Oh, Gregor, Gregor! she thought despondently. My darling, my love, a murderer! At this moment undoubtedly hiding someplace. And he had done it for her, for her greed for the treasure! It was all her fault, the death of Nordberg, the death of Axel Lindgren, the fact that her beloved Gregor was a murderer. He had done it for her, and the guilt would lie on her soul and her conscience for the rest of her days...
She looked up. Inspector Rodhe was coming from the apartment, pushing ahead of him a manacled figure. Knud Christensen was looking at her in complete non-recognition. The inspector ushered the manacled man into the front seat next to the driver and climbed in back beside Ruth.
“He was in the kitchen, drinking aquavit,” the inspector said cheerfully for the benefit of the driver. “Gave me no trouble at all. Kept saying he had been cheated, and that the dead man wouldn’t drink some whiskey he had brought with him, and the next thing he knew he was holding the man by the neck.” He looked at the silent figure beside the driver. There was a touch of compassion in his voice. “I don’t believe he’s all there...”
Ruth felt a wave of tremendous relief, followed by a flush of shame that she could have thought her Gregor capable of killing Nordberg, followed by an equal feeling of shame that she should be happy it was poor Knud Christensen who had committed the crime. Another thought came. If Gregor was not involved, where was he? Inspector Rodhe might have been reading her mind.
“This Gregor,” he said gently, almost sadly, “is his last name Kovpak?”
Ruth nodded dumbly, waiting for word of more terror. The inspector nodded to the driver. “First, the Plaza Hotel,” he said, and turned back to Ruth. “I made a call from your hotel room, you may remember. I just called again from the apartment upstairs to get the results. I am an old-fashioned policeman, perhaps, but when something very valuable connected with a case disappears, and when a person connected with the same case also disappears, I tend to believe they very well might be together.”
Ruth stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” the inspector said in his gentle voice, “that a man named Gregor Kovpak took a Scandinavian Airlines nonstop flight for Leningrad less than thirty minutes ago. He was carrying a very expensive suitcase; the young lady who checked him in remembered it particularly, because it was so similar to the luggage she had very often checked in for Count Lindgren on his many travels...”
V
1979
Chapter Twenty-Four
New York — August
The three weeks Ruth McVeigh had spent in Paris of a month’s leave of absence, approved by cable from the board of directors of the Metropolitan, had done nothing to lessen the combination of grief and anger she still felt whenever the thought of Gregor Kovpak and/or the Schliemann treasure came to her mind. Her visits to the Louvre, once one of her greatest pleasures, were dull and purposeless. She paced the many galleries without seeing the many treasures on either side of her, feeding on her anger, unheeding, even, of where she was or why she was there. No amount of time spent in boutiques selecting clothing — all purposely high-necked and as sexless as she could find — could assuage the constant bitterness. Parisian food, once her greatest delight, was tasteless in her mouth. Her nights were lonely and sleepless, tormented with a need she tried to reject for the sake of her self-respect. Nor did the passage of time seem to ease either the grief or the anger, and when she knew her hiding from her work would never really resolve the problem — although she did not know what would — she cabled the Metropolitan that she had had enough vacation and would be back at her desk on the following Monday.
The plane trip home seemed endless, with her mind constantly revolving between the hurt she had suffered at the hands of a man who had taken advantage of her, taking her to bed under the pretense of love, making her fall in love with him, and then capping his churlishness by stealing a treasure from her — and what she intended to do to even the score once she was home. To begin with, there was no doubt it had been a common theft, a theft from the Metropolitan, as well as from her, personally. After all, she had traced the treasure, she had insisted upon their visiting Knud Christensen, when that — that — Lothario — had wanted to go back to Copenhagen and go to bed. She had done all the work. Dr. Kovpak had merely tagged along to get what he could get, and then when he saw the opportunity, he had stolen the treasure. A common thief! Surely there had to be a way to press charges, possibly through the State Department to the Cultural Commission in the Soviet Union — although if they were anything like Gregor Kovpak, they would probably deny any knowledge of the treasure. And how could she prove her case? At the time she had left Copenhagen, after attending Axel Lindgren’s funeral, poor Knud Christensen had been put in a home for the mentally handicapped. And Count Lindgren was dead and so was Professor Nordberg. So how could she prove her story? To the police, all that Gregor Kovpak — damn the memories of the man! — had stolen was a suitcase. What it contained, nobody knew.
But she knew!
And proof or no proof, she would see to it that the entire world knew just what a libertine Gregor Kovpak was, what a cheat, despite all his fine titles and his great reputation! A common thief, a liar, despite his dark good looks and his glib tongue. She would spread the word through every archaeological society, every professional journal, to every friend she had in the entire archaeological world. She would drive the name of Gregor Kovpak down so far he would never dare to show his face anywhere except at the Hermitage, if even there! Men!
She arrived at Kennedy Airport early on that Monday morning, tired but determined to get right on with her campaign. Until she could rid herself of the incubus of her disgust with Gregor Kovpak and her equal disgust with herself for having fallen in love with a knave, she felt that she could never again lead a normal life. She dropped her suitcases off at her apartment and took a taxi at once to the Metropolitan Museum. She climbed the steps, hating Gregor Kovpak even more for taking from her the great pleasure she had always felt in walking up those steps each day. Now there was no feeling of belonging, of possession. Now there was no feeling except the need for revenge.
She stalked past the many receptionists, all of whom looked up with smiles of pleasure to see their director back again and then looked at each other in wondering surprise at not even having their greetings acknowledged. She marched down the corridors past the neat guards without seeing them or caring how they looked, and entered her office intent upon getting to her telephone and beginning her campaign. Her secretary looked up with a smile.