The lawmen at the door were stone.
At the conference table, the elderly White Russians made a pair of rather frail mated doves. (And why had they concealed their obviously long-standing relationship until now?)
Temple had a few answers and they weren’t pleasant, but she still had so many more questions that had to be answered before anybody here could move on from last week’s events. So she spoke again.
“There was one person, already on the scene, who could substitute for Andrei. The perfect solution to the problem. So obvious yet hidden that only one careless moment was needed to give someone the awful answer to a criminal dilemma that led to grand theft and disaster and death.”
Randy looked up at Temple with clear, disbelieving eyes. He glanced at Olga and Ivan. He saw where she was going.
“Shangri-La!” he said. “That twirling stunt right on top of the onion dome! She was perfectly positioned to knock off the scepter and bungee cord out of there. Of course, her performing career would be over—”
“As Shangri-La,” Temple pointed out. “She already was a conundrum, as disguised as the Cloaked Conjuror in her own way. She could always have reinvented herself.”
“Still,” Randy said. “On a Las Vegas level? Comebacks are almost impossible.”
Temple winced on Max’s behalf but Randy was right.
“Why would she do it?” Wayans wanted to know. “This is a major venue. The money is princely.”
Against their venal speculations, Olga’s sobs were soft and continuous.
Temple looked over her shoulder at Alch. “Detective, would you mind telling everyone who Shangri-La really was.”
He stepped forward. “Sure. Hai Ling. Member of a Chinese tumbling troupe that defected here in Las Vegas several years ago. They do that. Artistic types from Communist countries. Want the artistic freedom of the West.” He stepped back into position at the doors.
“We defected,” Olga said, her quiet voice clogged with tears. “Ivan. Myself. Andrei. All years ago, when that was the only way to leave Russia by free will. Andrei, he became drunk on Western freedom and destroyed his career, almost himself. Ivan and I met in Paris while I toured with the Russian Ballet. When Andrei and I defected, Ivan joined me in helping other defectors. After the Cold War ended, Russians could come and go, but not the Chinese or the North Koreans.”
“We helped them,” Ivan said, “the younger generation of defectors. Covertly, of course. We didn’t want to cause international incidents. With Hai Ling, she had family back home she feared for. She wanted to work anonymously. We helped her in the beginning. Later, we’d lost touch. We didn’t know her stage name. We didn’t know Shangri-La was Hai Ling until she approached us, very discreetly, after we were all here preparing for the exhibition and show opening.”
“She thanked us,” Olga said, “for helping make possible her participation here. For helping to ensure her continuing career, so that she could perform as a star at this magnificent hotel in America . . . and because of us she was here to be coerced into becoming a thief and to die in a stupid accident caused by such a petty motivation as greed!
“She told us she’d been careless,” Olga went on bitterly. “She was so eager to see the exhibition space going up she darted into the area without her constant concealing makeup on. The area was filled with workmen. How could she have known that our masters immediately spotted her. Defectors—their own or other countries’—were their business. They knew her instantly.”
Temple was as speechless as everyone in the room. She had thought that only she remembered the few moments a barefaced Shangri-La had shown herself. And it wasn’t due to bedazzlement at the White Russian exhibition, or any other naive girl reasons she had given to her long-ago sponsors.
It was because she had wanted to taunt Temple. She was already a thief, she had brazenly taken Temple’s Tiffany opal-and-diamond ring from Max onstage. She was no shrinking lotus to quail at someone’s suggestion that she steal a priceless artifact. She’d had some unsolved connection to designer drug dealers. She could turn on her persona as easily as she could spin on a bungee cord, and probably would, for a big enough cut.
Temple could have mentioned all that, but she didn’t want to expose a personal life that led right back to the Mystifying Max Kinsella and the real thief of the scepter.
And she didn’t want to disillusion a pair of heroic old people who revered their heritage and probably regarded Hai Ling as a foster daughter.
Hai Ling, aka Shangri-La, had likely laughed up her scalloped sleeve when she realized that showing herself to Temple had earned her a cut in a major heist. She at least had the grace, or balls, to make her former sponsors feel they had done a good thing all those years ago, and that she was an exemplary graduate of their school for defectors, and someone worth mourning.
Temple would leave her those two true mourners.
Pete Wayans was disrupting the silence by see-sawing a pencil on the lever of his fingers, one end and the other tapping against the tabletop like a metronome.
“So, just who are these ‘masters’ behind all this? As far as I know, these people don’t have ‘masters’ anymore.”
“You don’t know much,” Randy muttered into his double chin.
“Exactly,” Temple said. “Who was putting the pressure on everyone to dance to their tune?”
Ivan eyed Randy. “Sometimes ‘masters’ are czars, or political functionaries, or CEOs. And even if one defects and is safe in another country—or one’s family fled decades ago—the pull of power is a long and deadly one. You have your own masters to account to, Mr. Wayans, and you know it.”
Pete cleared his throat and choked off the pencil.
“And sometimes,” Temple said, “masters are mobsters.”
“Wait a minute here!” Pete Wayans stood up. “That is such an old charge for enterprises in Las Vegas. Maybe the mob was a factor in founding Las Vegas. Maybe it ruled the roost in the fifties. And the sixties.”
“And seventies,” Detective Alch put in.
The other, unidentified man at the doors was unnervingly quiet.
“The mob has gone corporate,” Randy said, “for the most part. It has to answer to . . . folks. It would never endorse a high-scale heist at a major hotel. Bad for business. Everybody’s business.”
“Agreed,” Temple said. “But I’m talking about the Russian mob.” She smiled at Boris and Natasha, who did not smile back.
Ivan pulled Olga off her chair and to the floor.
Wayans gulped, grabbed Randy’s arm, and pulled him down too.
The men at the door remained at attention.
Boris and Natasha pulled two ugly black guns with nasty long barrels that Temple didn’t know what to call.
She did know enough to punch one button on the computer keyboard in front of her that was set to operate the gray flannel blinds that wore mirror shades on the other side.
The sound of them remotely being opened was enough to draw Boris and Natasha’s attention in the same split second that the blinds reflected an infinity of Fontana brothers in off-white ice cream suits with black Berettas, all in copyrighted James Bond pose, legs planted and guns aimed and braced in both hands at Boris and Natasha’s most precious bodily organs.
It was an infinitely split-screen stand-off.
Boris and Natasha lowered the firepower as the Fontana brothers to the ninth degree circled in on them like well-tailored sharks.
Dimitri sat still. “I am not a defector,” he said, “but I am requesting the protective custody of the U.S. government. These are my guards, but not my bodyguards. I have been their prisoner since arriving in this country. They are mobsters intent on robbing the exhibition and I would like them extradited to my country for . . . proper punishment.”
Temple sank onto her chair, her knees shaking, as the Fontana brothers wafted the two Russian mobsters to the doors, which opened to reveal the boys in buff (officers of the LVMPD) ready to cuff ’em, read ’em their Mirandas, and cart them away.