Obviously in a hurry now, Earnst stepped through and made sure the door caught behind them.
“This way,” he beckoned, and Blaine moved with him down the hall into a beautiful office, furnished in the same colors as the display area downstairs. The old man closed the door and limped to his desk.
“My granddaughter has told me quite a lot about you, Mr. McCracken,” he said. “Please sit down. Excuse me for being so nervous, but I haven’t slept well in a month now.”
Blaine sat down opposite Earnst in one of a pair of red velvet chairs facing the neat desk.
“A month ago,” McCracken noted. “Was that when it started?”
“Yes. The feeling of being watched is well known to me. You develop a sense for such things when you spend years running for your life.”’
“I can understand that. It’s why I’m here.”
“The others didn’t believe. The police … ach. I tell them and they listen, but they think I’m crazy.”
McCracken leaned forward. “Mr. Earnst, you said you were being watched. Does that mean followed as well?”
“No. I don’t go anywhere, so there would be no reason to follow me. I come here and I go home. Nothing else. I’m watched all day long. Nights sometimes, too.”
“And it started one month ago.”
“Yes.”
“Does anything else about that time stand out in your mind?”
Earnst didn’t have to think. “No. The robbery had happened two weeks earlier.”
“T.C. didn’t mention anything about a robbery.”
“I’m not sure I mentioned it to her. There was nothing worth worrying her about. Only a few items were taken.”
“Specifically?”
“Ruby-red crystals sent to me by a supplier in Greece.”
“Rubies?”
“Only in color. I’d never seen anything like them. I thought they might be quite valuable and agreed to take them on consignment.” The old man’s stare turned distant. “Strange crystals they were, jagged and irregular. Unfinished. There was only one customer who showed any interest in them at all. Why is this important?”
“I’m not sure yet. Tell me about this customer.”
Earnst pushed himself up from the chair and limped behind his desk where he extracted an appointment book from the top drawer. Flipping through it, he quickly came upon the day in question.
“Lydia Brandywine made me show her all five of the crystals. Said she was searching for something exotic and totally different. I showed her plenty of gems that afternoon, I remember now, but the crystals were the only items that interested her. She made an appointment to choose a setting but the crystals were stolen a few days later.”
“Just the crystals?”
“Because of their potential as one-of-a-kinds, I kept them in a separate place.” The old man shook his head. “My security was antiquated. The door we passed through was added after the robbery. My first, you know, in all these years.”
“And ten days or so after that you started feeling you were being watched.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need Lydia Brandywine’s address.”
Earnst jotted it down in a large scrawl and handed it over. “Why bother?” he wanted to know.
“Because I don’t believe in coincidence. I want to follow these crystals and see where they lead, so I’ll speak with Mrs. Brandywine. If I get nowhere, I’ll start over somewhere else.”
That set Earnst thinking as he sat back down. “It’s strange.”
“What is?”
“The man who supplied me with the crystals requested their return shortly after the robbery. He sounded quite agitated, even frightened, when I told him they had been stolen.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He’s a Greek named Kapo Stadipopolis. He’s a prime dealer in artifacts and gems sometimes obtained through shady means. All merchants depend on the black market from time to time, including me.”
“That’s not the issue here, Mr. Earnst. Your safety is.”
“Stadipopolis has a shop in Athens, on Monastiraki Square. He’s good at what he does, seldom makes a mistake. But he claimed he shipped me the crystals by accident. Said he needed them back desperately.”
“In your mind, what were they worth?”
“Whatever the market would bear for one-of-a-kind items. Believe me when I tell you, Mr. McCracken, that I had never seen anything quite like them before. A woman like Lydia Brandywine, well, there’s no telling how high she might have gone for something no one else had.”
“She was no stranger to you then.”
“Hardly. All the merchants know her. She is always in search of the unusual.”
“So the crystals were worth stealing.”
“Even more so because they were untraceable. Once remade and refined into stones for setting, they wouldn’t even resemble what I obtained from Greece.” Earnst looked impatient. “I still don’t see what this has to do with my being watched.”
“T.C. also said you felt your life was in danger.”
“An old man’s exaggeration.”
“Really?”
“I’m … not sure.” He hesitated, groping for the words to express what he felt. “I can feel them out there waiting; for what, I don’t know. A few times I walk to work, and I see faces I shouldn’t recognize but do. My apartment building has a new doorman — all of a sudden. The guard service sends a new man to watch the—”
The intercom on Earnst’s desk buzzed. “Yes?” the old man said into it.
“Mr. Obermeyer’s man is here with the delivery, sir,” a clerk’s voice came back.
“Hmmmmm, early. Send him up.” Then, to McCracken as he started for the door, “Forgive the interruption.”
But Blaine reached out and restrained him by the arm, his mind working in another direction. “The fact that he was early bothered you….”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s not the routine. How early, damnit, how early?”
“An hour, perhaps two.”
“And who would check his papers?”
“The guard at the main entrance, of course.”
“The one your security service replaced,” McCracken said softly, recalling the man’s difficulty in finding the button beneath his desk.
Earnst nodded slowly, fear filling his eyes as he realized the same thing McCracken already had.
“What do we do? What do we do? They’ve come! Oh God, they’ve finally come!”
“They’ve done us a favor, Mr. Earnst, because they don’t know I’m here, and even if they did they couldn’t know who I am. What’s the procedure?”
“A clerk will escort the delivery man to the security door.”
“And then?”
“I open it and let them in.”
“Follow the procedure.”
“But—”
“Trust me, Mr. Earnst. I’ll be right behind you all the way. But we’ve got to move now. Quickly!”
McCracken crouched low as soon as he was back in the corridor, and moved quickly to the security door so he couldn’t be seen through the window two-thirds of the way up. When the old man was five yards away from the door, a face appeared against the glass.
“My clerk,” Earnst said to McCracken who was now poised low against the wall adjacent to the door, so that when it opened it would obscure him.
Blaine motioned him to open the door, whispering, “Move toward me quick as you can when it gives.”
Earnst punched a coded sequence into a keypad. The door snapped open and began to move inward.
The rest unfolded too fast for the old man’s eyes to follow, but McCracken grasped it all. The clerk’s frame shoved against the door and through it into the hallway with a large man behind him. There was a fssssssst and the clerk went down. Blaine noted the strange-looking pistol in the man’s hand and sprang into action.