THE COLD FIRE- Page 20

  “I never dreamed Veronica could have taken it,” continued Buzzy. “The necklace was one of the great treasures of antiquity. It was a protection amulet, very sacred. The ancient Egyptians recognized no difference between the ornamental, magical, and even medical. Veronica, of course, knew this. In retrospect, I think it was the talisman she wanted more than some decorative piece of jewelry.” Buzzy shrugged his shoulders. “But as I said, I had no idea she was the one who had stolen the thing. She was only twelve-years-old and a very well-behaved girl, too. Rachida had a reputation for being wild and careless. I simply thought she was responsible somehow for losing the necklace herself.”

  Buzzy grew silent for a moment as his mind seemed to drift back. John shifted in his chair and Buzzy refocused and continued the story. “The following year, when we returned to New York, we were exhausted from traveling, so we spent a very quiet New Year’s Eve. I took Veronica to the Russian Tea Room for a birthday dinner with her grandmother and then we stopped off at Serendipity for ice cream sundaes before returning to our suite at the Pierre to watch the ball drop on television. The Pierre does such a good job of keeping their guest’s business private, I never even realized that damned diamond bracelet had been stolen from the South American widow down the hall. I didn’t hear about it until the following year when the press starting talking about the Ghost and mentioned that a bracelet had been stolen from the hotel while we were guests there.”

  “That’s when I first learned about the Ghost—about Veronica.” John shook his head still trying to get his mind around it.

  Buzzy smiled sadly. “It was on her fourteenth birthday that I discovered what my daughter had been doing. We visited the Baroness Hull in Vienna. She was sponsoring my next expedition in Turkey. It was New Year’s Eve, and she had a fantastic holiday party after the Kaiser Ball. Everyone in Vienna was there, and of course, since it was a formal party, they all wore their best jewels. Like Veronica and myself, many of the guests were staying with the baroness. That night a diamond tiara, which was once owned by Queen Victoria, disappeared from one of the lady’s rooms.”

  The old man shook his head and looked heartbroken, “and I knew Veronica had taken it. I think it was her way of feeling important, like she mattered, at least in the beginning before it turned into a compulsion. Or perhaps it was a way to compensate for losing her mother. I didn’t have the heart to confront her about it. I knew that was wrong, but I thought it must be a phase. At any rate, I decided what she needed was companionship, so I sent her to boarding school in Switzerland where she could be with other girls her own age. I think that only made things worse. I’m afraid what she really needed was me. If only I’d spoken to her then about the thefts, perhaps I could have stopped her kleptomania before it got out of control. I should have been there for her.” Buzzy wrung his old hands together and his kind face was riddled with guilt.

  “But you seem to be close now,” said John.

  “Oh, don’t misunderstand me. My daughter and I are good friends, and she has been invaluable to me in my work over the past few years, helping me catalogue all my discoveries and organizing the mess I scribble into legible books.” Buzzy’s face brightened a bit and some of the good humor returned to his eyes. “As far as I know, she stopped stealing after she divorced Derrick. I think when that marriage fell apart Veronica made a decision to change a lot of things in her life. She began seeing a therapist and stopped spending time with some of her friends, whom I had never felt were very good for her in the first place. At any rate, she’s seemed happier and more at peace. Since then no reports of the Ghost have turned up. Until now, of course.” He looked worried again. “I cannot believe Lillian would use Veronica like this!”

  “Believe it,” said John.

  The old man just shook his head.

  “There are still some things I don’t understand,” said John. “Like who sent her the note you received warning her to stay away from the Diamond Ball?”

  “That’s right.” The old man looked perplexed. “I still have it.” He rose, went to the mantle, and opened a little ebony box. “Here it is.” He handed the note to John.

  John unfolded the paper and read it aloud.

  “Stay away from the Diamond Ball, Miss Rossmore, or you could find yourself an unwilling character in the latest Ghost story and the ending won’t be a happy one for you.”

  The old man frowned. “I never could understand why someone would send this to Veronica and pretend to be the Ghost.”

  “But that’s just the thing,” said John, the truth dawning on him. “No one was pretending to be the Ghost. This is a note to the Ghost not from the Ghost, probably from someone who didn’t want the competition.”

  “You mean some other jewel thief?” asked Buzzy astonished.

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Well!”

  “Okay, that explains the note,” said John, still not satisfied, “but what happened to her jewels? She tried to say tonight that they weren’t stolen, but I could tell she was lying. Why would she do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said the old man, looking mystified. “Maybe she was telling you the truth.”

  “She sure put on a show when she first came to tell me they were gone, crying and sniffling like her childhood dog had just been flattened under a Mack truck,” said John confused.

  “It’s not like her to lie and pretend,” said Buzzy. “I know that’s hard to understand considering all the thefts she’s committed, but really, I’ve never known her to lie outright or to fake tears.”

  “Well, she did seem genuinely heartbroken,” admitted John. “I can’t say I understand getting that upset about a bunch of rocks. You have insurance, don’t you?”

  “For all the jewelry she legitimately owns, yes,” replied Buzzy. “But I hope you won’t think she’s too materialistic,” said the old man, appealing to John. “It’s not greed. It’s just…well, haven’t you ever owned anything that you really cared about? A family heirloom maybe or something from your childhood? I believe somehow her compulsion to hold onto these jewels was tangled up with her feelings about her mother’s loss, about being vulnerable and alone in the world. After all, diamonds are one of the few indestructible, seemingly eternal things in our ephemeral world where people can die or desert you. A world where all too often disaster seems to be just around the corner.”

  The WWII medal with the wrinkled black-and-white photograph of his father immediately sprang to John’s mind. He felt a slight, painful tightening around his heart when he thought of losing it. “Yes, I guess maybe I do understand, but that still doesn’t explain what happened to her jewelry.”

  Buzzy frowned. “No, it doesn’t.”

  They both sat in silence for a moment pondering the situation. Then the archeologist thumped the arm of his chair. “Well, it seems we have no choice but to go straight to the source!”

  “That’s what I thought when I drove down here tonight.”

  “All right, then.” Buzzy stood and walked across the room to a pile of neatly stacked files. He lifted them up and handed the pile to John. “My eyesight is not what it used to be. Too much hanging around dimly lit tombs,” he laughed. “Tell me if you see a file marked Amritsar.”

  Confused, John took the stack of files and looked through them until he came to one marked by that name. “Here it is.” He handed the file to the old archeologist.

  Buzzy beamed as he flipped open the folder and pulled out a yellowing, tissue-thin map. “All right then!” he said, excitement lighting up his face, making him look about ten years old.

  “Mr. Rossmore, are you okay?” asked John, suddenly afraid the old man had gone senile or cracked under the stress of his daughter’s escapades.

  “Never better,” crowed the old man and he leaned down to John, a twinkle gleaming in his eyes and asked, “Do you know how I got my nickname?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, come dawn, you’ll find out! Just give me a moment to get so
me decent clothes on and we’ll be off.” The old man dashed out of the room leaving a confused John still sitting on the parlor sofa.

  ****

  John did indeed get to find out how Buzzy Rossmore got his nickname as the platinum convertible pulled into the Westchester County Airport. The archeologist led him through the washed-out grayness of dawn to a small plane. With the brightly lit eyes of a maniac, he told John to climb aboard.

  An engineer was carefully examining the engine with a flashlight, doing his preflight check. John couldn’t help feeling some concern and evidently the look on his face must have reflected his thoughts. The reliable looking young man nodded his head in an encouraging way, so John took Buzzy’s advice and climbed the steeply pitched steps into the cockpit.

  Buzzy exchanged a few polite pleasantries with the young engineer outside and then came aboard himself, wincing as his arthritis kicked in. He sat rubbing his knee after parking himself in the pilot’s seat of the flimsy-looking plane.

  “Well, what do you think?” asked the old millionaire beaming. He reminded John of Veronica when she was excited about a particularly bright, shiny diamond.

  “I saw an old movie once with Cary Grant where he played a pilot. In the movie, they had to kick one of the pilots off their squad because his eyesight was shot,” said John nervously.

  Buzzy laughed, “Oh, that was in the old days before we had high tech gadgets like this.” He tapped the elaborate dashboard of bells and whistles in front of him. “You better fasten your seatbelt, though.”

  John fastened the buckle around his waist and white-knuckled it as Buzzy eased out on the throttle and the plane shot forward down a runway which looked much too short.

  “You want to tell me where we’re going?” asked John over the roar of the engine.

  Buzzy’s eyes twinkled. “You’ll see.” He turned his attention back to the runway, but then said as an afterthought, “I hope you’ve had all your shots.”

  The plane lurched and rose sharply into the air.

  John swallowed hard and tried to breathe long and deep like his friend Bethany had shown him. After the initial terror had subsided and his adrenaline level had returned to normal, the lack of sleep hit John like a ton of bricks and the drone of the plane soon sent him into a coma-like sleep.

  ****

  He didn’t wake up again until the ear-popping descent of the plane brought him back to consciousness. They landed in a private air field outside Lisbon, refueled, and stopped in for some lunch at a little fado café where they ate a Portuguese version of seafood piala and thick cut, greasy French fries before returning to the jet and resuming their flight.

  The archeologist still wouldn’t tell John where they were going and seemed to take a gleeful pleasure in the prospect of surprising him. The old man reminded John more and more of Veronica with every passing hour. Buzzy amused them both by telling John stories about his days as an archeologist in Egypt, Mexico, and the Island of Crete. It turned out Buzzy Rossmore had been a regular Indiana Jones in his time. At least that was how he told it and John didn’t doubt the older man one bit.

  Finally, they landed again just outside Bangkok, in an airport that was really no more than a glorified field with a rusty control tower, a snack shack, and a gaggle of very territorial chickens. After all of their hours of flight, John insisted they find a hotel and Buzzy get some sleep. The old man put up a fight, but finally agreed, and they bunked down at the house of the friendly man who served as engineer, air traffic controller, and baggage claim boy at the “airport.”

  They ate a good noodle stew with some ingredients John didn’t recognize and knew better than to ask about. After the meal, they slept on the brightly colored wool blankets in their host’s living room for about four and a half hours before Buzzy, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, thanked their host in his native tongue, handed him a generous wad of American money, and they were off again.

  “You never really know a man until you’ve shared a pig intestine or logged fifteen hours of flight time together in a two-man plane,” said the archeologist once they hit their flying altitude.

  “Pig intestine, huh?” said John, trying not to get too queasy.

  “Oh well.” Buzzy smiled and his soft wrinkly face became a happy mandala of lines and light. “You’re in love with Veronica, aren’t you?”

  John didn’t know what to say, so he simply answered, “How did you know?”

  “You never would have come this far,” said Buzzy, smiling warmly at John.

  “Has this whole trip been some kind of test?” asked John suspiciously.

  Buzzy’s smile grew even broader. “I like you, John.”

  John shook his head and looked out at the miles and miles of pale blue sky and fluffy white clouds.

  “Have you ever heard of the Hindu goddess, Sita?”

  John frowned. He had heard of her, but he couldn’t remember exactly where. “I think so.”

  “Mother Sita is one of the great goddesses of the Hindu religion. She rules over purity, grace, perfect beauty, the harvest, and constant prayer,” the old man informed him. “Though she was a goddess, she once incarnated into the form of a mortal woman and that woman was a queen. Well, one time Sita found herself in a situation where her purity and goodness were in question. So she gathered all the court together and she said this,” Buzzy’s voice took on the cadence of one reciting something from memory, “‘I am as pure as fire. Hence, I will prove the purity of my character by passing through the raging fire of flames.’”

  “And do you know what she did?” asked the old man.

  “She walked through a fire?”

  “She walked into a raging fire and stood there until the flames burned down into ashes. Not one bit of her was burned because in her soul she was pure,” the old man told him gravely.

  “I think I finally know where we’re going.”

  “Where you’re going,” corrected Buzzy.

  John raised his eyebrows and looked at the crazy, old man. “Excuse me?”

  “I have a friend in Delhi I’m going to drop in on. I haven’t seen him in at least twenty-five years.”

  “Aha.”

  “You, of course, will be going on by train to Amritsar,” the old man informed him.

  “To the temple of Sita.”

  Buzzy beamed. “That’s my boy!” He squeezed John’s arm warmly.

  Chapter Eighteen

  India was beyond anything John had ever imagined. The smell of burning trash and pollution was so strong he had to cover his nose with his sleeve just to breathe. Delhi was like Manhattan times a billion, with cramped avenues jammed with cars, brightly painted trucks, and big-horned cows, all clogging up the road. Everyone stared at him and not all the looks were friendly. Hordes of children hung on him begging for money in their fast-talking little voices. It was hotter than hell. There were no traffic lights in the entire city. He had to make a dash for it through the chaos of honking cars and hope that he’d make it to the curb on the other side safely.

  Aboard the old-fashioned train that chugged slowly northward toward the little town of Amritsar, there was no air conditioning and no toilet. Just a hole in the floor to squat over and no toilet paper in sight. At least the throbbing, sweaty mobs of desperate humanity were left behind in Delhi and John was alone in his train compartment.

  Deep green fields, bright jungle flowers, and ancient twisted-up trees flashed by outside his window like nature on some kind of psychedelic fertilizer. By the time the train pulled into Amritsar, John had counted sixteen skinny, bronze-skinned men he’d seen pooping in the fields. He made a mental note to himself to stay away from the produce on this trip.

  Outside the train station, he hired a bicycle rickshaw. The ride was about as hair-raising an experience as he’d ever had as the flimsy vehicle skidded across broken streets and weaved through crowded, medieval-looking alleys, so narrow John had to pull his elbows close to his body to avoid banging them on the faded stone bui
ldings. They sped past men in turbans stirring large vats of milk over open fires and barefoot women in brightly-colored silk saris with mud clinging to the hems of their skirts. Horns blared, other rickshaws whizzed by. John clung bug-eyed to his seat hoping the wizen-faced driver had understood the place he’d shown him on Buzzy’s old map.

  At last, they broke away from the wild little town and jolted down a long dirt road bordered by more of that incredible lush forestland on either side. After they’d gone for a while, the driver hit the brakes and they skidded to a stop.

  John didn’t see any temples around. Just road and forest.

  The driver smiled a toothless smile and waved his hand indicating for John to follow him. “Ji, come this way, Ji,” he said and bowed his head slightly.

  The ageless Indian man started barefoot straight into the woods. As John followed, he saw that there was a small trail, and wiping the sweat and dust off his face, he followed his driver down the path until they came to a little clearing.

  A one-room, whitewashed house stood there with its doors thrown open. A string of orange and yellow marigolds were draped around the entrance, but aside from that, the place looked humble.

  The driver turned to John, smiled his big gummy smile again, and nodded in the direction of the little building. “I will wait for you.”

  “It could be a while,” said John doubtfully.

  “It’s okay.” The man sat down on a fallen tree at the edge of the clearing, obviously making himself comfortable.

  John shrugged his shoulders and tentatively walked toward the doorway and peered in. He started to enter when the driver called out in an agitated voice, “Ji! Ji!” and motioned frantically at his shoes. “You must take them off!”