Capriccio (21 page)

He gripped my upper arm in a vice hold and dragged me, loudly protesting, bucking and kicking, back to the Monte Carlo. I noticed he had left the door hanging open in his rush to catch me. At the car, he said, “I’ll take this,” and tossed the violin onto the seat of the car.

I made one more effort to get away. I tried to wrench free, but his fingers were like metal clamps on my arm. Fear rose up in a wave, a palpable, tangible thing when he shoved me toward the open car door. “How did you escape?” I asked.

“You heard about that, did you? Or was it you who tipped them off?” As he spoke, I dug in my heels and tried to resist. It took him about thirty seconds to pry me loose. I just had time for one final holler before I was flung onto the front seat, missing the violin case by a fraction of an inch.

He was in beside me. The motor was still running—all he had to do was put the car in gear and roar off. He was driving too fast for me to fling the door open and jump out. As he drove, he darted quick, angry looks at me.

“Well, was it you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I claimed bravely, but my shaking voice betrayed my fear, and my fingers were trembling. I crossed my arms to hide my panicky condition and thought furiously. How long would it take for Ronald to phone the apartment and discover I was missing? Would he come pelting over to see what had happened, or would he think I’d taken a sleeping pill as he’d suggested and decide to let me rest till morning? The police! At least they knew Sean had escaped. They must be looking for him, and they’d know what car he had rented. How had he got his car? He’d have been taken to the station in the police cruiser.

“The cops were waiting for me when I got back to the hotel as you apparently know,” he said.

“Then how did you escape?”

“I didn’t. I just did a bit of fast talking. They didn’t have anything on me. Bad P.R., arresting an American and holding him with no evidence. I started yelling for the American Consul, and before you could say Jack Robinson they let me go."

Was it possible he had talked them into releasing him after what I’d told Marven? Or was this yet another lie? “They’re probably having you followed,” I said.

“Not now. I managed to lose them about half an hour ago. When I didn’t find you in the apartment, I had a pretty good idea where to look. Did you know the Strad was there all along?”

“No, I just figured it out tonight.” I was answering carefully, hoping to keep Sean calm, hoping to come up with a plan. He didn’t seem terribly hostile, not yet anyway. But the very fact that he’d been “in” the apartment told me he had Victor’s key. And there was no way he could have gotten it except from Victor.

“What were you planning to do with it?” he asked.

“Take it home. Call the police.”

“Wouldn’t it have made more sense to call them before you left the Casa Loma? Even before you left the apartment,” he added.

“Yes, I guess it would.”

“Of course, if you never had any intention of letting the cops know you’d found it . . .” He let it hang and snatched one quick look at me from the corner of his eye as he roared around a corner doing about seventy miles an hour.

“Why would I do that?”

“It’s worth a lot of money.”

“Not to me, it isn’t. I just wanted the papers to announce it was found, so you—they’d let Victor go.”

Sean didn’t mention my slip, but I knew he’d noticed it. “Where’s Ronald?” he asked suddenly.

“Out with some friends. Why?”

“When you stood me up, I thought maybe he was the cause.”

“Where are we going?”

“To your place. A shame to let those two steaks go to waste. I didn’t bring my pajamas. I figured they’d just be in the way.”

That was when the panic began getting out of control. I could almost taste it, bitter and burning at the back of my throat, making me weak and breathless. The talk so far had been very low key, not what I’d expected at all, but now he was going to get his revenge. He had the Strad, he had Victor and Victor’s money and he had me. All he wanted was revenge. And there was nothing to prevent his getting it. He had evaded the police. Ronald was out somewhere with friends. He was going to take me back to the apartment . . . Beads of perspiration gathered on my brow and my fingers. I heard my shallow breathing in the closed car.

CHAPTER 16

My mind soon turned to escape—preferably before we reached the apartment. The blur of buildings and street lights told me we were going too fast to jump out. I thought Sean knew what I had in mind. He kept to the inner lane which made getting out in the traffic nearly as dangerous as staying with him. He rushed all the orange lights and once leapt through on a light that had just turned red. The time to make my bolt would be after we stopped. With luck on my side, there’d be some other people in the parking garage at the apartment; with divine providence, some of those people might be policemen. Or Ronald.

When we entered the garage, there was nothing but silent rows of dully gleaming cars and long shadowy aisles leading to the service elevators. Sean took a good look around before he got out. In all the excitement, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have a gun. And if he did, I could forget trying to bolt. I wanted to
discover if he had one and peered for suspicious bulges in his clothing. It was impossible to tell by his lumpy jacket whether he carried a concealed weapon, but at least he didn’t have one in his hand. I’d make a run for it as soon as the car stopped.

He parked so close to the other car on my side that I couldn’t get my door open. He had done it on purpose. I knew by the smug set of his lips. This wily maneuver convinced me that he was too experienced to be walking around without a gun. I had to jiggle over and get out by his door while he stood waiting, watching closely.

He put on his hat and said, “You carry the violin.”

I took it from him, he clamped a menacing hand on my arm, and we walked swiftly toward the elevator—the service elevator to lessen the likelihood of company. I uttered a silent prayer that when the elevator arrived, someone would be in it, a man, or men. It was already there, empty and waiting. My next and last hope was the hallway when we got out.

Sean stood behind me as we rode silently up in the elevator. I expected every minute that he’d do something—attack me with either lustful or other intent. And if he did, all I had for protection was my little evening purse and the Stradivarius violin worth a fortune. Not that that would have stopped me, but it was too fragile to do any good. There was no hope of the elevator stopping on the way up. Anyone using it would be going down to the garage. I kept picturing the hallway of the seventeenth floor, my last hope.
Please God, make there be someone in the hallway.

When the elevator door rattled open, I looked into a perfectly empty stretch of corridor with rows of closed doors along either wall. Maybe if I screamed . . . I opened my lips. Sean heard my intake of breath and clamped his hand over my mouth. He dragged me along to Victor’s door. At the door, he pulled out the key he’d taken from Victor and waited for me to go in before him. When I didn’t he gave me a shove. Those two little inches of metal were as good as a confession that he’d kidnapped my uncle. I wondered what he’d done with the key ring and all Victor’s other keys.

It was a strange feeling, the usual security of home all mixed up with the sheer terror of being here under duress with a dangerous criminal. But at least it was home. I knew the apartment more thoroughly than Sean did. Maybe I could find a weapon.

Before any concrete plan occurred to me, he tossed his head toward the violin case and said, “Let’s have a look at it.”

I put the case on the coffee table and opened it while quickly scanning the room for a weapon. The ash tray, close at hand, wasn’t heavy enough. “So this is what all the fuss and bother was about,” he said, lifting the violin, turning it around this way and that as though he’d never seen it before in his life. Maybe he hadn’t; maybe Etherington had done the procuring, and I knew he’d handled the exchange. “Fuss and bother” struck me as a mild description of what Victor and I had been through, but then we probably rated low on his scale of victims.

While he was looking at the violin, the phone rang. Ronald! It was time for his call. I looked at Sean, waiting for him to decide whether he was going to let me answer. “If that’s the boyfriend, tell him to get his keyster over here, fast. Tell him you’ve got the violin. That should do it.”

I heard this order with delighted surprise. My incipient love for Ronald hadn’t reached that unfathomable stage where I would sacrifice my life for his. Two against one gave me a fighting chance at
least. Sean lifted the receiver and held it halfway between his ear and my own. We both heard Ronald say, “Hi, did you have a good sleep?”

My words came out in a strangled whisper. “Ronald, come right over. I found the Stradivarius.”

“What! Where? How?” The questions came gushing out in an excited babble.

“Come right over,” I repeated just before Sean reached out a finger and cut us off.

“That should do it.” He smiled. But it wasn’t a real smile, more a baring of teeth. There was nothing pleasant in it.

“Now what’ll we have to drink? Coffee or beer?” was his next question.

A kitchen had knives—which Sean would soon wrestle out of my hand and quite possibly turn against me. “Nothing for me,” I said.

He gave me a mocking smile. “Has something put you off your feed?”

This wasn’t the moment to risk a smart ass answer. He went to the bar and poured a shot of Scotch into a glass. He sipped it like that, with no ice and no water, in the English way. While he sipped, his eyes seldom left me. “Was it you, or was it the boyfriend who sent the cops to the hotel?” he asked after about a minute of that silent, sinister staring.

“That’s the second time you’ve asked that. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The pictures were stolen from your purse. It doesn’t make any sense for Strathroy to call attention to those pictures. Even if he knew, and if he gave them to you, he wouldn’t be eager for Marven to know about them.”

“Why not?”

There was a feeling of tiptoeing on eggs during this exchange. I didn’t want to get Sean in a fit of fury before Ronald came, and he seemed to be just as edgy and secretive as I was. “If you trust him so much, how come you went alone to pick up the Strad?”

“Ronald was busy. I just decided at the last minute to go. Never mind about Ronald. What are you going to do about Victor?”

“I don’t know. That depends on Victor.”

“Sean, you won’t let Etherington kill him!”

“No, I won’t,” he agreed, but diffidently. “Sure you don’t want a shot of this stuff? It’s real good Scotch.”

“It should be. It’s old enough to vote. Maybe I’ll have a bit of that Irish Cream.”

It was an unreal quarter of an hour we spent waiting for Ronald to come. Sean had two neat Scotches, and I had two shots of Irish Cream. The bottle might have been capable of knocking him out if he’d ever stopped staring at me long enough to get a crack at him. I could tell by the intense glow in his eyes that he was doing some deep scheming. Whatever it was caused a pleat to form between his brows, and the gouges at either side of his moustache to deepen. He seemed content to just think, and so I remained silent and thought too.

“The pictures were stolen from your purse,” he had said. An odd way to say he’d stolen them. Would he kill Victor or not? If it was an identification he was worried about, then he’d have to kill me and Ronald too, and surely Sean wasn’t a mass murderer. He’d just tie us up and make a fast getaway.

When I figured it was nearly time for Ronald to arrive, I risked a question that had been bothering me ever since Marven told me this man wasn’t Sean Bradley. “Who are you?” I asked.

“My name, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated a moment then answered, “John. John Weiss.”

 “Where are you from?”

“The west.”

“From North Platte?”

“North of there. My dad does own a hardware store. I worked there summers when I was in high school. I stick as close to the truth as I can. No point complicating life by claiming a profession you can’t fake. You never know when you might meet somebody who can blow your cover wide open.”

“You were wise to stick to two-by-fours,” I snipped before I realized the danger of angering him. But he didn’t seem angry. “How did you get mixed up in this business—I mean this specific business of Victor and the violin?”

“You mean what’s a nice guy like me doing in a business like this?” He laughed. “I’ve been chasing the Carpani loot for months, ever since Etherington lifted it from the contessa’s villa. The violin is the least interesting thing in it, but it surfaced first so it might lead to the rest of the stuff. They try to get rid of it all at the same time—usually in different countries so word doesn’t get around. That’s why it’s so important to certain people that it shouldn’t be found and identified. I’m a specialist,” he said proudly. Pride in stealing previously-stolen goods was as bizarre as the rest of that bizarre night.

The door buzzer sounded, and I looked at Sean for permission to answer it. The doorman often let Eleanor and Ronald up without announcing them. “Let him in. And let me do the talking. If he tries anything . . . But no, I don’t think Ronald will sully his lily whites by trying to sock me.” He gave an ironical little laugh and followed me to the door.

I opened it, and Ronald came charging in. He stopped dead when he saw Sean. For a minute I had a very real fear that he was going to turn tail and run. But Sean gave him an oily smile that seemed to set his fears at rest, and he came reluctantly into the living room.

“Surprise!” Sean smiled and pointed at the Strad.

Introductions seemed irrelevant, but in case Ronald wasn’t aware who he was dealing with, I said, “This is Sean Bradley, Ron.” I tried to give him a mute warning by frowning and staring at him. Just what warning I didn’t know myself, but I wanted him to know at least that Sean wasn’t the disinterested friend he would probably pretend to be. Why had he called Ronald here anyway? Ronald apparently interpreted my grimaces to mean he wasn’t to ask any close questions as to why Sean was here when he should have been in jail.