Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

There had been a full-length curtain on that cubicle door. Here, they faced a shorter curtain on the opposite wall. Temple was reminded of a motel window with the drapes drawn.

“You know what to expect?” Alch asked, a hand on the drapery pulls.

“She’ll look like she’s ‘sleeping.’ ”

“No, young lady. I well know the temptation to get smart in the face of something unpleasant. She will look like she’s dead. You need to compare the pallor and stillness you see here with the healthy and mobile face you saw a few days ago. There will be changes but not significant ones.”

Temple swallowed, remembering that Matt had performed this very unpleasant service for his dead stepfather. How domestically bizarre and living-roomish it was to open the chintzy, short drapes just to see a draped gurney with only a dead head revealed.

How weird to see a person lying down never to get up again. How bizarre to imagine that graveyard-pale, makeup-masked Shangri-La persona as still as death.

“They washed off the makeup, of course,” Alch added.

Who was “they”? Temple wondered, bracing herself. Barefaced. Temple recalled the taut, angry, raw features she’d glimpsed on the exhibition floor when she was too surprised to realize that it was Shangri-La until the woman had moved on.

“How tall was she?” Temple asked.

A rustle as Alch consulted his lined notebook. “Five four.”

Temple nodded. Her impression exactly and height was always a prime issue with a shorty like herself. She knew where the top of her head hit on Max, for example, in heels and out of them, and now, on Matt. What a fickle girl! She deserved this moment of penance and repentance, only she didn’t believe in all that breast-beating stuff. Did she?

You don’t gaze on a dead person everyday. In funeral parlors they’re tarted up for the afterlife. Here, it was the naked and the dead and no escaping that reality in the comforting rituals of church and state and custom.

“Ready?” Alch didn’t sound ready himself.

Temple nodded.

The curtains hissed open on their rods like hula-dancing snakes. The sheet was so white it made the body’s skin tone look dingy, like yellow-gray laundry. In a way, Temple felt she was viewing a gray-and-white movie still. She saw mostly profile, but there was no denying the small, stubby nose, the large flat cheekbones, the jet black eyes. Nothing could return the taut muscular facial animation that had made all these features bold and vibrant and rather scary.

“That’s her.”

“Sure?” Alch’s forehead had creased like a raised miniblind, all furrows. Must be from working for Molina.

Temple nodded. “The animation’s gone, of course, but the features were quite striking. Unforgettable. And, we were a similar height, I saw them close-up. Do you have any idea yet who she really was?”

“We know exactly who she was.” Alch came to stand beside her. “Fingerprints. Ran them internationally.”

“Internationally?”

He shrugged. “Her Asian origin, the fact that the exhibition has a Russian connection. You never know what will turn up.”

“And?” A minuscule part of Temple’s reptile brain, the sheer primitive instinct part, still wasn’t sure this wasn’t Kitty the Cutter with plastic surgery and a spirit-gum extreme makeover.

“This little lady was on an international wanted list.”

Kitty? My God. Maybe she’d had plastic surgery years ago when she was on the run from both Interpol and the IRA, like Max. He’d just popped in some green contact lenses and disappeared into a bold performing persona. Maybe Kitty had remade her face and created a veiled persona. But wait! Matt was the only one to see her face-to-face as Kathleen O’Connor, and she’d been a black Irish beauty then. How could she—?

Alch was watching her wheels turn way too carefully.

“What could a young Asian woman do to be wanted internationally?” Temple asked.

“She defected fifteen years ago from a mainland Chinese company of acrobats touring in Spain. Was never seen since. Until now. Name of Hai Ling.”

Temple would have gasped but she held her breath instead. That would explain Shangri-La’s on- and off-stage makeup disguise. She was a political defector using her acrobatic prowess in a new career, magician.

That would not explain why this wanted woman who apparently had no love for Temple, sight unseen, had shown Temple her true face on the floor of the exhibition hall only two days before her death.

Who, What, Why?

Okay.

The Synth was big, bad, and in this caper up to its vanishing cream in perfidy.

Temple knew that. She also knew, somewhere deep in her foreshortened bones, that more was going on here at the New Millennium than Synth games.

Andrei-Art had died first, during a possible attempt to steal the scepter.

That meant that someone had torpedoed his scheme as artfully as Max’s. Not just anyone. If she believed in Max, at least as a wily super-criminal—and she did, until death or disinterest did them part—his role was the coda of this operation, not the prelude.

Speaking in musical terms, could Olga Kirkov have used her disabled and disowned younger brother to fulfill a long-delayed lust for a priceless piece of her White Russian past?

And what about Count Volpe, an urbane aristocratic gigolo living on the decadent Western cult of personality? He had consulted himself into the trivial notoriety of the Vogue and Vanity Fair party-photo pages, a grave that would ultimately be unmarked. Unless he recovered the Czar Alexander scepter for his family, his past, his legacy.

Then there was Dimitri, the government functionary nobody much liked. And his big guard dogs too. Two. What couldn’t the three of them accomplish if up to no good . . . up to no Boris Godunov? Temple imagined that the New Russia was no more immune to the lure of Big Bucks than the old imperialist model.

So. Who had planned what would have been a spectacular distraction? Up in the sky! Look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s super-destruction—!

Had Max not been there on Synth business, the Cloaked Conjuror, Shangri-La, the two black panthers, and Hyacinth, the performing housecat, would have all plummeted to their deaths.

In that chaos, with everybody present focusing on the carnage on the floor, any ground-bound predator could have easily nipped the scepter.

Max had admitted that he’d prepared the Lexan cover for lift-off. Someone else might have observed his operation and planned to take advantage of it.

Had the scenario gone as planned, the crushed body of Max Kinsella, aka Mask Guy, would have joined everyone else on the killing floor.

But the plan had gone wrong, thanks to the hypersensitive sixth sense and super-physical strength of said Max Kinsella.

Temple paused to smile. Even when she was mad at him, she knew he was a hero. Her secret smile faded. It was hard to be a hero’s helpmate, was all.

And . . . there was something Max wasn’t telling her, as usual. He had gone very vague when she’d asked what had kept the leopards from plunging to cat heaven sixty feet below.

He’d had nothing to do with it. Couldn’t have.

And what the heck had happened to Hyacinth anyway? After she’d left the wide-load tracks in Max’s back? Shouldn’t she have been DOA on the floor far below, along with her mistress?

Nobody had asked Temple to ID a cat.

Not even her own.

Hmmm .

Since she didn’t think interrogating Midnight Louie, wherever he was, would do her one whit of good, she decided to start with the wandering Russians.

Madame Olga was to be found wandering the lower levels of the installation, a study in melancholy. The exhibition was roped off now, of course, but it was not the scene of the death and insiders were still allowed access.