“Anything?” said Rosie.
I nodded. “Second floor, two thirds of the way down the block. Either somebody with the biggest eyeglasses ever made likes to sit in the dark, or there’s a goon in there with a pair of binoculars.”
“A cop, you think?”
“That would be my guess, yes. They deliberately cleared the street to keep from scaring anybody off. Now they’re waiting to see who shows up, if anybody. They must not have any real leads to follow at all.”
“So that’s it, right? As in, ‘We’re out of here?’”
“Wrong. It’s just harder now. But there’s still something I’ve got to find out here. Go straight until we’re out of sight of him, then look for a big drugstore.”
“You need some antidepressants? I do.”
“Tools,” I said.
We found a Walgreens half a mile away, and I went in and got disposable latex gloves, a pair of needle-nosed pliers, some paper clips and hairpins, a spray can of penetrating oil, and two good, big flashlights. Wonderful places, these modern pharmacies. Just on principle, I added a roll of duct tape, too. Remembering the unpredictability of some of my recent meals, I also stocked up on mixed nuts, beef jerky, potato chips and pop. And some chocolate-covered cherries for Rosie. Never let it be said that I’m an inconsiderate date.
I got back in the car and we headed back the general way we had come, but on a parallel street a block over from the one with the Gypsy building. While Rosie drove, I set about converting the paper clips and hairpins into a set of lock picks. If the Gypsy community had gone all electronic, then the picks wouldn’t help me, but I was betting that people whose ancestors talked to angels were even lower-tech than I. We passed a second hand clothing store along the way, and while I hadn’t given any thought to trying to disguise ourselves, it seemed like a good idea to at least get something that would make our features hard to make out. We went in and got some nondescript, oversized shirts and jackets, plus hats with big, floppy brims.
“You go to a costume party?” said the withered woman at the cash register.
“Something like that.”
“
Ashlen Devlese, Romale
.”
“
Ashlen Devlese
,” I said, nodding solemnly. I must have said it right, because she smiled through about a thousand wrinkles and gave me a wink.
“What was all that?” said Rosie after we got back outside.
“Beats the hell out of me, but I have a good ear for accents, don’t you think?”
She giggled. “And you said we weren’t a natural pair.”
***
We parked three blocks away from the
officia
, put on our makeshift disguises, and walked through the alleys to the back of the row of connected stores. If there was another watcher in the shadows somewhere, I couldn’t spot him.
“You think the back door won’t be flagged off, too?”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “But we’re not going in the back door. That cellar I was in had a tunnel going out of it, maybe thirty feet long. We’re looking for the building where it comes out.”
“It’s the middle of the day, Herman. Don’t you think anybody will notice?”
“It’s also an official crime scene in the middle of Gypsy home turf. I figure the locals are all off on urgent, unexpected visits to their relatives in Pago Pago.”
“And if they’re not?”
“Hey, I’m a homeboy. I speak Rom. Didn’t you notice?”
“God help us.”
***
Two stores down from the fortune-telling parlor was a carpet store that looked as if its last customer had been Aladdin. I strode up the steps of the loading dock as if I had every right in the world to do so, went up to the small door at one side, slipped on a pair of latex gloves, and proceeded to work the lock. Rosie stood behind me with her hands on her hips, so her elbows stuck out and gave me some visual screening. If I ever decided to turn to a life of crime, she would definitely be my first choice for an accomplice.
“Yes?” she said.
“Ka-lunk,” said the lock. We were in.
We went through the door casually, making little gestures with our hands, as if we were in the middle of an animated conversation. Once inside, we relocked the door and got away from the glass as fast as possible. Then we pulled out the flashlights and looked the place over. The interior held several rolls of carpet, piled in no observable order, an old desk with scattered papers on it, some trash cans, and the kind of serious dust and cobwebs that only come with long neglect. But the dust on the floor had tracks in it, so the place wasn’t completely abandoned. We traced the paths of the tracks with our beams. Most of them went to a door that must have led to the front of the store, where I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go. Some wandered around aimlessly, and a few led to a crudely framed closet that poked out from a side wall. We followed that set.
The closet was also locked, with a heavy-duty Schlage cylinder that looked even more ancient than the one outside the dock. I gave it a shot of spray oil first, then went to work on it with the picks. For something that looked like late pre-Industrial Revolution, it slipped open with amazing ease and smoothness. And the door opened without a sound. A perfectly built fallback exit, if I had ever seen one.
Inside, the tiny room was lined with electrical panels and telephone switch gear that looked as ancient as the lock. A lot of it had no wires left, just empty metal fuse boxes and knobby terminals. I looked for one that had signs of being handled recently, and found a main disconnect with a tattered decal remnant that now said “DANG…HI….AGE.” I rather liked that. So did somebody else. When I threw the big switch arm on the side of the box, a piece of the floor sprang up to greet me. A sigh of clammy air came with it, laced with the scent of damp limestone and old secrets, and the familiar chill settled into my lower guts again. If somebody else had tried to make me go down there, I’d have told them to take a hike. Inside and below was the shaky ladder that I had last seen from the bottom end only. I tested the top rung to see if it would hold me and, unable to think of any excuse not to, descended. The floor below was soft and gritty, just as I had remembered it.
“Are you going to leave me here, Herman?”
“Only if you don’t come along.”
“I was afraid you’d say something like that.”
I stepped to one side of the ladder and shone my flashlight on the floor below it while Rosie came after me.
“Did you close the door after yourself?” I said.
“What are you, my mom?”
“No, I’m your paranoid partner.” I went back up the ladder. At the top, I looked through the closet door and back to the one where we had first come in, the one with the small window in it that I hadn’t paid any attention to. Something was definitely obscuring the light in the dirty glass panel. I tried to remember if there was a big dirt smear on the glass. If not, then there was a person trying to peer in. Swell. And I had to make a joke about being paranoid. But if it was a person, it wasn’t doing anything but looking. No door rattling, no flashlight, no automatic weapons, no concussion grenade. Whatever was out there, we could deal with it later. I closed the closet door quietly and ever so slowly, relocked it, and went back down the ladder. At the bottom of the shaft, the blackness closed around us like Methodist gloom.
Flashbacks
“Whoever was here last was either very fastidious or really cheap,” I said. “When you and I left the place, there was a light on.”
“I just hope there aren’t any tiger traps or land mines. Are these the biggest flashlights you could get?”
“The biggest ones you could hope to hide under a jacket, anyway.” I had to admit, they seemed like a couple of candles in a coal mine. When I played the beam of mine across the ceiling, I heard a soft rustling sound, which I took to be the resident cockroaches, running away from the light. A lot of them. I decided not to mention that to Rosie, nor the rather evil smells that had been added to the general decay and must since I was last here. I switched to sweeping the light over the dirt floor ahead of us.
“Lots of footprints,” I said. “The forensic crew had a real party down here. That should mean we don’t have to worry about wiping out our own tracks when we leave. There are already so many, they’d never sort them out.”
“How nice. It probably also means there’s nothing left for us to find. What did you see at the top of the ladder, by the way?”
“Did I say I saw anything?”
“Stop it, Herman, okay? I saw how careful you were when you closed the closet door.”
“If you absolutely must know, I think there may be somebody outside, on the loading dock.”
“You
think
there
may
be.”
“Yup, that’s about the size of it. See? You should have let me lie about it. Keep your voice down, by the way.”
“You think they might add disturbing the peace to the charges of breaking and entering and murder?” But she was whispering now.
“Only if they catch us,” I said.
“Well if they do, don’t blame it on me. Did you bring a gun?”
“I didn’t have to. I travel with this woman who always has a bagful of the things.”
“You take a lot for granted, you know that?” She shoved a semiautomatic nine into my free hand. “How are you fixed for socks and underwear?” she said.
“You should know.”
“Yeah, huh? I guess my focus was somewhere else when I could have checked.”
I led the way through the narrow tunnel and into the cellar where Evans body had been, being careful not to step in any of the stains. The trap door was shut again, preserving the total blackness. This time, I did not pull the chain to turn on the overhead light.
“So what is it that we’re looking for, again?”
“This.” I went over to the free standing ladder by the door and shone my beam up. On the bottom side of the lid, there was a lot of odd looking hardware that all connected to some device by the hinge. And coming out of the nameless gizmo were several skinny wires. Some of them went to a switch box by the top of the ladder and the others led to a small hole in the floor, further back, by the far wall. I went up the ladder a bit and touched the box, which turned out to have not one, but two toggle switches. I picked one at random, took a deep breath, and put my finger on it.
“Lights out,” I said, switching off my own beam.
“You’re going to open that thing? Seriously?”
“As seriously as I know how.”
“Wait one sec.” She took a half-stride stance and extended both arms up, towards the trap door, one holding her pistol and the other the flashlight. She shut off the light with her thumb, and we were in blackout again. “Okay, do it,” she said.
I threw the toggle and the trap door snapped open with incredible speed, then immediately slammed shut again. It was a good thing I wasn’t directly in its path, or it would have knocked me into next week. I mean, that thing
moved
. I returned the toggle to its original position, flipped it again, and the door repeated its performance. Open, shut. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. A guillotine should be so fast. The brief strobe view of the room above was poorly lit, except compared to where we were. It looked as if the place was abandoned. I flipped the switch once more to be sure, then returned it to the neutral position. Then I tried the other switch. This time the door flew open and stayed that way.
“Is this a good thing?” Rosie’s body said otherwise. She still had her gun pointed up, and she was doing a good impression of a big bomb with a very short fuse.
“Tell you in a bit, when I see where the other wires go.” I climbed up the ladder and into the fortune-telling, shootout room, keeping low and checking sight lines to the outside world as I went. The heavy floor-length drapes in the front were barely cracked open, too little for our silent watcher across the street to see anything. The back door out of the room opened into a short hallway that ended at a high window with frilly, once-white curtains over it. It gave the place enough light to move around by, but not much more than that. So far, so good. I called quietly for Rosie to come up.
“Can I use my flashlight?”
I nodded. “Just be careful not to point it outside. And don’t put the gun away just yet.”
“I heard that.” She came up quicker than necessary, and it occurred to me that she knew perfectly well what the rustling sounds had been.
“What am I trying to find?”
“The upstairs duplicates of the switches I just used on the trap door. They have to be in this room somewhere.”
The round, velvet-covered table was still in the middle of the room, though it looked as if it had been knocked around a bit. We checked there first, looking and feeling all around the edge and bottom for something that somebody seated at the table could have reached. Nothing. I chanced using my flashlight a bit then, exploring first the floor and then the walls, unintentionally lingering on the area where we had last left Stefan Yonkos. More nothing. Bullet holes all over the damn place, though. Also a lot more bloodstains than I had remembered. Hadn’t we done the compress bandage right? Or had Yonkos been shot yet again, after we left?
Finally, I peeled back a drape on the back wall and hit pay dirt. A pair of toggles just like the ones in the cellar were mounted into the plaster, just under a regular light switch. Painted the same dirty yellow-cream as the walls, they would be almost unnoticeable if you weren’t looking for them.
“Are you clear of the trap door?” I said.
“If there’s only one of them, then I’m clear of it.”
I worked the wall switches and got the same result as with the first set. One switch had an open and a closed position, and the other one triggered a quick open-shut action. So back when I had been unceremoniously dropped into the cellar, the switch had not been tripped by Yonkos, who was still seated at the table, hands clearly visible. It had to have been done by the woman, Vadoma. That was why she had been standing back by the wall, looking like a sentinel or a bodyguard. But later, when the trap door opened again and stayed open, dumping the wounded Evans down into my world, it couldn’t have been tripped by her. She was already dead. Nor was it tripped by Yonkos, who would have been slumped against the adjacent wall by then, oozing his essential fluids, nor by Evans himself. There was no way the same person could stand on the trap door and also reach the switch.
Rosie continued to use her flashlight to look at bullet holes and bloodstains, not paying much attention to what I was doing or to the expression on my face. “What do we know now that we didn’t?” she said.
“We know there was another person in this room, just before you came in.”
“What? You mean like another shooter?”
“Just like that.”
“Then why are you and I still alive?”
“When you started to open the front door, he couldn’t have known who it was. He must have assumed it was the cops and split by the back exit.”
She knitted her brows a bit and shook her head. “No way. I’d have heard the door.”
“Maybe he didn’t go all the way out.”
“Oh, that’s a cheery thought.”
“Isn’t it, though? Let’s see what’s back there.”
“Must we?”
“In for a penny, and all that.” I led the way into the back corridor, gun ahead of me, flashlight ready to use as a light or a club.
Directly behind the parlor was a small kitchen and pantry, and a toilet beyond that. At the back, the short hallway split into a T, with a back door to the alley on one end and a narrow stairway going up on the other. Neither the little window nor the glass in the back door showed us anybody lurking outside, but we didn’t linger there anyway. I went up the stairs quickly, leading Rosie by the hand behind me.
Upstairs were two tiny bedrooms, furnished in garage sale decor with the occasional genuine antique thrown in. The floors were all covered with ornate throw rugs, rather than carpet.
The mark of a perpetually transient people?
There was also another bathroom, several closets, and a steep staircase leading up to the roof. The whole place, and the kitchen below as well, hadn’t exactly been trashed, but it had been searched more crudely than the crime lab team would have done it. Pillows and mattresses were cut open but not disemboweled, and most of the furniture was still upright, though all the drawers and doors were open, all the contents dumped. The lid of the tank on the toilet was off, also.
“They didn’t rip the backer paper off the pictures,” said Rosie, “or smash the glass in the mirrors.”
“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t.”
“Oh?”
“They weren’t looking for anything that you could hide in the back of a picture or a mirror. They were looking for the violin.”
“That fits what we’re seeing,” she said. “But you said Yonkos made a deal with you, for you to go get it. Why would it already be here?”
“It wouldn’t. But somebody didn’t know that, or they thought I might have brought it to him.”
Somebody. Somebody didn’t know it wasn’t here. Evans didn’t know where the hell it was and Yonkos didn’t know either, but he had faith in me finding it. One emailer says he knows I have it, but Nickel Pete says it’s been swapped. So Amy Cox had to have it with her when she was killed, but if her killer was also the secret gunman here in Skokie, why didn’t he already know where it was? In fact, why didn’t he already have it? Another emailer says he can tell me where to find it. As if it were lost. So who lost it? Amy’s killer, maybe? Or somebody from the Ardennes Forest, with an old, old score to settle? Was that possible, after all these years?
“A man I know named G. B. Feinstein says great violins have dark stories attached to them,” I said. “He also thinks they have souls, and I guess the souls could be dark, too. Stefan Yonkos said this one is evil, a demon, something that destroys people.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t know if I really believe in evil, but I definitely believe in luck. And that stupid fiddle is bad luck, if I’ve ever seen the stuff. Everybody wants the damn thing, everybody who has anything to do with it seems to wind up dead, and everybody, I mean absolutely everybody, thinks I have it.”
Rosie shrugged. “Maybe you do.”
I gave that a moment’s thought. “Maybe I do at that,” I said. “If that were true, it could be the real reason why we are still alive.”
“I’m not sure I like that reason,” she said. “It sounds to me like one that could be canceled at any moment.”
“There is that,” I said. “But somehow, I don’t think this is the moment.”
I went over to the side of a window that faced the street and risked a peek out the edge of a tattered curtain. The window down the block where I had seen the watcher with the binoculars was still dark, unreadable. A quick look out the back window into the alley was just as inconclusive at first, but then something made me do a double take. I didn’t have a good enough view of the loading dock, where we had come in, to see if anybody was hanging around down there. But on the other side of the alley, further down, in deep shadow between two buildings, was something that definitely didn’t belong with the rest of the general clutter. Dark, massive, and almost out of view was the unmistakable front end of a shiny black LTD.
“Time for us to get the hell out of here,” I said.
“A man after my own heart,” said Rosie.
“Quiet and smooth.”
“You forgot ‘quick.’”
“No, I didn’t.” But I took two steps down the stairs and froze. This time there was no question about it. There was somebody standing outside the back door, possibly also working on the lock.
Rosie bumped into me from behind, nearly knocking us both down the rest of the steps. “What happened to the quick part?” she said.
“It got a little more complicated. Go check out the door to the roof.”
She left and I backed slowly up, the way I had come.
“It’s locked,” she said from behind me.
“Does it open onto the alley side or the street side?”
“Damfino. Let’s see, north is where the little dipper points to the big hand on your watch, if there’s any moss on it, and…”
“Will you please cut that out?”
“I’m nervous, okay? Street side, I think. What are you going to do, pick the lock, pop out and drop a water balloon?”
“No, I’m going to go enlist the aid of our spy across the street,” I said. “Stay where you are a minute.”
I went to the front of the flat and deliberately shone my flashlight out the window, ruffling the curtains a bit for good measure. Then I thought,
what the hell, why fool around being subtle?
and I cracked one of the panes with my elbow, adding a little noise to the bait. Down the street, on the dark second floor, the shiny twin discs of the binoculars flashed as they swung around towards me, then disappeared into the shadows again. The guy was alert for having had such a long, dull wait, I had to give him that. I let him see another bit of flashlight beam, just so he’d know he hadn’t been imagining things, and then I pulled the window shade down, fast. Then I did the same with the other one in the second bedroom. I looked at my fancy new watch. It probably had a stopwatch function, but I didn’t know how to work it yet, so I settled for watching the sweep second hand. If the Skokie cops were any good at all, I figured three minutes, maybe three and a half, tops.
“What are you doing down there, Herman? You’re starting to make me very nervous.”
“Stay put, Rosie. We’re about to set the wolves to devouring each other.”
Unless, of course, they are all from the same pack, which would not be good at all.