Quest Read online

  Geoffrey Battissen taxied them to a bank on Madison Avenue and introduced her to an officer, explaining that Claire was an heir of the late Mr. Andrews and how the bank could get verification of Miss Andrews’s right to access. It took forty minutes for both Carney banks to verify Claire’s identity and rights to access. It was also made easier by the fact that Claire had possession of the key.

  Inside the vault, Mr. Battissen went to the box to help her.

  “It’s too heavy for a woman, alone,” he said.

  They both grunted getting it to the table. And she helped him lift a heavy burlap sack out of the box, and set it upright. As soon as she started to pull down the rough cloth she saw a gold bowl on top and knew what it was. It was Lucky.

  The last time she’d seen it had been twenty years ago, just after Dad had had his first heart attack. He had taken her down to the cold cellar where the family stored potatoes and squash in the old-fashioned way above a packed dirt floor. He had dug into the dirt himself and hauled out this very burlap sack and then showed her this magnificent big gold thing with the shiny stones.

  “You’re a big girl now. And I want to share a big girl’s secret with you. No one else in the entire world knows this secret,” he had said.

  “Not even Mommy?”

  “No one else, honey. This is mine. It’s very valuable. No one knows it’s here but you and me. If anything should ever happen to me, remember where this is. It’s ours. Yours and mine. But you must never ever tell anyone about it. All right? Just keep it. It’s lucky. I call her Lucky.”

  “Why do you keep her here?”

  “Cause I don’t want anyone to steal her. She’s special.”

  “Could you lock her in the biggest bank possible?” Claire had asked.

  “I want to keep her near me, not in some vault somewhere. I know she is in the safest bank in the world, because no one knows where she is but me, and now you. So that’s what makes it such a big promise. You’re my locks.”

  It was the biggest promise she had made to that point in her life, and she treasured it. She understood later that he had told her this because he thought he might die, and he didn’t want Lucky accidentally sold with the house or never discovered at all. Funny, she had forgotten about it at his death, just the time she should have remembered.

  “It’s an elegant saltcellar,” said Mr. Battissen. “But of course it was never used as that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Obvious. Look at the bowl on top. This is gold. Salt will pockmark gold. Your great saltcellars will never be used, rather displayed such as this. Vern and I were certain of a sale. It’s certainly special in its environment, don’t you think?” said Mr. Battissen, putting the empty drawer back into the wall of steel doors. It reminded Claire of the morgue shelf. She didn’t know what he meant by “special in its environment.”

  “I see. Well, I’m not really sure I want to sell it. You see, it was Dad’s special property, and I think I’d like to keep it now.”

  “Oh, we can’t do that. We have a sale. We have a commitment—your father made it.”

  “I don’t know, really. I don’t want to sell it.”

  “But it’s sold. Your father already sold it. Now all that remains is delivery and money transfer. We can’t back out now. And truthfully, with what I know of Vern, I am sure he would not want to change things now. This was the last decision he made.”

  Claire looked at the big red stone with the carving. It had looked so much larger back in Carney. Everything was larger to a small girl.

  “All right,” she said softly. It was what Dad had wanted.

  He gave her a receipt on Battissen Galleries stationery before they left the vault, and outside he said that he would have the sale completed shortly and that he wouldn’t need her for a few hours.

  “These things are best done when buyer and seller are separate. It is a discreet business,” he said with such consummate assurance that Claire thought it would be improper to disagree.

  “Go out to a very good restaurant. You deserve it this day, and treat yourself to the very best meal you can buy. When you meet me at the Battissen Galleries, everything will have been completed. Your father would be happy with the way this is turning out.”

  Claire chose the closest restaurant with tablecloths. She didn’t enjoy the meal. She sat by the kitchen and had a hard time getting a waiter. Dad would have been furious at this treatment, but all she wanted was to get out. This only reminded her that Dad was no longer here, and she had had enough of that already. She didn’t eat. The waiter, who had not put her at this table, asked her if there was anything wrong with her meal, and she said no.

  “Ah, you have lost a lover,” said the waiter.

  “No … Yes. I guess, yes. Yes, I have,” said Claire.

  “There will be others for a beautiful young woman.”

  “Not like him,” she said.

  “It always feels like that,” said the waiter. “When you come back again, and you bring someone, I will see to it that we make up for what you have passed by today.”

  “I won’t be coming back. I’m leaving the city tonight.”

  “You must come back. We owe special service.”

  “Thank you, but I think I will go to any city in the world but this one. Not this one. Not for a long time at least.”

  At the gallery, Mr. Battissen had her check ready. It was all so smooth and elegant, she felt almost embarrassed to look at the numbers on the check. It seemed too crude for a place so fine. The check was from Battissen Galleries but it was wrong.

  “This is for thirty thousand dollars,” she said.

  “As you know, one never gets what one wants on a sale one wants to conclude quickly. Yet we at Battissen Galleries feel secure in this price. And your father would have been pleased. It was the upper-limit figure your father thought we could get.”

  “Dad wouldn’t come to New York City for a week to make thirty thousand dollars. He was involved in a big deal. He spent more than that on his cars.”

  “That’s all we received, minus of course my commission, which was five thousand dollars. I think I deserved that at least for finding a buyer.”

  “He never would sell it for that. I can’t take that. I’ll take the saltcellar back. I’ll take it home.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “I didn’t sell it. I never sold it to you. I have your receipt that you took it. But I never authorized a sale for that price. You’ve got to get it back. Who did you sell it to? I’ll see him. I’m not taking this money.”

  “This isn’t how we do business at Battissen.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t know who you sell things to, is that it? Is that what you’re telling me, Mr. Battissen?”

  “I am telling you your father entrusted us with this sale and we completed it.”

  “Maybe the police would like to know about what goes on here.”

  “Fine. We have been here for twenty-two years, and we certainly would be most happy to talk to the police if you wish,” said Mr. Battissen, snatching back the check before Claire could get a hand on it. She couldn’t believe he had done that.

  “I have your receipt. I have your signature,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” said Mr. Battissen, fanning imaginary dust off his mocha suit, “but I don’t like this sort of display. I wouldn’t give you a Battissen check at this moment. I don’t want anything more to do with you than I have to. I don’t even want my commission. When you calm down I would be happy to give you thirty-five thousand dollars in cash for your receipt that really doesn’t explain anything. It’s either that or nothing. It’s that clear.”

  “Maybe you think you’re dealing with some New Yorker for whom everything has a price, but you’re not, Mr. Battissen. That was my father’s cellar, and I’m not giving it up.”

  “I have lived twenty-two years in the art business, my good girl, and I am tough too, so let’s not get into a cat fight.”

 
; “If there is one thing that isn’t over, it’s this. I wouldn’t sell you this receipt for a half million dollars. I’m going to get back that saltcellar and I am going to make you pay for this.”

  Mr. Battissen seemed so content in his mocha suit, like a little bundle of pudding, that Claire wanted to scratch his eyes out. Of course, she thought, he probably would win a scratching fight.

  She knew something he didn’t. She knew she was never going to let him get away with this. She didn’t know where she was going to sleep that night. She didn’t know the full range of things she would do, but she was an Andrews and they didn’t give up on things like this. She could outwait Dad, and Dad was the toughest man in Carney, everyone said.

  “I am going to the police,” said Claire.

  “Please do,” said Mr. Battissen, and because he seemed so sure of himself, she yelled it while going out of the gallery. Unfortunately, only his redheaded assistant was there at the time.

  Police headquarters was a skyscraper, One Police Plaza, and it was so big it had its own zip code. It probably had more people than Carney, she thought. They checked her bag and checked her body with a metal detector in a line at a desk. It was a gloomy building, and the fraud squad was located in a large, barn-sized office. A good-looking young man with black curly hair, a bit too hoodlumish for Claire’s taste, came up to her and asked her what her problem was.

  He handed her a pamphlet with the seven most common fraud crimes in the city and asked her to read it and then tell him which one was most like the one that fit the crime perpetrated against her.

  His name was Detective Arthur Modelstein.

  “I am sure, Detective Modelstein, that even in a city as big as New York this crime has got to be unique.”

  “Yeah, well they all are, you know. If it happens to you, it’s special. Match it up as close as you can, okay?” said Detective Modelstein.

  “I’d like to just tell you about it. I can express myself.”

  “It’s not you, lady. These things kind of give us a framework, so you don’t have to go wandering around for an hour. Ninety percent of all the fraud crimes are right there. And the other ten percent are partly there. Okay?”

  “I have been swindled by a supposedly legitimate businessman. Is that routine? Is it normal to be robbed by a supposedly high-class merchant?”

  “Hey, those are the best kind,” said the detective. Claire could have sworn he was glancing down her blouse.

  III

  The foreign officer entered Buckingham Palace through the small arches of the East Gate. A Union Jack flew from the second floor. The Queen was in residence. He did not use the Privy Purse entrance with the room containing the guest book, thus avoiding the waiting rooms. He was not going to wait.

  He was not visiting. He had been summoned to report what had happened in New York City. His name was Jenkins, and he was the one who had received the contradictory messages from Buckingham Palace and relayed them to New York. A servant led him up a grand staircase to a long passageway without windows. A curving skylight almost two stories high gave an eerie white light to the long journey of the two lone men down the polished marble floor. Their feet beat with the sound of timpani.

  They walked past yards and yards of large paintings in massive gilt frames, neither of them bothering to look up at all the outsized heroism and grandeur.

  At the end of the corridor, Jenkins was brought into a large drawing room done in cream white, gold, and crimson. The doors were shut behind him, and he was alone. Large pale drapes shielded the room from what the foreign officer judged were the gallery gardens. He didn’t sit.

  But it was not Her Majesty who entered. It was her secretary, Sir Anthony Witt-Dawlings, who had been dealing with the Foreign Office in this matter on Her Majesty’s behalf. He was in his late fifties, and although his face was fleshy and loose, the folds seemed to hang with furious gravity.

  “There have been some serious problems with Her Majesty’s request. We’re going to need the help of the Americans,” said Jenkins.

  “No. Absolutely not,” said Witt-Dawlings.

  “An American national has been killed in America.”

  “That’s not our problem. That’s not our main concern.”

  “We care very much. America is our most important ally.”

  “Then they’ll have to understand.”

  “Sir, how can we help them understand if the Foreign Office doesn’t understand itself? We don’t understand. What could be so important about a jeweled piece to disharmonize our relationship with the Americans? This is especially puzzling since Her Majesty has already the largest private and public jewelry collection in the world, and according to someone in our office, he believes she already has a similar cellar at Windsor, one no one to his knowledge even bothers to look at.”

  “You were not supposed to discuss this with anyone,” said Her Majesty’s secretary.

  “The confusing and contradictory nature of your instructions, your insistence on withholding information to protect Her Majesty, has led to this difficulty. We had to withdraw our special man from America, with the deepest hopes and expectations that this incident will never be noticed. We are all holding our breath.”

  “You just abandoned the cellar? You didn’t get it?”

  “We are responsible for our international relations.”

  “Disaster,” said Anthony Witt-Dawlings. “Bloody disaster. How could you do that? With men like you, no wonder England struggles on her knees. How dare you? How could you?”

  Desk Officer Jenkins saw Witt-Dawlings redden with rage. Witt-Dawlings was of a type more royal than the Queen, more regimental than the Guards, the sort of Eton graduate who thought the United Kingdom was still the major player in the world. Sir Anthony enjoyed some quite diluted royal blood, and would get his peerage at the end of his service, and would be sure that he had performed some vital service to his nation and his crown by exaggerating the importance of an appointment calendar for Her Majesty.

  But Witt-Dawlings lived in a world that was no more, a little world of palaces and parades, while outside there were riots in the streets, bobbies being shot, a secret service so riddled with foreign agents no reasonable ally would trust it, an army that had all it could do to beat Argentina, and an industrial base that had seen its last dominance in the age of coal and steam.

  Sir Anthony could rage at the Foreign Office, but unless the Crown could somehow enlist the support of the Prime Minister in this affair his angry noise would mean no more than the tunes of a parade that had passed forty years before.

  “We are removing you from this … this quest. We will call upon other services more skilled and more loyal to serve Great Britain in her desperate hours.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Desk Officer Jenkins, and he left Buckingham Palace the way he had entered, back down the long corridor with the footstep-echoing marble walkway. This time he glanced at the portraits, many of them royals, some mounted on horseback, all so terribly important in the days they were painted. He didn’t even know the names of many of them, but was sure the likes of Sir Anthony Witt-Dawlings had memorized them all in first form.

  Her hair was neat. That’s what Artie Modelstein noticed first. She had that neat sort of way about her. A sharp light gray suit with a peach-colored silk shirt that opened never enough revealed the upper part of a slightly freckled chest, which unfortunately was encased in a bra. Her face had those clean magazine sort of features, where everything was right, naturally right. Nothing dramatic. Small upturned nose, not that upturned. Blue eyes, not washed out, and an even open jaw. He wondered what it all would look like in excruciating orgasm. He wondered if she had orgasms.

  The voice, of course, carried a twang that could saw brick. She was from the midwest somewhere. She did not have a place to stay that night.

  These were the things ascertained by Detective Sergeant Arthur Modelstein, Frauds/Jewels, as the pretty lady from the midwest worked on matching her fraud wit
h the list. Another thing to be noted from a glance at the calf of the leg was that she probably had an exceptional body.

  Her name was Claire Andrews and she had a number three, a switch as it was called, whereby one con man promises a lot of money but he needs security, and then he never returns with the security.

  “Where did it happen?” asked Artie, who now only had to fill in a few blanks on his report. She sat beside his desk in the bank of Fraud desks, a proper lady in a paper-cluttered squadroom with unwashed walls and a sense of disordered grayness.

  “It happened at two places. It happened at the bank—”

  “Name …”

  “The International Bank of New York, I think.”

  “Branch?”

  “Madison and Fiftieth.”

  “And how much did you withdraw from the bank?”

  “It wasn’t cash. It was a very, very valuable cellar.”

  “What, the cellar? You dug it up, or what?”

  “No, a saltcellar.”

  “A cellar full of salt?” Detective Modelstein lifted his hands from the keys of his manual typewriter and made a very New York sort of shrug. He was a handsome man with a strong nose and full lips and dark brown eyes that spoke of laughter in bedrooms and places Claire would not want to go but might love to hear about.

  “No. They were fancy, very fancy holders of salt. I imagine they were put on the tables where important people ate.”

  “I think I heard of them,” said Detective Modelstein.

  “Benvenuto Cellini sculpted a fancy one in Paris, I read somewhere, but I don’t know what it looked like. My father’s was two and a half to three feet tall.”

  “How much was it worth?” asked Detective Modelstein, turning the complaint form a notch on his typewriter to get the amount square underneath the keys.

  “I couldn’t imagine my father personally coming into New York to sell it for less than a million dollars. A million dollars. This man, Geoffrey Battissen, tried to give me a check for thirty thousand dollars. My father would never, never have sold it for that. I’m not trying to impress you but …”