goldovsky? I am old Nick the odd-job man who gets thrown a little something here, a little something there. Who are my great artists? A lush like Bernie, a mediocre student with parents who have money to start her off on a great career you should live so long. I hold the job at the Wilkins all these years because Palmerston is a cheapskate and old Nick is willing to work cheap. I don’t go along with what he wants, I lose the concerts. I have nowhere to show off my performers. I am nothing.”

He slumped down on top of the wrinkled trousers, his hands dangling loose between his knees.

“Nick,” said Bittersohn quietly, “I asked you to tell me what you know.”

“Max, I make it my business not to know. For years I think maybe is something funny going on and I shut my eyes. In school back in the old country my teacher used to show three idiot monkeys. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Hah! What a thing to tell us then. Before we know two and two we know to steal, to lie, to betray is to stay alive. I lie, sure. But about this I don’t lie to you, my friend. I know nothing because I choose to know nothing.”

“Then what do you suspect?”

“Suspect?” Fieringer rolled the word around on his tongue as though it were a new sound to him. “I suspect somebody has made from the Madam for a long time a fat living. Do I look like it’s me?”

“You could have given the money away,” whispered Sarah. “To your friends.”

“I could. I have given much. In the end I am still ugly old fat Nick. I stopped giving. If I could find a way I would take, but I never find a way. Max, I cannot help you. I know nothing. I suspect nobody. I am an old man. I have to sleep. Let me alone.” His voice broke. “Please.”

Bittersohn turned away. “Come on, Sarah,” he sighed, “let’s go home.”

S
ARAH CHECKED WITH THE
hospital about six times the following day. At five in the evening, while she was making biscuits for dinner, she phoned from the kitchen. Lydia Ouspenska had not yet regained consciousness but she was still alive. The floor nurse sounded surprised.

She’d just got the phone hung up and her hands back in the biscuit dough when Brooks called. “Sarah,” he hissed, “tell your young man there’s dirty work afoot at the Madam’s. I’m going to lurk here and see what’s up.”

“Brooks,” she gasped, “you can’t do that!”

“Of course I can. I intend to disguise myself as a fifteenth-century gargoyle.”

“You don’t know what dreadful risks you may be taking.”

“Sensible men don’t take risks.”

“Sensible men don’t disguise themselves as fifteenth-century gargoyles.”

“Sarah, I have no time to argue. Would you kindly explain to Theonia that I shan’t be able to take her to the Museum of Science tonight.”

“You can’t trifle with the affections of an honest woman like that.”

“Theonia will understand.”

“That’s what you think. Just a minute, I see Mr. Bittersohn coming in through the alley gate.” She thumped on the window, beckoned him up, and thrust the phone at him. “Here, for heaven’s sake talk him out of it.”

“Him whom?”

“Cousin Brooks. He says something’s going on at the Madam’s and he’s going to disguise himself as a fifteenth-century gargoyle.”

“Sounds like the only reasonable course of action to me.” Grinning, Bittersohn took the phone. “Hello, X-9? This is 007. How can I get in there without being caught? Coal chute, right. Check. Sure, you bet. Nine o’clock on the dot. Roger, over and out.”

He slammed down the receiver. “Madam, can you equip an expedition? Brooks wants ham sandwiches and root beer. He didn’t say anything about hanging a lantern aloft in the belfry arch, but I don’t suppose it would hurt.”

“One moment there, my fine Hairbreadth Harry. Why nine o’clock?”

“Because they’re having some kind of shindig there that’s supposed to be over by eight and may drag on till half-past, and Brooks figures the fun won’t start until the coast is clear. So that gives me time enough to eat my dinner like a
mensch
before I descend the coal chute.”

“In those good clothes?”

“Nay, fair maiden. I shall wear my chute-shooting suit. How about, in the immortal words of Bobbie Burns, a fond kiss before we sever?” He didn’t wait for her answer.

She struggled free at last. “Unhand me, sir! That embrace was obtained under false pretenses. What makes you think we’re severing?”

“Sarah, you can’t go. It might be dangerous.”

“In the immortal words of Carrie Jacobs Bond, big deal! I was in danger of arrest for indecent exposure the day you made me wear that sari, and a fat lot you cared. I was in danger of being seduced by Bill Jones last night—”