Alch was watching her wheels turn way too carefully.
“What could a young Asian woman do to be wanted internationally?” Temple asked.
“She defected fifteen years ago from a mainland Chinese company of acrobats touring in Spain. Was never seen since. Until now. Name of Hai Ling.”
Temple would have gasped but she held her breath instead. That would explain Shangri-La’s on- and off-stage makeup disguise. She was a political defector using her acrobatic prowess in a new career, magician.
That would not explain why this wanted woman who apparently had no love for Temple, sight unseen, had shown Temple her true face on the floor of the exhibition hall only two days before her death.
Who, What, Why?
Okay.
The Synth was big, bad, and in this caper up to its vanishing cream in perfidy.
Temple knew that. She also knew, somewhere deep in her foreshortened bones, that more was going on here at the New Millennium than Synth games.
Andrei-Art had died first, during a possible attempt to steal the scepter.
That meant that someone had torpedoed his scheme as artfully as Max’s. Not just anyone. If she believed in Max, at least as a wily super-criminal—and she did, until death or disinterest did them part—his role was the coda of this operation, not the prelude.
Speaking in musical terms, could Olga Kirkov have used her disabled and disowned younger brother to fulfill a long-delayed lust for a priceless piece of her White Russian past?
And what about Count Volpe, an urbane aristocratic gigolo living on the decadent Western cult of personality? He had consulted himself into the trivial notoriety of the Vogue and Vanity Fair party-photo pages, a grave that would ultimately be unmarked. Unless he recovered the Czar Alexander scepter for his family, his past, his legacy.
Then there was Dimitri, the government functionary nobody much liked. And his big guard dogs too. Two. What couldn’t the three of them accomplish if up to no good . . . up to no Boris Godunov? Temple imagined that the New Russia was no more immune to the lure of Big Bucks than the old imperialist model.
So. Who had planned what would have been a spectacular distraction? Up in the sky! Look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s super-destruction—!
Had Max not been there on Synth business, the Cloaked Conjuror, Shangri-La, the two black panthers, and Hyacinth, the performing housecat, would have all plummeted to their deaths.
In that chaos, with everybody present focusing on the carnage on the floor, any ground-bound predator could have easily nipped the scepter.
Max had admitted that he’d prepared the Lexan cover for lift-off. Someone else might have observed his operation and planned to take advantage of it.
Had the scenario gone as planned, the crushed body of Max Kinsella, aka Mask Guy, would have joined everyone else on the killing floor.
But the plan had gone wrong, thanks to the hypersensitive sixth sense and super-physical strength of said Max Kinsella.
Temple paused to smile. Even when she was mad at him, she knew he was a hero. Her secret smile faded. It was hard to be a hero’s helpmate, was all.
And . . . there was something Max wasn’t telling her, as usual. He had gone very vague when she’d asked what had kept the leopards from plunging to cat heaven sixty feet below.
He’d had nothing to do with it. Couldn’t have.
And what the heck had happened to Hyacinth anyway? After she’d left the wide-load tracks in Max’s back? Shouldn’t she have been DOA on the floor far below, along with her mistress?
Nobody had asked Temple to ID a cat.
Not even her own.
Hmmm.
Since she didn’t think interrogating Midnight Louie, wherever he was, would do her one whit of good, she decided to start with the wandering Russians.
Madame Olga was to be found wandering the lower levels of the installation, a study in melancholy. The exhibition was roped off now, of course, but it was not the scene of the death and insiders were still allowed access.
“Such a pity,” Madame Olga said when she saw Temple catching up to her. “Such glory. All fallen.”
Temple eyed the fittings from the Czars’s private apartments; exotic woods inlaid with mother-of-pearl and green-veined malachite and capped with gleaming gold ormolu decorations.
“So exquisite,” Madame Olga murmured. “Hard to believe that anyone lived like that. Our Swan Lake tutus were real swans’ down. Genuine diamonds studded our tiaras. Our strained muscles and bleeding toes were our own, however. We last dancers of the Old Regime. Oh, not myself, Miss Barr. I was too young for that. But the tradition lingered on. Even today, I am watched. Not that they can stop me. Even though I defected twenty years ago, and it is now legal, old habits are stubborn and they fear bad press. They fear an ancient of days and dance like myself. Mighty Mother Russia, who feared no one, not even Napoleon! Now my home is a bankrupt republic and its rulers are the Russian Mob, not the liberated mob of the people. Bullies will always be bullies, only some will be refined.”
“Is wrong ever refined?”
Madame Olga finally glanced at Temple. “Perhaps not. So. My brother, poor wounded swan, is dead. He was poetry in Swan Lake once. Now I could not knit a missing wing for him to fly one short distance with.”
Temple instantly recognized the fairy tale of the maiden indentured to weave wings for her seven brothers before they were turned into . . . what? The proletariat?
“Someone,” Temple said, “wanted you to help steal the scepter for your brother’s sake.”
“Ah. A young woman with imagination.” Madame Olga lowered her imperial receding chin to focus on Temple’s face instead of the glittering artifacts surrounding them. “And a knowledge of folk tales. Yet you look so . . . Paris Hilton. Perhaps it is just an American affectation of corrupted innocence.”
Temple cursed her bleached blond locks for the eighth time. Goldilocks was not a useful role model for modern women. Nor was Scarlett.
“It’s the look of someone who wants an answer,” she said. “There was more to your brother’s fall from grace than you let on.”
The old woman pinched the top of her Roman nose as if clearing her brain of blood. Strong nose, weak chin. Always a deceptive physiognomy in a woman. Temple tended to believe the nose, not the chin. Some of the feistiest breeds of lapdogs and the boldest belly dancers were zilch in the chin department. The recessive chin, in fact, was a snare and delusion for men who needed to think they were in charge. Her own was neither leading nor retreating, but just right, like Baby Bear’s bed. Which was still a bear’s bailiwick and very dangerous to be caught sleeping in.
Hmmm, speaking about being caught sleeping in . . .
Madame Olga laughed. “You have not lived in a totalitarian state, ma petite. Your face is a mirror of your emotions. I read guilt and it will cloud your judgment.”
“You called me ‘ma petite.’ ”
“Are you not petite?”
“Did you live in France for a time?”
“Mais oui. We all did. We Imperial Russian entertainers spurned, our artistry despised by the New Order. We fled to France, always a haven for the artistically disenfranchised. Your Negro musicians, for instance, and dancers. Josephine Baker, the divine Afrique. Erté, the gay blade of Art Deco designers. My poor brother took a pseudonym from him.”
“ ‘Art Deckle,’ a play on the Art Deco style. I always think of the paper when I hear the name. Deckle edged.”