The Resurrection Man (28 page)

M
OVING SLOWLY AND MECHANICALLY
, like a man in shock, as he quite likely was, Bartolo Arbalest pulled the golden chain up over his head and laid his charm bag on the desk in front of Max.

“You open it,” he said. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” said Max. “You must have done it often enough.”

“No, never. Not once. I’ve tried a few times, but I always see mother’s face, the way she looked when she handed me the bag, and I—I just can’t. Please, Mr. Bittersohn.”

Max shrugged, fumbling for a moment with the time-stiffened puckers at the mouth, then held the bag upside down and let the heavy stone slide out onto George Protheroe’s blotter pad. It was in fact the size and shape of a large hen’s egg; its many facets gathered the rays from the desk lamp into a cool, still interplay of light and shadow, of color and no color.

“Very pretty,” said Max.

Sarah was staring at the great jewel as if mesmerized. “It’s so clear, so still. What is it, Max?”

“Rock crystal. Mid-eighteenth century, as a guess. Probably cut for some nabob’s bedroom doorknob.”

“What’s it worth?” barked Levitan.

“In dollars? A couple of thousand, more or less. Sorry, Arbalest.”

“No! Oh, my God! All that for—mother, father, Erminie, Mr. Dubrec, all those others, killed for a crystal doorknob. Take it away, for God’s sake! Throw it in the ocean. Throw me in, while you’re about it. I’m not fit to live.”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Arbalest,” said Levitan. “You’ll be okay. Get him that brandy, somebody. I may as well keep this—what do I call it? Crystal doorknob?—for evidence. I’ll give you a receipt.”

“I don’t want one.”

“Sorry, it’s in the rules. You wouldn’t want to get me fired.”

Levitan tore a sheet off a memo pad that was lying on George’s desk and began to write, in a surprisingly beautiful hand. Sarah slipped out to fetch the brandy, and also a glass of soda water just in case. When she returned, Max was asking Arbalest, “Was it on account of the stone that you decided to hire yourself a bodyguard?”

Arbalest shrugged. “I suppose so. Indirectly, anyway. So many awful things had happened, and they’ve been going on so long. Erminie Dubrec was the great love of my life. I wanted desperately to marry her, but I didn’t dare ask. There’d been others before her, you see. Anybody I got close to, man or woman—I’m a sociable person by nature, I need to have people around me. I suppose a psychiatrist would call it a holdover from my ayah’s brothers’ workshop. I drift into friendships, I can’t help it. I form ties, and suddenly they’re horribly, hideously broken. It’s as though I put a curse on anybody who lets me get too near.”

He was crying again. “I have so much love to give, and I’m poison wherever I give it. I’ve signed so many death warrants just by caring for people. Oh, God! I can’t stand any more. I want to die and be with my father.”

That made three who’d loved George Protheroe, all lining themselves up for Charon’s ferry, not counting Anora. Fat old George, of all people. Who would have thought he meant so much to so many? Sarah couldn’t bear to stand here listening to the Resurrection Man’s sobs, she went back to the bar for more soda water. By the time she returned to the den, Arbalest had himself in hand and was answering somebody’s question, probably Max’s.

“No, I didn’t tell Goudge about the crystal when I hired him, I saw no reason why I should. The catastrophic record among my former artisans was reason enough.”

“Have you ever told anybody else?” That was Levitan.

“No, not even Erminie. Nobody has ever known, unless Roderick’s still alive. I can’t imagine my mother survived their last encounter, she’d have been after me to get back her so-called treasure. She’d truly convinced herself that it was a real diamond, you know. One had to believe her, she was so sure. I never doubted her, not for a moment. I’m sure Roderick didn’t either. One believes what one wants to, of course.”

“How would she have known where to find you?” Max asked him.

“I don’t know, but she’d have managed. I used to wonder sometimes if mother was a witch. Anyway, I didn’t get far away those first days. I’d only my feet for transportation, my few annas wouldn’t have taken me any great distance on the train, and I did have to eat. Food has always been a top priority with me, as you can see.”

None of his hearers gave a rap about Arbalest’s
embonpoint
, they waited for him to go on. He was too courteous not to oblige.

“I wasn’t much worried about Roderick, oddly enough. I kept remembering how mother had looked with that razor in her hand; I felt fairly confident that even if he killed her, she’d have managed to do him some serious damage first. Even if she didn’t hurt him too badly, he’d have wasted a good deal of time tearing our bungalow apart piece by piece with his bare hands, looking for mother’s secret cache before it occurred to him that I might have run off with the boodle. Roderick wasn’t all that swift a thinker.”

“What about his son?” asked Max.

“By Jove! You know, Mr. Bittersohn, I’ve never once in all these years thought about the son’s possibly getting involved. Stupid of me, Barn was a sneaky young devil. I remember coming home from the workshop one time and catching him lurking under mother’s bedroom window with a camera in his hand.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, nothing, of course. Barn was older than I, you know. I just slipped into the shrubbery and waited till he’d got tired of snooping and went home. God knows what the poor kid’s life must have been like, now that I think of it. I’ve no idea whether Roderick was taking drugs as well as dealing in them, but he obviously did drink a lot, though never into oblivion, unfortunately. Mother and I could always tell when he was drunk. We’d hear him bellowing at his servants, calling them filthy names, accusing them of stealing things. They didn’t care, he paid well enough and they didn’t half understand what he was saying. Then of course Roderick was American so he didn’t count as a sahib.”

“Where was Roderick from in America?” asked Max.

“I’ve no idea. He’d no particularly marked regional accent, that I can recall. He talked the way Carnaby does. Where is Carnaby, by the way?”

“Upstairs taking a nap,” said Levitan. “He’s got a bodyguard of his own, you may be interested to know. We didn’t think it was smart to leave the man up there by himself, considering what’s been happening around here. Does he have a drinking problem?”

Arbalest conjured the ghost of a smile. “Oh dear, no, he finds it no problem at all. Carnaby could empty the Heidelberg tun without getting even slightly squiffed. There’s a trick to holding one’s liquor, he says; he picked up the knack from bodyguarding all those Texas oil barons. He’s always having to pose as something he isn’t, you know, and often the role puts him in a position where he can’t avoid keeping up with the party without making himself conspicuous. Why do you ask about a drinking problem?”

“Because he’s drunk. He passed out.”

“Surely not. You don’t suppose he can have been drugged?”

“He didn’t act drugged when I saw him,” said Sarah. “He was singing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and trying to get frisky with Lydia. Max, wait! Don’t you go up there.”

“Sit still, Bittersohn, this is a job for Supercop.” Levitan was already on his feet, checking his shoulder holster, rushing toward the stairway.

Bartolo Arbalest looked after him in amazement. “Is he going to arrest Carnaby for being rude to Madame Ouspenska?”

“Who knows?” Max wasn’t happy at being held back. “What was this Roderick’s last name, Arbalest?”

“I can’t remember. I must have known, but it’s escaped me. One of Freud’s repressions, I suppose. I disliked both him and his son so intensely, even before—God! How could I have been such a coward, leaving mother there helpless on the floor, with that madman coming to kill her?”

The dutiful son hadn’t heard about George Protheroe’s climb up the many-limbed idol, or the circle of monks Medea had left lying around it with their throats all slit. Medea must have realized her chances of surviving Roderick’s second attack were nil, or she wouldn’t have given up the diamond, even to her son, Sarah thought. Evidently the woman had drugged herself into believing her own fairy tale about the noble Russian family, and filled her son’s head with it. How else could Arbalest have persevered in honoring his vow after so many years and so many tragedies? If ever the sins of the parents were visited on the child! Now what was this ruckus?

In through the door came an odd assemblage of arms and legs that turned out to be Jesse Kelling dragging a little man in a red jogging suit. The man was trying to kick his captor in the shins, but Jesse hadn’t roughhoused with his three bloodthirsty brothers for nothing.

“I got him, Max!”

“I’ll be damned! How?”

“Saw him coming across the yard, jumped out the kitchen window, and landed on his back. We can get him for trespassing, can’t we?”

“And he can get you for unprovoked bodily assault. Nice going, Jesse. Okay, comrade, whoever you are, what’s with the red suit and the athletics?”

Jesse’s captive made an unintelligible noise; unintelligible except to Bartolo Arbalest, who made similar noises back. The little man quit trying to kick Jesse and made other noises suggestive of entreaty. Arbalest nodded and turned to Max.

“He says please let him go, he was only doing his job. He says if we hurt him, my boss will be angry.”

“His boss?”

“No, mine. Isn’t that intriguing?”

Arbalest emitted more sounds and got a spate of frenzied outpourings in return. “He says I am a bad and ungrateful servant and need to be taught a severe lesson. He says he is going to tell my boss on me for consorting with persons of bad character. He says this woman here is too beautiful to be virtuous, she belongs in a zenana. He didn’t exactly say zenana. I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Bittersohn.”

“Not at all. Ask him your boss’s name. By the way, what language are you speaking, Hindustani?”

“No, by Jove, Tamil. That’s interesting. I thought I’d forgotten how, but out it popped. Odd how things come back to one. I can’t ask this fellow my alleged boss’s name, Mrs. Bittersohn, he’d think I’d gone mad. Perhaps I have. What’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know, but your father saw him running across the yard the day before he was killed. George said the man looked like a Tamil.”

“How bright of father, what a marvelous man he must have been! Good heavens, what’s going on upstairs?”

“I’ll go see.” Jesse crouched for the sprint.

Max barred the way with his cane. “The hell you will. Two cops with guns are up there, they don’t need you. Does Goudge go armed, Arbalest?”

“Now that you mention it, I shouldn’t be surprised if he does. I’ve never asked because I preferred not to know, I loathe guns. Not much of a credit to my father, am I?”

Sarah wasn’t about to let him start crying again. “I shouldn’t say that, I don’t believe George ever touched a gun in his life.”

“Oh, Mrs. Bittersohn, you relieve my mind immensely! But Carnaby—I’m all confused. Don’t you think we ought to go up?”

“No,” said Max. “How did you happen to hire Goudge instead of somebody else?”

“Through a concatenation of circumstances, as one might say. Back in New York, when I first started out in my own business as an art restorer—I’d worked my way from Madras to New York on a tramp steamer as assistant cook—this was some years after I’d escaped from Roderick. I’d been working here and there in India and also in New York for a while before getting up courage to launch out on my own. But I mustn’t digress, must I? Anyway, there was this little coffee shop where I used to go and this chap would come in.”

“So you got to know him?”

“Not really, one doesn’t go accosting strangers in New York unless one’s a mugger. But one does begin to recognize faces. He usually had a camera with him, I assumed he was a professional photographer of some sort. Then I ran into problems, as Brooks may have told you, and moved to the West Coast. On my very first day in Los Angeles, whom should I see but this same chap?”

“Did you speak to him?”

“No, I nodded but I don’t think he noticed. Then I didn’t see him again for a long time. I ran into more problems in Los Angeles and relocated to Houston. That was where I met Erminie, but I can’t talk about that. After she—after the accident, I was sitting on a park bench one day wondering whether to kill myself when he came walking by again. He stopped and looked at me, then he said, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

“I said yes, in a manner of speaking, we’d seen each other fairly often in New York years ago. So then we got to chatting about what a small world it was and finally decided to go and have a drink together. I’m a person who needs company, as I mentioned before. By then my Texas artisans had learned about my previous fiascos; they’d walked out on me, all except Jacques and he was busy consoling his family. The Dubrecs were badly broken up about Erminie, of course, as who wasn’t?”

“So you finally got acquainted with Goudge,” Max prodded. “Did he talk about himself?”

“Yes, he said he hadn’t had much luck in photography so he’d given it up to become a professional bodyguard. He’d been guarding a Texas oilman who’d got into some kind of difficulty, but that was all straightened out and he was at liberty. Like myself he was trying to decide what to do next. He said he’d come from the east and would like to get back but didn’t have any connections left in these parts.”

Arbalest sighed. “So that gave me my bright idea. I could set up a maximum-security atelier with a resident bodyguard and keep my artisans from getting killed. I asked Carnaby if he’d be interested. I warned him that I couldn’t pay the high fees he’d been getting from the oil barons, but he said that wouldn’t matter. He was a bachelor, he’d nobody but himself to support, he came from a well-to-do family and didn’t really have to work at all. He merely preferred having something to do, and he liked my idea. Maybe living communally with a group of artists would stimulate him to get back to his photography.”

“And that’s how it happened?”

“Yes, just like that. Carnaby and I flew east together. He helped me find a house and get a security system set up. Grilles on all the windows, an intercom system, locks and safety catches everywhere, it was most reassuring. I began interviewing artisans and picked out a few who were ready to go along with my concept—you’ve met them—then I sent for Jacques, who’d promised to join me as soon as I got set up, and here I am. And there, I suppose, I go. But where?”