8

Peter didn’t know who let it out about his paintings, but now it was too late to go back, so he supposed it didn’t matter. The phone was ringing at ten on Monday when he got to the office. It sounded at first like a hype. For a moment he only waited for it to be over, as if they were selling encyclopedias. Then, when it turned out to be for real, it was like winning a Nobel Prize in the wrong field. They were a gallery in Beverly Hills, and they proposed a show of all his pictures of the ranch for the middle of April. They could do it, they said, any number of ways—but suggested, since he was famous as something else, that they make it a benefit opening night, a percentage to go to a worthy cause of Peter’s choice. That way, he’d come off as a model of humility about his work as a painter, and the benefit publicity would drive up star attendance on the first night and insure a clean sweep of the walls as the days passed. If the stars bought, see, then everyone would want a piece. Did he have a better idea? He laughed out loud—genuinely modest, in this at least, but they didn’t know the difference—and asked for a little time to think. They didn’t like it. Just remember, they said, that we called first.

My God, he thought, and they’re not even dry. And then the second call came within the hour. This one bragged about their branches in New York and Amsterdam, and they promised, sight unseen, to take everything he did from here on in. They’d sign him up for life if they could. He said he was already represented. Who? they said, because we’ll outbid anyone. Peter hung up. Then, while he was talking a client into Roman shades to run twenty-seven feet across a wall of windows, a call came in from a painter’s agent. No, Peter said, but where did the guy find out about the pictures? With an audible shrug he answered back, “I don’t remember. It’s what people were talking about this weekend. What can I tell you?” And by that time Peter could only sit in silence, staring curiously at his trusty heap of fabric samples. Before noon, the Times had him on the phone. Because they were his buddies in the “Home” section, they at least took “no comment” for an answer.

“Are you sick or something?” Rita asked when he picked up the phone and said hello to her about a half hour later.

“I haven’t been bitten by a snake, if that’s what you mean. But I feel a little like Lana Turner on the stool at Schwab’s.”

“Has someone discovered you?”

“The whole western world has discovered me, Rita. Why aren’t you here? It’s afternoon already, and I have to hold your hand.”

“I’ll see you in twenty minutes. I’ll wait right here.”

“But you’re supposed to come here, remember? It’s called a job. Where are you?”

“Right now I’m lying naked on my bed. I’m just about to take a bath.”

“Are you sick or something?”

“Nope. Never better. It’s just I’ve been working my ass off to get something ready. Now hurry.”

“How did you even know I’d be here?”

“I’ve been keeping your calendar clean, Pete. You mustn’t ever forget how sneaky I am. In fact, if I were you, I’d think about it all the way home. It’ll get you all prepared.”

“Does it have to do with my paintings?”

“Your what? You mean Home on the Range? No, of course not. I thought you’d given that up.”

“Me, too. But it seems I might still be needed. I’ll tell you about it when I get there.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Why not? We never talk about me,” he said petulantly, in case she was trying to imply that he was too full of himself.

“You’ll see. There will be only one thing to talk about once you get here. Hurry,” she said again, and rang off.

It was true, he had to admit as he climbed into the pickup, that he’d done the course of his career in painting like a shooting star. First he was, and before he knew it, he wasn’t. The old revolving door trick. Even by the time he’d strewn the half-done things of the ranch all around the bedroom the night of the party, it was all for the hell of it. Now they were stacked in one of the closets, and he’d raised no cry when Hey took away his easel and paints as well, a couple of days later. But he could tell that Rita didn’t understand. She must have come to the conclusion that painting was just a phase he needed to go through, all fanfare and no gumption. In a way, he wanted to believe it himself.

But the fact was, he felt himself go very deep into the paintings only because of his accident. The first of them was crap, the one he abandoned by the fence to go get bitten. So when the second one filled him with power, he figured it was just this: He was better when he painted out of his head. He’d been lousy on location, he reasoned, only because he was cowed by the real thing. But then they got stranger and finer and fuller every day, and something else took over. Even if he was the only one to notice—Rita and Nick scarcely glanced at them, Hey protested they were all the same—Peter knew he was entering a temple. And then on that plateau, where he was expected to coast for a while being great, he realized something. He would only be good after something awful. He whipped up a desert and a sky in his pictures that got across the lightning shock of a rattlesnake’s strike. When the trauma passed, the brush was sluggish in his hand, like a stick poked in soft tar.

He didn’t grieve when the magic fled his fingers, and he knew he’d be able to do it again at the pitch of the next crisis, like a secret tunnel out of a battle. But in between, he could tell, the surface of the canvas would be flat and indecisive, the work mechanical. He refused to rely on peaks and furies and hurricanes because he had an intimation that a certain kind of painter lived impatiently, waiting for the next fire storm. Through all of this, Peter was not deluded. He wasn’t really good. He supposed great painters were possessed by their work, and he was jarred to wake up to himself experiencing even a breath of it. But he found, to his considerable disappointment, that he had a metaphysical distaste for being in the grip of forces—the metaphysical version of being squeamish about the splotches of paint on his hands and clothes. He couldn’t stand the mess. He was even afraid the fire storm painter produced his own apocalypse every now and then, just to get the juices flowing. Peter saw himself empty and only half alive, waiting for the next snakebite as if for a fix. Or not even, waiting but walking naked in the tall dry grass until something terrible took the bait.

Oh, come on, he said to himself, it’s not quite so fancy as that. He’d hoped to turn into a laser beam, and he hadn’t. He wanted his eye aligned with his brush hand like the hairs on a rifle sight, and he wanted the world broken down into planes and colors alone. It was meant to be done with the mind and not the heart, he thought, and that was that. Peter’s two laws in whatever he did were taste and style, which sound as if they amount to the same thing, but for him were like weather and climate, the active and passive faces of the one condition. Certain people criticized his living rooms as too impersonal, and he didn’t care because, as far as he was concerned, certain people were too unroomed. He thought of the move from interiors to art as a way of shedding the emotional turmoil of him and his clients, but otherwise there was no difference except in the degree of concentration, like a bowl of vanilla ice cream as against a tablespoon of extract. Serious painters, he knew, would have been horror-struck by his daring to compare the two, and his reliance on taste and style would have called up to them visions of San Marino matrons who bought blue paintings for blue rooms. But again, Peter didn’t care because he knew what he wanted. And when he found he couldn’t have it—that he was cursed after all with a heart when he painted and hadn’t a thought in his head—he had no choice but to give it up.

But he wasn’t going over all of this while he drove to Bel-Air in the pickup. His mind went into neutral, as it always did in a car. A blip sounded here and there in his radar and sent up an image from the morning just past, but only because his paintings had so taken over the news of the day. In fact, what was there left to say? He hadn’t suffered his way out of painting. He’d only thrown up his hands. Rita and Nick had probably thought more about why he’d put away his paints than he had—and, too, they’d probably done the thinking in a car. They both had minds that raced when they were on the road, though Nick’s was more finely tuned to four speeds from years of practice. Rita was a novice at it, and she didn’t so much think as conceive of things whole, which then would hang in her mind in a dazzle, like the setting sun. Peter went blank. He leaned slightly forward over the wheel, and for once he didn’t look like Noel Coward. He’d never gotten used to doing it himself, as if the generations of carriage drivers in Russia had refined the skill of traveling roads right out of him. He made a better passenger. And he didn’t mind that other people did most of his thinking for him. He may not even have noticed.

He certainly wasn’t going to make the moves on art before he talked to Rita and Nick. Though the thing had already snowballed in such a way as to blur where it all got started, it couldn’t have begun anywhere else but at the party. It was clearly the work of his clients, flexing their connections. He thought he’d left the paintings lying about to show that he had a private world they couldn’t invade, but the plan apparently backfired. His decorated women wanted him happy, and his two weeks’ private convalescence had whipped them up to a frenzy. No matter what he’d been doing to pass the time in his confinement—baking cakes or papier-mâché—they would have been on the phone to people who owed them favors. Peter was the one they’d decided to take care of, as if by common consent. He didn’t know if other decorators got the same treatment, since decorators tended for professional reasons to barely be on speaking terms. Perhaps, Peter thought when he couldn’t stand it and felt like running away to be a gypsy, it had most to do with the fate of princes. The very rich had always made their money in shady deals—none more shadily, surely, than the princes in Russia—but the money in LA was still too immediate to have shaken off the dirt, or maybe it only seemed that way in the company of princes. In any case, they couldn’t bear it if they had to watch Peter measure the drapes, and giving him too much money calmed them down. It may have been, too, that they were trying to buy fate off when they coddled Peter. If the Russians hadn’t been able to pay their way out of the slaughter in 1917 with all their assets, then nobody was safe. With Peter, at least they were taking care of one of their own. They’d expect the same themselves when they went into exile.

So Peter could do it if he wanted to. The connections would handle the details of doing it right, and even Peter knew they were talking high finance when they started talking galleries in Beverly Hills and Amsterdam. He and Nick had seen a hundred overnight successes. He’d been one. All you had to do was decide to go with the flow and not once wonder if you were any good. And then you spent the next five years trying to get back some say in the matter. Having done it once, he had to think twice—well, Rita and Nick would—about doing it again. He wouldn’t say he didn’t need the money, in case it might upset the balance of luck, but he’d have to have one good reason besides. And he couldn’t imagine anything worth the favors he’d suddenly owe to whichever of the ladies had set him up. Unless the attendant increase in power turned out to be so great it would leave him sailing over everyone’s head. In that case, he could close up shop and be a prince full-time. Turn out a painting now and then. The fewer the better.

That’s not what you want, Nick and Rita told him when he got that way. Princes, they said, went mad with boredom. He wondered sometimes how they came by their classified information, but he had to believe them. After all, they were the only two people he could be sure of who’d gotten over taking care of him. They didn’t think so, maybe, but Peter knew it in his bones. They would have referred him to all that thinking they did on his behalf, how it came in time to be second nature. It was the very thing Rita hesitated over before she took the job. And Nick would have added the stores he was assigned because Peter refused, the lies he was always telling over the phone to guard Peter’s privacy, the fits of temper he waited out. It was all true. But Peter had done enough thinking to figure them out, too, so it wasn’t a one-way street anymore. He let them fret and give him advice because they needed to, and in the meantime he was playing his instincts, turning the world to his account. Rita and Nick wouldn’t have understood where he was going because thinking had nothing to do with it. It had less to do with putting it into words than their lives did. But they must have felt how he’d begun to fight being driven by work, and as soon as they were ready to, they’d see they weren’t responsible for Peter any longer. Though he might still seem to need all the help he could get, it had come to be an act, to put up a wall between him and the people who wanted a piece of him.

He parked the truck close up to the green MG Nick had given Rita. The card said it was from both of them, and that was fine with him. He didn’t go out of his way to ask questions either. Meanwhile, it was hard for Peter to get too bothered by the pressure of what went on outside, where the clients and the galleries made the rules, now that he and Nick were in phase again. The days they spent together after the snake were all over, of course, but then they knew it couldn’t go on indefinitely. They were back to seeing each other mostly late at night. Time itself had changed. Now it was rife with qualities, the clock replaced by a scale that measured only intensities. It wasn’t just making love, though they turned to that again as if they’d been released from a vow of chastity. The body was all the soul they might get. But even more, they realized that it was possible to come back to the full flood of knowing just who they were. That is, they both understood what they’d come to themselves because they could see so exactly how the other arrived. Peter knew, for instance, what Nick ended up with after he’d abandoned his six-weeks’ love, just as he also knew it was Nick doing the leaving. Then he watched Nick and Rita glance off one another, probably because they’d never met anyone who looked so much like a mirror image—though only Peter appeared to see the likeness. Afterward, he watched them ricochet away to a safe distance. And all the time he was studying Nick, he saw the clearest picture of himself, as if every move Nick made gave him one of his own. Some things didn’t fit, like the green MG, because by his calculations Nick had passed that stage with Rita well over a week ago. But it was still all right with Peter. He didn’t have to know everything. Didn’t want to.

Crook House made no sound when he let himself in, so whatever Rita’s surprise might be, it didn’t require a crowd and didn’t resemble a party. That in itself was a nice surprise. He took the elevator down and would have walked around to the kitchen to see Hey first, but he noticed something funny in the living room. Don’t surprise me in here, he thought. Rita knew it had been the main design of his convalescence, and so she knew it had to be frozen just the way it was for a while. Peter had to brood over it, moving everything an inch or two until he’d got it perfect. When he went up close to the opium beds, he could see it was only a few things dropped on the rug going off into the hall toward Rita’s room. As if somebody clumsy had had his hands full. And the thing that had first caught his eye was only an envelope propped in the cushions on one of the beds, addressed to him. He tore it open.

“Follow your heart,” Rita had written on a plain white card.

He didn’t waste a second on the irony. His eyes darted to the trail of things on the carpet, and then, because they were so strange and dissimilar, he narrowed his look and began at the beginning. First was a pile of coins behind the divan, as if somebody’s pocket had sprung a hole. Gold, he could tell right away as he went down on his hands and knees to look, and probably Roman, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t touch them, though the note didn’t tell him not to, but just in case she wanted things left the way they were. Besides, he’d already decided that when he was done, he’d bring Rita back and go through it again. He stood up and walked two paces, damned if he was going to crawl the whole way. This time it was a piece of jade worked as a belt buckle, carved with a couple of storks. Next, only a couple of feet further on, a pocket watch in a sterling case. Then a powder horn which, if you could believe the inscription, once belonged to Wyatt Earp. And at the turn into the hall, more artful than all the rest, a blue enamel cigarette case with a snake going zigzag across it in diamonds.

The House of Fabergé, Peter guessed right off. He stooped to it and without thinking broke his rule and picked it up. Whatever the crazy thing was that Rita was mixed up in, it had so far produced two pieces of Fabergé. Ever since she gave him the picture frame, he couldn’t get it out of his mind that something fishy was going on. He knew how little Fabergé turned up on the open market, and he’d kept the frame to himself, at the back of his desk in the shop, for fear that someone would ask too many questions. The cigarette case in his hand, he knew, had to cost five or six thousand dollars. The other things on the floor weren’t cheap, but this was something else. He slipped it into the pocket of his suede jacket. He couldn’t just leave it on the floor.

Now what was he supposed to do? He called back into the living room, “Rita?” As if she might be watching him through a chink in one of the Japanese screens. But there was no answer. She was probably still in the bathtub. He turned into the hall to go to her room, and because his eyes weren’t yet accustomed to the dark, he didn’t see what was there and banged his knee against something that swiveled around and batted him hard on the hip. He jumped, his hand went out and threw up the light switch, and in the instant before he saw the trail continue all the way to Rita’s room, he thought, “But this is too much.” He meant the joke was over. He knew too well what everything cost, and what’s more, it was Rita who had taught him. Here was a telescope that probably belonged to Galileo, it looked so venerable. All the fittings in brass, cherry inlaid with ivory. And Peter knew there wasn’t an antique store in LA that could handle it without his having seen it. Things like this didn’t get priced. They were already all in museums. For good measure, Rita had draped and tied a string of pearls around the lens like a constellation, and he knew she was gilding the lily willfully, as if to say there was no end to this.

The next thing was big. It fell along the hall seven or eight feet, and it had the shape and heft of a railroad tie. A totem pole, in point of fact. And now Peter guessed Rita was in it so deep, she couldn’t even be doing it solo anymore. She could never have lifted this herself. She had to have an accomplice. And what if it was Nick? He stopped. He didn’t have time, but he had to look at this totem, it was just too beautiful. He peered closely at the worn, cracked wood where a bear stood on top of an elk, and a wolf on a bear, and then a man. No, he thought as he hurried himself along, it wasn’t Nick’s style to turn it into a treasure hunt. Nick could never be playful with things that came so close to art. He could make a game of giving away a green MG or anything else you could buy off the floor. But something that carried an air of age and values, one-of-a-kind, always left him stone-cold sober. The accomplice had to be someone as unafraid of the beautiful as Rita, who could pick things up and put them down, who had to have a feel of everything.

Further on, just within reach of Rita’s door, was another block of wood, sculpted this time in India. A plump figure in a full lotus, with a look on his face that made him seem like the god of compassion. Exquisite, and any other time Peter would have gazed at it long enough to lay a claim, but a corner of his eye had caught the last thing hanging on the door. A Cézanne watercolor of rocks and a tree, hardly finished, the tree hardly begun, and yet it made Peter want to give up everything and go live there, as if he would never need to move from just that random space of a few feet of forest. Peter’s continuous process of picking the best wherever he was took a deep breath. Everything else, all the way back to the coins on the living room floor, was nothing compared with this. The snake-lidded cigarette case was marvelous and frivolous and ritzy, but a real Cézanne showed it up as a curious toy. Peter had two thoughts at once—that value was a very subjective thing, particularly in the presence of what was priceless, and that Rita had gone too far for even him and Nick to get her out of it.

Though he gaped at the watercolor, he must have knocked right away, as if he didn’t dare spend too long in a rapture when there was so much to get to the bottom of. But as he was dazed, he didn’t remember the knocking. All he knew was that he was an inch from the painting one moment, and the next thing he knew, the door was wide open and Rita was grinning as if he’d come to pay a social call. He was hit just then by a crippling sadness. It all seemed to mean he didn’t know her at all, and he couldn’t afford to lose either of the members of his team. At the same time, he must have panicked at the thought that if he lost Rita now, what little he had of the past went with her. Take care, he told himself. They stood in silence, staring at each other across the threshold. Rita’s grin softened when she saw that he was in turmoil, and as the tenderness welled up in her eyes, Peter felt the color coming back to him, too. In a minute, they looked exactly the same, tuned to each other again and ready to sing a duet. Partly, it was a brave front, but Peter realized it wasn’t in him to react to anything Rita did with anything like moral criticism. If she’d had to kill to get this stuff, she must have had a good reason. All Peter cared about was that she not get hurt. He’d kill, too, if he had to, to keep her safe.

“You’re very clever, I see,” she said, pulling him into the room and locking the door behind them. Against whom, he wondered, but let it go. “It would take some men months to follow those clues to the end.”

“Would it?” he asked lamely. The sorrow gripped him again like a cramp. He’d like it better if they got right down to it. He didn’t think they’d be laughing once they’d started.

“Oh, at least,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t go any further than the gold coins. A bird in the hand, you know. Then, if they got as far as the telescope, they’d have to diddle around with that.” She talked right at him for a bit, but she couldn’t seem to stand in one place. She turned to the windows and, starting at one end, went down the row, shutting and locking. “Who ever gets to the good stuff, Pete? And how do they even know when they’re there? What percent of the world even knows who Cézanne is?”

“Rita, where did you get all this?”

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” she said, coming back from the end of the windows and holding out her hand. “Come on.”

“Wait,” he said, his hands stiff at his sides. “None of it’s yours, right?”

“I’m trying to show you, Pete.” She made it sound as if he was getting in the way of a good explanation. But she saw at last how far off the track he was, and she acted quickly to ease his mind. He wasn’t having any fun. “Listen,” she said, “we aren’t in any trouble. A lot of this is against the law, but all the criminals have run away. I swear it, Pete, if the cops do anything to us, it’ll be to give us medals. Do you trust me?”

“All right.” He gave her his hand and let himself be led across the room to the closet. He knew enough now to guess the rest, and it showed what he could do with his mind instead of mere thinking. It had to be Rusty Varda, he suddenly decided, and the stuff must come from a secret cache. Of course. It was as if, in some unfocused corner of his mind, he’d always known. There was always something more to Crook House. He understood houses so well that his antennae had at some point picked up the extra space, but he hadn’t got around to it consciously yet. Eventually he would have groped his way here, though still it took a Rita to crack the lock. Peter would have had to break through the mirrored door with a hatchet. Now, as Rita ushered him into the closet, he realized that he’d never been satisfied with the Varda story. All that waiting around in Crook House, forty years of it, had to have a purpose beyond forgetting to give away twelve million. Peter used to ask Hey: What did Rusty Varda do? Hey didn’t know. Said he didn’t know. Peter abandoned it in the end, but something never ceased to nag at him. Now it came back at full volume when Rita closed the door. Strangely, he felt as if he’d been waiting all his life for this.

“Ready?” she asked, holding a finger up like a magic wand.

“Does Nick know?”

“Yes.”

“Who else?”

“Nobody else.”

“Go ahead.”

She was standing with her back to the door. She brought her finger down to her side and touched it against the button in the doorknob. Click. As the mirror swung open, Peter became aware of a smell that he knew and couldn’t name. In a way it was the smell of money, but later he would place it more precisely. A certain kind of Brooklyn Heights apartment, full of the goods of Europe and smuggled haphazardly out of Russia. Louis XVI painted furniture, polished silver, and old masters—the smell of all the princely quarters of Saint Petersburg.

She lit the candles, and they wandered in like Hansel and Gretel at the edge of the Black Forest. For the longest time they said nothing at all. She didn’t, of course, have to identify anything to Peter, who supplied a running commentary in his own head, mentally fixing a label and a price on every piece. Rita had by this time sent off twenty or twenty-five packages, but she’d hardly made an appreciable dent. Lots of it was very big. It was one thing to drag a totem pole out to the hallway, quite another to put it through a mail slot. Rita knew she had to expand her operation, which was the main reason she’d decided to let Peter in on it.

But practical matters aside, being there with Peter was like being there the first time again. Rusty Varda couldn’t have asked for a better audience. They were kids in a toy shop, kids in an attic, but because they knew the magnitude of the power they stood at the center of, they could hardly get more grown-up either. They were like a king looking out from a mountain at miles and miles of his land. Some of it was sheer possession, of course:All the world they can imagine is theirs, look at the proof, or perhaps there isn’t a meaningful line anymore between them and the world. But mostly, in their case as with a kingdom, it had to do with being overwhelmed by a glut of beauty. Nick had told them both that, when he walked up north through a redwood grove, he found himself in the presence of superior beings. For Peter and Rita, it was as if all the artists who did these things were in the room with them, from Rembrandt standing like a tragic philosopher all the way down to the Chinese weaver embroidering, stitch by stitch, the cloth of gold draped on the stone table. It was how Rusty Varda must have seen it, as a meeting ground for artful spirits.

“Where’s it all from?” Peter asked quietly, moving off by himself from one thing to another while Rita followed behind, content to go his way and watch it all discovered.

“Everywhere,” she said. “Museums, colleges, libraries. A lot of it belonged to the anonymous rich. It’s all in a book he kept.”

“Where?”

“Keep going. That’s my office up there.”

She sat him down on the sofa, brought over the book, and put on his head the miner’s lamp she’d found in the desk’s file drawer. She faced him in the wizard’s chair. He was turning to the book, she knew, to take a break, so his mind could adjust to the size of the treasure ground. He wanted to anchor himself in details. And with his background, even the diary was gripping, a Gone with the Wind reduced to its lists of damages. It could have been an accounting of the Kirkov losses in ’17. Rita watched him to be sure she’d been right to tell him. Oh yes, she thought, no problem. Of course, she still had to convince him to agree to keep returning what was returnable. Nothing prevented him from calling a halt to the mail-order business. He could hoard the room from now on as the closest he was ever going to get to the inheritance modern politics stole from him. But Rita didn’t think he would. What made the secret room serene was the feeling of being touched by a fabulous story. No matter what else was closing in outside on their actual lives, Rusty Varda’s dream sat them down and promised that life wasn’t boring at all to those who went after something. Peter was the acid test, since he would appreciate everything here so much, but Rita believed all along that the experience of the place didn’t make a person feel possessive. She would let Peter see that they had enough work to do in here to keep them busy for weeks. And the work was enough. It was power over things without the responsibility of owning them.

“There’s a Rembrandt?” Peter asked, looking over at her a moment so that the miner’s light shone in her eyes.

“You went right by it,” she said, as if that in itself was something of an event. “But I put a sheet over it so I could save it for last. You won’t believe it.”

He took off the helmet and laid it in his lap as he leaned his head back in the pillows. He settled down to being as happy as she was, since it was turning out to be dinner at ‘21’ all over again—actually much much more, because their standards had gotten higher. They’d done enough ‘21’ and the like in the past few years to know the menu inside out. So they prepared to bask in the glow of this place with a vengeance, like a week flat on the beach in Hawaii. And just as Rita had predicted, the afternoon in the real world was canceled. They were going to get light in the head in the next few hours. They wouldn’t be any good at other people’s houses, not today, even if they could have torn themselves away. They had something amazing they had to work out.

“Do you think they used to come here and have love scenes?”

“Who?” Rita asked abruptly. She hadn’t gotten as far as Rusty Varda and Frances Dean.

“Rusty Varda and Frances Dean,” he said, reading her mind down to the least inflection. “You don’t go as far as this just to give yourself a little privacy. You have to have someone to do it for.” His head lolled in the goose down, and he spoke up at the rough-beamed ceiling. Rita saw a split she wasn’t ready for. It sounded as if they were going to be in passionate accord about the treasure and hardly understand what each other meant by Rusty Varda and Frances Dean. “Like some of my clients,” he said. “When they do over their houses, and they feel they’re doing it for me, they do a fabulous job.”

“I don’t know if they were ever actually here inside,” Rita said. Which was fussy of her, since she’d fantasized any number of times about Varda showing off the masterworks to his movie star by the light of a single candle. To Peter, she seemed to be trying to say it was only a storeroom in here. But wait, she said to herself, you don’t have to protect them anymore. The spirits of Varda and Frances Dean were on their own. In fact, Rita remembered just in time, she needed to hear opinions totally different from her own, if only to begin to draw her out of the story. If Peter thought it was folly and she thought it a great romance, it didn’t mean either was wrong. But even if it meant they were both right, she had to admit it was a romance made up entirely of yearnings for what might have been. All doom and no all-night kisses. She knew she might have to make do with the notion that, though it was more folly than not, at least it was vast.

“Tell me about them, will you?” Peter said. He must have sensed he was intruding on something of Rita’s that was very far advanced, and that she had the prior claim. Just as he didn’t have to ask how she’d stumbled on the room or gotten in—it simply had to do with being Rita—he didn’t wonder how accurate her information was. If it wasn’t the truth, so what. It was better than the actual facts because it came so close to who the people thought they were.

“I probably don’t know anything you don’t know,” she said, conveniently letting a little desert murder slip her mind. “But as far as I can guess, she was scared of life, and he was scared of death. So he had to think up something as ingenious as junk was for her. And this is it.” She spread her arms helplessly, trying to take in the two thousand years of art as well as the hillside room. But in the gesture there was something of a shrug, too, as if to finish up by saying nothing cheated death, even if it took the fear away.

Then she passed across to him the note that Varda left for Frances Dean’s ghost. And then they began to look at the things one by one. And once they were doing that, it was easy for Rita to start detailing the method of her retrieval project. Peter understood everything right away. They went very fast. They would have gone on all day without a break, except that the air usually got tight after an hour or two. So Rita decided they’d work until one-thirty, and then they’d go out into the house for lunch, where she knew they’d be savoring higher matters than food. If they had an image of the whole of Crook House in their minds just then, it must have seemed open and bright and very alive. In the secret room, they were in the heart of something larger, and the peopled house about them was wonderfully calm and humane precisely because it had a secret heart. Neither of them could have imagined violence or chaos possible, now that they were in possession of such a completely real inner world. For a little while, they were wholly without the need of dreams.

Which is why some people get bitten by snakes when they least expect it.

Hey knew what was going on in there. He was sitting in the kitchen, his stool up close to the parrot’s cage, and when he heard Peter call to Rita in the living room, he knew the two of them would be locked in her room within a few minutes, and then he could have the house to himself again for a while. Rita had told him only to stay in the kitchen till quarter after twelve, so he knew she must have it timed down to the minute. She didn’t mind him watching her set up the treasure trail, and she even asked him to help her drag the Eskimo piece out of her room, though of course she didn’t ask till it was already out of the closet. She wouldn’t have let him see that. And Hey smiled mildly, thinking of her precautions. Why hadn’t she guessed? He’d been in and out of there a thousand times.

He wondered now and again why he’d never told her, since he’d told her everything else he knew. It was as if, somehow, he had to keep himself out of it entirely to give Rita more space in which to maneuver. The moment he laid eyes on her at the airport, Hey was convinced he’d found the right person to let into Rusty Varda’s room. It was destiny, pure and simple. As Holy Brother had promised, he was coming into a time of great release, and Hey could tell on the spot that Rita was part of the ticket. He gave her what clues he could and was delighted to find her skimming along on the same wavelength, pursuing her own investigation before she was in the house a week. Curiously, he refrained from telling Holy Brother what a burden she lifted from his shoulders on the Monday night she figured out the trick to getting inside. But then in one way it made sense, because he’d never gotten around to mentioning Varda’s room to Holy Brother in the first place. He said to himself it was all for the dead man’s sake. Hey protected Varda’s right to a world undelivered by holiness, a world that scorned the universe and made its own nest. But it was also true that he wanted to cover his bets. He held Holy Brother at arm’s length in just this one thing, partly to have a secret shelter of his own from everything, if it ever came to that, and partly as a test of Holy Brother’s power to see through walls. A test Holy Brother had so far bagged.

So Hey was not as duped as the current residents of Crook House seemed to think. The really serious business between Hey and Holy Brother was limited more than anyone knew to Linda. It was the one direction of energy in his life that scared Hey, and nobody else had an explanation that comforted him so much as the notion of visits from another life. He had to sit through a lot of smoke and long white robes that faintly offended his sense of theater—he had, after all, studied under Balanchine. The philosophy of Holy Brother was brimful of fateful accidents and wild reversals, and Hey noticed that all the previous lives Brother uncovered in his congregation went on in glamorous ancient times, with Hollywood sets and costumes. No one had ever been just a farmer or a clerk. They were priests of Ra or favorites of the courts of the Louis, or they were extreme and particular people like the disciple Andrew or Marco Polo. But Hey was impressed by the psychological profile Holy Brother drew of two selves dancing in a single soul. He knew now that the presence of Linda had a beginning and an end, and he spent a lot of time just waiting for it to be over and taking it as it came. And when it was over, he planned to drop back to being a Christmas-and-Easter parishioner of Holy Brother. He’d pay his dues, of course, as insurance against another onset out of the past, but otherwise he’d had enough of holy bullshit.

And Nick was wrong when he said once that Hey would rather talk to the parrot than to other people. Wrong because Hey and the parrot didn’t talk. Hey wasn’t positive what the parrot did, but for his part he found it relaxed him just to watch the bird preen and blink and sidle back and forth on his perch. It wasn’t that he watched for hours at a time, either, as if it were a fix for a glassy-eyed brand of meditation. He would amble over to the cage while he waited for water to boil, or he’d stop on his way out with the trash. A minute here and there, and it put him in touch with a world as full of form and endless movement as the ballet. The parrot suffered nothing. He wore his beauty in the open and had his million shivers and twitches to execute, and he never tired and never like Hey got so old he couldn’t do it without an agony in his joints.

But today Hey sat at the cage a little longer. He was worried and a little wounded about Rita telling Peter. In his mind, he’d turned it all over to her, so he supposed he ought to trust her with all the decisions. He hadn’t thought to question, for instance, where Rita was taking the loot, package by package, whenever she left the house. He could tell she knew art, and he was sure it would all get put on the proper pedestal. He would have had to admit that Peter knew art, too, but Peter was spoiled and never serious, and he certainly didn’t care a jot for Rusty Varda and the old days. Unlike Nick and Rita, who seemed to feel pangs that something rare had passed for good. Hey would have told Nick months ago, long before Rita, if he could have been sure Nick would keep it to himself. Yet he knew it wouldn’t be fair to demand such a vow of silence, since Nick and Peter were the deepest sort of lovers, who passed on to each other everything, no matter how trivial, to get as close as they could to being one. Or that, at least, is how it looked to Hey. And, in fact, Peter’s loving Nick so well was in Hey’s view what redeemed him, though not enough to make him worth entrusting with the hidden room in the hill. Peter might give it all out to his overdressed, cotton-headed clients. Even Nick might decide to keep it, if only to wrap it up for Peter. It had to go back to the people at large, and Hey was convinced that Rita alone would see it that way.

There was a rustling in the bushes below the kitchen garden, but the parrot got more upset about it than Hey. He stretched out his wings and said “Machu Picchu” very loud. All it was, Hey knew, was a loose dog. One evening at dusk a deer had emerged from down the hill while Hey was cooking, and they had spent a startled moment staring eye to eye before the deer leaped up the hill and away behind the house. People said there were still coyotes in the hills, and a Bel-Air woman, a famous drunk, had once reported to the police a pack of raccoons, a hundred or more, silently crossing her lawn. But that was all at night. At this time of day, it was just a dog. And then the crackling of branches stopped, as if the animal was sniffing out a smell at his feet. Hey forgot about it till he heard the rustle start up again.

One thing didn’t seem to make any more sense with Hey than Rita: How could you keep the flame alive for Rusty Varda if you were at the same time taking apart the room where he’d planned to make his last stand, to keep his own fires going beyond the grave? Hey didn’t find the two goals incompatible, and Rita would have agreed. They applauded Rusty Varda’s extravagant idea, and they both felt their hearts fill to bursting when they lit a candle to go explore it. Rita learned to dream of it in Gothic novels, where brave women came upon ghosts. Hey learned it dancing in the corps de ballet, in a ring around a princess. But they both believed, though they loved the daring of the plan, that it was time to recycle the art and get it back in currency, so as to tempt more visionaries to shoot the moon. Rita and Hey were very democratic. It was like believing that every man can be President. Now let someone try to break Varda’s record, Hey would have liked to announce when they gave the public back its paintings and such. He put no more credence than Rita in the notion that Varda and Frances Dean would actually meet when they were dust and ashes. It was a hero’s project, the secret room, and it made his life awesome. But now it was over.

This time the noise in the bushes came up like crashing, as if whatever it was couldn’t get any purchase on the steep part of the hill below. Hey got up from his stool, very annoyed, and went across the shady kitchen terrace to the dense bushes that fenced it in. Why didn’t the dog go find a nice garbage pail at the next house down? If he had to call the Bel-Air Patrol to come and catch it, they’d track dirt all through the house getting it out. “Go home!” Hey shouted. He bent down and picked up a handful of gravel and threw it into the foliage. It made a moment’s noise like a hard rain, and the rustling stopped. He scooped up more gravel and did it again. And again. He figured he must have scared the animal silly, and it wouldn’t move a muscle till he went away, so he turned around and started toward the kitchen door. It was one of those ordinary moments just before a terrible accident which a man would do anything to retrieve in all its ordinariness. Because suddenly the bushes broke open with a smash like a car going through. He didn’t even have time to turn to face it. He saw the parrot go crazy in the cage and bang against the bars, and then the butt of the gun came down, square on the back of his head.

He was out only five minutes, but time did not go easy on him. He felt as if he’d fled into yet another life when he opened his eyes to the scald of the pain. The gradual, gradual calm that had finally come over him during the years since Varda’s death seemed to have vanished entirely. And when the first thing he saw through the fog was Sam’s face looming grimly over him, he was seized with the certainty that things would never be good again. And that was before he remembered who it was. He tried to talk to plead for time, for anything to stop the throbbing, but he choked on his own horror and gasped and gasped. And when, a moment later, he really saw Sam as Sam, he fell through a time warp. He thought it must be the very day Varda died, but with a slight change in the script—now Sam was killing him, too, on the way out. But he wasn’t going to be permitted the luxury of amnesia. Sam pulled him to his feet and swung him over so that he sat down heavily on the stool.

“Come on, come on,” Sam said impatiently. “You’re not dead yet.”

Hey could hear the parrot flying against the sides of the cage, making an awful racket. Sam held his arm so tightly it was going numb, but Hey turned around on the stool and forced him to let go as he brought his own hands up to the cage. He held them against the bars, palms open, and felt the wings rush against them and then stop. Hey didn’t take his hands away until the parrot made his way back to the perch and settled his wings and shook the disheveled feathers on his head and neck into place again. Then he couldn’t put it off any longer. It was here and now and not ten years ago at all, and even worse, it wasn’t just a terrible dream. He had to go forward and live through this at a time when he was much better at remembering and imagining. He turned full-face to Sam and looked out coldly, only now opening his eyes wide and not at all flinching when the light sharpened the pain in his head. He determined not to be afraid, no matter what. It all fell to him because it was all his fault.

“Now we’re going to play a little game,” Sam said, gripping his arm again and pulling him across the kitchen. The dizziness was bad. Hey hung his head loose and let Sam propel him, and he noticed the butt of the gun protruding out of the waistband of Sam’s jeans, right above the belt buckle. The barrel of the gun pointed insolently into the crotch, like a symbol that had gone too far. He’d come a long way in ten years, Hey thought bitterly. A simple killing with his bare hands must have begun to seem amateur. So by the time they’d gone through the living room to the opium bed, Hey knew he couldn’t save them all by breaking loose and running away on a dancer’s legs. His only advantage was that he knew Crook House better than Sam. That was the one way out, and right away he started to wait for it.

“What does it mean?” Sam asked him, nodding at the trail leading out of the room.

“It’s just some presents they’re giving each other,” he said. Clever Rita, he thought, to try to loosen Peter up for the big transition into the secret room, to make it a game so he wouldn’t get greedy. Even Sam seemed to know it was child’s play. “Take it all and go,” Hey said evenly. “Please. Tie me up. None of them will be home to find me till after six.”

“Oh, really? You’re the only one here today, is that it?” He kicked the pile of coins and they landed silently all over the rug. Hey couldn’t seem to stop his getting mad. Sam tripped him and pushed him down roughly on his hands and knees. “Follow it, baby,” Sam said. “See where it goes.” And Hey just went ahead and did it. The more he held back, the more he’d get hit. He crawled over the buckle and the watch and Wyatt Earp’s horn, and he paused only when he got to the hallway, to wait and hope that Sam had had enough.

“Can’t you figure it out?” Sam asked. “Let me show you.” And he came around behind Hey and kicked the telescope hard. It flew apart, the pieces landing heavily on the floor, the string of pearls sailing ten feet to burst against the far wall. The pearls rained down like hail. “Can’t you see where this is all going?” Sam demanded, his voice getting more and more pitiless. He couldn’t do a thing to the totem pole, but he picked up the Indian figure and smashed it down and cracked it. Now he was right outside Rita’s door. The length of the hallway separated the two of them, and Hey sat back on his haunches and tried to figure how much time he had if he leapt up now and ran. Not enough, of course, and besides, he couldn’t leave Peter and Rita now that the nightmare had started to net them in, too.

“What do you want to bet me this is Rita’s room?” Sam said, as if it was all too easy. “And you know what I noticed while you were taking your nap out back? This door’s locked from the inside.”

He paused to let it sink in:There was no hope. Did I want to bring this down on all of us? Hey wondered. But being hurt had made him too hard on himself. Until now, he’d have said he was the only one in danger. The reason he blamed himself was that he knew it was Sam a month ago, when he glanced up from the vacuum cleaner and nearly screamed in fear. He tried to tell himself it wasn’t who he thought, and then that night, when Peter was missing, he decided Sam had probably taken him for ransom. Still, he waited to say so till he was sure, trying to wish it away. And then, when it wasn’t true and turned out to be only a snakebite, he was twice as relieved as the others. He decided he must have made a mistake when he’d recognized Sam, and he’d forced it out of his mind from then on. There was too much else going on, anyway, what with Linda and Rita and waiting hand and foot on the convalescent painter in the upstairs bedroom. Hey knew the nature of fate too well. It didn’t pile on the really heart-stopping things, like the return of Sam, until one got the feeling one was coasting along on the flats with a view that went all the way to the horizon. Fate had a sense of occasion.

Sam lifted the Cézanne from the picture hook Rita had lightly tapped into the door. He held it in one hand and pounded with his other fist three or four times like a punching bag. Then he stopped and listened, and when there was nothing, he turned to Hey and grinned. He was having a wonderful time. “She doesn’t seem to understand how bad it is, does she? Why doesn’t she answer the door? Do you think she’s mad at us?”

“She took a sleeping pill,” Hey said, persisting in lie after lie, because all he needed was for one to take hold. “The doctor says she has to rest.”

“Get over here,” Sam ordered, and Hey stood up and came to him meekly, waiting for his move. “We’ll both knock. I can make enough noise to get through a Seconal.” He dropped the Cézanne on the floor, where it landed face up and the glass cracked. Then the two of them banged and hammered the door, four fists, and Sam said, “Louder. Call her.” Hey sang out, “Rita! Rita!” in the saddest voice imaginable. If she heard him, she could never have jumped to the conclusion that it was a fire or a landslide. It had to be something to sorrow over. Hey was as furious as Sam. He beat at the door and cried out, and it felt just fine for a while, to bring it all up from his knotted stomach and his shorted nerves like an Indian crouched at a war drum. But then he was seized with exhaustion. He slumped against the door frame, and Sam stopped too, to goad him on. He was breathing deeply. He’d worked himself into a sweat, and he stood over Hey like a player in the middle of a winning game. Hey couldn’t breathe at all. He shrank back, terrified Sam would punish him into going on. And then they heard Peter’s voice.

“Hey? What’s wrong?” He was right on the other side of the door. “Are you still there? Rita, hurry!” Hey knew, as he met Sam’s eyes, that Rita was going down the row of windows, undoing the locks. Sam put out one hand against Hey’s chest and pinned him there, the pressure so intense Hey couldn’t have shouted again, even if it would have helped. Sam’s face was wild with triumph, and Hey tried to tell himself it was a good sign. We can’t get him mad, he thought. And then, as he heard the lock release on the door, just as they flung it open, he looked away from Sam down at the floor, as if he was ashamed. The heel of Sam’s boot was on the water-color. Hey couldn’t see the damages clearly, because everything started to happen, but it registered in his mind that it was ruined.

“He said you were asleep,” Sam called to Rita over Peter’s shoulder as she hurried toward them along the windows. He ignored Peter as if he weren’t there. “Maybe you were in bed but wide awake, huh?”

“What do you want?” she asked him roughly, still a little blinded by the light through the windows. “If you’re here to see Nick, you wait in his room. The rest of us have some rights in this house.”

“It’s not Nick, Rita,” Peter said quietly. “That’s all over.” He and Rita had never revealed to each other that they’d seen Sam, and they both saw now how loyal they’d been to Nick. Rita still didn’t understand how bad it was. She assumed Nick and Sam were still fighting their way out of a sloppy affair, and she thought Sam had gone over to bullying Hey and Peter and her in order to make trouble for Nick. As if any of them would abandon the others for anything now. The angrier she got, Rita figured, the more she was coming to Nick’s rescue. But when she looked at Peter and Hey for support, ready to drive him out of the house bodily if she had to, both of them were staring at the ground. She looked down. She nearly let out a wail of pain, seeing the litter of all her beautiful things.

“He’s right,” Sam said to Rita. “Nick has nothing to do with this.” He still held Hey by the front of his shirt, and he still didn’t look at Peter. “You have something that belongs to me. Go get it.”

“They don’t know anything about it,” Hey said fiercely. “Lock them up somewhere, and I’ll take you in. I’m the only one who can do it.”

Instead of answering, Sam pulled him up close, grinned again an inch from his face, and pushed him through the door into Rita’s room, scattering the others out of the way. He closed the door and stood there, taking the measure of the room while the three of them grouped at the foot of the bed. Rita couldn’t believe it. It must have been Nick who told Sam, but who told Hey? Did Hey know all along? The walls were breaking down everywhere, and Rita’s first reaction wasn’t fear for the Rembrandt or even for the trusty little band of eccentrics in Crook House. The fears would start attacking in a minute, but just now she couldn’t bear it that she’d lost control of the project. She would have let in everyone in the end. But not yet. Now, she thought, she would no doubt begin to stare into mirrors again, instead of walking through them.

“Tell them who I am,” Sam said, but looking at no one in particular, as if he was asking the house itself. All three of his present victims would have had a different answer, but Hey was first. His was the worst news, and he spit it out like an accusation.

“This is the punk who killed Varda,” he said. And Rita and Peter looked at each other questioningly, wondering what he meant. Sam had only one connection to them, and that was Nick. Hey was rattled, they thought. He was mixing it up with another life.

But Sam seemed to get the idea, and his face stretched tight as he spoke. “How did I do that?” he asked evenly, quite as if he couldn’t recall.

“You choked him in his own bed.”

“Is that right?” There was no defining the comic quality in his voice, but as things got less and less funny, he seemed to bristle with little laughs. “Now, as I remember it, he was sucking me off at the time.” And he seemed to plead for reason from Peter and Rita, who flanked Hey like henchmen. “He thinks I don’t understand the difference between killing and sex. And I always know sex when I see it. I’ve never yet mistaken it for anything else.” He paused as if he might go on talking for hours, but then thought better of it. Still giddy, he took the gun from his pants at last. Then he waved them all across the room and into the closet. He didn’t seem to know exactly what he was looking for, but he’d apparently decided it wasn’t out here.

Somehow, Rita thought, there wasn’t a shred of suspense left in the act of opening up. For a brief moment, the four of them stood in the closet like the crew on a rocket ship in a comic strip, ready to man their stations, all systems go. But Rita closed the door and pressed the button without any flair, like someone ringing for an elevator high up in an office building. And when the door went open, the three of them watched Sam get startled, three against one. It diluted the quickened energy of having someone new to show it to, and, anyway, with Sam they were inwardly vowing to play it down. Peter and Rita and Hey had imagined the secret room so differently one from another that they were bound to be fighting for separate corners of it, covering separate gates to its deepest secrets. In that, too, it was three on one.

Rita lit the candles and handed one to Peter. She’d been such a stickler for authenticity that she’d never used any more light than Varda used himself. She’d started out the first week with what probably were the stubs of the candles Varda had taken in with him on his last inspection. Since then, she’d gone through a dozen more. Sam, she thought, would have to find the miner’s lamp on his own, just as she did. She and Peter entered first and stood like acolytes while Hey and then Sam followed them in. Sam made no protest when Hey sat down on a limestone capital from Crete. He took Peter’s candle away from him and looked around guardedly, candle in one hand, gun in the other, trying not to show what he felt. He was annoyed at being overwhelmed by the clicking open of the mirror. He had the sense he’d let them see that he was weak. He was worried for their sake, because he wasn’t weak at all and didn’t want them thinking they could grab the upper hand. They’d get hurt.

The blank look on his face looked awfully shy to Rita, and it gave her a first inkling that he didn’t have a clue what the room was about. Already he looked as if he’d been tricked. It wasn’t that he’d never seen rare and costly things before and thus felt clumsy, a beggar shuffling his feet in a mansion. He’d had his dose of baronial taste all the while he was growing up, and in fact he was probably the only one of the four who’d had a Cézanne in the library face to face with a gilt and ormolu mantel clock from Fontainebleau. But that in a way was the problem. Because he used to live like this—not so splendidly, of. course, except it all seemed the same to him—Rusty Varda’s secret room looked like the attic of a swank town house. He was silent and tense as he held the candle up and squinted into the warehouse gloom. This couldn’t be the right place.

“Where is it?” he asked, turning to the light of Rita’s candle.

“Where is what?”

“The money,” he said sharply. “Stop playing it like a game, Rita. I already won it ten years ago.”

Rita frowned. “But there isn’t any money here,” she said. “I don’t understand what Varda told you.” She stepped forward, leaving Peter standing next to Hey. She came up close to Sam, so that they stood candle to candle. His calling her Rita helped. He isn’t so bad, she thought, as we want him to be. “These are his things,” she said, “and some of them are worth a fortune, but not to us. You couldn’t sell them, because they’re hot. And if you took away something to hold for ransom, who would you get it from? We don’t have that kind of money.”

She spoke so gently she might have been about to ask for a donation. She saw what Peter and Hey didn’t, that Sam really had imagined a vault knee-deep in silver dollars. Rita had waited forever for a room like this, and so had Sam, and Rita got just the one she wanted, and Sam didn’t. It made her feel generous and wise. She felt like a runner safely across the finish line, arms wide to comfort the losers. What else could she do? Somebody had to come in second.

“He used to tell me about it,” Sam said, still as if something was funny. “Of all the boys he ever had, I was the only one he told. He said so. He used to say he had the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow all locked up in his house.”

Rita felt a shiver of something electric passing close to her heart. She suddenly knew she had to get Sam’s gangster act behind them. She realized for the first time she had someone here who’d actually heard Varda himself on the subject. Heard it in bed to boot. So Rita worked to alter the tone in the secret room, to have it seem like a normal day so Sam would talk. Because it was the closest Rita would ever come to what it was like when Varda sweet-talked the moon and stars to Frances Dean. She didn’t know where to begin, the gun and the break-in having sent them off on the wrong foot. If she could have had it her way, she’d have sent Hey and Peter out to the kitchen to eat the avocados stuffed with steak tartare. Then she would have sat Sam down in her office to cross-examine him. But nicely, and not so he’d feel he was being grilled by a caseworker. It was amazing how much she’d figured out of his story already. She didn’t have a clear picture of the relationships with Varda and Nick, and she wasn’t much struck by the cold-blooded connection between the two liaisons. Mostly, he’d arrested her with the hint of a ten-year wait. And Rita wrote the book on waiting.

“How did he sound? Happy?” she asked, as blithely as if they were holding cocktails instead of candles, and nobody had a gun.

“No, it wasn’t so much that,” Sam said, but fishing for it, trying to get it right. “He sounded safe. Like he was so high up, no one could reach him.” And when he saw her nod as if it fit like a glove, he found he felt safer himself. Sam was more cautious than Rita, from years of no one to trust, and he wasn’t ready to let the mood go nice just because she wanted it to. He knew the balance of power was with him right now. And he knew she wanted it back. At the same time, though, he could tell she had all the answers to this place. She was the one who could help him redirect his plan, which he had to do in the next few minutes or else. He didn’t waste time on having been wrong for the whole ten years. If the getaway car isn’t there, then you run. If the clerk wakes up, then you hit him again. Crime didn’t pay unless you had an alternate route set up at every dead end.

“Did he say it was a room set aside by itself?”

“I thought it must be a walk-in vault,” Sam said, “like a bank.” They paused a bit after every exchange, as if to study their positions. He had to admit it would do him good to talk it out about Varda. Though Sam had gotten in at gunpoint, the talking didn’t seem odd because Rita didn’t. He would have to make a private arrangement with Nick after all, he was thinking, maybe work out some regular payments. He had to exert some control in this house. He’d never really need money out of it, any more than Rita did, or, in any case, not to buy things. The Varda treasure was never meant to let him retire from hustling and settle down in a house in the hills with a view of the downtown smog. Security didn’t interest him. He only wanted to walk in in the middle of a very big deal, stay long enough to put his mark on it, and split. If it had been silver dollars or stacks of cash, the way it was supposed to be, he might have thrown it all out like confetti from the open door of a helicopter. Or bought up something crazy, a half dozen Cadillacs maybe, and sent them one by one over the bluffs at Santa Monica. He couldn’t figure out what was going on in here instead, but he had the suspicion that Rita was feeling around for a deal of her own, a separate peace, or else why didn’t she just shut up and let him get nowhere. It might be they could work something out, he thought, something a little more creative than armed robbery. The break-in turned him on, the pushing Hey around and talking surly, but he was just as amenable here as he was in bed to trying something new. Whatever worked.

“Why don’t you make me an offer?” he said, breezy and open, and for once the humor didn’t seem misplaced. They had to fashion a compromise, and lightly was the safest way.

“This is what you ought to do,” Rita said, as ready to deal as she would ever be. “Take something out of here, a little painting or something, and that establishes your credentials. It’s like having a share of stock in Varda’s company. Then you have to work it out with Nick. Like I say, we don’t have the big bucks to pay out for ransom, but there are rewards for a lot of these things. The rest we have to fence somehow, because there isn’t any owner to return them to. See what I mean? We’re going to have money coming in. What you do is ask for a cut of it.”

For a moment, then, they were gliding along like Bonnie and Clyde. Had Rita somehow forgotten the torn and stepped-on watercolor lying out in the hall, its price plummeted to nothing? It was in her, she knew, to get so infatuated with the process of giving a briefing that she neglected her own best interests. But she was gambling here on his innocence, evident to her in the loose, unfocused way he held the gun. His protests aside, games were clearly his strong suit. All his previous crimes, she could see, were a whore’s crimes, victimless and brief. He’d stayed a kid by fucking day after day and letting the rest of life go by. That was what it amounted to: He was still a kid, and he needed to hear a kid’s story. Nine parts plot to one part character.

“Screw that idea,” he said. “You’d have a roadblock up before I got out of Bel-Air.”

She talked fast: “Oh, but you’re wrong. We can’t have the police involved in any of this. We’ve all been in and out of this room for weeks. I think we’re accessories after the fact, but it’s very technical, so I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. There’s millions of dollars worth of stuff in here, and to get it they can always think up charges you never heard of.” Then what? She took up the tongue of a small-time hood, since no one had ever had to say such things in the drawing rooms of Gothic novels, and thus she had no tradition to tap. “We’ve got to wipe out the serial numbers, or whatever it is that labels them. Then we get them placed in little old lady antique stores, and then we discover them. It’s going to take a long, long time.”

“I don’t want to do a deal with Nick,” Sam said, and she could see his pen was poised above the dotted line. He wasn’t fussy about the fine print. He was just protecting his access route to the top man. Which in this case was Rita. “I work for you. I take a cut from you.”

“You’re absolutely right,” she said, nodding so vigorously her candle shook and guttered, “It’s the only way to keep things straight.” And now that we’re in it together, she thought, I wonder what it is. She was making it up as she went along, and now she had to come up with a job that would satisfy him. It was all a play for time, time being the game she played well.

“So what do you want me to do?” he asked, just half a step behind her.

“Well,” she said, and she looked away as if to mull it over. She and Sam had gotten turned slightly sideways from the others, so as to talk in privacy. Now her breath froze in her throat. She saw the next thing happen an instant before it did, but not in time to stop it. Peter lobbed a Persian bottle across the darker side of the room, and it smashed against the bust of Hadrian close by Rita’s office. Sam whirled and fired at nothing, the oldest trick in the book, and Hey came down on top of him before he got the joke. They fell to the floor together, Hey around his neck, and the noise of the gunshot thundered around the room, beating on the walls to find a way out. The candles were snuffed and dead on the floor. They had to make do with the dim, faraway light from the closet. Peter was at Rita’s side now, and he tried to draw her off. She wouldn’t leave. Sam was face-down in front of her. Hey was perched like a monkey on his back, but he didn’t know what to do next. He’d done a dazzling dancer’s leap in perfect time to Peter’s bottle ploy, but he couldn’t seem to get rough. The seconds passed, and Sam heaved his shoulders and squirmed and shook. It was all Hey could do to stay on.

“Hit him!” Rita shouted, digging her fingers into Peter’s arm. But even as he broke away from her to pick up something heavy, she saw Sam’s gun hand struggle free from under him. Before he could use it, he still had to throw Hey off and turn over. She took two steps and stamped her heel hard on his wrist, but because she was barefoot, it didn’t do anything but make him madder. He pulled loose, and the arm swung back and forth in an arc. The spurt of rage shuddered through his body. He rolled, and she saw his face. For an awful moment, as Hey lost his balance and fell and Sam was on his side with the gun free, the barrel swept across her body. Her stomach muscles locked. She opened her mouth to beg for something—if they could only start the last part over—and in his eyes she watched the moment pass when it could have been Rita he shot. Then the gun rolled with him all the way over. At last he and Hey were face to face, lying on their sides like a freeze at the end of a dance, and it happened. The fire flashed. The blood fountained out on the front of Hey’s jacket. And again the noise. It roared like the blooming flower of a bomb.

Sam leapt to his feet, and Rita dropped into a crouch beside Hey. Sam shrieked, “Don’t touch him!” But Rita wasn’t any more scared now than she was before the shots. Horrified and maddened and sick, yes, but except for the slow second she was looking down the barrel, not bodily threatened herself. It was just a meaningless accident. Though she would have killed Sam now with no regrets for what he’d done to a man like Hey, she knew it was the game gotten out of hand. And her anger was endless in the face of things that got evil by being stupid, like the final years of Frances Dean. “I told you,” Sam barked twice, “I told you.” But she wouldn’t even look at him. Hey’s eyes opened, and he gritted his teeth and took the pain. If they did this right, she thought, he’d make it. The hole was in his shoulder, not his heart, and the blood had slowed to a seep.

“Peter,” she said, like a rock inside, “get help. Then bring me some cold towels.” When she looked up to get a confirmation, she saw he was holding, cradled like a baby, the Jacobean mace, a wood and silver club that had once belonged to a Scottish lord. Victoria and Albert Museum. It was what he’d picked up too late to bash in Sam’s head, but he looked right now like a sad-eyed herald walking in front of a luckless king. He let it down on the floor and turned to go.

“Don’t move,” Sam said, brandishing the gun to catch his eye. Peter stopped. Rita turned on Sam so sharply that he jumped away, and for a couple of seconds the gun swung back and forth at Rita, then at Peter, like a pendulum.

“When the hell are you going to let it go?” she demanded. “Don’t you see? It’s over.”

But he did the very thing she’d done to him. He didn’t even look at her, and he went ahead as if she wasn’t there. He approached Peter, aiming the gun at his belly with both hands. When they were close together and it was just between the two of them, Sam put a hand to his back pocket and pulled from it a set of handcuffs. He held them out. “Left hand,” he said to Peter. “Very slowly.” Peter reached over and took the cuffs, but then it took him a minute to open the hinge because his hands were trembling. Rita made as if to stand up, her fury so high she meant to snatch the gun herself, and Sam said, “I’ll kill him, Rita. Stay where you are.” So she didn’t dare move, but she said in return, “No you won’t. You go too far, and we have to let you win, so go ahead. Take what you want and get out. But you didn’t kill Varda, and you won’t kill us.”

“Shut up, Rita,” Peter said. He snapped the cuff tight around his hand. Then he held it against his stomach as if he was hurt and had to keep it in a sling. He waited for the next order, with nothing to do now but stay alive. He could tell that Rita was as angry with him and Hey for attacking as she was with Sam, though she wouldn’t admit it. But Peter had sensed, as soon as they were all locked in together, that Rita was safe and they were in trouble. Sam’s eyes glittered with hatred. Peter and Hey both saw it and started to hatch the plot the moment Rita began to deal. They did it with a glance here and there and a couple of pointed fingers, because they could trust the rhythm they already had from running the house together. They both knew the gun would go off. One of them might get in the way. But it seemed to Hey and Peter worth the risk, since Rita was dead wrong about Sam. He didn’t kill her way, out of what she would have seen as an excess of passion. He’d do it for nothing at all or not at all. And Hey and Peter were as meaningless in the way of victims as any he could wish for.

“What’s the most expensive thing you’ve got?” Sam asked, as if he was an oil tycoon on a shopping spree.

“The Rembrandt,” Peter said, and he could feel Rita flinch from where she knelt next to Hey. She would have tried to tell a lie even here. Tried to palm off a cracked Ming jar or a dusty tapestry.

“Get it,” Sam said.

Peter moved very deliberately among the crates and boxes. He didn’t want to make Sam nervous, and though the painting was so heavy in the frame that he couldn’t imagine lifting it, it wouldn’t do to begin by protesting. Hey moaned, as if he’d tried to shift positions, and Rita bent over close to him. Sam retrieved a candle from the floor, but he couldn’t put the gun down to strike the match. He looked to see if anyone noticed, and when they didn’t, he let the candle fall again. By now they were all accustomed anyway to the near-darkness—their eyes had patiently adjusted while they were busy clamoring for power. Slowly, Peter rocked the Rembrandt and balanced it on one corner. Then he dragged it over the concrete until he could seesaw it onto a crate where Sam could take a look at it. He undid the sheet that covered it, which fell aside like a veil, and the clear-eyed Dutchman stared at them all and didn’t move a muscle.

“Now get over next to her and cuff yourselves together.”

Peter let down the painting beside the crate and propped it sturdily. Walking away, he was strangely shaken by Sam’s not looking at it. For Sam, apparently, there was no such person as Rembrandt. Peter had to wonder, when he went down beside Rita and gripped her hand in one of his and somehow got the feeling Hey was dead, whether the painting was worth a thing anymore if Sam should have it.

“It isn’t going to be much longer,” Peter whispered close to her ear as he shut her up in the other cuff.

“Why doesn’t he run?” she whispered back. “He can’t get anywhere with a Rembrandt now.” But she didn’t expect an answer. Peter was right, she thought, to shut her up. It had all gotten out of her range, and if it had gone the same way for Sam, the two of them together might have found the way back to where they were, even in spite of the gunshots. But Sam had cut his losses and gone on, and she was too much overwhelmed at last by the disarray to keep up with him. Hey looked at her when he was conscious with an agony that turned him into a stranger. Anything she could have done to cool him or pillow him, any news she had of an ambulance, would have restored him enough to be recognized. But as she wasn’t free to try, she began to be something of a stranger herself. She’d always said she’d been through it all, and yet the suffering she’d done for love was the only kind she knew, and now she knew it had all been in her head. Hey with a blood-soaked shirt was insupportable. She felt like a lone survivor of the kind of disaster that sweeps away men like ants, and nothing is ever going to be the same again.

Peter stared at Hey for half a minute, willing him alive. He could hear Sam pulling at the painting, his energy draining into rage because he couldn’t move it any more easily than Peter. Where Rita had fallen so fast from wheeling and dealing and wild defiance to a state where she felt brutalized and worn—as if Peter’s “Shut up” had done the reverse of the slap in the face that stops hysteria short and makes a man cool and feisty again—Peter himself grew wilder and more alert as the time passed. He knew what the next step was before Sam even thought of it, and he didn’t have much time. Hey would just have to cease looking dead so Peter could go ahead and hold out hope. He didn’t know how bad it was, but he refused to believe it was fatal. The snakebite taught him how far he could go on a wound that looked awful.

Hey responded to Peter’s stubbornness as if it were treatment. He quivered and came partly awake. He opened his eyes and looked at each of them a moment and then seemed to sigh back into sleep. It was enough for Peter, and he hoped like hell. Unlike Rita, he determined that everything would be the same again. Exactly the same. It was what kept Russian princes in exile going.

“I can’t do it,” Sam said. He sounded at once upset and a trifle conciliatory, as if he might convince someone to jump up and come give a hand. Rita and Peter had the brief satisfaction of sticking to their little group and letting him stew. There was a pause in which Peter felt Sam begin to figure out the risks of going one step further. Then Peter squeezed Rita’s shackled hand with his shackled hand, and murmured, “He’s going to split us up. Tell Nick not to get mad. I’ll leave a sign in the house to let him know you’re here.”

The whole three sentences came out in a monotone, and Rita heard it as a string of one-liners, like the comic remarks made at wakes, meant to evoke the irony of everything compared to death and not to make anyone laugh. We’re caught in a bad cliché, Peter seemed to be telling her, and we’re forced into speaking lines out of comic strips. As the crime widened and fed on itself like a mountain fire, they were less and less allowed to talk like themselves, compelled by the tenor of events to be rather formal. It went through Rita’s mind in a melancholy way, and the part of her that never stopped grappling with life and what was meant to come of it began to see the scene from very far away. It was an existential event. The great fight to get on with it filled her mind like blood, but it was as if she couldn’t speak around the broken teeth. She never dreamed Peter was giving her the orders to get her through the next several hours in Hell. She’d begun to think they were only waiting for Sam to go. It was all she could do not to tick the seconds off, drumming the fingers of her free hand. So when Sam came over and knelt between them and said, fiddling with the key in the lock, “Peter, you’re coming with me,” Rita drew a blank the size of a movie screen. But wait. Someone had got to repeat the three things he said, she thought in a panic. Because she didn’t know what to do at all.

The steel bit into her flesh, her wrist got yanked, and her watch stopped, all while Sam was struggling to get them apart. She prayed the cuffs were broken. Though she couldn’t attach a meaning to Peter’s instructions, even as the phrases filtered back, she did still remember “Shut up.” So she made no protest when Sam cuffed her other hand. She put on a brave front for taking her last look at Peter. At least he was smarter than Sam, she thought, trying to calm down. She telegraphed to Peter with her eyes that she and Nick would comb the earth to track him down.

Just at that moment, though, he was pretending to Sam to be simple and subdued, so he couldn’t very well start winking at Rita. He stood up and, as he went with Sam to the painting, licked and blew at the raw spot on his wrist. The two of them lifted the Rembrandt without any trouble. Rita thought when she watched them carry it out to the closet that they were gone for good. Calm down and count to fifty, she said to herself. And then she’d follow along and get to a phone, peeking around the corners all the way, the receiver clenched between her cuffs. Sam was a dope. If she’d been Sam, she would have cuffed her hands behind her and put in a gag. What was the worst that could happen now? Nobody in his right mind would harm a Rembrandt. If Sam laid a finger on Peter, Nick would kill him. She would kill him. Hey appeared to be a grudge from the far past, and Sam was taking Peter along only to further defuse the crackerjack team of Peter and Rita and Hey. In the weird quiet that fell for a bit on Varda’s room, she groped to get back her limitless capacity for stories that turned out well in the end. She must have counted to twenty or twenty-five. It’ll be okay, she thought. The wrecked Cézanne seemed to fly from her mind a second time, and the hole through the blasted shoulder below her on the floor was a notch less fatal. She was almost high again, ready to fight and win.

But the sounds of things outside the secret room were always cut off—as if, inside, the hills held their hands over everyone’s ears. So Rita heard nothing, and it was all a trick of the house. Peter and Sam were in her room the whole time, working out the best way to get the picture to where Sam’s car was parked. Peter cooperated impeccably, with all his skill as a mover in space, for the sake of the priceless thing between them. Even Sam knew right away, when he heard Peter out, that he was kidnapping his very own museum director to go with the painting. He understood how great the painting must be from watching Peter try to protect it. He went back into the closet to close up the mirror, and he knew he could leave Peter all alone out in the bedroom. Peter wouldn’t run from the Rembrandt. He wouldn’t even risk a scuffle if they were near it. Sam decided with some relief that Peter was a hostage with a built-in gun at his head.

Rita thought at first that it must be help arriving. When Sam slipped through the door again to take a final look, he was there so suddenly that she didn’t think. The light was behind him, and her heart leaped up. It was Nick! Because nobody else would have known so soon where to come. And when, the next moment, she saw her mistake, the breath went out of her yet again. The back of her neck prickled with the start of a dead faint. Nothing would have shut her up now, except she couldn’t think what to say, as she sometimes couldn’t cry out in a nightmare. She knew his hand on the mirror’s edge meant he was locking them in, and no one would ever hear her screaming. The trick to the sound worked both ways.

“Tell him I’m going underground,” Sam said across the room to her. “There’s no use trying to find me. I’ll call him tonight.”

And then he pulled the mirrored door shut with a click behind him, and Rita was thrown into total darkness. Her voice came back like lightning. It may have been that soundproof walls were just what she needed. She started to scream, and she threw herself at the lost light until she was beating the back of the mirror with her fists. She didn’t need to do it long. In a minute she was listening to her own noise, and the fall into consciousness brought her up short into silence. Dying away, the echo of the scream sank into the hills like water out in the sun, with only the faintest tremor. It never went so far as to shake things in their frames, but there was a shiver to the room for a moment more before the silence took a grip. Rita didn’t even know what the next hysteria was that came after screaming. She sank against the door on one shoulder, and in the pitch dark an image went through her mind of a woman much like herself on the mirror side of the mirror. Pretty and thin and taking time at how she looked. Never the wiser about the treasure there for the taking on the other side.

It would be too much, though, to say she wanted to go back and start over with a suitcase full of the wrong clothes. She only felt how much more she’d chosen over a mirror that stayed in one place, with just one side. She stood in the dark now and saw nothing. If none of it ever happened, she could have stood all she liked instead at the three-way mirror. She had to wonder which way gave her back the most true picture of herself. Maybe neither. But she started to think about it, just as if she was lying by the pool and stirring Campari and soda with a finger. Sealed in the hills with a wounded man, no help in sight till sundown, her oldest friend abducted, she started to imagine what she could have done differently. That was the next hysteria. When Hey said her name, she was already so caught up in speculation that she wasn’t even shocked to hear him strong enough to speak.

“Rita?”

“What?”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure,” she said absently, and then, to be polite, “are you?”

“I think so. Come here. I want to see if I can sit up.”

And suddenly she realized. She stood up straight, and her eyes widened. Hands out in front of her, she made her way like a sleepwalker back to her nurse’s station. He’d sounded so clear, so matter-of-fact, that it might have been nothing more than a sprained ankle. Just like Peter, she’d refused to entertain the notion Hey would die. And look what happened. He was practically as good as new, up on one elbow already by the time she knelt beside him. She’d do well, she thought, to refuse whatever she could of agony and evil. It might just all go away.

“Get me over to the sofa,” Hey said, and he talked through his teeth as he gripped her around, because at first the bones in his shoulder jiggled like sticks. Rita held him up, and they took little steps and said nothing till she eased him down among the pillows.

“It won’t be long,” she lied.

“Have you got the lamp?” he asked, as if the darkness they were in was after all a cave from Arabian Nights. All they needed was a genie. Rita turned to the desk and groped at the drawer pull. She thrust both hands deep inside, much as she’d done day after day for weeks, always certain what she’d find. One hand grasped the lamp, and the other took hold of the diary. It was only a half hour since she’d put them back in place, when she and Peter stopped to eat the lunch they never got to.

“Here,” she said. She held it out, but of course he couldn’t see it, so she snapped it on. He grinned into the light.

“Now put it on,” he said. “You’ve got work to do.”

“How come you’re so much better, Hey?” She slipped her head into the lamp the moment he told her to, though she knew it was a waste of time. He didn’t seem to understand they couldn’t do anything now but wait. They had to save their breath. Not use up all the air. “Are you a Christian Scientist?”

“I’m not a bit better,” he said. If he’d left it at that, she would have had the horrors, but he was only being precise. She thought: He’s the one realist we’ve got in this house. He’d monitored his own vital signs since the first shock passed and the pain went into a rhythm. He went on, and he was as tough as the tough guys that turned up to put things right in Rita’s stories: “But with him here, I thought I better play dead or he’d empty the gun in me. Now, the first thing you have to do is find something good to stand on.”

“We shouldn’t move around too much,” she said, faintly saying no. “It gets very stuffy in here very fast. We have to wait for Nick.”

“Nick won’t be home till tonight, and you know it.” It was as if she didn’t understand how tough he was. “We don’t have time. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

“Just try to hang on,” she said, putting his urgency out of her mind. He couldn’t see her eyes for the light, but she saw his. He wanted something. No matter what it is, she thought, I can’t. She tried to sound caring and solicitous, and the words tasted awful and cheap. “Let me make you comfortable,” she said.

“Oh, I’m comfortable as hell. It’s a goddam country club in here.” He laughed, short and bitter, and it fell over into a cough that went on and on. Suddenly it sounded like his last breath. He strangled the next words out. “Listen. Please. I’m trying to tell you. There’s another way out of here.”