I felt as if I’d been standing there for some time, unable to tear my eyes away from the awful sight, but it was probably only for a few seconds. I was pulled back to reality by the tiniest of sounds: a very slight creak over my head, as if someone, upstairs, had shifted his weight slightly. I stood very quietly, then heard it again, this time closer to the stairs. I ran across the room, unlocked the front door, and dashed into the street, footsteps now pounding down the stairs behind me.
I flagged a cab and leapt in.
“Bit of a hurry, lady?” the driver said. “Where to?”
The truth was, I didn’t have a clue. I got him to take me to the Plaza Hotel, thinking in my overheated brain that it would be unthinkable for anyone to kill me in the Plaza Hotel, and ran into the lobby, cutting through it and out the side door by the Oyster Bar in my idea of a diversionary tactic. Then for an hour or two, I just tried to blend into the crowd.
An observation I would make about New York is that you can always tell the natives from the visitors. I don’t know what it is, a way of walking, perhaps, or more likely a style of dressing. Moira would know. She has the kind of job that requires knowing what’s in and what’s not. Mine isn’t, which is just as well, because under normal circumstances I wouldn’t know haute mode from a hot fudge sundae. I just know that New Yorkers look like New Yorkers, and the rest of us don’t.
Whatever the reason, I felt that I stuck out like a sore thumb. I’d brought only a change of underwear, a cosmetics bag with a few essentials, and a clean shirt, which I changed into in the ladies’ room in the Trump Tower, the elegant sound of a grand piano and a waterfall tinkling in the background. Then I bought a New York Yankees baseball cap from a street vendor, and pulled it over my head. I wore my sunglasses even though it was now raining. Haute mode indeed.
I realized after a couple of hours of this that I really had to pull myself together and think what I would do. A baseball cap and sunglasses would hardly be sufficient cover, and obviously I had to go somewhere. Home was my first choice. There was one small problem with that. I knew I’d left my business card with Edmund Edwards, now deceased. I tried visualizing the desk again, to see if I could recall if the card was where I left it. I couldn’t remember, the rivers of blood blotting everything else out. If it was still there, and the police found it, I could be implicated in the murder. Even if I could talk my way out of that one, the Spider—if indeed it was he who had killed the old man, and I was quite convinced that he had—would have my name too. Perhaps the Spider already knew it, I thought, from Molesworth Cox. They were known to be discreet, but it wouldn’t take much to read the list of auction attendees at the front desk. I’d done it myself more than once. But of course he knew it, I thought. He’d found the shop already: Who else could have killed Lizard?
The upshot was I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go home. I knew that the police, Rob in particular, would try to protect me as a witness to this horrific event. But the Spider, I was quite sure, was a truly brutal and determined killer. And not just brutal, I thought, although he was that. I thought of the pathetic body of Lizard, hands tied behind his back, looking as if he’d begged his executioner to spare him. And Edwards, a shortsighted, rather befuddled old man, whose throat had been slit with a ceremonial knife. To my mind, the Spider was someone who enjoyed killing. He knew where I worked, and could easily find out where I lived. Even if he worked alone, which I very much doubted, the police couldn’t protect me forever. That pretty well left me one destination, if I hoped to figure out enough about the situation in which I found myself to extricate myself from it. There was, however, one stop along the way. I raced to the curb and hurled myself in front of another cab—perhaps I was beginning to look like a New Yorker at last—and jumped inside.
“The airport, JFK,” I gasped. “As fast as you can.”
Once there, I checked the departures and approached a counter. “Mexico City. I’d like a ticket for the next flight to Mexico City,” I said. After all, what good are old loves, if you can’t call upon them in a crisis?
6
If any one of my acquaintances would know how to shake a tail, police or otherwise, it was the former love of my life, Mexican archaeologist Lucas May. Make that Congressman Lucas May.
One quick phone call was all it took to persuade him to meet me at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, a place we’d frequented many times on our trips to Mexico City when we’d been together. We’d go to see the exhibits, then find ourselves some lunch to eat in the park surrounding the building.
I cut through the strikingly handsome courtyard and, picking the Maya section, began to look carefully at the exhibits, as if I were a real tourist. I felt his presence immediately. It’s amazing really, how you can do that, when you’ve been as close as he and I once were.
“Hi,” I said, turning around.
He looked completely different. I hadn’t seen him for almost two years, not since he’d dumped me—there is no other word for it—to pursue a political career, getting himself elected to the Mexican Congress. Then he’d been an archaeologist, his hair too long to be fashionable, and dressed almost always in black jeans and T-shirts, wearing his work boots most of the time. Now he wore a grey tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and grey and silver tie. His hair was cut short, and he looked very businesslike and almost a little prosperous, maybe just a tiny bit heavier than he’d been when I knew him. He took my arm and led me out of the museum and into the park.
“I’m in a bit of a jam, Lucas,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “They’ve called already.”
“They?”
“The Canadian authorities. Fellow by the name of Sergeant Robert something or other I can’t pronounce. RCMP.”
“Luczka,” I said, pronouncing it Loochka. He nodded. “How did he find me before I even got here?”
“He didn’t say. Did you use a credit card for the ticket?” I nodded. “Bad idea,” he said.
“Yes, but there was this small problem called lack of cash. I know it’s my turn to treat lunch,” I said, “but I’m trying to be frugal, being a fugitive and all.” He went and bought us enchiladas from a stand.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
I took the little gold man out of my bag and handed it to him.
He looked at it carefully. “Funny,” he said finally. I just looked at him. If there was something funny about all this, I’d be more than glad to hear it.
“Funny how it happens,” he said again. “Didn’t know much of anything about this stuff,” he went on, “until a couple of weeks ago. I read about it in an archaeology newsletter. Then a day or two ago, an old friend, a fellow archaeologist, mentioned it too.” He looked at me. “Ear spool. Moche, I would think,” he said. He looked at it again. “Real Moche, that is.”
“I figured,” I said.
“These are, apparently, much in demand on the black market. A pair of ear spools like this sold for about $150,000 U.S. not so long ago in Asia, according to this friend of mine. It’s illegal to take Moche artifacts out of Peru,” he added.
“I figured that too. But obviously someone did it. Not very successfully perhaps. It ended up in a box of junk at an auction. But someone did get it out of Peru.” I told all that had happened. “I don’t want to do anything that would put you in a bad position, Lucas. You’re an important person now. But I need a new identity, and I need to get to Peru. I want to take the little Moche man back to Peru, and figure this all out. It’s the only way I can think of to extricate myself from this situation.”