FOOL’S GOLD: TEN

  

“You forgot you were dating someone?” I asked Astrid.

“You were gushing about him yesterday,” Daniella said, followed by a small hiccup.

“Are you two the good-girlfriend police?” Astrid said, her bright red lips set in a pout. “There’s got to be some real royalty here somewhere. I’ll leave two prudes to yourselves.”

She stormed off, several men turning to watch her as she walked by.

“What’s the matter with her?” Daniella asked.

“How well do you know her?” I asked.

“You think Astrid stole the chess set?” She shook her head. “But I was with her.”

“She could have hired someone.”

“She doesn’t have that much imagination,” Daniella said. “Oh God! That sounded awful, didn’t it? Maybe I’ve had too many of these.” She set her empty champagne class on a nearby side table. “No, I know Astrid can be difficult, but she’s not a criminal.”

  

Back at the hotel, I had to squeeze out the rest of the contents of the clutch to find the key to my room. How did women use these things? When I pushed open the door, my breath caught in my throat. The light of the room was on. I was certain I’d left it off.

“It’s about time,” Sanjay said.

“You were about this close to getting my knee in a very uncomfortable place.” I flung my key at him. I wasn’t surprised that he caught it. It disappeared from sight in the palm of his hand.

“You didn’t leave me a choice.” Sanjay placed the rematerialized key on the bed stand and sat down in the one chair in the small room. “You weren’t answering your cell.”

Sanjay was still wearing his tuxedo from his performance. His bow tie hung loose around his neck, and his bowler hat rested on the bed stand.

“My phone barely fit in this little clutch. I thought if I opened it I’d never get it shut again.”

“You own a clutch? What happened to the messenger bag that goes everywhere with you?”

“It’s not mine. I found it in the suitcase. I didn’t think my messenger bag would fit in too well at the gala.”

“You’re stealing from this poor woman’s suitcase?”

“Borrowing,” I said. “Where do you think I got this dress? But I bet she’s drinking the American whiskey I brought as a gift for Daniella and having the historical letter appraised.”

Sanjay leaned back on his elbows and watched me.

“What?” I said, smoothing out the dress. “Do I have a big chunk of lint on me? God, please don’t tell me I’ve got remnants of canapé stuck in my teeth.”

“You were eating fancy food? Where’s Jaya and what have you done with her?”

“Very funny.”

Sanjay shook his head slowly but didn’t say anything. “I was admiring your dress,” he said finally. “You look…”

“Silly?” I said, slipping off my heels and flinging them into the corner of the small room. “I know. It’s not really my style.”

“That’s not the word I was thinking of,” Sanjay said. “Stunning is more like it. You look absolutely stunning.”

“In this?” I looked down at the vintage black and white dress. “It’s all wrong for my shape.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you don’t know how to take a compliment?”

“It’s hardly a fair assessment coming from a good friend.”

Sanjay cleared his throat. “Why don’t you dress like that more often?”

“I’m a professor, you know. Or at least I will be in two weeks. This dress doesn’t exactly say “authority figure.” I can’t very well go around looking like a nightclub singer.”

“I don’t know. It has its charm. So who is this woman you stole it from?”

“Borrowed,” I corrected him. “I have no idea. She didn’t answer the phone number tucked into the suitcase. But she has great taste. The case was full of dresses like this. She’s not as short as me, but she’s thin, so this one worked pretty well since it has a belt.”

I gave a little pirouette. Sanjay laughed.

“Sounds like your show went well,” I said.

“Even better than expected. A woman fainted.”

“Oh no!”

“No, that’s a good thing,” Sanjay said.

“It is?”

“Weren’t you paying attention earlier?” he asked.

“Apparently not.”

“You were supposed to be scared when the whisky barrel caught fire with me inside it. I cut short the effect when you were there, but with the fully drawn-out presentation, I was brilliant.” He grinned as I rolled my eyes.

“What about that poor woman?” I asked.

“She’s fine. She came to as soon as Ewan gave her smelling salts. The diversion allowed me to heighten the drama of the illusion.”

“I’m sure she’s traumatized.”

“That’s what people pay to see. If people didn’t think I was truly putting my life at risk, I wouldn’t sell out nearly as many shows as I do. Why do you think Houdini was so famous? He was a mediocre illusionist, but he understood the value of drama. Close-up magic baffled him, but give him the grand venue of an outdoor stage with a challenge to escape from a straitjacket while hanging upside down hundreds of feet above a crowd, and the public ate it up. But enough about my sell-out performances.” He paused. “That’s not why I’m here. How did the gala go?”

“No fainting was involved,” I said, “but Daniella did get fall-down drunk. And even more interesting—Astrid is hiding something.”

I sat down on the bed and tucked my legs under me. I went over the little I’d learned about the publicity for both the play and the chess set growing exponentially because of the press surrounding the theft, and I thought about Astrid lying about whatever she had to do away from the group the morning before the theft took place.

“Interesting,” Sanjay said.

“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say? Aren’t you going to say something about turning Astrid over to the police for the third degree?”

“That,” Sanjay said, “would be jumping the gun.” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. After glancing briefly at the screen, he put it back and looked up at me. “It’s late enough,” he said.

“Late enough for what? I’m too wound up to sleep. My sneakers are in my missing suitcase so I haven’t been able to go running, so I doubt I’ll ever sleep again.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Let’s go check out the room.”

“You’re not serious. The scene of the crime? I’m sure it’s off limits.”

“Of course I’m serious. How else are we going to solve this?”

“I’m sure the police have the room locked up.”

Sanjay’s forehead crinkled as he raised his eyebrows.

“Right,” I said with a sigh. “The lock of that room won’t be much different from this one.”

“Exactly. You think I let myself into your room for kicks? The hotel is booked up, so I needed to practice on a door to a room I knew was empty.”

“How long did it take you?”

Sanjay cleared his throat. “Let’s not sit around discussing the details of how long it took to open what should have been a straightforward lock.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

“I’ve got jet lag.” He yawned. “At least this hotel is proud enough of its historic roots that it still uses real old-fashioned keys. Those modern key cards aren’t nearly as easy to break into with the set of skills I’ve got at my disposal.”

“I’ll remember that the next time I book a hotel room.”

“Shall we?” Sanjay said.

I hesitated.

“You can either leave this to the police and see your friends go to jail,” Sanjay said, “or we can take a look.”

“I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?”

“If you don’t come with me, I’ll do it on my own.”

“Let me change,” I said.

Sanjay’s face fell. “Can’t you go in that?”

“This is hardly cat burglar attire.”

“Exactly. It’s the perfect cover. If we’re caught, our excuse is that we’ve just come from one of the festival’s parties and we’re drunk. That way we’ll only get a drunk-and-disorderly warning—or whatever its British equivalent is—rather than being charged with what we’re really up to.”

I opened my mouth but Sanjay kept speaking.

“But we’re not going to get caught,” he said. “Especially with you as my lookout. Coming?”

I picked up the white clutch, slipped my heels back on, and followed Sanjay out the door.

  

“Three minutes, forty two seconds,” Sanjay said.

I turned toward him from where I stood a few paces away in the hallway, holding my heels in my hand and trying to look tipsy to anyone who might see us skulking around the burgled room. Sanjay turned the handle and opened the door.

The room was completely dark. We locked the door behind us and Sanjay turned on the light.

“There’s nothing more suspicious than flashlights,” Sanjay said.

“You mean if we happened to have flashlights,” I pointed out.

“Touché.”

The suite wasn’t much bigger than a standard hotel room in the US. The door opened into a small hallway. To the right, a bathroom that would have been at home in an airplane. To the left, two bedrooms that looked like they were previously one larger room. Straight ahead, a sitting room barely big enough to fit two chairs, a coffee table, and a loveseat in a tartan print matching the furniture in the lobby. The loveseat faced a television mounted on the wall, and next to the television was a hole where the wall safe had been. The wallpapered wall surrounding the safe was blackened, and the remnants of the safe’s metal door hung askew.

In addition to the evidence of the explosion around the safe, the room showed other scars of the theft: the furniture was soaking wet. The sprinkler on the ceiling had done its job.

Neither the sitting room nor the bathroom had a window. That luxury was reserved for the two bedrooms on the opposite side of the hallway, each with one small window. Each bedroom had enough room for two twin-size beds—that looked smaller than standard twin-size to me—about two feet apart. The tall, narrow windows were in the space between the beds. Neither room had built-in closets, but instead had antique wooden wardrobes.

Sanjay ran his fingers along the edging of the floorboards through the whole suite, then did the same thing along the walls. While he did two slow, meticulous circles, I studied the windows. They were small, almost like the openings for archers in a castle. There was no reason to have bigger windows for a view, since the windows faced another old building a few yards away. I looked around the edges of both windows. Typical of hotel windows, these windows didn’t open. How had the police thought someone could have gotten out through one of them?

Sanjay came up behind me at the window and rested his chin on my head. I moved out of the way and let him examine the window.

“Nothing out of the ordinary here,” he said. “Thick stone walls, solid construction.”

“You thought there would be a secret passageway?”

“Not really. But one has to be thorough. Damn. This window doesn’t open, either,” he said, frowning. He pressed his forehead to the glass and looked down, and then up.

“Fifth floor,” he mumbled to himself, staring out the window. “Sprinklers…no fire escape. Even if the thief could have altered one of these windows to open and get out, squeeze through the opening, and slide down a rope—or walk across one to the opposite building, if we want to entertain really outrageous ideas—there wouldn’t have been time. They’d need to replace the window to its present state. No, the only way out of this place is that front door.”

“Which a whole group of German tourists say didn’t happen.”

“Nobody got out through these windows,” Sanjay said. “I don’t like this at all, Jaya.”