I wasn’t about to go to an emergency room and sit for the rest of the night. Nursing my hand in my lap, I went north to Ukrainian Village, to Rivka Darling’s home. If Karen Buckley had ridden the L back down here, Kystarnik would have found her easily.
A Hummer was parked in front of Rivka’s building, engine running. The driver flicked up the brights as I went passed, looking to see who was on the street. I pretended not to notice, although they probably had my license plate in their files.
I called Rivka on my cell phone. We had a short, annoying conversation. She wouldn’t say one way or another if Karen was there, even when I said that the Artist’s life was at risk.
“You weren’t in the club tonight,” I said, “but a gang of serious thugs attacked her at the end of the performance. She managed to get away, but if she’s with you, you need to call the cops. One of the creeps is in front of your building, so if she’s there, don’t let her leave without a police escort. If she doesn’t want the cops, call me. Do you hear?”
“Karen can look after herself. She doesn’t need you.”
I guessed from the quiver in Rivka’s voice that the Artist hadn’t shown up. I drove to my own home, where I looked at my right hand under my piano light. The fragment was just visible below the skin. I found a bottle of peroxide in my pantry cupboard and poured it into a mixing bowl. Tweezers and a needle, which took a little more finding-I don’t often mend clothes or dig out splinters. When I had my kit assembled, I went back to the living room and stuck my hand in the peroxide.
“Courage, Victoria,” I said.
I’m right-handed, and digging around for metal splinters with my left was a challenge that brought me close to the screaming point. I was beginning to think an emergency room was the answer when Jake knocked at my front door.
“We just finished rehearsing, and I saw your light,” he said. “You interested in a nightcap?”
“I’m interested in someone with long, delicate fingers and a surgeon’s deft touch.”
I held out my hand, which was bleeding pretty heavily from my bungled probing.
“Vic! Blood makes me throw up.”
I thought he was joking, but his face actually did have a greenish sheen.
“I’ll rinse it off,” I said, “if you’ll take this splinter out for me. Please! I’ll even open my last bottle of Torgiano for you.”
He made a face but took the tweezers from me.
“You go rinse this off until it’s not bleeding,” he said, “or you’ll be removing lasagna from it along with the blood.”
When I got myself cleaned up, he clamped my hand between his knees as if it were a cello. He was sweating, but he had the chip out fairly fast. He turned his head while I wrapped the hand in a towel.
“What is this?” He held the chip under the light.
“A metal fragment. A palette knife exploded in my hand.”
“A palette… No, don’t explain. I’m happier not knowing. And I don’t know about you, but I need something stronger than red wine right now.”
I got out a bottle of Longrow. It was a small-batch single malt that my most important client, Darraugh Graham, had brought me from Edinburgh. It went down like liquid gold. By the time I’d had my second glass and followed Jake into my bedroom, I’d almost forgotten the throbbing in my hand.
28 Mourning Coffee
When my cell phone rang four hours later, at first I incorporated it into my sleep. I was in Kiev, and the Body Artist, painted like a Russian Easter egg, was madly pulling ropes to ring church bells all across the city. The ringing stopped, then started again almost at once.
“I know the Bottesini,” Jake muttered. “I don’t have to rehearse it.”
“Neither do I,” I said, but I got up and found my phone, in the pocket of the jeans I’d dropped on the floor last night.
My call log showed the same person had called three times. The phone was chirruping to tell me I had new voice mail, new text messages. r u there? ansir!
My head was too blurry from a short night on top of a gun battle to call back. I stumbled, shivering, down the hall to the bathroom. Seven in the morning, still dark. I didn’t think winter would ever end.
I stood under the shower, washing sleep out of my face, while my phone rang again from the towel shelf. On the caller’s fifth try, I answered before it rolled over to voice mail.
“Who is this?” It was a husky whisper.
My least favorite conversational gambit. “V. I. Warshawski. Who is this?”
“I… Clara. I’m supposed to be at mass in fifteen minutes. I need to see you. There’s a coffee shop on Blue Island a block from the school.”
A truck or bus roaring by made it hard to hear her; I shouted over the noise that I’d be there in twenty minutes. Jake didn’t wake up as I banged drawers and doors open and shut, pulling on sweaters, jeans, my practical heavy boots. For a perverse moment, I wanted to yank the blankets off, freeze his toes, force him to wake up, but he’d done surgery on me that turned him green, he’d spent the night, he’d made me feel less alone and more beautiful than I usually do.
My right hand was swollen, the palm a purply brown. When I couldn’t get a glove over it, I stuffed it into an oven mitt, grabbed my coat and gun, and ran down the back stairs to the alley, where I’d parked last night. Once I was in the car, I put the Smith & Wesson on the seat, under my coat, wondering how well I’d aim if I had to shoot left-handed.
Lake Shore Drive is a parking lot this time of day, but the side streets weren’t much better-parents dropping kids off at school blocked most of the roads. It took half an hour to reach the coffee shop, a franchise of one of the big chains, on Blue Island. I didn’t see Clara Guaman at first and thought she’d gotten fed up with waiting. However, while I stood in line for the espresso I urgently needed, Clara emerged from the shadows at the back.
“I thought you’d never get here. I have to get to class before they miss me.”
“I’ll walk up with you. We can talk on the way.”
“No! I don’t want anyone to see you with me. Come over here where it’s dark.”
She headed toward the back, to an alcove near the doors to the toilets. I collected my drink and joined her. This was the only coffee shop close to her school, and it was filled with kids on their way to class, so I didn’t think she’d be particularly anonymous. At least so far no one had called out to her.
Once we were in the alcove, she couldn’t seem to get to the point. She fiddled with her phone and kept peering around the corner to see who was standing in line.
“What’s going on, Clara?” I tried to keep irritability out of my voice, but my short night made me not only foggy but grumpy.
“Did you go to-did you ask-were you talking about Allie with Prince Rainier?”
“No,” I said. “I went up to Tintrey’s headquarters in Northfield yesterday. Did Rainier come around?”
Like so many chains, this place had overheated the milk for the cappuccino, which ruins the taste. Caffeine is caffeine, though. I poured some into the lid to cool and swallowed it, wincing at the bitterness.
“Did you go up there to spy on Allie? Why can’t you let her and Nadia rest in peace?”
“The soldier who’s accused of shooting Nadia lost his whole unit in Iraq. I was trying to find out if Alexandra had died in the same attack.”
“Why do you care?” she said in a fierce whisper.
“I’m trying to understand where Nadia and Chad Vishneski’s lives connected. It seemed to me that Iraq was a place-”
“Leave Allie alone. What don’t you understand about that?”
“Everything. Why can’t I talk about Alexandra?”