“It was planned to have a full-time curator,” Gonor said, “but there was never any need for it. And lately, since Dhaba became independent, the museum has been virtually closed. We have a notice on the front door saying the museum is open by appointment only and giving my office phone number to call. There are still occasionally scholars of one sort or another interested in having a look. When one of them calls, either I or one of my staff will come by, unlock the place, and show the visitor around.”
“That’s the only time anybody goes in there?”
“We have a commercial cleaning service, which goes through the display rooms once a week. Also a grounds-keeping service, but they don’t actually enter the building.”
Formutesca twisted around again to say to Parker, “The museum isn’t exactly the liveliest place in town.”
“It was a bad idea to begin with,” Gonor said, “and is now outdated as well.”
“But Patrick Kasempa is living there.”
“Yes. I discovered them almost by accident over a month ago. An anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania had asked to see some items in our musical instrument department. He spent most of the afternoon. It was getting dark when we left, and that evening I realized I’d left a pipe behind. I went back for it, and there were lights in the top-floor windows. We had been looking for the Kasempas for two or three weeks before that, ever since our friends at home had let us know about the plot, so I waited around to see if anyone appeared. Within half an hour Lucille Kasempa came walking down the street, apparently returning from shopping.”
“Did she see you?”
“No.”
“It’s just the two of them in there?”
“Not at all,” Gonor said. “Patrick Kasempa is one of four brothers, all of whom disappeared at the same time. My guess is the other three are in there with him. On guard duty, you might say.”
Parker nodded. “How many ways into the building?” he asked.
“Well, the front door,” Gonor said. “And a back door, of course; the Fire Department insisted. But it is metal and very securely fastened on the inside. There was a fear of burglaries, the building being empty so much of the time.”
“What’s in back?”
“Not much of anything. At one time it was arranged as a small garden back there with some outdoor sculpture. But it wasn’t authentic; the sculpture was metal casts from wood originals, the flora was wrong and so on, so it was given up.”
“How do you get out there? Just through the house?”
“Yes.”
Formutesca said, “There’s a fence at the back, a wooden fence about eight feet high. If you wanted to, you could come through a building on Thirty-ninth Street and over that fence.”
Manado said, “Sir?”
Gonor said, “What?”
Manado was looking at Parker in the rearview mirror. “We are being followed,” he said, “by a white Chevrolet Corvair containing two men. I can’t make them out clearly.”
“Go around a few blocks,” Parker said. “Lose them.”
“Yes, sir.”
To Gonor Parker said, “What about the side alleys? Can you get to the back through them?”
“There are iron gates at the rear corners of the building,” Gonor said. “They are usually kept locked.”
“Can you get me blueprints of the building?”
“Naturally.”
“And floor plans showing where the displays are.”
“We have those, yes.”
“Good.” Parker frowned out the window a minute, then turned back to Gonor and said, “You know you’re going to have to kill.”
“Not necessarily,” Gonor said.
“Yes,” Parker said. “There are four brothers up there. You won’t get in without killing at least one, and that means you have to kill all four. And the wife.”
Smiling bleakly from the front seat, Formutesca said, “We already knew that, Mr Parker. We weren’t sure you knew it. Or what your attitude would be.”
“It just means you’ve got to look out for the local law too,” Parker said.
“Anything that occurs,” Gonor said, “will occur in our building. We are unlikely to make a complaint.”
“Then noise is a problem too,” said Parker.
Formutesca, smiling, said, “We can be quiet.”
Manado said, “The white Corvair is no longer following us.” He sounded proud of himself.
“Good,” Parker said. “Take me back to my hotel.”
3
Lying on his back on the floor, Parker fixed the holster to the underside of the bed. A .22-caliber High Standard Sentinel fit in there snugly, but would slide out without trouble. With the pistol in place, Parker got to his feet and saw Claire frowning at him. She said, “You’ve never done that before.”
“I do it when I’m working.” He hadn’t told her about the Corvair.
“We’re at a different hotel,” she said. “We’re using a different name.”
“I like to be careful,” Parker said. His other gun, a Browning .380 automatic, was on the bed. He picked it up and put it on the shelf in the closet, under the extra blanket. The Terrier he’d bought the last time he was in New York he’d gotten rid of as soon as he’d left the city. It was cheaper and safer in the long run to buy your guns as you needed them and get rid of them as soon as they were no longer necessary.
Watching him, Claire said, “Are they back again?”
Parker carried a chair over to the hall door and leaned it so it would fall over if the door was opened. “Who?” he said.
“Those three men. The ones we saw first.”
“I haven’t seen them,” he said. He went into the bathroom, came out with a glass, put it on the windowsill, and leaned against the window.
Claire had lit a cigarette. She was moving nervously around the room, studying Parker and shaking her head. “There’s something,” she said. “You don’t do all this every time. You think they might come after us.”
Parker turned and looked at her. “Sure they might,” he said. “There’s a country they used to run and now they don’t. They want to run it again, and to run it they need to put their front man Goma in power, and to do that they need money, and that means the diamonds, and that means they don’t want me involved. So they might come around.”
She bit her lip. “You want me to leave,” she said.
“Yes. I was going to tell you in the morning.”
“You want me to go back to Miami?”
“No. In the morning you take a cab out to Kennedy Airport. Then you take another cab back, and you take a room at a different hotel under some other name. We’ll work out what hotel, what name.”
“Why?” she said.
“Your shopping trip. You can go on”
“No,” she said. “You don’t give a damn about my shopping trip.”
He hesitated, then said, “All right. I don’t want them to lean on me through you.”
“All you had to do was say so,” she said. “I guessed it a long time ago.”
He shrugged. “What hotel do you want to stay at?”
“The thing is,” she said, smiling at him now, “you worry about me, and you don’t like it that you worry about me. You don’t want me to see it.”
Parker shrugged again, irritated. “Whatever you say.”
“So why don’t I shop in Boston?” she said. “Do you know the Herridge House there?”
“No.”
“It’s a nice hotel, very small. I’ll be Miss Carol Bowen.”
“Mrs,” he said.
“Oh, of course. Because you’ll be coming along later.” She stepped forward and put her hand on his arm. “Not much later, will you?”
“I don’t know how long it will take,” he said. “A week, maybe a month.”
“Then we should start saying goodbye now,” she said.
4
It was like an art gallery: blueprints, floor plans, and photos all along the walls. Parker moved slowly from one to the next, an interested patron of the arts.
Gonor had set up this one room of his apartment as a kind of headquarters or war room. He’d stripped it to a table and four chairs under the central light fixture, he’d put the blueprints and other material along the walls, and on the table he’d put pads and pencils. He moved with Parker now, pointing out specific items of interest on the different floor plans.