Relic of Time (25 page)

“Making Hannan what? Twenty-nine?”

Laura squeezed his arm.

Nate's conversion had had its influence on Laura and Ray, too, but there was no need to go into that with John.

“There's a replica of Lourdes at Notre Dame, too, you know.”

This prompted Laura to tell John of the actual basilica that Don Ibanez had constructed on his property in Napa Valley.

“A basilica?”

“In miniature. A replica of the shrine in Mexico City that's been so much in the news.”

A pained expression came onto John's face. “Why would anyone steal a miraculous image?”

“The answer to that seems clear. Look at the chaos it has stirred up.”

John turned toward her. “This isn't just a social call, Laura. The Vatican remembers the role that Mr. Hannan played in recovering the third secret of Fatima. Would he be willing to do something similar here?”

“John, he is way ahead of you.”

She told him of the hiring of Crosby. “Remember Traeger? Nate wanted to hire him first, but he had already been activated by the CIA. They let him go and now he's back with us.”

Boris, the chef, was delighted to have mouths to feed that might have some appreciation of his culinary skills. Nate Hannan ate like a bird and would have been happy with hot dogs. Boris, of course, affected the great starched hat of his profession and his girth suggested that the feasts he prepared did not go unappreciated by their creator. His great weakness was that he washed down his food in torrents of wine and, when thus elated, was likely to tell endless stories of the notables he had fed in his career. Taking this job at Empedocles made little professional sense, except, of course, for the king's ransom Nate had lured him with.

“I sometimes entertain,” Nate had said, and the phrase became a mantra for Boris when he was in his cups. Laura and Ray had their lunch at Empedocles, providing a target of opportunity for Boris. In recompense, they were both on diets, diets impossible to keep to if they continued to lunch at Empedocles. They reconciled themselves to the rise and fall of their weights by saying it was only charitable to provide Boris with a raison d'être.

When they went inside, Nate was still in his office with Ray and Traeger. Laura peeked in and was immediately asked to join the discussion.

“John is here, Nate.”

“John!” Hannan bounded from his chair and headed for Father Burke as if he meant to tackle him. But he came to a halt and reached out to pat him on the arms.

Once it was clear that Father John Burke was here as an informal emissary of the Vatican, seeking Hannan's help in restoring that sacred image to the basilica in Mexico City, Nate asked Traeger to bring John up to date.

Listening, Laura thought what an impossible task they had set Crosby, and it was no less impossible for Traeger. He spoke in a clipped manner, ticking off the things he had done—“all of them useless”—dwelling on the embarrassment of the events in long-term parking at the San Francisco airport and the fiasco near Pocatello when Grady had been hustled off before they could get to him.

“Then it's been recovered?”

Ray said, “Grady denies he ever had it.”

“Maybe he's lying.”

“He was lying when he said he had it.”

The disposition of the Grady matter was mysterious. From coast to coast there were calls for an indictment for the murder of those poor pilgrims in the basilica in Mexico City. But no indictment had been brought.

“That makes his denial look plausible. If he wasn't behind the theft of the picture, he can't be held responsible for those deaths.” Traeger sounded as if he were trying to convince himself.

Hannan got to his feet. “Come on. Boris will be awaiting us.”

There was turtle soup. There was Cornish game hen. There were haricots verts that seemed dropped from heaven rather than plucked from earth. There was a soufflé. White wine, red wine, a flute of champagne. Nate drank water, as usual. And, oh, the sauces. The salad followed the entree, of course,
à la mode française
. Lise, Boris's bitty but bossy wife, shooed him back to the kitchen whenever he appeared at the doorway, like a figure in a clock, anxious to watch his handiwork disappear. Laura drove thoughts of the spartan diet she was supposedly on from her mind. She smiled at Ray, deciding that she liked him better with a little weight on him. Before they left the table, Nate asked Lise to bring in Boris.

He came in and waved dismissively as they applauded him. His roseate complexion suggested that he had tried each of the wines, for approval, of course. Lise led him back to the kitchen.

John and Traeger would spend the night in Nate's residence. On the way home, Ray said, “He hasn't a clue where that picture is.”

“I'm not so sure.”

He waited.

“You heard the remark he said Arroyo made when he visited Don Ibanez: ‘Where would you hide a book? In a library.'”

“That picture is a helluva lot larger than a book.”

“Well, there are large libraries.”

Traeger would have liked to sit up next to the pilot, Jack Smiley, but that would have meant sitting on the lap of Brenda Steltz, the copilot, so he napped in the cabin for the first hour of the flight west, then had a beer, settled at the desk in Hannan's airborne office, and got out his computer. Being relieved had been a bit of a downer, but visiting Dortmund had had its usual effect and now, working again for Ignatius Hannan, Traeger felt his first enthusiasm for the project return. He let his fingers do the thinking as they moved over the keyboard of his laptop.

The premise of his recollections was that Boswell had both said the mission was accomplished, meaning that the image had been recovered, presumably in Pocatello, and yet allowed Grady to deny he had ever had the picture. The two of them, Boswell and Grady, could stand for the island in the liar's paradox, the island whose standard was “Here everybody is lying.” But was that statement a lie, too? On the other hand, maybe the Pontiac had not belonged to the agency. But then who had sent in that Chinook?

It had now been three weeks since the theft of the Virgin of Guadalupe from the basilica in Mexico City. Traeger read what he had on the event, news reports, notes on conversations. He was determined to start from scratch and look for things he hadn't thought important before. Maybe they still weren't. But he found himself dwelling on the American who had been gunned down during the theft. Lloyd Kaiser. What had he been doing in the basilica? Why had he tried to stop the thieves? The answers seemed obvious. He had been a pilgrim and had been in the back of the basilica, waiting to go to confession, when all hell broke out. Wouldn't any pilgrim do what Lloyd Kaiser had done? Apparently not. He was the only one who had risen to the occasion.

Googling Lloyd Kaiser told him that the man had been the author of books for young adults. Citizen of Indianapolis, native of Minneapolis. It sounded like a Roger Miller song. He called up the website of the
Indianapolis Star
and found an obit that must have been written by one of the family. But there was also a news story on Kaiser, citing him as one of the many in the great pantheon of Hoosier authors. Traeger thought he recognized Booth Tarkington and Kurt Vonnegut, but the accomplishments of the others seemed as modest as Kaiser's.

After that blind alley, Traeger got back to relevant facts.

Theophilus Grady called a press conference in El Paso, claiming to have stolen the painting as a way to stop the invasion of the country by undocumented aliens. Grady was whisked away and soon it was learned that all the Rough Rider camps along the border were gone, leaving the subsequent uproar to Paul Pulaski and his Minutemen.

All the events in the guerrilla war aside, along with the ful-minations of congressmen and senators and the odd silence from the White House, the next significant item was the emergence of Miguel Arroyo as spokesman for his fellow Latinos. The head of Justicia y Paz had issued a call to arms, but like Grady he seemed to shy away from any personal involvement.

Next was the deal with Morgan and the arrangements made for the exchange in the long-term parking lot of the San Francisco airport. What a fiasco. Morgan dead, whatever he had brought missing, and then Hannan's million-dollar ransom almost missing but for Laura's shrewdness. From cover, Traeger and Crosby had seen the package carried from the house to the Pontiac with tinted windows.

Meanwhile, Crosby had gone back to his own business. Traeger put through a call but Crosby was not available. Traeger left his number.

The one good thing that had come out of the fiasco in the parking lot had been Crosby's tailing of the Hummer. That had brought him, and eventually Traeger, to Grady's hideout near Pocatello, Idaho. And then the big Chinook landed and Grady was taken into custody by former colleagues of Traeger and Crosby. And then the package had been put into the Pontiac with tinted windows.

Apart from the recent assassination attempt on Miguel Arroyo, that seemed to be it. But Lowry had urged Traeger to go see Arroyo, as he would have done if he hadn't been summoned back to Washington.

That was about where he was, and it was pretty much nowhere. His first thought was to direct the plane to L.A. and follow Lowry's suggestion. As it was, they were headed for Oakland. Hannan had insisted that Traeger must first consult with Don Ibanez. Because Hannan had liked the report on the old man's behavior in that parking lot? In any case, the insistence had seemed whimsical. But he had put the obvious question. If Grady didn't have the miraculous portrait, had Morgan brought it to the San Francisco airport and then been killed while at the wheel of his car? Whatever had been in the trunk of his car was missing.

“Which is why Grady didn't have it,” Ray Whipple said. “If Morgan could deliver it, that meant Grady no longer had it. He wouldn't have wanted to admit that, so when he saw the charges he might be facing he took back his whole story.”

Traeger decided not to correct the assumptions of that declaration.

Hannan had been insistent. “Talk to Don Ibanez.”

“Okay.”

“Traeger, the stolen image was life-size. How could it fit into the trunk of a car?”

Lots of ways, if you didn't mind making a smaller package of it. Rolling it up maybe. But Traeger remembered Don Ibanez in that parking lot. His reaction to that empty trunk was odd. In fact, every time Traeger had talked with the old man, Don Ibanez had not seemed overly anxious about the missing Virgin of Guadalupe.

More than merely puzzling, that was beginning to look significant.

The San Francisco Giants were at home and Smiley and Steltz were looking forward to a few games while they awaited word from Traeger. Alerted by Hannan, Don Ibanez was waiting for him with a car. So up the Napa Valley they drove, with Don Ibanez narrating a history of the area. Traeger listened, looking at the passing scenery, keeping his eye out for other wild geese he might chase.

Clare opened the door of the hacienda and greeted Traeger warmly. He went inside while Don Ibanez went off to make a visit to the basilica. On a patio in front of the house, George Worth was seated, a glass of wine in his hand. He lifted it in greeting. There was another glass on a glass-top table. Clare's.

“Won't you join us?”

He would. Clare poured Traeger a glass of wine. “I had a long talk with Lowry.”

The reminder of the Catholic Worker house in Palo Alto made Worth uncomfortable. Lowry had told Traeger of the star-crossed romance—his phrase—between George Worth and Clare Ibanez. Was Worth wavering in his dedication to the poor devils who showed up at the house? Looking around, at the grounds, at the hacienda, at Clare when she handed him his wine, Traeger couldn't say that he blamed George Worth if he was finding this setting more attractive than the one in Palo Alto.