The Pegasus Secret (20 page)

All works that very much resembled the result of Jeff’s efforts with finger paints at age three.

Jeff and Janet. For the last few days, Lang had concentrated on finding their killer rather than dwelling on the emptiness their deaths had left in his life. His fists clenched. By God, he would find the unknown They. He would have vengeance.

A schoolmarmish woman, her white hair gathered in a bun, gave him a frightened look and scurried away, turning her head to make sure he wasn’t following. Lang realized he had spoken out loud.

Conceding he was no culture vulture and that contemporary art was beyond his ken, Lang retreated to the sculpture promenade to admire a Michelangelo relief.

After the abstractionists, it was just that: a relief.

As he started back towards Old Bond Street, it stopped misting. The sky was a little lighter with a hint if not a promise of sunshine to come. Umbrellas were now furled, used as walking sticks or carried underarm.

Once again, the bell tinkled his entrance. Lang busied himself inspecting the furniture as he waited for Jenson to come out from behind his curtain. Machined rather than planed surfaces and cast rather than forged nails betrayed most pieces as reproductions, reflections of revivals of the past century: a Savonarola chair, its fish-rib back more likely made for the fashions of the 1920s rather than fifteenth-century Florence; an Irish Chippendale table from the craze of the fifties, its claw feet matching more perfectly than could have been done by any eighteenth-century craftsman.

Lang soon grew tired of the game and checked his
watch. He had been waiting ten minutes. Jenson had to have heard the bell. Perhaps he was in the midst of a lengthy phone conversation.

“Mr. Jenson?” Lang called.

No response.

The man had to be there. He wouldn’t have left his shop unlocked.

Lang called again with the same result. He was getting a little angry at the man’s rudeness.

Lang crossed the room and pulled back the curtain.

Two naked bulbs, the low-wattage sort the English prefer, hung from the ceiling. Dust-speckled light created an archipelago of shadows around tables, chairs and chests, all in various states of repair. Ornate but empty picture frames, some large enough for life-size portraits, leaned against furniture with a haphazardness at odds with the order of the showroom. The dimness and the dark spots gave Lang the creeps.

To his right, light seeped around a door. An office, no doubt. No wonder Jenson hadn’t heard him enter with the door shut. Lang made his way over, using touch as much as sight to avoid his shins colliding with some very unforgiving wood.

Lang reached the door and knocked. “Mr. Jenson?”

Receiving no response, he knocked again, this time harder. The door swung open.

Lang had often heard the smell of blood described as coppery. To him it was reminiscent of the taste of steel, a smell like the taste of your tongue running across the blade of a knife. However it smelled, there was blood everywhere.

Jenson sat at an old rolltop desk that was swamped in papers. Were it not for the blood, he could have been napping, head tipped against the back of a chair. Blood covered his shirt, his jacket and his trousers. Blood formed
puddles on the desk and covered the bare planks of the floor. Blood was splattered across the wall in a display not unlike the art exhibition. An oozing gash separated Jenson’s chin from his throat. Eyes not yet dull gazed in surprise into the darkness of the ceiling.

Next to the desk, a safe yawned open, a trickle of papers spilling onto the floor. More papers were scattered across the desk and floor, some already reddish as the fibers sponged up the fluid of Jenson’s life. It looked as if, in a final fit, Jenson had taken every scrap of paper he could find and tossed them into the air.

Lang leaned the umbrella against a wall and touched the back of his hand to Jenson’s slack jaw. The skin was still warm. Jenson hadn’t been dead very long. Lang glanced nervously around the room. The killer could well have been hiding in those shadows on the other side of the door. Moving to face that way, he hurriedly sifted through the papers on the desk.

A quick peek showed mostly bills. Lang almost gagged from the overpowering stench of blood and tried to breathe through his mouth. He was probably wasting his time. Why would They kill Jenson and leave the very information they were trying to cover up?

Answer: They wouldn’t, and Lang sure didn’t want to be here when the next customer walked in.

He took a last sweeping look and noticed something on the floor under Jenson’s chair, a sheet of paper soggy and red. It would not have been visible to someone standing over the unfortunate antique dealer. Lang picked it up gingerly, trying to get as little of Mr. Jenson’s blood on his fingers as possible. These days, blood can kill, depending on what unpleasant virus it might be carrying. The paper was soaked, virtually unreadable. A DHL shipping bill. Lang was about to drop it and wipe off his fingers when the word “Poussin” made him forget his squeamishness. There
were a list of items, some too blurred to read, but Lang guessed the painting had been one of a number of items of furniture and furnishings sold in bulk. The only other words were “Pegasus, Ltd”—the shipper—and an illegible address.

Either Lang was looking at a list totally unrelated to the people he was searching for—or he had gotten lucky. Which was the more likely, that Jenson had handled more than one Poussin or that his killer hadn’t seen the paper Lang was now holding? Although hardly active in the art world, Lang had never heard of Poussin a month before and the shipping bill had been where someone standing over Jensen might not have seen it, particularly if Jenson had put it on the desk and pushed it over the edge onto the floor when his muscles gave their final spasms.

Lang didn’t have a lot of time to decide. The bell over the door announced another arrival. Or departure. The killer could be escaping and there wasn’t a lot Lang could do about it.

Or maybe there was. Stuffing the bloody paper into a pocket, he cautiously went back into the storage and repair room. Whoever had sliced Jenson’s throat would be covered in blood, judging by how much had splattered the office.

Unless he had managed to steal a car, or have one waiting at the curb, Jenson’s killer was going to be easy to identify if Lang could catch up to him before he could change clothes.

Of course, he could have still been in Jenson’s shop, too. The possibility slowed Lang as he edged towards the showroom, his back to the wall in case the bell had meant an entry rather than the killer’s departure.

As he reached the curtains separating the show area, Lang saw something on the floor. For an instant, the dim light gave the illusion of another body. He felt himself
tense until he realized he was looking at nothing more than a bundle of clothes, coveralls stained red with blood.

Lang was certain he would have seen them had they been there when he came in. He picked them up, quickly searching. He would have been surprised to find anything useful, but he had to look. The idea the murderer had been there when he arrived, watched him go into the office, was enough to make the fish and chips lurch in his stomach.

Why not try to finish what They had failed to do in Atlanta?

Lang’s question was answered soon enough. A police constable in the traditional four-button jacket and high, rounded hat was looking around the showroom. He held an automatic pistol pointed in Lang’s direction.

Lang’s first thought on seeing the weapon was that the killer had remained, disguised as a police officer. Then he remembered that the London police had abandoned tradition and begun to carry arms a few years ago.

“Someone called, said there’d been . . .” The cop’s eyes widened and Lang realized he was still holding the bloody clothes.

“Look, I didn’t . . .” Lang began, all too aware of how lame he sounded.

Judging by the tremor in his voice as he spoke into the radio transmitter fixed to the lapel of his jacket, the constable was more frightened than Lang was.

“Backup, more chaps ’ere in a ’urry,” he shouted in an East End accent that would have done Eliza Doolittle credit. “ ’Urry th’ bleedin’ backup! I got the bugger whot done it right ’ere. Number Twelve Auld Bond Street.”

Lang dropped the incriminating coveralls and backed through the curtains into the storage area, his hands extended so the policeman could see he was no threat. “I just walked in here, found him.”

The officer was young and clearly nervous. The muzzle of his weapon—a Glock nine-millimeter, Lang guessed—wavered. “An’ I’m th’ bleedin’ Queen’s Consort. Right where you are, Yank, ‘old it right where you are.”

Lang took another step backwards and came up against a large piece of furniture. The cop followed slowly. Maybe he was afraid if he let Lang get too many steps away he would miss if he had to shoot. Lang put a hand behind his back to feel his way around the obstacle. His fingers touched one of the picture frames he had seen earlier.

“ ’Ands up where I can see ’em,” the constable demanded.

Lang was betting the cop wouldn’t pull the trigger unless forced to, a risk Lang wouldn’t have taken in Atlanta. Lang wasn’t going to submit to arrest if he could avoid it without doing the young policeman any great harm. When and if Lang could be proved innocent, the tracks he was following would be cold. Besides, he had had more than enough experience with the criminal justice system to know it for the crapshoot it was. Lang’s fingers ran along the ornately carved frame as the officer came closer. The hand that wasn’t holding the gun was fumbling behind him—for handcuffs, Lang guessed.

“Both ’ands, I said. . . .”

Lang took a deep breath and shifted his weight to his front foot. He gave a high kick that the Rockettes would have envied and the Glock spun from the officer’s hand and clattered to the floor. As the officer spun to retrieve it, Lang swung the picture frame over his own head and the policeman’s. It could not have fit better. The officer’s arms were pinned to his sides by the gilded wood. The constable could do little more than glare.

“Trust me,” Lang said, headed for the door, “I had nothing to do with this and I’d like nothing better than being able to stick around and prove it.”

The constable didn’t look much like he believed him.

Lang could already hear the pulsing sirens used by police all over Europe, the ones that reminded him of the movie
The Diary of Anne Frank
. It might as well have been the Gestapo coming for him: if he was caught, he wouldn’t be sent to Auschwitz but he sure as hell would be going somewhere behind barbed wire where They could reach him at their leisure.

Lang stepped outside and walked away, resisting the impulse to run like hell. He was two blocks down the street before he realized he had left his umbrella.

London, St. James
Ten minutes later

There was a note waiting at the Stafford:

Gone shopping. Dinner at Pointe de Tour. Tea here at
1600 hrs.
Gurt

Attached was part of an article clipped from a magazine, informing Lang that the Pointe de Tour was one of the new London restaurants, located on the south side of Tower Bridge. French cuisine, multiple stars. Expensive.

Waiting around for Gurt didn’t seem wise. He went to the room and packed his bag. He felt guilty as hell but she had no place in his plans. They had set him up, killing Jenson and calling the police to nab him virtually in flagrante delicto, as lawyers say.

Well, as some lawyers say, those who remember the phrase from law school.

Every law enforcement agency in Europe as well as the
United States would have a reason to be looking for Lang once the fingerprints were lifted from the umbrella and it was traced back to Fortnum and Mason. Being part of a couple wasn’t going to be sufficient cover, anyway, once the constable got to a police artist who could draw Heinrich Schneller’s face.

Once run through Interpol, the fingerprints would put the Herr Schneller persona to rest for good.

Lang pocketed the cash Gurt had left in the room’s safe, wrote her a note he knew was inadequate, and left.

Crossing the Mall to St. James’s Park, he spent a few minutes pretending to watch the birds on Duck Island. No one else showed an interest in him or the waterfowl. He walked along Whitehall and the edge of the brown pea gravel of the Horse Guards’ parade ground and the Paladin facade of Banqueting House, the site of royal revels. That princely party boy, that swinging sovereign, Charles I, had been beheaded there. Today, Lang wasn’t nearly as interested in history as he was in anyone who might be following.

Of course, the fact he couldn’t see Them didn’t mean They weren’t there. Lang appreciated Their cleverness. Jenson’s killer could have killed Lang in the shadows of the shop. In a country with fewer annual homicides than, say, Montgomery, Alabama, such a murder would have raised more questions than merely the death of the antique dealer would have. They had arranged to have Lang sought as the culprit.

Once Lang was in custody, he suspected They would know where to find him. A criminal organization with members in America and Europe would have access to police records and, quite likely, any jail in which he might be incarcerated. And what could he do? Who was going to believe a suspect in two murders who raved about international conspiracies and secrets hidden in pictures?