Then, as Rigaud held up the coat, Palliser turned and slipped his arms into the sleeves. He felt warmer already. But as he reached down to button it, Linz patted him on the shoulder, much harder than he thought necessary, and he was thrown off-balance. Before he could quite regain his footing, Rigaud had crouched down and was lifting him by the cuffs of his trousers.
“Stop! What the-”
But he was already upside down, his hands scrabbling at the edges of the oubliette. He tried to brace himself, but the stone was slick and his fingers kept sliding off into space.
“Let go!” he shouted, trying desperately to kick free, even as the coins and keys from his pants and jacket rained onto the stone, and the glasses slipped off his nose. The Mont Blanc pen dropped from his breast pocket, spinning into the black void. One hand was still firmly planted on the stone, but Linz put out a foot and nudged it aside.
An instant later Palliser was falling headfirst, caroming off the edges of the narrow shaft, shredding his clothes and ripping his skin, until he plunged, screaming, into the black water at the bottom of the pit.
Linz waited a moment, listening to the gurgle of the water, then brushed his hands against his jacket and replaced the 1936 Sancerre on the shelf. He nodded at the grate, and Rigaud bent down and pushed it back into place.
On the way out, Linz flicked off the lights and went upstairs to his bedroom. Ava was in the bathroom, removing her makeup. After getting undressed, he put on his pajamas and red silk robe, and began leafing through the pages from the late Mr. Palliser’s briefcase. So far, they looked very similar to papers he’d seen before, more’s the pity. They could join all the other sketches and journal entries and ricordanze, carried by previous, and equally unsuccessful, emissaries. Sometimes he wondered what he would do for amusement if these detectives and so-called art experts ever stopped coming.
“Who was that bore at the dinner table?” Ava called from the bathroom.
“Nobody.”
“Will he be coming back?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied, turning another page. Linz knew that behind them all, there lurked a rich and resourceful adversary-though nowhere near as rich and resourceful as he was-and while Rigaud had often advised him to cut the tree down at its roots, Linz resisted. A life like his held little enough to savor, and simply knowing that a nemesis existed gave him a special frisson of pleasure. He had always relished having enemies; he’d felt that their animosity directly fed his own power and invincibility.
And as for these futile attempts to recover La Medusa? He was the cat playing with the proverbial mouse.
Ava bounded back into the bed, nude as usual, and yanked the covers up to her neck.
“Tell me again why you won’t install central heating?”
“Tell me why you refuse to wear the nightgowns I buy you.”
“They’re not healthy-they constrict the limbs in sleep.”
It was a discussion they had had a thousand times.
“Heating ducts would destroy the integrity of the chateau walls,” Linz said. And he had always been terribly superstitious about any alterations to the Chateau Perdu.
She burrowed deeper, pulling the blanket up to her eyeballs. “You and your integrity,” she snorted.
Linz slipped the papers into the bedside drawer, right under the loaded pistol he always kept there, and turned out the lights. In the darkness, as he rolled onto his side, he fancied he could hear the cries of his dinner guest, echoing from the oubliette.
Chapter 3
For David, Sunday night had always meant dinner at his sister Sarah’s house in the suburbs. And for years, he had looked forward to it.
But those simple, happy days were gone. For the past year or more, it had been an increasingly fraught occasion.
Sarah had been battling breast cancer, just as his mother had done, and like his mother, many years ago, she was losing the war. She had been through endless rounds of radiation and chemo, and even though she was only four years older than David, she looked like she was at death’s door. Her wavy brown hair, the same chestnut color as his own, was entirely gone, replaced with a wig that never sat quite right. Her eyebrows were penciled in, and her skin had a pale translucence.
And he loved her more than anyone in the world.
Their father had gone AWOL when he was just a toddler, and after their mother succumbed to the disease, it was Sarah who had pretty much raised him. He owed her everything, and there was nothing he could do to help her now.
Nothing, it seemed, that anyone could do.
He was just stamping the slush off his boots when she opened the door. Around her head, she was wearing a new silk scarf in a wild paisley pattern. It wasn’t great, but anything was better than that wig.
“Gary gave it to me,” she said, reading his mind as always.
“It’s nice,” David said, as she smoothed the silk along one side.
“Yeah, right,” she said, welcoming him in. “I think he hates the wig even more than I do.”
His little niece, Emme, was playing tennis on her Wii in the den, and when she saw him, she said, “Uncle David! I dare you to come and play me!”
She reminded him of Sarah when she was a little girl, but he sensed that Emme didn’t like it when he said that. Was she just showing her fierce independence, or was it a sign of some subliminal-and justifiable-fear? Was she aware of the terrible ordeal her mother was going through and trying to separate herself from a similar prospect? Or was he imagining the whole thing?
Eight-year-old girls, he recognized, were beyond his field of expertise.
A few minutes later, right after David had lost his first two games, Gary came in from the garage, carrying a bunch of flyers for the open house he was holding the next day. Gary was a real-estate broker, and by all accounts a good one, but in this market nothing was selling. And even when he did get an exclusive listing, it was usually with a reduced commission.
He was also carrying a pie he’d picked up at Bakers Square.
“Is it a chocolate cream?” Emme asked, and when her dad confirmed it, she let out an ear-piercing squeal.
Over dinner, Gary said, “It’s the Internet that’s killing the real-estate business. Everybody’s convinced they can sell their houses themselves these days.”
“But are there any buyers out there?” David asked.
“Not many,” Gary said, pouring himself another glass of wine and holding the bottle out toward David, who passed. “And the ones that there are think no price is ever low enough. They want to keep making counteroffer after counteroffer until the whole deal winds up falling apart.”
“Is it time for pie yet?” Emme asked for the tenth time.
“After we’re done with the meat loaf,” Sarah said, urging David to take another piece. There were dark circles under her eyes that the overhead light only made worse. David took another slice just to make his sister happy.
“Save room for the pie,” Emme said in a stage whisper, just in case anyone had forgotten about it in the last five seconds.
When dinner-and dessert-were over, and David was helping to clear the table, Gary disappeared into the garage again. By the time he came back in, he was dragging a six-foot-tall tree.
“Who wants to decorate a Christmas tree?” he announced.
“I do! I do!” Emme shouted, jumping up and down. “Can we do it tonight?”
“That’s why your uncle David is here,” Gary said. “To help us get the lights on. You mind?” he asked, and
