When he threw open the wardrobe’s doors, Felicia found herself looking at the object she had found there when she was poking around the place two days before, after arriving from New York-a black, heavy-duty metal security cabinet with a rotary combination lock, like that of an old-fashioned safe. Middleton dialed the numbers then pulled on the handle to open the door. Felicia caught her breath, though in truth she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. A small armory-pistols, rifles, boxes of ammunitions, other items she didn’t recognize-was neatly lined up inside.
Leonora Tesla put down her shoulder bag, joined him and starting picking at the hardware. Middleton had brought two grey hold-alls for their booty. The two of them looked like a couple in a fancy chocolate store, trying to decide what delicacies to take away with them.
“So the Volunteers are back in business,” Felicia said.
“Supply and demand, kid,” Tesla replied, taking down what looked like a pack of small metal balls. Grenades of some kind maybe. “Be grateful you’re in a nicer business.”
Middleton and Tesla were so utterly absorbed Felicia didn’t feel too bad about poking around at something else while they were so preoccupied.
After a minute, she said, “I am grateful. Yet still, in your new job, you find time to buy nice jewelry. Nora, is this for you?”
They stopped packing weaponry into the soft grey cases and turned to look. In her delicate pale fingers, Felicia held the glittering object that had caught her attention as Leonora Tesla placed her bag on a chair by the dining table, the top half open. The article was enclosed in a transparent plastic evidence packet and tagged with a NATO label bearing the previous day’s date, and what sounded like a French name. It occurred to Felicia that they must have been in a hurry indeed if they sought weapons before delivering what must, she imagined, have been something of importance.
“You know, when we first got to know one another I don’t recall you being in the habit of going through people’s things,” Middleton told her.
“I got older, Harold. Quickly. You remember? With the company you introduced me to it seemed to make sense. What is this?”
She opened the evidence bag and removed the gleaming bright bracelet, studying it closely. When she was done she examined the two other items that had been alongside it: a slip of paper and a recent Indian passport in the name of Kavi Balan. The photo inside showed an inoffensive-looking Indian man perhaps 30 with a bland, perhaps naive face. He had, she thought, very prominent and unusual eyes and wondered whether they had noticed. Probably not. Harold Middleton and Leonora Tesla were both intelligent, hard-working officers, trapped, Felicia had observed, inside an organization they seemed unable to leave. But small details often escaped them. They possessed neither the time nor the inclination to look much beyond the obvious.
“Our business, not yours,” Middleton announced.
“He’s dead, I imagine,” she said, and they didn’t reply. “Didn’t you notice his eyes…?”
She was stalling and they knew it. As she spoke, she scanned the sheet of paper. The writing was in Harold Middleton’s hand, easily recognizable for its cultured yet hurried scrawl.
It read:
“It sounds like a puzzle,” she said. “I love riddles. I never knew you did… ”
“I hate them.”
“What does Scorpion refer to?”
“It was a reference in an email from Sikari. I think it’s a person, but I don’t know if he’s allied with Sikari or is a threat to him.”
“The bracelet is beautiful.”
It looked like copper, though the color was lighter, more golden than most bangles of its type. In Poland, copper wristbands were popular among the elderly who believed they warded off rheumatism and disease. The jewelry she saw hawked around the cheap street markets in Warsaw looked nothing like this. The metal here was softer, paler, as if it were some kind of subtle alloy, the edges, flecked with green, more finely worked, with a line of writing in a flowing, incomprehensible Indian script, and, most curious of all, an oval feature like a badge, a mark of pride for its wearer perhaps.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
“I wish I knew,” he replied. “We think it’s from Kashmir. An identity bracelet, maybe denoting membership in a gang, a cult, an organization of some kind. Presumably the emblems stand for something. It could be connected with India. Or Pakistan. They’ve been fighting one another over Kashmir for half a century. I need to get it to the lab, get the inscription translated.”
Felicia stared at it and frowned.
“You have any ideas?” he asked.
“What? Some little kid Polish musician? What would I know?” She looked at the copper bracelet again. “You never do crosswords do you?”
“I told you. I hate puzzles.”
“That’s because you think logically, in one direction only. Crosswords are like Bach. Or jazz. They demand you think in several different directions simultaneously. Call and response, question and answer, all in the same moment.”
She examined the bracelet again.
“The point is… All the information you need is there. In front of your face. Nothing is missing. You just have to make the links.”
Middleton looked interested. It was the mention of Bach that did it.
“My problem,” she added, “is I still think in Polish, not English. I love crosswords but they’re too hard for me in your language. I used to wish you could see them instead of read them. You know what I mean? Look at cross
They had what weapons they wanted. They were ready to go. Middleton held out his hand and she passed to him the note and the photograph of the dead Indian with the curious eyes. He placed them back in the evidence packet and slipped them into his carryall. She clung to the copper bangle, waiting for the question.
“If the pictures on the bracelet were a crossword,” Middleton asked, “what do you think they might mean?”
Leonora Tesla shook her head. “We’re giving these to a bunch of forensic people, Harry. Not a crossword expert.”
“That’s a shame,” Felicia said.
They looked at her.
“Because?…” Middleton asked.
She pointed at the moon on the bracelet
“This would be the answer, I think. The part that is calling. See how it’s separate, and the other two elements are subsidiary to it, as if their response somehow answers everything. The elephant. The way he blows his trunk comically into the sky, like a fountain, except that the liquid doesn’t go very far, does it? The stream falls to earth so quickly, as if it weighs more than it should. This seems obvious to me.”
“Obvious?” he asked.
“Look! It’s an elephant. The biggest land animal on the planet. What’s he doing? Trying to spray the moon, and failing. Two words. Maybe it’s me being crazy but remember: I was born in the year of Chernobyl. We weren’t far away. Five hundred kilometers maybe. At school they came along every six months and took our blood to see if the explosion had done something bad to us.”
That blunt needle, the same one they used on everyone, hurt which was why she had read so avidly to understand its cause.
She put her finger on the carefully carved beast on the bracelet and said, “Heavy.”
Then she indicated the fountain of liquid rising from the beast toward the sky and falling back again, too quickly. “Water.”
Felicia Kaminski couldn’t help but notice that Harold Middleton went a little paler when she said that.
“Chernobyl happened because there was no heavy water,” she said quickly. “The Russians used some cheap and useless method of their own to produce a nuclear reactor which was why the plant exploded. I’m sorry. This is
