“If you have thought it through, then, very well,” said Charlemagne with a wave of his hand. “You would like me to take care of this for you?”
“Please. You can put the furniture and everything in storage until I figure out what to do.”
“Bien.
And where will you go?”
“I'll check into a hotel for now, I guess. Then maybe get an apartment.”
“Do you have money?”
“Some. Enough.”
Living at home and waiting tables between magic jobs, Emma had managed to put a few thousand dollars in her savings account. Of course it wouldn't last very long if she wanted to have her own place. She'd have to break down and get a real job sooner or later. The thought made her fairly sick.
“Maybe the estate can help you out with a loan.”
“I'm sorry for being so rattled, Charlemagne. I obviously don't know whether I'm coming or going. Oh, I almost forgot.”
Emma reached into her pocket for Jacques Passant's gold cuff links, which she handed to Charlemagne.
“I'm sure Pépé would want you to have these. You were his best friend.”
“Merci beaucoup,”
said Charlemagne, staring at the tiny gold articles in his open palm. “I am deeply moved.”
“Would you mind if I left one of my suitcases here for now?”
“No, not at all.”
“Thanks,” said Emma, still trying to find a comfortable position on the couch as Charlemagne deposited the cuff links into the pocket of his vest.
Her own jewelry in Jacques Passant's heavy leather two-suiter would be safer here, Emma knew, shifting position on the sofa, yet again. She probably wouldn't have much occasion to wear her party dresses in the near future. The last thing she needed now was to get ripped off in some hotel room.
Charlemagne, who had been watching Emma squirm around on the sofa, his ears growing pinker and pinker, now spoke.
“Are you having the problem?”
“No, I'm just uncomfortable.”
“Do you perhaps wish to go to the little room?” said Charlemagne, looking at his shoes, then the wall, then his carnation.
“What little room?”
“âThe little room where all must go,'” whispered the attorney, unable to meet her eye. “Is that not what poor Jacques called it?”
“The bathroom?”
“
Oui.
”
“I don't have to go to the bathroom, Charlemagne,” said Emma, trying not to laugh at his embarrassed expression.
“You are sure? You have been wiggling.”
“I've been wiggling because of your couch.”
“And what is wrong with my couch?” said Charlemagne, glancing up indignantly.
“It's about as comfortable as a sack of potatoes. What am I sitting on? I think there's something in here.”
Emma reached under the cushion of the sofa and pulled out
what had been causing her discomfortâa bone about five inches long. It was dull gray in color, but otherwise exactly like the bones that dogs were always pictured burying in backyards. Except for the carving. The bone was entirely covered with crudely etched designs. Emma had heard of witch doctors before, but witch lawyers?
“So that is what happened to it,” said Charlemagne, laughing, as he took the item from Emma's hands. “You will please to excuse me. Margaret, my granddaughter, came by with the baby last week, and this is what he does, the little thief.”
Charlemagne deposited the bone on the end table, where it apparently belonged. Emma reached over immediately and retrieved it. The carved designsâstars and lines and facesâwere striking, and strangely familiar.
“You said the estate could help me out with some money?” said Emma, trying to recall where she had seen such patterns before.
“Yes, that is true,” said the lawyer, clearly happy to change the subject back to matters of business. “It is time for the reading the will.”
“Oh, please, Charlemagne, not now.”
“This is what you have said this to me before, Emma. But we cannot postpone this forever,
n'est-ce pas?
It is the law.”
“I don't care about the details.”
“There is money involved as well as details.”
“I don't care about that either. Except maybe a little advance to keep me going. Can't you take care of everything?”
“It is not that simple,” announced Charlemagne in his gravest legal voice. “It may take many months to sell the house, and the probate procedures must be handled, taxes and other obligations must be paid. As executor you must choose the attorney to help you do this, by the way.”
“You mean you won't do it?”
“If you so wish, I will be honored. I did not wish to presume.”
“I wouldn't have it any other way. Now what about an advance?”
“A small fee is available to you as executor, and I can lend you whatever else you may need until funds are free in the estate.”
Emma shook her head.
“No, I don't like to borrow anything,” she said, unable to pry her attention away from the carved bone. “Just how small is this small executor's fee?
What was it about the bone? Why was it so familiar?
“Two percent is customary.”
Emma glanced up.
“That won't go very far,” she said, biting her lip, trying to imagine what the house could be worth. She had never even thought about it before.
“It is true,” said Charlemagne sadly. “The estate is worth maybe a million, so two percent of this would be only twenty thousand dollars.”
“Twenty thousand dollars! That can't be right,” sputtered Emma.
“Two percent of a million dollars is not twenty thousand anymore? Mathematics have changed?”
“No. Pépé couldn't possibly have had a million dollars. That's crazy.”
“A million dollars is not so much money anymore these days,” said the attorney, taking a sniff of his carnation. “And most of it is tied up in the house. The income on the rest is not enough to live onâat least in this city of oursâconsidering present interest rates. Jacques had his social security and still took the odd jobs, you know.”
“But where did he get it, all that money?”
“Jacques did not
get
all that money, as you say,” pronounced Charlemagne, shaking a perfectly manicured finger. “It grew. Like the tree from the seed.”
“What do you mean, it grew?”
“Your grandfather had some capital when first we met so many years ago,” said the lawyer, pursing his thin lips with obvious pride. “A modest amount, from the sale of property he had owned. From this, the industrious Charlemagne Moussy helped him to make the down payment on the house you now wish to sell. The rest, we invested. I have the knack for such things, and the market, she did well. Your grandfather lived simply, letting the portfolio build up so that you could have a better life. The best way to make money is never to spend it, you know.”
“I'm stunned,” said Emma. “I don't know what to say.”
“Jacques loved you very much. Of this I am sure.”
“Look at me,” said Emma, digging into the pocket of her jeans for a piece of Kleenex and wiping her eyes, which were full of tears, yet again. “I'm a total mess. Maybe I can get a job as a fountain.”
“It is understandable,” said Charlemagne.
“What do you think happened, Charlemagne?” said Emma after a moment, collecting herself. “Why was Pépé killed?”
“It was a mugging. A random street crime.”
“Yes, yes, that's what everybody said at first, but it makes no sense now.
“The senseless violence, it is the disease of our time.”
“One isolated death, maybe. But how could it be a coincidence âHenri-Pierre Caraignac being killed with the same gun?”
The lawyer stood, and walked to his desk, his hands clasped behind his back, his face inscrutable.
“This I do not know,” he said finally. “I told the police last week everything I can think of, which is nothing. Nobody would have wished to harm dear, sweet Jacques, and I have never heard of this Caraignac person.”
Emma looked down. She was still clutching the strange bone in her hand, clutching it so hard her knuckles were white. Now she forced herself to relax her grip.
“What is this thing, anyway?”
“It is a carved bone.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Probably not human, Jacques always assured me. He gave it to me, you know. Many years ago. It was one of those primitive things he liked so well.”
Emma took a deep breath. That was it! She didn't know why she hadn't seen it before. The carved lines and figures were identical to the carving on the wooden figures in her grandfather's room.
“It was Jacques who first taught me that I should have little toys for the nervous clients to play with,” Charlemagne continued, a sad smile passing over his face. “âCalm a man's hands and you calm his mind,' he used to say. He was very wise about such things. I miss him very much.”
Emma turned the bone over in her hand. The carving was not deep and had been worn smooth. The artifact felt old and strangely comfortable to hold, as if it had been specifically made for anxious hands.
“Where did my grandfather get it, do you think?”
“This, I do not know,” said Charlemagne, wiping his eye, apparently still thinking of his friend. “One of my clients, he is a collector of primitive artâand greedy wives, I am sorry to sayâtold me he believed the bone to be Kaito.”
“Kaito?”
“An Indian tribe, native to one of those islands in the Caribbean.”
Suddenly Emma remembered.
The name on the model boat that had disappeared from Pépé's dresser had been
Kaito Spirit.
And carved directly underneath had been other words.
“San Marcos,” she whispered.
“Yes, that is it,” said Charlemagne triumphantly.
“Is what?”
“The island where the Kaito live. It is somewhere near Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, is it not?”
Â
Â
T
he Alhambra sat on top of Nob Hill like the crown on the head of a king.
It was a huge yet strangely delicate stone structure which had risen, Phoenix-like, from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake just a few blocks from two of San Francisco's other grand hotels, the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins.
Emma pulled her battered Nissan into the hemispherical driveway and stopped directly in front of the hotel's massive entryway. It had been only three days since she had dropped Henri-Pierre Caraignac off here, but it seemed more like a lifetime ago.
A doorman dressed in a uniform that would have earned nods of approval in Czarist Russia instantly swooped down on Emma's car, followed by two porters and a parking attendant. The team extracted Emma's luggage and departed with her vehicle with an efficiency she had thought reserved to car thieves. The doorman then ushered Emma up the steps and into the waiting clutches of another character dressed for operetta, who in turn guided her through the bustling lobbyâa gigantic affair of plush
furniture and palm trees, topped by a soaring skylight ceilingâand delivered her finally to the front desk. Presumably she would be reunited with her luggage at some other time; it was nowhere to be seen.
“May I have your credit card, please, Miss Passant?” sniffed the check-in clerk, barely looking up. He was a slender young man with long teeth and eyebrows that slanted upward at an ever steeper angle the closer they got to the middle of his faceâas if they aspired to grow vertically, rather than in the usual horizontal fashion.
Emma dug into her wallet and handed over the appropriate piece of plastic, then turned her gaze back to the busy lobby as the clerk went about his business.
A few individuals sat reading newspapers or milling about in small groups, but most of the lobby's population seemed to be in motion. A continual stream of people rushed about in every direction: men dressed in dark suits and quiet ties, women with silk blouses and gold jewelry. Everyone seemed very serious and very well fixed. Even their hair looked expensive.
“And how long do you plan to be with us on this stay, Miss Passant?”
“Not long,” said Emma, looking down at her blue jeans, feeling out of place, as she knew she would. “Maybe a few days.”
The clerk continued tapping the keyboard of his computer terminal. He didn't seem to have noticed her outfit. In fact, he didn't seem to have seen her at all. No one hadânot really. There was nothing so anonymous as a large hotel.
“That will be three hundred forty dollars per night for a single.”
“Three hundred and forty dollars!”
“Not including tax. Sign here, please.”
The price was outrageous, thought Emma as she signed the registration slip. The strange thing was that she could actually afford it.
Charlemagne hadn't let Emma leave his office until he had written her a check for twenty thousand dollars as an advance against her executor's fee and given it to Jean Bean to deposit in Emma's account. Emma would have more when probate was finished and they had sold the house, much more. She could order anything she wanted at dinner or from room service and not have to scrimp on gasoline and chocolate for the next month.
The only trouble was that Emma still couldn't understand how Pépé could have had so much money. How could she feel comfortable about spending even a nickel of it until she did?
And Charlemagne's insistence on reading Jacques Passant's entire will to her before she left the office had only made matters worse. In it her grandfather had actually referred to the Kaito Spirit as Emma's legacy, though his words had made no sense:
“ ⦠that she may take her place at the helm and turn the wheel on the legacy that I have kept hidden from her.”
What legacy was Pépé talking about? The million dollars? What did that have to do with some boat that he had sailed on thirty years ago? And how was she supposed to take her place at its helm?
“A friend of mine was murdered here the other night,” Emma said in a quiet voice, remembering why she had come to the Alhambra.
The desk clerk looked up, his eyebrows collapsing in astonishment. He certainly seemed to see Emma now.
“Beg pardon?”
“I said, a man was murdered here.”
The most intolerable thing about her grandfather's death had been its senselessness. Henri-Pierre's death, however, had changed everything. Two apparent strangers shot with the same gun couldn't be coincidence, no matter what the police said. There was a single reason why both men had died, a connection between them; there had to be.
Emma couldn't believe Detective Poteet wasn't taking Henri-Pierre's
death more seriously. Before getting off the phone with her he had even had the gall to suggest that their best hope was to wait for a tip from somebody to whom Henri-Pierre's murderer might have bragged. Just another random act of violence, he had said. But Emma knew Poteet was wrong. The Alhambra was the logical place to begin proving it.
“His name was Caraignac,” Emma said aloud. “I understand he was shot on Saturday night.”
“I'm certain that you're mistaken, Miss Passant. This is the Alhambra.”
“No mistake, I promise you.”
There had been no clues to Pépé's murder, but Henri-Pierre's was different. On the ferry the Frenchman had said he was overdue to be back in New York, so he must have stayed at the Alhambra awhile. He would have talked to people, perhaps had meetings in the lobby or the restaurants. This was where Emma had last seen Henri-Pierre, where he had died. Somewhere his path must have crossed Jacques Passant's. That intersection was the key to everything. Emma intended to find it.
She swallowed hard, steeling herself. She wanted to get the hardest part over first.
“I'd like to see the room where it happened, if I may.”
“Perhaps you should speak with Mr. Anthony,” said the distressed clerk, his eyebrows elevating again. “Please wait here a moment.”
The young clerk hurried away to an office at the back, giving Emma a moment to catch her breath.
She couldn't believe she was actually doing this. She knew it was probably pointless wanting to see the room where Henri-Pierre had been killed, but as a magician Emma had learned never to assume anything. Illusions worked because of the audience's assumptions. People thought that Sergio disappeared into thin air because they assumed the base of the trick cage was too small to conceal him. They thought that Emma produced the playing
cards they were thinking of by magic, because they assumed she couldn't have fifty-two different cards concealed in fifty-two different places on her person.
But they were wrong. She could. And she had.
The key here, Emma knew, was to make no assumptions. She had to see everything Henri-Pierre had seen, touch everything he had touched, and maybe, ultimately, she would understand why things had happened as they had.
After a moment the clerk returned with a well-groomed older man with iron-gray hair and half-glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. He stopped behind the desk directly in front of Emma and studied her as an owl might study a mechanical mouse.
“I'm Raymond Anthony, the manager,” he finally said in a smooth baritone. “May I help you?”
“Yes. I'd like to see the room where Mr. Caraignac was killed Saturday night.”
“I'm afraid that's not possible,” said Mr. Anthony, picking an invisible piece of lint off the sleeve of his dark-blue suit.
“Someone was really murdered here?” gasped the clerk, his eyebrows fluttering with disbelief. “Why didn't anybody tell me?”
“Let's keep our voices down, shall we?” said Mr. Anthony between clenched teeth. A well-heeled middle-aged couple who were being checked in a few feet away apparently hadn't overheard.
“Why wasn't it on the news?” said the clerk in disbelief. “Why wasn't it in the papers?”
“It was,” said Mr. Anthony, shooting an expression at the young man that seemed to say shut-up-or-I'll-kill-you-painfully-and-feed-your-body-to-my-cat. “Happily most of the media was too responsible to give it a lot of play. Why don't you take your break now, Jason?”
“Butâ”
“And don't repeat any of this. It's bad for morale. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said Jason reluctantly, glancing back over his shoulder as he walked away.
“Now, Miss Passant,” said Mr. Anthony, tapping the computer keyboard when Jason was out of earshot. “What's your interest in this? Why do you want to see that room?”
“Mr. Caraignac was a friend of mine. I want to understand what happened.”
“We went over all this with the police. There's nothing to understand. It was an unfortunate incident, but no one on staff knows anything about it or about Mr. Caraignac.”
“How long was he here?”
“Two weeks, I believe.”
“He was here two weeks and nobody talked to him?”
“That's right.”
“Surely there must be some way for me to see Henri-Pierre's room, Mr. Anthony,” said Emma in her most earnest and innocent voice. “I know it sounds crazy, but it's very important to me. Please.”
The gray-haired manager looked down at Emma's blue jeans, then punched a button on his computer.
“We don't show our rooms, Miss Passant, be it to the press, comparison shoppers, or merely the morbidly curious. It's against policy. I'm afraid the only way you can see that room is to rent it.”
“What?”
“The staff is finishing the cleanup now, and it should be ready within the hour. You can have lunch at our restaurant while you wait.”
Emma stared at the manager, whose thin lips had turned up slightly into the merest suggestion of a smile.
“But how can you be renting out the room already?” she asked. “I was told Mr. Caraignac's body was only found yesterday morning.”
“That's true,” said Mr. Anthony. “The police were here all day yesterday and into the evening. Happily our maintenance team is
on the job twenty-four hours a day in order to keep things up to our high standards.”
“But don't the police still need the room?”
“Not unless they wish to pay four hundred twenty-five dollars per night.”
“Four hundred twenty-five! The clerk told me it was three forty.”
“This is a more expensive room.”
Emma didn't say anything for a moment, trying to think it through. All it would cost was one night's rental, after all. She could afford it. She could see what she had come to see. She wouldn't actually have to stay there.
“Oh, by the way,” said Mr. Anthony, glancing down at her jeans again, his smile growing almost imperceptibly widerâand cruelerâ“there's a minimum five-day rental on that particular room.”
Emma stared at his smug, condescending expression only a moment longer. Whatever doubts she had had disappeared.
“I'll take it,” she said, then turned on the heel of her tennis shoe and walked back across the lobby, leaving Mr. Anthony sputtering in astonishment at the desk.
She had the money, and it wasn't as if the room would be haunted or dripping with blood, Emma told herself. She had sawed too many people in half to be squeamish. The only thing to be afraid of in life was people like Mr. Anthony. Besides, it wasn't like she had anywhere else to go.
“One for lunch,” said Emma, arriving at the arched doorway of the Le Petite Trianon, just off the lobby.
It was now a little after eleven-thirty. The hotel's main dining room had just opened and was entirely empty. Emma wasn't particularly hungry, but since she'd have to wait for the room anyway, she might as well check out the restaurant.
This must have been where Henri-Pierre would have taken her to lunch, had she been able to accept his offer last week. He could
hardly have had the coffee shop in mind. Judging from the look of the placeâstrictly white tablecloths and crystal chandeliersâthe Frenchman had been ready to put his money where his mouth was.
“If Madame will follow me, I will show her to her table.”
The maitre d', a stocky man with white hair, was dressed in a tuxedo. If he made any judgments about Emma because of her outfit, he didn't show them. They were probably used to the occasional rock star or schlubby software millionaire in a place like this, Emma thought as the man led her to a banquette.
“Bon appétit,” said the maître d', handing her a menu the size of a kite. Judging by the nasal lilt of his French accent, Emma figured he had probably come from somewhere between Chicago and Indianapolis.
“What's your name?” she asked.