Читать книгу An Angel In Stone - Peggy Nicholson - Страница 15

W hen they reached their building, Lia hopped off the back of the Vespa. Leaning against the front door to hold it open, she tapped her foot with impatience while Ravi wrestled his motorbike up the steep steps from the sidewalk. If he didn’t chain it in the rear of the dirty hallway, it would be stolen by morning.

Watching her roommate grunt and groan and swear at the machine, she thought of Kincade, so smooth and good smelling. Lia had to giggle at the difference. Such a man would own a car, not a beat-up old motorbike. He’d drive a Jaguar, and he’d have a garage in which to park it. Maybe he even had a chauffeur!

When she was rich, she would have a chauffeur—a blond one in a blue uniform, who would carry her shopping bags and open doors for her. Soon, yes! She bent to kiss the box she held, then forgot about helping Ravi. She almost danced up to their apartment.

Six flights of badly lit stairs that smelled of cat piss and cabbage dampened her gaity, but hardened her resolve. The sooner she had money, the sooner she could move away from this dump and the losers who lived here.

Placing her box on the shelf above her desk, she took the letter from its top drawer. She paced the room, her lips shaping the words as she reread them.

Like I explained when you phoned me last week, that pocket watch has got to belong to my grandfather, Private Amos Szabo, of the 11th Airborne. He always carried just such a watch. But please, please believe me, miss, it isn’t worth beans. I’m sorry if I sounded harsh, and that I yelled at you. You surprised me is all, calling out of the blue like that. And wanting all that money.

But believe me, its only value is sentimental. You see, my grandmother never knew what happened to my grandfather (her dear beloved husband). Only that he and his squad parachuted into the island of Borneo, during WWII. Except for that one letter she got, he was never heard from again—none of them came back. He’s gotta be dead by now, but the family would sure like to know where he died and how. You can understand that, can’t you?

I’d be happy to pay you fifty dollars as a reward for return of the watch. You went to a lot of trouble to find me, and you must be real clever to have tracked me down on the Internet. Lucky for me, I guess, that my name isn’t a common one.

I’d be glad to pay the postage if you want to mail the watch C.O.D. And maybe I could give you a bit more than fifty, if you really feel you deserve it. Maybe if you wrote down all the details you know about where and when he died, that ought to be worth something, I guess, shouldn’t it? Fair’s fair, I always say.

So why don’t you call me again—real soon—and let’s talk it over? I swear I’ll make it worth your while.

Yours truly,

Amos Szabo the third

As she punched in Szabo’s number, Ravi tried the doorknob, then knocked. “Lia?”

“I’m busy! Use your key.” But she’d lost track of the numbers. She swore and started over as he shambled into the living room.

“Who can you be calling at this time of night? So late, it’s not polite. It isn’t done.”

“Oh? But you see me doing it, don’t you?” She gave him a teasing smile. He was so easy to handle. “Anyway, this man wants to hear from me, most desperately.”

“It is not polite,” he muttered with a weary shrug. “And this time you really must repay me the charges, okay?” He went on into the bathroom. “Yes, Lia?”

“Most certainly,” she called, knowing he’d have forgotten by the time the bill came. Or if he didn’t, why, by then she’d be rich; her debts would be nothing. She let the phone ring four times, then five, as she drummed her fingers on the desktop.

When the man answered, she brightened. “Hello. It is me again,” she began—then frowned as the voice kept on speaking. Ah, an answering machine!

“It is me again,” she repeated, after the signal. “Lia, who has your—”

“Hello!” broke in a man’s voice, rusty with sleep. “Missy, is that you? Hang on. I’m here. Just let me—” He seemed to fumble with something, then said, “Well, you’re sure some night owl.”

An owl? What was that? “It is night,” she agreed. “And you ask me to call, so here I am. I need to know. Do you want to buy the watch?”

He cleared his throat. “You got my letter? I mailed it to that post office box number you gave me. Did you read it yet?”

“Yes, I’m reading it now, tonight. And I need to know.”

“Well, if you got the letter, then now you do know. That watch isn’t even real gold, just gold-plated brass. But like I said, if you could tell me a bit about where my granddaddy died, then I could pay you maybe a hundred bucks, all told.”

“I say to you last time we speak. My price is ten thousand dollars, for your ancestor’s watch.”

“Now look, you little island monk—!” He paused, muttered something under his breath, then laughed. But the laugh had sharp edges. “Look, Missy, maybe I could give you a hundred-fifty for your trouble, if you—”

Lia snorted. “I have two other bidders who will give me more than that.”

“What? You showed it to somebody else? Shit! Now what would you go and do that for? Nobody’d want it but my family!”

“Ohhh, you think so?” Smiling, she wound a lock of hair round and round her gloved forefinger. “One lady, she will give me ten thousand for this watch. And there is a man—a very rich and handsome man—who will give me twelve.” At least Kincade surely would tomorrow night, once he’d seen how she looked in her blue model’s dress that she’d found at the consignment store.

“So my price must go up, if you wish to bid. The price is now…fifteen thousand dollars.” Her face went all hot; her eyes went misty, as she thought of so much money. Picturing what she’d do with all those excellent dollars, she waited till he’d finished cursing. “You like to buy?” she said when he’d wound down to hard-breathing silence.

“Shit,” he said softly. “Well…it wouldn’t be easy, raising that kind of nut. You said there’s some sort of map drawn on the inside of the cover?”

Her smile widened. He was like a little bird that had hopped to her palm for sugar. If the fingers were quick…“Yes, it has a map. But if you are a poor man, without much money to buy the watch of your ancestor, well, I can sell the map to one of these others. I will make a copy of the map and sell it. Then I will scratch out the map on the watch, and you may buy it without, most reasonably.”

“No!”

She clapped a palm to her mouth to smother the giggles. Oh, little bird, you are in my cage now! “No?” she said innocently. “You want the map?”

“Uh, err, I don’t want you messing with that watch. However my granddaddy fixed it, that’s the way I want it. Shit, girl, it’s an heirloom! His souvenir of the war.”

Oh, little lying bird. How you sing! They all wanted the map most desperately. Lia couldn’t hide the laughter in her voice, but now there was no need to. He was caged. “So. You want the watch—and you want the map.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right. But at a reasonable price. No more dickin’ around.”

Whatever that meant. “Very reasonable,” she purred. “My price has gone up. Watch with no map is fifteen thousand dollars. Watch with map is eighteen thousand.”

He roared like a gored water buffalo. Like a lovely silver jet taking off from the Singapore airport. When she was rich, she’d fly on a jet to Paris. First-class ticket.

But now this fool had given her an idea that would make her even richer. Before she sold the watch to Szabo, she would copy its map—and sell one copy to the pale-haired lady who was much too old for Kincade. Why, that one must be almost thirty!

And Lia would sell a second copy of the map to Kincade.

Or perhaps she’d give him his copy as a wedding gift, if he offered to marry her. Once he saw her in her blue dress…

“Look,” Szabo growled. “You still there?”

“I sit here, waiting most patiently.”

“Yeah, right. Well, listen, you can be patient for another day or two, can’t you? Don’t be in such a rush. I’ll raise the eighteen thousand, but it’ll take me a couple of days. Meantime, don’t you sell it to anybody else—and don’t you show it to anybody. Do that for me, then in two days, I promise. You’ll get what’s comin’ to you.”

Yes! That was precisely what she wanted. Just what she deserved. After all her dreams, all her hard work to make them happen, at last it was coming.

Szabo cradled the phone, then leaned across the bed to look at the caller id on his new answering machine. “Gotcha.” Area code 212. That was New York City.

He stood, stretched, then hauled his old army duffel bag out of the closet; he’d packed it days ago. Figure a two-hour drive to Raleigh, then catch the morning flight.

When he got to New York, he’d go to a library, find a backward directory, which showed the address when you looked up the phone number. Dropping by a drugstore for a roll of duct tape and a pack of single-edge razorblades wouldn’t take but a few minutes.

By early evening latest, he’d be knocking on the bitch’s door.

“One of these days you’re going to tell me you were a guy in your last life,” Raine murmured drowsily, her fingers ruffling through silky-soft fur. Otto, the portly orange tomcat from the apartment below, had a suspicious fondness for jumping her, every time he caught her in bed. Stretched out full length on her chest, with his nose snuggled under her chin, he rumbled in unabashed contentment. He’d tiptoed up the fire escape, then in through her open window this morning and she’d woken to a familiar twenty-two pounds settling into place. “You know, I’ve had maybe four hours sleep. Surely a cat can appreciate that that’s not quite—”

She broke off as the bedside phone rang. Managing to reach it without dislodging her passenger, she yawned and said, “That…was fast.”

She’d phoned, then faxed Trey at headquarters when she got in last night. Out in Grand Junction, Colorado, the rising sun would have yet to clear the Rockies. Knowing Trey, he hadn’t slept since she roused him.

“I’ve just scratched the surface so far.” Trey’s gravelly voice echoed the cat’s rumble—about two octaves lower. “But I’ve got a few things of interest.”

Trey was the Expediter of Ashaway All. The still and ingenious center around which Raine and her siblings whirled. The man who arranged, and the man who obtained. He was an ex-SEAL—and maybe ex-merc, though he’d never admit it—with useful connections in the weirdest backwaters of the world.

A dozen years ago he’d come limping into their lives on his one good leg plus a whole lot of attitude, and he’d soon made himself indispensable to the firm and to the family. There wasn’t one of the Ashaway women who hadn’t sworn at one point or another that she’d die if he didn’t love her—and there wasn’t one who could claim she’d ever been properly kissed by the man.

But they all would have gone to the wall for Trey, and he for them. He was big brother and stand-in father, since John Ashaway’s accident. Keeper of their darkest secrets and their most excruciating bloopers. Teaser and mentor and coach. And he got them whatever they needed, whenever they needed it; he was their expediter. “Whatcha…got?” she asked on another yawn.

“The language on that newspaper you faxed me is Indonesian.”

“Darn, I was afraid of that.” Indonesia was a sprawling archipelagic nation, covering a swath of the Pacific about the size of Europe. The country encompassed a few monster-size islands to the northwest of Australia, and hundreds of small ones. If Lia was Indonesian, then she and her tooth might hail from Bali, or New Guinea, or Java, or—“It’s not from Sumatra, where the tsunami hit?”

“No, from about a thousand miles east,” Trey assured her. “The name of that paper translates as the Morning Star. It’s the local daily for the city of Pontianak, Kalimantan.”

“As in Borneo?” Raine rolled to one side, then unhooked Otto’s claws from her T-shirt. He scrambled to his feet and stalked to the foot of the bed, tail lashing his vexation.

“Yep. Borneo is the third-largest island in the world. It’s divided between three countries. Kalimantan in the south is a province of Indonesia. Sarawak and Sabah in the northeast and northwest are states of Malaysia. Then tucked in between them is the Kingdom of Brunei.”

“A lot of ground to cover. What’s the date on the newspaper?”

“Mid-August of this year.”

“Six weeks ago—that sounds about right. The way the tooth was wrapped, I’m betting somebody mailed it to Lia. If she’d carried it as hand luggage on a plane or ship, she wouldn’t have needed so much cushioning—and it was too valuable to risk checking it with her bags.”

“Plus you said her English is fairly fluent, which might mean she’s been in New York awhile.”

“Mmm,” Raine mused. “So six weeks ago somebody packs up this tooth and mails it to Lia. Somebody who can only afford to send it surface mail. Somebody who trusts her to find out what it’s worth and to cut a deal.”

“A relative…a friend…maybe a classmate?” Trey hazarded.

“Somebody who sees Lia as the smart one in the family? The big-city college girl who should know how to tap the American money machine?”

“Sounds about right. And here’s another thing. The city of Pontianak is on the coast, at the mouth of the Kapuas River. But that tooth can’t have come from there. Geology’s wrong for finding fossils—nothing but swamps and mangrove. But more than that, the area’s too populated, with an entrenched power structure whose prime law is ‘Top Dog eats first.’ A priceless find along the coast would have been impossible to hide. It would’ve been snapped up by the head honchos.

“And when they went to sell it, the boss-guys wouldn’t trust it to a twenty-year-old girl, with no credentials or standing.”

“Amateur hour is what we’re talking here,” Raine muttered.

“Gotta be. So if not from the coast, the tooth came from somewhere in the wilds of the interior. That’s the deepest, darkest rainforest remaining in the world. No cities, no roads. Transportation strictly by jungle footpath or by longboat up the river. You’ve got rice-farming tribes settled along the waterways, and nomad hunters up in the mountains. It’s not even a money economy yet in the interior—it’s barter. Boar fat and birds and wild honey brought down to the river towns to be traded for shotgun shells and salt.”

The back of Raine’s neck was tingling. This was why she was a bone hunter! Not just for fossils, but for the crazy adventures in finding them. The new, the strange and the wild were what called her. “That’s where it came from!” she said with conviction. “Somebody found it up there, somewhere in the mountains. An innocent who hadn’t a clue what it would bring in a city.”

“Probably traded it for something practical, like a case of dried beef or a pair of used eyeglasses,” Trey agreed. “So it passed into a slightly savvier somebody’s hands, who passed it on to Lia to get what she could for it—where the money grows on trees, and the streets are paved with gold.”

Raine sighed. “Yep. She was flashing dollar signs on every wavelength.”

“Have you thought about an offer price?”

“That depends on what will beat Kincade. What have you found on him?”

“Nothing you’re going to like. Turns out he owns half of Okab Oil.”

Oil! She winced. “A drilling company out West? He sounds like a Westerner, with a bit of polish.”

“No such luck. We’re talking offshore oil, the Red Sea. His partner is the nephew-in-law of the emir of Kurat.”

“Oh, joy! Dad always says you can judge a person by his enemies. But we have to piss off an Arabian oil tycoon?”

“You’re sure he’s carrying a grudge? Did he threaten you?”

Raine smiled to herself. She could almost hear Trey flexing, two thousand miles to the west. “Not in so many words. He said something about SauroStar being just a hobby so far, but now that he’s got time to give us his undivided attention…”

“Hmm. Is there any chance, considering this is the find of a lifetime and considering you’ve been known to be a trifle, well…intense…when it comes to getting your dino, that you’re mistaking plain old bone hunter’s lust for something stronger and more personal?”

Slowly she shook her head at the cat, who’d rolled onto his side to gaze at her with a pair of simmering amber eyes. “No.” Cade had looked at her last night the way Otto must contemplate a mouse creeping along the baseboards. As something to be toyed with, then tasted, and finally devoured—and every last bite would be personal. “No, he’s got something against us, Trey. Something big and bad.”

“Then it’s got to be findable. I’ll keep on digging.”

“Thanks.” She stretched to rub her foot along the cat’s belly—a dangerous caress, but hard to resist. “Anything else?”

“One last thing. You mentioned the girl’s gloves? Are you sure they were gloves—and not tattoos?”

Raine laughed in surprise. “No, the light was hardly the best, but I’m fairly certain. Thin blue gloves, chopped off at the first knuckle. Why?”

“Just something I stumbled across, once in my travels. You know Borneo’s head-hunting country?”

“Yikes!” Raine sat upright, then scootched back against the mounded pillows. “But that’s got to be…way back in their dark and evil past, right?”

“Well, yeah, if you call 2001 the Bad Ol’ Days.”

“Oh, stop! You’re not serious.”

“’Fraid I am, though I s’pose you could write off that latest episode of head-taking as a nasty little hiccup. Just a minor backslide during an intertribal tiff about land rights.”

“I thought Lia seemed a bit…intense, herself,” Raine murmured, smoothing her palm thoughtfully down her neck.

“If she’s a Dayak, then, yeah, the women were as warlike as the men. But what you’ve got to understand is that head-hunting was a matter of prestige. To prove your daring and skill. If a guy wanted to score with a girl, he darned sure better bring a few heads when he came courting.”

“Beats a bouquet of roses any ol’ day,” Raine observed dryly.

“On an island with ten thousand flowers for the picking, I reckon it did. Anyway, to take a head meant you were a great achiever. And to advertise that you were a head-lopping Bravo, you had your hands tattooed blue—from the wrist to the first knuckle.”

Goose bumps stampeded up her arms. Raine shuddered as she rubbed them. “Oh, come on! This is a thoroughly twenty-first century kid. Uses the Internet and nail polish, for Pete’s sake.”

“Yeah, but it never fails to amaze me how people hang on to what works for them from their own culture, like polygamy or camel racing, then they graft MTV and cell phones on top of it. All I’m saying is that maybe Lia’s given herself blue hands to show she’s a high achiever. That she’s fearless and she’ll stop at nothing.”

“Or that she means to score big,” Raine murmured.

“All of the above. So my one bit of advice to you is, whatever you do, just don’t…lose your—”

Raine groaned. “Don’t you dare say it!”

“Okay, I won’t,” he agreed, chuckling. “I’ll call you when I’ve got more.” And just like that Trey was gone.

Raine sighed, hung up the phone and oozed back down to mattress level. “Nap?” she suggested, rubbing Otto’s belly with her toes.

Like a fuzzy orange bear trap, his paws snapped around her.