The Fire (34 page)

The conquest of Spain and Africa by Islam had made the king of the Franks the master of the Christian Occident. It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable.

– Henri Pirenne,
Mohammed and Charlemagne

Sage Livingston, Rodo Boujaron, and Monsieur ‘Charlemagne d’Anagram’ himself, my suspicious new Colorado neighbor, Galen March. These were the very last folks on the planet I wanted to see at this precise moment, especially en masse like this, with me half-naked. I felt like gagging. But I managed to pull on my plush velour robe and knot the sash, the only thing I could think to do when confronted by this unexpected trio of mismatched coconspirators.

Nim had stepped from the steamy Roman bath and tugged his arms into his own robe. With one deft sweep, he plucked Key’s fax from my hand, shoved it back into his pocket, and handed me a towel for my dripping hair.

He muttered from the side of his mouth, ‘You’re acquainted
with these people, I take it?’ When I merely nodded, he added, ‘Then timely introductions might prove to be in order.’

But our Charm School Queen beat me to it.

‘Alexandra!’ Sage exclaimed, crossing the space to me with the two men in tow. ‘How astonishing to find you here at the same hotel where Galen himself is staying. He and I were searching all of Georgetown for you until your employer here was kind enough to point us in the right direction; it was he who suggested you might be visiting your uncle at the Four Seasons.’

Before I could respond or react to this startling remark, Sage had turned her charms upon Nim, extending one flawlessly manicured hand and bestowing an even more polished smile. ‘And you must be Dr Ladislaus Nim, the noted scientist of whom we’ve all heard so much. I’m Sage Livingston, Alexandra’s neighbor from Colorado. Delighted to meet you.’

Heard so much of
Nim
? The Man of Mystery himself? Hardly from Mother or
me.
And just how could Rodo pin down our whereabouts so fast, without the use of those bugging devices I thought we’d just ditched?

Nim was shaking hands all around, as dignified as one could be in such attire. At this moment, however, I was cold and dripping – not to mention more than desperate to figure out the rest of Key’s fax about Mother still stashed in my uncle’s pocket. I decided to excuse myself and head for the locker room to dry off, in hopes I might escape by a back door and follow up with Nim on these and other questions.

But our ‘Hostess with the Mostest,’ it would appear, had yet another surprise up her sleeve.

‘Dr Nim,’ Sage was saying, in a sultry sotto voce, ‘surely you, of all people, must know just who we all are, and why we’re all here. So you must understand, as well, why we must speak and why time is of the essence.’

Who we all
are
?

I tried not to glance at my uncle. But really – what gave here?

Sage was sounding less like the pretentious bit of fluff of my longtime acquaintance and a bit more like Mata Hari. Was it actually possible that the Sage standing before me right now, the one mindlessly toying with her diamond tennis bracelet and pouting, could be heiress to more than just the Livingston oil fields and uranium mines? Might she be heiress to all those intriguing Livingston intrigues as well?

But just as that unbidden thought about Sage had done its best to bite me from behind, the shade of her mother reared its unattractive head.
Exactly whom do you believe you are dealing with?
Rosemary had asked me that night at the restaurant.
Do you have any possible conception of who I am?

I decided – at least under these cold, wet circumstances – that it was time to blow the whistle. I’d definitely had enough.

‘What exactly do you
mean
,’ I asked Sage in irritation, ‘that Nim must know “Who We Are”? Let’s see… reading from left to right, you all look a lot like my uncle, my boss, and a couple of my mother’s neighbors—’

I paused, for Sage, completely ignoring me, had sighed with understated elegance, lips pressed together and nostrils slightly flared. Glancing meaningfully toward the reception desk, she whispered directly to Nim, ‘Isn’t there someplace we can go and speak privately, the five of us? Just as soon, of course, as you and Alexandra have had time to dry off and change. You must know very well what we need to discuss.’

I was about to object, but Nim took me by surprise. ‘My room. Ten minutes,’ he told her, nodding to the gang of three. Then he tore a bit of paper from the piece in his pocket and scribbled his room number down.

What on earth was he thinking? He knew better than
anyone that my mother was in danger – maybe right here in D.C. – that I had to get out of here now. And yet we were fraternizing once more with the enemy, about to throw another extended tea party. I was really fuming.

When Nim hit the lockers, I doubled back quickly and grabbed Sage by the arm.

Galen and Rodo were already well ahead, halfway up the stairs to the athletic club’s private entrance and hopefully out of earshot of my questions. But the moment I began, I found I’d been corked up so long that when uncorked, I just couldn’t seem to stop.

‘Who called this meeting?’ I demanded of Sage. ‘Was it you or Tom and Jerry up there? Why were you and March looking “all over Georgetown” for me today? What are you both doing in Washington, anyway? Why did you both race down to Denver last Sunday just after I’d left? What did you have to talk about with Vartan Azov and Lily Rad?’

It was clearly no secret that I knew all this – Rosemary had already let the cat out of the bag that she knew I’d had a report from Nokomis Key.

Now Sage coolly regarded me with that lofty, condescending expression that had always filled me with the desire to wipe it off her face with a Brillo pad. Then she smiled, and the familiar Miss Popularity returned, doublebarreled dimples and all.

‘You really ought to ask your uncle those questions – not me,’ she told me sweetly. ‘After all, he’s agreed we would all meet. It’s only ten minutes from now, as he’s just said.’

Sage started up the stairs once more, but again I grabbed her by the arm. She looked at me in shocked surprise. Bloody hell! I was surprising even myself. I must have been nearly snarling in her face in my frustration.

Maybe I’d never shown my true colors toward Sage before,
but from my perspective this had been a pretty rough week, even before it received any help from her and her awful family. Besides, I was in no mood to get the brush-off from a girl whose entire prior accomplishment in life, so far as I knew, was to be a card-carrying Teen Goddess. People were in danger. I needed information. Now.

‘You’re here. We’re alone. I’m asking
you,’
I told her. ‘What would be the advantage in waiting ten more minutes to ask my uncle something you could tell me right away?’

‘I was only trying to help, after all,’ said Sage. ‘It’s your uncle we’ve come to meet with, as you must realize. Galen insisted we had to find him. He said it was urgent. That’s why we went to Denver to question the others after your mother came up missing at that party. And when even
you
didn’t seem to have a clue where she had gone—’

She cut off when I’d glanced around quickly to see if anyone could overhear us. This was more than I’d expected. Galen March was hunting for Nim? But why? I was almost in shock.

Then I looked up the long flight of stairs and saw that Galen himself was headed back down them, coming right toward us. I panicked and dragged Sage into the ladies’ locker room where he could hardly follow. Still holding her by the arm, I checked under the stall doors to be certain we were completely alone.

When I turned back to Sage, I was nearly panting with anticipation. I knew I had to ask the question – though I confess I was genuinely terrified to hear what her answer might be. Sage was staring at me as if I might start frothing at the mouth. I would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been quite so grave.

As Key would say, I bit the bullet.

‘Why would Galen March be chasing after my uncle?’
I asked. ‘After all, they’d never met each other, until just moments ago, in this club.’

Right?

‘I never really inquired,’ said Sage with her customary sangfroid.

She was treading carefully, no doubt, so as not to excite me more than necessary, though I noticed that she was eyeing the nearby fire alarm box, as if contemplating how hard it might be to break the glass and pull the handle to summon help.

I was about to press further, but Sage hadn’t finished. With her next words, I nearly blacked out.

‘I just assumed they must know each other. After all, it was your uncle who put up the money to purchase Sky Ranch.’

I had never before studied my uncle through the bottom of a brandy snifter, but I’d accepted this stiff belt he’d proffered the moment I’d arrived, wet and bedraggled, from the club.

Now, dried off and dressed in the fresh change of clothes he’d earlier stuffed into my backpack, I was peering through the glass as I sipped the last of my cognac, curled barefoot in a comfy chair behind one of those exotic flower arrangements the Four Seasons is famous for. I tried to remember their names: the orange and purple were birds of paradise, the green and white were yucca plants, the fuschia were wild ginger, the plum were cymbidiums…or was it cymbidi
a
? I’d never been much at Latin.

Nim came around the table and removed the glass from my hand. ‘That’s quite enough for one morning,’ he informed me. ‘I want you relaxed, not comatose. Why don’t you pull up your chair and join the group?’

The group.

He was referring to the motley trio seated on rich brocade
chairs that were scattered about the lavish suite. Nim padded back and forth over the luxurious carpeting, fixing them drinks of their own.

I really couldn’t believe all this was happening.

I felt truly ill, and that cognac had hardly helped relieve my confusion or pain.

I knew I somehow had to get to the bottom of things. But for the first time I felt completely and utterly alone.

Thank God I’d done those thirty laps in the pool today, before reality set in.

Thank God I’d pinched Key’s fax from Nim’s robe in the bathroom just now.

Because my beloved uncle Slava – the one person I’d always trusted with my confidences and my life, more even than my own parents – now appeared to have a ton of explaining to do. At this point, I wasn’t sure how much he
could
just explain away. After all, as my mother used to say when I was a child, ‘A lie by omission is still a lie.’

As he’d requested, I pulled my chair from behind the table of flowers to ‘join the group,’ and I seized this opportunity for a quick mental recap.

How much fact or speculation had I myself shared with Nim since last night?

How much of his input was a ‘lie by omission’ – versus actual commission?

I couldn’t state that he’d outright lied, but he’d certainly misled me. For starters, his every remark in the past twenty-four hours had seemed to imply that he’d never met Rodo or Galen – even as far as this morning, when he’d deciphered the latter’s code name and had pointed out how the two might be linked through Charlemagne and the chess set.

This picture of blissful ignorance certainly shifted, once you squinted a bit closer at a few unobtrusive facts. Like the
fact that Rodo had known right where Nim was staying in D.C., when no one else had, including me. Or the fact that Nim had footed the multimillion-dollar bill for a worthless Colorado ranch purportedly owned by Galen March.

Once you read a bit of that fine print, it might well appear that my uncle had been well acquainted – and well before today – with everybody here in the room, with the possible exception of Sage Livingston.

Of course, that’s only if you assumed that Sage
herself
was telling the truth.

‘Clearly, we seem to have been protecting the wrong person all along,’ said Nim to the room in general, when everyone had been refreshed with refreshments. ‘Cat outwitted everyone with that disappearing act of hers, though I’ve no conception of
why.
Any ideas?’

‘Just as clearly,’ Rodo volunteered, ‘she didn’t trust any of us to protect either her
or
Alexandra. Why else would she have taken such critical matters into her own hands, as she has done?’

But even as he talked, I knew I couldn’t take this for even one teensy second longer. I was all but sure I’d explode.

‘Um, I
thought
none of you had ever met before?’ I said sweetly, my eyes all the while shooting daggers at Nim across the room.

‘We haven’t,’ he said, in disgust. ‘We were kept apart for a purpose. This was all your mother’s idea from the very beginning. I should say, it really began from the moment of your father’s death. This is what comes of dealing with a woman who’s let her maternal instincts seize control of her mental faculties. She’d had a fine brain before
you
were born. What a mess.’

Great. Now
I
was responsible for whatever wild scheme these folks had been up to, while I myself had been kept completely in the dark.

‘Perhaps you can explain,’ I said to Nim, as I motioned to Galen. ‘Are you the owner of Sky Ranch, as Sage says you are? Or is
he
?’

‘Cat asked me to purchase the place,’ Nim said. ‘A kind of buffer zone from the land speculators, as she explained it. She had someone act as a “front” to deceive the local residents as to our involvement. Though I never knew who, I now assume that would be Mr March. Apparently, it was Miss Livingston here who helped instrument the sale in privacy.’

Sage? Why would Mother involve
her
? She hated all the Livingston clan. Though it might explain how Sage had learned who the real owner was, this scenario was making less sense by the moment, even less than inviting them all to her bloody birthday party. I felt like screaming.