“Yes. He was a man of culture at the beginning, anyway, which may be why he used white-face for a disguise that night. Then he was a man of any way he could make a living. Being an exile does that.”
“And you?”
“I suppose women have it better. We can always settle for decorative. I became a dressmaker’s model for a time. Everyone sketched me. I was quite famous for a mystery woman.”
“Still, that must have been a fabulous time.”
Olga leaned her Roman nose hard against a Plexiglas barrier, staring at a mannequin wearing a Russian court dress with a glittering white train as long as a snail’s trail at dawn.
“My brother’s body was broken, I was impoverished and forgotten. Our history was . . . considered trivial and decadent. We went our ways. His were secret and demeaning. I was eventually . . . rediscovered. Asked to teach master classes in Paris, London, New York City. I never saw him again until I came to this”—she sighed, looked around the vast museum-within-a-hotel-casino space—“this proletarian paradise. What hath Lenin wrought? Las Vegas. Anyone can win. Or lose. A people’s paradise.”
“Someone won possession of the Czar Alexander scepter,” Temple heard herself saying. Hypocrite!
Temple felt horribly guilty for playing dumb, but she still needed to determine whether the earlier death was part of a separate plot. Damn Max for putting her in this position! For the first time, she understood Molina’s fury at being sure he was guilty of something and being unable to touch him. And now Max had really become a thief. Was it possible he had killed Andrei? The idea was unthinkable, but Max had been doing a lot of the unthinkable lately. No wonder Temple herself was contemplating the formerly unthinkable.
“Not I,” Olga said in her measured way. “And certainly not poor dead Andrei.”
“Were you working together to get it, though?”
“No. Never working together. Not again. Not dancing together. Not for decades. Working apart to the last.”
She eyed Temple askance through her crepe-paper eyelids, so like an aged serpent’s.
“Someone had enlisted him for this cursed venture. I discovered his participation too late. He never dropped me. Not once. When we danced. Until here. And he did not drop me here either. I dropped him, I suppose. It is the perfect pitiable end to Swan Lake that a ballerina should be the cause of her supporting prince’s fall. Brother, lover, it does not matter. Do not cause any man’s fall, my petite interrogator. It is not something one ever lives down.”
When, Where,
Why For?
Temple fled from the nihilism of Madame Olga to the urbane charms of Count Volpe, even though he reminded her of some rapacious object of Molière’s wit.
He was always ready to oblige a young woman, an attractive young woman, as he told her freely.
“Are there any unattractive young women in your opinion?” Temple asked.
“Not really,” he said, after a moment’s consideration. “Why are you worrying yourself white about these exhibition-area deaths? It was obvious that someone would attempt to steal the scepter and someone did. Quite dramatically. Pity about the acrobat. I don’t believe the thief intended to drop her, although that fact did slow down the pursuit.”
Volpe’s urbane Old World sexism and New World frankness almost undid Temple. She supposed if she had seen an old political order perish she might be somewhat cynical too.
“I’ve just come from identifying the body.”
“My dear girl! Pardon my blasé pose. It’s expected of me. Here. Sit down. Why would the police impose on you for this sad duty?”
“I’m the only one around at the moment who’d seen Shangri-La out of her concealing makeup.”
“Surely the tiger-faced fellow—?” He waved a veined but exquisitely fluid hand.
“The Cloaked Conjuror had never seen her face-to-face.”
“How bizarre, when you think of it. Two strangers performing life-threatening antics on wires and cords. It did lend itself to substitution, didn’t it? Is it certain that the Cloaked Conjuror we saw before the fall was indeed him?”
“He was by the time the police got there.” Temple sat up straighter. “But it may not always have been him, is that what you’re saying?”
Volpe shrugged and produced a dark European cigarette. “If you permit. Nasty habit, but so is being the eyewitness to a violent death. Who’s to say that was the mantled mage himself we saw caught in that cat’s cradle of rope? This theft was a piece of legerdemain gone astray, I think. The man in the catsuit appeared to be improvising, but he did apparently make off with the prize.” Volpe exhaled an elegant stream of blue smoke, scented slightly of licorice. “And why are you so involved, petite chou? Dragging you out to see a dead body! So retrograde. I thought they had television screens for that now.”
Was Volpe probing?
“They do,” Temple said. “But since no one else on the premises had glimpsed her face, I was elected to go to the viewing chamber. A room with a glass viewing window,” she added in answer to his elegantly inquiring eyebrows, which reminded her of something. Someone?
“I wish I had seen her! She was an amazing performer, sinewy as one of the big cats yet delicate. Do the police have any idea who her almost rescuer was? He does appeal, doesn’t he, to the dramatic sense? Part rogue, part rescuer, anonymous. That sort of swashbuckling type went out with the old-time movie stars, didn’t it? Fairbanks. Flynn. The Scarlet Pimpernel in literature. Zorro. Irresistible to women.”
“I imagine that would be hard to live with.”
“Who said anything about living with? I meant loving with. Young women today are so distressingly practical.”
Temple felt her lightly freckled skin flush. Why did she think she could domesticate the wild Max anyway, or even want to?
“I see his attractions are not lost on you. A fine hero for an opera—no, too ponderous. A ballet. He certainly had the moves up there. I almost thought he’d save her; I’m afraid he did too. It’s a remarkable thief who interrupts a clever caper to save the innocent bystanders. Or to try to. I hope the scepter is worth it to him.”
“I do too,” Temple muttered fervently. She fidgeted under Volpe’s keen dark eyes, then struck back.
“I think he was hired help.”
“Really? Not a dashing entrepreneur, then, but some coarse theft-for-hire thug?”
She wouldn’t let Volpe yank her chain any more. Time to turn the tables. If he was so blasé but observant, he might know something she could use. He had confessed a weakness for young attractive women, after all, and Temple could attract when she felt like it.
She smiled and nodded. “You’ve said exactly what I was wondering. The scepter isn’t just some valuable artifact, it’s a one-of-a-kind catch. Whoever wanted it doesn’t need to sell it, or even show it off. It’s a trophy. Who’d want it for that?”
“I would.”
“You, Count, the toast of Vanity Fair’s photo layouts?”
“Theoretically, of course. I am a penniless aristocrat, I’m afraid, and could not even hire a pickpocket. I might, however, be tempted to by the Russian government’s current scrabbling for money and recognition over the graves of my ancestors. Of its crawling like what you call a Johnny-come-lately to exploit the culture and glory that was Russia before the anarchists and Bolsheviks and drunken peasant party functionaries ravished its heritage and weakened its influence in the world.”
“White Russians still have such strong feelings?”
“You Americans have felt the first wave of anarchy in your own, sea-bound land. Russia has always been the large, unmanageable brother of western and eastern Europe, the not-quite-tamed lumbering bear. We produced more art, music, literature, and grandeur than we have ever been credited for. The Czar Alexander scepter is a symbol of that, yes?”