Fallen Sparrow (11 page)

She said, “I made my vow then, Kit. I’d be as good as your father was. No matter what, a friend was a friend.”

He didn’t get it; he refused it. He said brusquely, “I’m afraid there’s little chance for me to be a friend to your Toni.” It was enough subject change.

She said grayly, “It might be better if you didn’t.”

He waited but there was no explanation.

Her voice was pitying. “She’s had a bad time, Kit. It’s never been roses for her—as for others.” They were both thinking of Barby but he didn’t understand the bleakness of her mouth. She hadn’t always felt that way of Barby. “You’ll have to make allowances for Toni.”

They might have conjured her by speaking. They hadn’t heard the bell. Sable, smoky hair, saint’s face, silken legs. She was rapid crossing the room and she didn’t see Kit. “Oh, Det!”

Her voice broke as she saw him. The fear went out of her leaving her waxen but it had gone into Det’s voice. “Toni!”

The girl smiled then, a tiny, polite smile. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.” But her eyes didn’t reject Kit now; they were almost shy on him. “I thought I’d beg a cup of tea before taking the bus.”

Tea hadn’t impelled her entrance, her crying throat. Det pretended it had. The heartiness was daubed over the fear which made rigid her body. “Of course, my dear.” She pushed the bell. “You must be frozen. You remember Kit McKittrick?”

“But certainly.” And she gave him the shy smile. She’d come around overnight. He could take it but he’d never believe it. It didn’t click with her finality yesterday afternoon.

They wanted him to go away but he misunderstood. Another highball didn’t hurt him. He talked ranch inanities; he asked gossip questions of the set. Det answered him, leaden beneath her assumption of normality. Toni sipped tea and smiled but there were blue shadows smudged beneath her eyes.

He exclaimed from his watch, “Six! I’ll drop you off, Miss Donne.”

Det waited with stiff eyes.

Toni accepted, “That’s good of you.” Det spoke without inflection. “You might as well get a lift home, Toni. Looks as if it’s turned nasty again.”

There was steely snow falling. Kit helped the girl into the cab. She said, “Riverside Drive at Eighty-third.” The cab plowed into the whirring snow. “It is good of you to give me this ride.”

“I’m delighted.” He smiled on her the way a Park Avenue gallant would. “Only sorry I couldn’t have given you lunch yesterday.”

Her eyelashes were long and black covering the circles. “I am sorry,” she stated. “I was in a bad temper. You will forgive me?”

He laughed. “I’m surprised you’d even speak to me after the sturm und drang I kicked up.” He was confidential. “I was so furious I went out and got pie-eyed—in broad daylight.”

She echoed the laugh faintly. “I will make amends.” She was beautiful; she wasn’t real and beautiful as Barby was; she was no more real and no less exquisite than a collector’s item or one flake of snow. He was abashed at his sudden warmth in the emotions; he hadn’t trusted her; he didn’t now, but he admitted it wouldn’t be difficult for her to reverse all of his preconceptions.

“Make amends by dinner tonight?” he suggested.

“I am sorry.” She laid on his wrist a small glove, a French glove of white kid; women wore them when he was a child. “I’m really sorry this time. We are having friends for dinner.” Her eyes were enormous. “But why do you not join us?”

“Barge in on your party?” He began refusal.

“Please.” One finger lay more deeply; he could feel warmth through white glacé. Her face was sad. “We do not entertain with formality. Not any longer. It is not a party, merely a few friends. It would not upset anything.”

He told the driver, “Wait.” The small house was of soiled gray stone; it had been one of the fine places when he lived off Riverside. He and Louie used to walk past on Sundays when they were kids, try to see what kind of furnishings the rich had. The façade was shabby now. He went into the lower hall with Toni.

She said, “There is no elevator. We are second floor, the front. We have a nice bay window.” She put her hand in his. “You will come?”

“What time?”

“At eight.” From the steps she smiled. “We dress.”

He went back through the snow to the cab. “Park Avenue. Take the transverse.” He wasn’t getting mixed up with a femme. This was clicking. It was his business to find out what Toni Donne knew. But even he couldn’t rationalize it as business when he stopped the driver on Broadway, and sent around two dozen of the reddest roses to the girl he didn’t trust.

Kit breathed, “The cups!” He didn’t say it aloud. The others were seated at the table when he arrived, when Toni led him to the dining-room. His startled eyes met other eyes and his glazed wisely. The Prince was a bird of prey; the smile under his hawk nose was evil; the claw fingers on the gold knob of his cane were evil. “You like my goblets, yes?”

Kit said, the way any Park Avenue fellow should say it, “God! They’re breath-taking.”

But all were still watching him, Christian Skaas, no expression on the hairless disk of his face, sadness in the chocolate holes of his eyes; José with sulky scorn, Toni wearing inscrutable gravity. She had red roses against her small breasts, the color deeper than the dark crimson of her dress. Even Det was watching, and she was more gray and more tired than she had been this afternoon. It was she who broke the spider spell. “Prince Felix will have to tell you their history, Kit. It’s a fascinating one.”

The oaken table was too massive for the box-like dining stall. Toni served from a great silver tureen. “Fascinating,” the Prince hissed.

Kit had believed it at first but only for that moment. There weren’t six cups any longer. He turned the one at his plate by its delicate gold stem, frescoed in precious gems. He turned it to see the base. The moonstone. And he smiled secretly. They’d not seen the true Babylon goblets. These replicas were exquisitely exact but the artisans hadn’t known. They had embedded the large jewel at the base; the originals would not sit steadily on a table. They were stirrup cups, the wine would spill unless the golden goblet was emptied. The copyists didn’t know; they’d only seen one mutilated one, the stem bent, the base carried away. They’d re-created from that and research. But they hadn’t known about the position of the great jewels.

He understood now. It was the cups. He’d been an ass not to translate that part of the dialect, to think cops meant cops. Louie had been killed because he, Kit, had endangered him in telling him of the golden goblets. Louie had been killed because he knew too much and doubtless tried to find out more. Toni had brought Louie here and he’d goggled; he cried out, “Where did these come from?”

Kit had fact of his immediate danger now. Toni hadn’t changed to him; her orders had been changed. She’d been sent to bring him in and she’d done it with trickery, with femininity. He wondered if he’d get out of this place tonight. He would. The small gun was cold in his pocket. He would without shooting. Det was here. And Det wasn’t mixed up with this den of thieves, at least she didn’t know that she was. Doubtless she was trying to repay a relic of kindness out of her hideous long ago in Paris.

José was handling his goblet in tenderness and unconscious imitation. Kit saw the ruby. He said as in surprise, “Yours isn’t like mine.” It was a game. They displayed for him; the Prince, the diamond; Det, the sapphire; Toni, the emerald; Dr. Skaas, the luminous pearl. These lozenge-cut stones actually looked real.

If they were genuine, even these imitations were worth a king’s ransom. The originals were without price. And they belonged to Kit. War, the now almost forgotten Spanish Civil War, had laid the treasure in Kit’s hand. But it wasn’t their worth that was of import to him. That element had nothing to do with the degradation he had accepted from the Wobblefoot and his master, the little man who fancied himself an aesthete.

It was difficult to explain in terms of the Kit who’d embraced the new civilization. It was difficult to remember that once there was a Black Irish youth with passion for truth and justice and beauty, for the integrity of spiritual values. That was all hogwash now. The little man had conquered, as even in defeat he would continue to conquer. He had brutalized even the remnant who had thought the spirit could remain impregnable.

But there once had existed that youth, and it had been a glorious jest to walk off with the Babylon goblets, to determine that these should not be caressed by bloody hands, not while I, Sir Christopher, am their protector with this shining rifle and flashing bomb.

He shouldn’t have left poor Gottlieb there. They’d probably tortured and killed him when they found him in the cave, knocked out and trussed up like a fowl, the mutilated goblet on his chest. But it was Sir Christopher then, not the new Kit. He’d thought he was playing the chivalrous game when he left Gottlieb behind to tell, to describe him, give him a name. He didn’t expect the fortunes of war, plus an old crate that belonged to the early Wright era, to deliver himself into their hands.

Despite all, he hadn’t given over the Babylon cups. They’d been safely stashed away months before. And after the knight’s devotion to his fine spiritual values faltered, after the brave Sir Christopher was reduced to a degraded slobber, after the cups were no more than an old and evil dream, the will to live could not die. That one small value remained, that lower animal value, to resist extermination. He refused the secret of the cups because were it told, he would die. And he didn’t want to die.

The abstract truth of beauty had not died because he had wanted to live. The leader didn’t get the cups. He would never get the cups. By now it was neither a matter of ideal nor of existence. It was hate. Cold stone hate. He could hate as the barbarian and his worshipers. He could retaliate as they. The little man who had deified himself until the thwarting of his least wish was, to himself, as sacrilege, could pout and scream and rant and be sucked across the borderline of sanity in impotent rage; he’d never lay eyes nor obscene fingers on the Babylon goblets. The ghost of a Black Irish crusader he would never see had power to thwart him.

Toni’s soft voice came through past and future to present. “Your plate, Kit.” There was uneasiness in her eyes. She’d been saying it over and over.

He set the false cup away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.” He took the soup plate and he laughed, a good hearty healthy laugh. He wasn’t afraid of anyone present. He could handle them without turning a hair. He would if they threatened, if they even threatened to threaten. He didn’t even need a gun for underlings; that would be saved for the top. And after brutalized decency, created by brutalized indecency, had conquered its Frankenstein, he would retrieve those lovely vessels of legend. Until then they were safe.

Dr. Skaas’ accents were thick as the bouillabaisse. “You were thinking of something afar.” They weren’t German accents; they were accents overlaid on accents. They were not of the inflections of a learned man. But Norway’s Nobel chemist could have come up from the peasantry. He’d ask Ab. Ab was educated.

Kit grimaced brazenly at the old man. “Yeah, I was thinking of something else. “This bouillabaisse a noble dish is—A sort of soup, or broth or brew.” His black eyes laughed up at the girl. “I was thinking about Toni.”

She looked startled and for a moment bright color lay under the pallor of her delicate face.

José Andalusian made a sound into his stew. Kit turned on him. “Are you insinuating, sir, that Miss Toni isn’t worth thinking about?”

The Spanish youth was thin-skinned. Immediately he angered. “I do not say that.”

Kit glared. “You’d better not.” He made a like noise to his dish, brandished a bread stick. “When a girl is as beautiful as Toni Donne and can cook as one divine—” He slurped from his spoon.

She was embarrassed and annoyed. The color had gone, all but one small circlet on each cheek.

Kit proceeded blatantly, ignoring Det’s cold warning. “Prince, I congratulate you on your choice of a granddaughter. If she had been personally selected for you by the Gestapo you couldn’t have done better.” He had to return to the food and with quickness. It had never occurred to him that Toni might not be a granddaughter but he’d drawn some blood on that. José was giving away, his eyes skitting wildly from the old man to the girl. She said nothing; but the Prince’s hawk beak narrowed and his eyes were mean as a civet’s.

Kit gave them all a good blank look and then sponged his mouth with vigor. “Did I say something out of order?” He appealed to Det. “Shouldn’t I have mentioned the Gestapo maybe? I thought you could snicker at them now you’ve all escaped to safe American shores.” He rolled his eyes at the circle. “Good God, you’re not still afraid of them here in New York, are you? They can’t get away with anything in this country. The Finest could take them on without assistance but the boys have plenty of help in the F.B.I.” He might as well throw a scare into them. “Or don’t you know about the F.B.I.?”

Toni spoke as if Kit were a show-off child in need of repressing. “José, you will pour the wine if you please.”

Kit refused repression. He took up his goblet and waved it in mock awe. “You mean you actually drink out of these museum pieces?”

The old man’s smile was haughty. “I am the Prince Felix Andrassy.”

Kit whistled mock apology. And he said with wicked innocence, “What I’d like to know is how you smuggled these out. From what I’ve heard the boss has an eye out to collecting treasure.” He was striking blood over and again. He could see it trickle. The Spaniard filled Kit’s glass with the pride of an aristocrat serving a commoner. The wine wasn’t up to the receivers.

Det was afraid for him. She couldn’t know why her fears were valid but she was sensitive to the birds of prey watching him. She asked, “Wouldn’t you like to hear the story of the cups, Kit?”

“I would.” He smacked his lips and set down the moonstone. It didn’t teeter.

The Prince stated, not simply, but with the pomp and pride of an ancient regime, “These are the Babylon goblets.” There was unheard fanfare trumpeting his statement.

Kit made up a look composed of ignorance and disinterest, with a faint smattering of curiosity.