Circles of Confusion (33 page)

Claire's decision had been made for her the moment she saw Charlie was still alive. "You don't have to make threats." With her chin, she motioned at the stroller behind the two men. "It's in that bag."

Smiling a cat's feral grin, Paul delicately slid out the painting and weighed it on his fingertips. "Twenty million dollars, and it doesn't weigh over three pounds." Overhead, the lights flickered and dimmed. Looking down, he addressed himself to the painted woman, still cushioned by her protective wrapper. "You're just as beautiful as I thought you would be." His eyes didn't move, but his next words were for Claire. "Bubble wrap. I'll have to remember that the next time I transport a painting."

"The next time you transport a painting?" Claire echoed. "Then I take it you're not a cop."

"No." He looked up and then smiled, dangerously playful. "And my name isn't Paul Roberts. My real name is Rudy Miller."

"You—you're alive!" The room reeled. She remembered the man whose photos had decorated her aunt's mirror. That was where she had seen those quicksilver eyes before. In fifty years, Rudy Miller hadn't changed.

All playfulness vanished. He took a half-step toward Claire. "You know who I am?"

"Cady wrote about you. In her diary."

"That woman kept a diary!" His mouth tightened. "Grandpa should never have taken up with that stupid bitch."

"Grandpa." Claire blinked. "Then you're—"

"Rudy Miller." He lifted his chin, making the resemblance even more pronounced. "The Third."

"Is your grandfather still alive?" She tried to imagine what the man before her might look like in half a century.

Rudy shook his head. "Dead for six years. He was a smart man, my grandfather." His voice warmed into boastfulness. "No education, but he knew something beautiful when he saw it. He liberated a king's ransom and sent it home wrapped in plain brown paper, courtesy of the U.S. Army Post. But after the war ended he saw which way the wind was blowing. The Germans were becoming friends with the Americans again. Jews were in power all through this country. People began to ask what had happened to certain collections that had gone missing during the war."

Understanding broke. "That's why my neighbor was killed. You didn't care if you blew up the painting, too. It was more important to you that no one question its source."

To her surprise, Rudy shook his head. "Don't lay that at my feet. It's been years since anyone really cared. That was all his doing." He gestured with his chin at Karl, whose face reddened. "And he was acting without orders. He was supposed to get the painting back, not destroy it."

The big man protested, "You said you didn't want anyone to know! You didn't want anyone to start asking questions!"

"Only because I wanted a chance to get the painting back before anyone knew what it was. You were supposed to get it from the old lady's trailer, but you screwed up and got there too late. I never told you to blow up a twenty-million-dollar painting. You thought up that clever twist all on your own."

Claire interrupted their bickering. "But won't a potential buyer care if the painting was stolen by the Nazis?" Then Charlie bandaged Claire's chafed wrists.

"My grandfather said that the more time passed, the less people asked about where things had come from. If he'd waited a few more years, he probably could have stayed right in the U.S., instead of moving to Argentina."

Now Claire understood Rudy's precise, colorless speech. The perfect uninflected command of English that only a non-native speaker possessed. "And everything originally came out of that warehouse he was supposed to be guarding?"

"Who did all that belong to? No one. At least not any longer. The only reason the United States had it was because they had won. Do you think they took everything from that warehouse and gave it back to its original owners?" He snorted in derision. "Go look in any museum and ask yourself where the paintings on its walls came from. The Louvre has dozens of paintings acquired courtesy of the Nazis, and they are not working too hard to find out who used to own them. The greatest galleries and auction houses in the world sell art taken during the war. Some even note it on the provenance. After all, what does it matter who owned something two generations ago? What is it they say here? Possession is nine-tenths of the law?"

"So if you don't care if people know your grandfather stole a bunch of paintings from the Nazis, why are you so eager to get this one back?"

Rudy's laugh sent a chill sliding down Claire's spine. "Still determined to play the innocent, are you? My grandfather was not an educated man, but he liked beautiful things. In Germany, he bought 'degenerate' modern paintings the Nazis despised for a few marks. Twenty years later he sold them for millions. In the eighties, he sold Impressionists to the Japanese before the market bottomed out. And as he learned more about paintings, he realized what he had lost." He turned the painting to face them, resting the top edge against his chest. Claire stared at the woman's image through the bubble wrap and wondered if this was the strangest scene she had witnessed in the last three hundred and fifty years. "He had given your aunt a Vermeer, when there are only thirty-two others in the whole world. He even wrote to her, offered to buy the painting back—and he was the one who had given it to her in the first place. She refused. But even though he knew how much it was worth, he was a fool. He refused to take it from her, made me swear that I wouldn't either." A bemused expression crossed Rudy's face, and Claire realized that he had actually loved his grandfather. "But I never promised that things wouldn't change once she was dead. I sent Karl to retrieve it, but he botched it. And by the time I came up here, you were gone. I figured we could trade your roommate for the painting."

"But how did you figure out where I"—Claire almost slipped and said we—"was tonight?"

"You probably thought you were so smart—taking the same ID card from Karl that he had taken from the guard. Instead it just led me straight to you. When I flashed my policeman's badge at the security guy out front and told him I was investigating this morning's incident, he was more than willing to let me look at his computer. And that led me straight to you."

"So now what happens?" Claire asked.

Karl answered, "We kill you, of course."

Rudy shook his head and laughed. "Of course we do not kill them, Karl." He set the painting down on the desk. "We leave them tied up here. By the time someone comes into this office, we will be out of the country. We got what we wanted—and we do not need any more trouble. Two more deaths will just make the police more eager to find us."

Karl's face reddened again. "But they will talk. And that talk will spoil any sale."

"Oh, it will, will it?" Rudy made a disparaging puh sound. "If anyone pays attention to what these two nobodies have to say, it will just drive up the price. Use your head for once. The people I sell to already know they have to keep our little deals a secret. Any publicity will simply give the painting more cachet. Everyone wants to own something famous."

"Don't laugh at me." Bright spots of color appeared on Karl's cheeks. He took a step back and gestured with his gun in Claire's direction. "Just because they are women and this one is pretty, you just do not want to do what is necessary." He hesitated, then with a slow deliberateness he aimed the gun at Claire. Time seemed to stop.

Crash! In the corridor behind Karl's and Rudy's backs, Claire saw a stool fly out of the X-ray room and land in the exam room across the hall. Their argument forgotten, Rudy and Karl ran to investigate. Not to the X-ray room, but to the room where the stool had landed. As soon as they began to crowd into the narrow door,

Dante—still clad only in his briefs—charged up behind them with a yell. He jammed a wastebasket on Karl's head, and then swung a heavy lead apron as hard as he could at Rudy's face. The weighted apron wrapped itself around Rudy's head and shoulders, and he fell to the floor like a stone.

Forgetting that she was tied to her chair, Claire tried to get to her feet to help. The telephone cord bit into her wrists and the chair's weight dragged her back down. Karl was bellowing with rage, the sound echoing, hollow and metallic, as he scrabbled at the edges of the wastebasket. The gun fell from his hand, hit the wall and spun away on the floor.

"Dante, get the gun!" Claire shouted. "Get it!"

But it was Rudy who made the next move, suddenly coming alive. Still lying prone, he swept his arm out in a blind arc until his hand connected with Dante's ankle. He yanked. Dante's head hit the doorjamb with a horrible hollow thunk, and he went down in a slack tangle. Rudy pulled the apron from his face and got to his feet, his fingertips gingerly exploring his already swelling face.

A second later, Karl succeeded in pulling the wastebasket from his head and flung it in the corner. Angry at finding his enemy already vanquished, he lifted one of his huge heavy shoes and kicked Dante in the ribs. Then again. Claire could hear bones cracking, but Dante didn't stir.

Dear God, was he dead? All the anger she had felt earlier drained from her, leaving only a terrible sense of loss.

"Did I not warn you?" Karl said to Rudy, somewhat irrationally. "Did I not tell you that you had to take care of things before they got out of hand?"

"The women did not do anything," Rudy said wearily. "It was this guy." He lifted his foot and pulled it back as if he, too, were going to kick Dante, but then dropped it to the floor again. He looked over at Claire. "Who is he, anyway?"

She decided to keep her answer simple. "My boyfriend." Charlie looked at her and raised one eyebrow, but kept silent.

"Well, he is not doing you much good now, is he?" Karl said. Claire froze as he reached down to pick up the gun and then aimed it—almost casually—at Dante's sprawled form.

"You are not in the secret police anymore, Karl." Rudy held out his hand, palm up. His voice was steady. "I do not want to leave a trail of dead bodies behind me."

Instead of handing over the gun, Karl raised it and took a step backward into the reception area. "Do not do this, Karl. Do not do that," he mimicked in a singsong voice. "I am tired of you telling me what to do." His huge hand hovered over the receptionist's desk. Then in one quick move he picked up the painting and tucked it under his arm.

"What are you doing?" A note of panic had crept into Rudy's voice. Claire thought of the sorcerer's apprentice, setting into motion what he ultimately couldn't control. "You give that—"

As he was speaking, the lights went out.

For a long moment, everything was silent except for the keening of the wind. It was completely dark—no light in the room, no windows glowing in the buildings around them, no spangle of lights on the hills that lay to the west. The moon was far away, a white thumbprint against the inky sky.

There was the sound of a body running into something—Claire thought it was the receptionist's desk—followed by a grunt of pain or surprise. Rudy, Claire guessed, trying to grab the painting from Karl.

"Give it to me, Karl. You would have no idea what to do with it."

Karl's voice sounded stronger, more certain, as if he were gaining courage from his own rebellion. "After five years, I know your buyers as well as you do. And one thing I have learned is that they are not choosy. They will buy from whoever has the goods. Which in this case would be me."

As Claire's eyes began to adjust to the light provided by the distant moon, she strained to see what was happening. Next to the window a dark smudge moved against the night sky. Karl, she guessed, not talking now, simply concentrating on circumventing Rudy as he made for the door.

Rudy must have caught sight of him, too, for suddenly there was the rush of feet running, and the sounds of a struggle. "Give it to me, give it to me!" Rudy cried, but Claire didn't know whether he now meant the painting—or the gun.

When the gun went off, the sound was even louder than the roar of the wind outside. The first shot shattered one of the floor-to- ceiling windows, letting the outside in. The wind was so fierce it was hard to gulp a breath. Glass stalactites glinted in the moonlight. Eyes watering from the wind, Claire watched the two figures reel back and forth amid a swirl of loose papers that had risen up from the receptionist's desk and now whipped through the room. The sound of the wind was nearly deafening, but still, the second shot was even louder.

The bigger figure—now Claire could just make out Karl's pale face—staggered backward, off-balance, one arm flailing, the other still clutching the dark shape of the painting against his chest. Just below it, a black stain was spreading across his once white shirt. One huge foot stepped back into space. Karl seemed to hover for a moment, his free arm reaching blindly and finding only air. Then he was simply gone.

Claire tried to scream, but the wind tore the breath from her mouth.

When Rudy walked slowly from the shattered window to stand in front of them, Claire was sure it was the end. Dawn was just beginning to wash the sky. She could see the silver glint of the gun, now held loosely by his side, but because Rudy had his back to the window, his face was in the shadows. She was never to know what he was thinking at that minute. Was he reluctant to add more dead bodies to his troubles, even though they had just witnessed him commit a murder? Did he think of whatever had existed between his grandfather and Claire's great-aunt? He only stood looking down at her for a long minute. Then he turned on his heel and left.