THE ROOM WAS SEMIPRIVATE, dim gray, and as noisy as fingers in a felt glove. Mrs. Evancek had the bed nearest the door, with a folding screen standing between it and its mate. I peeped around the edge of the screen. Vertical blinds were drawn over the room’s only window and what light there was fell on a mop of dirty-gray frizz showing over a humped blanket.
“She’s quite deaf, Mr. Walker. Fireworks in the room wouldn’t awaken her.”
I turned. Mrs. Evancek was half sitting up with two pillows bunched behind her back and a thin green cotton blanket drawn over her lap. She looked less aristocratic, more peasant-like without the veil, and some strands of her white hair were loose, but the bold nose and heavy lids were still arresting, and dramatic shadows lay in the many hollows of her face. She wore a gray flannel nightdress that tied at the neck and had long sleeves and a ruffled bodice that probably embarrassed her. Her strong rough hands were folded on the blanket.
“They tell me you had a scare.” I hung my coat and hat on the edge of the open door to the bathroom.
“Very little is left that can frighten me. Please sit down.”
The only chair on her side of the screen was a tricky tan vinyl number with an attached footstool that slid out when you leaned back. I didn’t.
“You are good at what you do,” she said. “You learned in twenty-four hours what I could not in nineteen years.”
“I got lucky. My fist went through the wall in a spot where I usually just bruise some knuckles.” I paused. “I wish the news could be better.”
She shifted her position on the bed and reached across to open the drawer in the nightstand. Her hand rummaged around inside for a moment and then she sat back again, breathing heavily. “They’ve hidden my cigarettes again.”
I gave her one of mine and lit it without taking one for myself. She inhaled smoke in that odd way she had, holding it in her mouth and then seeming to swallow it, letting what was left find its way out her nostrils. She looked at me. “What is the Norton woman like?”
“A hard egg, we used to call her type. She thinks everything she does is right once she’s done it and no one can change her mind. Not a bad woman. Just tough.”
“Tough.” She ate some more cigarette, her hand covering the lower half of her face. “It’s an important word over here. I’m not sure I understand its meaning.”
“You’re not alone. Some cops think it has to do with getting someone in an interrogation room with badge muscle all around, and in the corner poolrooms downtown it seems to mean who has the loudest gun. You can be born tough — the kind of tough that lets you watch German bombers roaring roof-high over your backyard and not blink — or you can acquire toughness like callus from what life bounces off you, like Barbara Norton. We set a lot of store by it here ever since a small group of misfits in Boston stuck their tongues out at King George and made him like it. That’s what tough is really all about, bucking the odds and coming out with all the important things you had going in. It’s one of the reasons so many Americans support what another small group of misfits are up to in your country.”
“That’s all very democratic and inspiring, but the people who make speeches here wouldn’t invite the people who are fighting there into their houses to use the bathrooms. And in most cases they’d be right not to.”
“Nice people don’t make revolutions,” I said. “Being tough doesn’t have a lot to do with knowing which fork to use at a dinner party.”
“I think you would know, or make those who do know appear superficial. And yet I think you are tough.”
I said nothing. The ruby on her right hand glistened like a drop of fresh blood in the room’s dimness.
“Tell me about Michael,” she said.
“He had a friend, Fred Florentine, in the place where he worked. He was the one who was with Michael at the time of the accident. I spoke to him on the telephone. He said Michael was the best kind of friend to have, the kind that’s there when he’s needed and good to have around even when he isn’t. The kind of friend I’ve been looking for all my life. He collected coins,” I added. It seemed important. None of it was enough, for a life.
“That’s comforting. But of course you only hear good about the dead. I would like to talk with this Fred.”
“I have his number. It’ll be in the report.”
The woman on the other side of the screen stirred. There was a rustling of bedclothes and a thin old voice like a parrot’s said something to someone named Caroline.
“Her daughter,” Mrs. Evancek explained. “The nurse said she died in childbirth thirty years ago.”
I nodded sagely.
“There is something else,” she said.
Her eyes moved to the door of the room, which remained open. I got up and closed it and sat down again. She moved her head approvingly.
“It is a religious artifact, a silver crucifix trimmed with semiprecious stones. It has been in my family as long as this ring and was cast by the jeweler to the court of Sigismund Augustus in the sixteenth century. Its intrinsic value is not great. Its historical value is greater, though not enough to make the difference between a poor man and a wealthy one. I gave it to Joseph when he left Poland. He was to keep it as a family trust and not to part with it unless his life were threatened. I don’t know what happened to it after his death. I would like to know now.”
That spilled me as much as anything about the old lady had spilled me from the first. Her case had seemed complete without a holy relic. I took a deep breath and leaned back and the footstool licked out. I used it.
“Why didn’t you mention this before?”
She tipped some ash into a saucer that was trying hard not to look like an ashtray on the nightstand. “It was not as important as finding Michael. There was the possibility it would be found when he was, but if not I would have been content to have my grandson returned to me. It is different now, you see. Also, the crucifix would be considered a national treasure and illegal to remove from Poland. I did not know you well enough before to trust you with the story, which might mean deportation if it reached the immigration authorities here. I feel that I know you well enough now. Also the possibility of being made to leave this country has lost its terrors.”
“You want it back.”
“It belongs to my family, not to the Russian puppet government in Warsaw.”
“I can ask Barbara Norton. If she has it she’ll want something for it.”
“It isn’t hers to sell,” she said sharply. Then she closed her eyes and rested the back of her head on the pillows. Lying that way she reminded me of Stash Leposava.
“Do you have proof it’s yours?”
“Of course not.” She opened her eyes, smoked. “You may offer her five hundred dollars. In the nature of a reward.”
I nodded. “She might bite, if I offer cash.”
“You will do it?”
“I’ll do that much. If she doesn’t have it I wouldn’t know where to begin looking.”
“Karen has deposited the rest of the money I gave you. I have that and the five hundred dollars you returned Tuesday and a little more.”
“It’ll keep till you get out of here. What’s the cross look like?”
“It’s silver, as I said, about seven inches by three. The largest stone is a lapis lazuli, deep blue, perhaps a third of an inch across and set in the center. There are smaller red garnets set in each of the four points. The inscription on the back is in Cyrillic characters and means ‘Glory and Eternity.’ ”
I wrote it all down and kicked the footstool back under the chair. “I’ll get back to you with her answer.”
“Karen is not to know anything about this,” she said. “If she asks what we talked about, tell her it was about Michael.”
“Sure.” I got up. Her eyes followed me.
“She has it in her mind that I am an old immigrant woman with nothing to live for but her memories. I’m afraid she’ll think me grasping if she hears of the crucifix. Do you?”
“You aren’t paying me to think, Mrs. Evancek. But if it’s grasping to want what’s yours we’re all just as bad as one another. She won’t hear it from me.”
“They say that material things mean less the nearer we get to death. I think that those who say that are very young.”
She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and lay back. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. I told her again I’d get back to her. She might have nodded. I got my hat and coat and left. The hallway seemed bright after the gray colorlessness of that room.
There was no sign of Karen on my way out of the building.