The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (30 page)

He thought of how he would make these suggestions at next week’s staff meeting, and what a furore his revelations about the threat to the collection would make.

Time . . . A maverick speculator working on his own.

He got up from his desk and, brushing aside his secretary, again went back into the body of the museum.

So many people. Crowds milling to and fro, almost like a revolution in the making. A people’s uprising, an assertion of ownership in the great artworks of all countries and centuries that
had found their home in the Hermitage. He wandered around the ground floor – the shops, the cafeteria, the children’s assembly area, the cloakrooms. A city in itself.

And there he was again.

Walking purposefully towards the cafe again, but five minutes away from it, potbelly thrust forward, the legend KANSAS – WHAT A STATE WE’RE IN blazoned across the chest of his
red T-shirt. His eyes were staring from left to right. Looking for somebody? An accomplice?

No, looking for a lavatory. Suddenly he swerved aside and went into the Gentleman’s just outside Room 99.

Leonid waited, loosening his belt – the only weapon he had. Then he went into the small convenience and bolted the door, as the cleaner always did when she was at work inside. Then he
disappeared into one of the cubicles.

The Yank was into serious business. Eventually, after sounds that made Leonid feel quite queasy, paper was torn, a flush was pulled, a door unlocked, and The Threat was out into the main part of
the lavatory and running water into the basin. Leonid went out.

“Hi! You’re the guy I was talking to in the cafe, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey, I got an idea after you left. You’re one of the gang – guys, I mean, who run this place, aren’t you?”

His hands were all soapy, and he put his head down towards the water – Leonid noticed for the first time how nasty he found the little moustache, reminiscent of the last great threat to
the Hermitage collection in 1941 – and washed his fat cheeks.

“Er – yes, I am.”

“Seems to me we could be useful to each other. What I need is information, background, maybe classified stuff. I could pay well – in dollars, of course. Always in dollars.”

He’d at least learnt
some
thing about the new Russia, Leonid thought.

“So what do you say? Mutually advantageous, that’s what it would be. Is it a deal?”

He was tugging down the paper towel. Leonid slipped his belt from round his waist, quickly slipped it around the man’s neck, and tightened it around his throat.

“No,” he said. “No, I won’t. No.”

So much time it took! And so much strength. The capitalist pirate at least made a struggle of it, his face going first red and then purple, his eyes popping, his wet soapy hands flailing. At
last, when Leonid’s own face was red with the struggle, the man started to fail, the movements became feebler, and finally his body slumped down onto the tiled floor. For a minute or two
Leonid held the belt tight around his neck, resisting the temptation to pull up his trousers, which were around his ankles. At last he straightened up, and secured them with his belt.

He looked around him. The Threat’s cubicle, smelly and dirty, was the place to put him. He picked him up by his shoulders, dragged him in, and shut the door. He couldn’t lock it, but
he pushed the feet well inside. Then he went and looked at himself in the mirror. Quite presentable, really. Quite normal. He slipped back the bolt on the door and went out into the thronged,
pulsating gallery.

He was too excited to go straight back to the office. He must go around the great artistic domain that he had saved. He walked with his head high, his heart throbbing with pride. He was on cloud
nine with the gods on the Grand Staircase, and he knew it. Never had he been so prompt in decision, so effective in action. He felt like God himself, almost like the Museum Director.

So taken up was he with his new status as the man who saved the Hermitage that he did not notice in the Spanish Gallery the man with the off-white T-shirt with the barely legible slogan which
read KERRY TO WIN. Or the man in the French seventeenth-century gallery in the green T-shirt with the slogan which read HANG NELSON MANDELA. Both were peering closely at the labels under the
pictures, and both were clutching small notebooks and ballpoint pens. Both were purposeful, efficient, and smiling.

Simon Levack

My mistress was concerned about her water supply.

This may seem an odd preoccupation for an Aztec. After all, our city, Mexico, was built on an island in a freshwater lake and was riddled with canals, one of which ran past my mistress’s
house. However you had only to think of all the rubbish and other things that were tipped into them by the city’s thousands of households to know why the water we drank always came from
springs. Some of these were within the city itself; but the city had long since outgrown them, and now the most important source was on the hill of Chapultepec, across the water on the western
shore of the lake.

Years ago – before I was born – the rulers of Mexico had built a great aqueduct whose two stone channels linked Chapultepec to the city. Most households got their fresh water from
men who filled their jars from the aqueduct near the point where it entered the city and carried them by canoe through the city’s network of canals direct to our doors. They were paid in bags
of cocoa beans and most Aztecs scarcely reckoned the cost, being happy to be spared the daily chore of fetching their own water. Merchants, however, took worldly wealth more seriously than most of
us. My mistress – Tiger Lily, the lady to whom I was bound technically as a slave, although in reality our relationship was a good deal more complex than that – was a merchant. This all
had something to do with why I was standing in one of the aqueduct’s channels – the southern one, currently empty and closed for cleaning – with evil-smelling muck oozing between
my toes and a fetid stench filling my nostrils.

“It’s free water for two years, Yaotl,” Lily had explained. “Just for standing around and watching a ceremony, and you can’t claim you haven’t done worse
before. Not to mention the fact that you drink the water too.”

“I know,” I admitted. “It still seems like an odd request, though. What can I tell a water seller that he can’t see for himself?”

Blue Feather, whose canoe brought a full jar to Lily’s house every day, had asked her for my services for a day. The newly cleaned and reopened northern channel of the aqueduct was to be
rededicated to the water-goddess, Lady Jade Skirt, and I was to watch the ceremony. I was to take careful note of every aspect of the proceedings, even down to precisely where the priest stood
while he made his sacrifices – Blue Feather had been most particular about this.

My mistress’s face, framed in a mass of dark, silver-streaked hair, wore a frown whose meaning I could catch better than anyone. She obviously thought my assignment strange too.
“Does it matter?” she asked eventually. “He can’t be there because he’s got to make a sacrifice at Jade Skirt’s temple, but he wants to be sure every detail of
the ceremony at the aqueduct is right. And you have to admit you’re a better person to observe something like this than most – after all, you used to be a priest.”

That much was true although, as I stood in the slime watching Jade Skirt’s devotee going through the ritual, I was still puzzled. This ceremony was not much like the bloody sacrifices of
men and quails I had been used to when I had served in the temples.

The goddess’s priest balanced precariously at the edge of the full channel. “Oh, Lady of the Jade Skirt!” he cawed in a harsh, deep voice, “Oh, Goddess of the rivers and
springs, accept this, our unworthy gift!” And so saying he tossed the object in his hands into the water at his feet.

It made a soft “plop” and vanished from sight.

The Goddess had received many gifts that morning, each of them accompanied by the same self-abasing formula. Some had been humble enough: tortillas, ears of maize, drinking vessels, a ladle full
of burning incense; but the priest had saved the best till last, and the offering he had just made had been splendid: a small gold statuette of the goddess with glittering emeralds for eyes. It had
been paid for by the water-sellers. A small crowd of them stood around, some with the priest on the edge of the water-channel, others looking up from the empty conduit next to it. Their canoes
jammed the canal running beneath us under the aqueduct. Others, including Blue Feather, were at the goddess’s temple, where more offerings would be made.

It was the southern channel’s turn in the regular maintenance schedule, which is why it was empty of water. I stood in it among the rest of the water-sellers and the other spectators,
waiting silently for the ceremony to end and fervently wishing I were somewhere else. A fine drizzle had begun to fall. It plastered the priest’s already long, lank hair to his pitch-stained
temples and made his black cloak hang limply around him, and made me feel more miserable than ever.

“It always seems like a terrible waste to me,” someone nearby remarked.

“A waste of time, certainly,” I muttered. Then I peered around at the speaker. He had a plain, undyed cloak and the tonsured hair of a man who had never captured an enemy warrior in
battle: the lowliest of commoners. I wondered whether he was one of the water sellers, but when he caught my eye he told me otherwise.

“I know what you mean.” He spoke quietly, for fear of upsetting our neighbours, although they were all huddled and shivering in their cloaks and probably longing to be elsewhere too.
“But we have to do it, don’t we? My parish provided the work detail that cleaned out that half of the aqueduct, you see, so we have to be here.”

“Cleaning these channels must be a nasty job,” I remarked sympathetically. One of the quirks of slavery among Aztecs was that it freed a man from many of the onerous duties that
ordinary commoners were subject to, such as taking part in public works whenever the Emperor or his officials demanded it. The only person I had to obey was my mistress. So I had no first-hand
knowledge of the kind of labour that cleaning the aqueduct or shoring up the sides of a canal or whitewashing a palace might involve.

“Oh, it’s all right, unless you have a problem with filth, stink and a back that feels like you’ll never be able to straighten it again.” The other man grinned. “Of
course with this particular job we always live in hopes – if you see what I mean. Never comes to anything, mind you. Like I said, it’s a terrible waste.”

I frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Stuff like that gold statue,” he explained patiently. “And all the other jewels and things that get thrown in the water as offerings to the goddess. You’d think,
wouldn’t you, that some of that would come up when we’re scooping all the muck out of the bottom? Never happens, though.” He sighed regretfully. “A man could live for years
on just one find like that, but I suppose the goddess can’t spare it! All we ever get is the rubbish. She doesn’t seem so interested in the clay bowls and tobacco tubes. Funny, that,
isn’t it?”

Eventually, the priest gabbled his way to the end of the ritual. It concluded with a sacrifice of his own blood, drawn from his earlobe with an obsidian razor and sprinkled on the water’s
surface.

By the time I had returned home, Blue Feather was already there, passing the time of day in Lily’s courtyard and clearly itching to be told exactly what I had seen. He
was all polite attention as I gave my account, but he might as well have been asleep, since he immediately asked me to repeat it.

After he had left Lily and I agreed that we still could not understand what he was about. Still, as Lily pointed out, that was up to him, provided she still got her water.

She was less sanguine the next morning, when she found out that her water-seller had vanished. And naturally it became my job to find him.

“I was looking for him in the marketplace,” she explained, “to get our agreement witnessed. But he wasn’t at his usual place, by the canal, and no one could tell me where
he was. Go and see if he’s ill, or something.”

This was the start of a frustrating morning. Lily told me where he lived, and that part was easy enough. It was a typical Aztec house, two rooms opening onto a small square of courtyard,
fronting a canal just broad enough for a two-man canoe.

I had to skirt a small pile of trash piled against one side of the house. It looked like the usual rubbish – ash from the hearth, broken shells of turkey eggs, maize husks, and so on
– and I would normally not have spared it a glance, but I was surprised to see a hollow cane, the sort used as a smoking tube. This puzzled me because tobacco was expensive, imported from the
hot lowlands for priests and lords; I could not understand what it would be doing in a humble water-seller’s house.

The water-seller’s wife was home: a weary-looking woman, fine boned and grey haired, whose patched and frayed blouse and skirt made the idea of her husband taking his ease with a pipe even
more incongruous.

She received me politely, inviting me to squat in her courtyard and offering me food, as good manners required. It was a piece of a slightly stale tortilla which I had no hesitation in
declining.

She had little to tell me. “He went out last night and didn’t come back.”

I waited for her to add something to that, but the silence merely dragged on. Eventually I said: “He didn’t say why?”

“No.”

“Was he in the habit of going out at night?” Few Aztecs were. The night was widely feared: it was ruled by spirits, creatures out of dreams and fateful beasts such as owls and
weasels whose appearance could foretell a man’s death. Only those trained to overcome such things, such as priests and sorcerers, usually went out after dark, unless there were some very good
reason.

“No, he wasn’t. That’s why I’m worried.” The woman did not sound especially worried to me. In fact she was downright curt, considering I was trying to find her
missing husband. It was almost as if she resented my questions.