The muscle had flanked the back of my box chair by then. They were ready to pluck me up and chuck me out the door.
“Send him up,” a dignified, if a bit wavering, woman’s voice commanded.
The black man in the blue suit swallowed hard and then nodded at the two men standing behind my chair.
“Stand up,” the one on my left ordered.
I pondered the command for twenty seconds and then rose. I turned to face the men and realized how much like an oversized boxing ring that entrance-hall-turned-office was. The suited muscle on my left wore dark gray. The one on the right was clad in burnt umber. The men were white, burly, and not unacquainted with violence and its uses. This combined knowledge brought a smile to my lips.
The brown-suited man put a hand around my right biceps. It was a big hand but when I tightened that muscle he realized that his fingers couldn’t even encircle half of the circumference.
“Let me go or we gonna rumble,” I said. “Right here, right now, win or lose, the three of us will fight.”
It was, most probably, me talking about dead Hector and the family he left behind that brought out the desire to hurt someone.
The man released me but now I posed another problem. If I was this violent what would their mistress say if they brought me in front of her? Maybe I’d start throwing punches in her den.
“Bring him up here now,” the woman’s voice ordered, punctuating each word.
“Right this way,” Gray Man said.
Beyond the entrance hall there was a room that could only be called the Staircase Room. On both sides and in front of me were stairways that seemed to be leading to completely different areas. I wondered if this structure was once three different buildings that had been cobbled together by an idle rich mind that had nothing better to do.
We headed up the curving, carpeted stairs on the left. I took the steps two at a time to keep my guards on their toes. On the fourth landing I was faced with a humongous library that had no doors or even a doorway. The entire floor was a room, thirty feet high and as wide and deep as the building it capped. The far wall was a window that looked down on the park and beyond. In front of that window was a big desk that was blond and not wood.
Behind the desk rose a tall and elegant woman wearing a cranberry-colored blouse and khaki riding pants. As I approached the woman I began to see subtler details. She was lean, gray-eyed, with the mostly erect posture of an arthritic ballet dancer. At one time she could probably have crossed that room in four or five leaps.
There was a spiteful sneer on her lips. Maybe she loathed anything that rose from the lower level to her aerie.
“Mr. McGill,” the brown suit said to the woman.
“Leave us,” was Evangeline Sidney-Gray’s reply.
“But, ma’am...” Gray Man protested.
“Leave us.”
And they did.
“Bones?” I asked when the help was gone.
“What?” she asked, insulted that I spoke without being spoken to.
“This desk,” I said. “It’s made out of bones. Done well, too. Tooled so that they fit together almost like real wood.”
I had never seen a sneer morph so seamlessly into a smile before. Her moods could switch from superior to vile to magnanimous in moments. I couldn’t think of a more dangerous personality.
I sat in the chair before her desk. It was cobbled from bone also.
The mistress of the mansions lowered into the chair behind her saying, “When I was a child my father told me that they were the bones of his enemies. Later I found out that it was even worse, that he slaughtered three bull elephants to get the right ivory and bone matter for his desk and your chair.”
“That’s worse than people’s bones?”
“Elephants are innocent.”
I was speechless mainly because I believed that she believed what she was saying.
“Why are you here, Mr. McGill?”
“I assume that you heard what I was saying to your man Richards,” I said.
“I did.”
“Good. I hate repeating myself. The man murdered in my office might not have been innocent but I liked him. He was just doin’ his job and people, probably working for you, cut his life short.”
“I have never been the cause of a murder, Mr. McGill. I mean, I pay my taxes and the president uses it to kill people but that’s as far as it goes. If, as you say, people working for me committed such a crime I should want them to be prosecuted.”
“Is that all you have to say to me?” I asked. I could be haughty too.
“What else can I say?”
“What about the murder of Hiram Stent?”
“I’ve never heard of that individual.”
“And Josh Farth?”
Ms. Sidney-Gray didn’t respond immediately. Her gaze honed down on me and there was something almost human in her eyes.
“You’re threatening to go to the police?” she asked.
“It’s not a threat but a duty, ma’am.”
“If it is your duty then why haven’t you already gone to them?”
“There are multiple responsibilities in most men’s lives,” I said. “Women’s lives too. Hiram Stent came to me, I turned him away, and he died. I feel responsible for that. Hector Laritas was trying to protect my property and he died. The police don’t care about the women and children that either man left to fend for themselves, but I do. I was abandoned as a child and so I’m here to give you a chance to do what’s right.”
What might pass for a knowing smile crossed the lady’s lips.
“What do you want?”
“Tell me why you’re after Celia Landis and give up the man who killed the people I represent.”
“You represent the dead?”
“I could just leave and let the NYPD take charge. I know a cop in Manhattan who’s not afraid of any sum of money or persons that bleed blue.”
“Is that a threat?”
“The cop is the threat,” I said. “I am merely the conduit.”
Evangeline Sidney-Gray took in a deep breath through her long, distinguished nose. She moved her head in birdlike fashion, taking me in from a series of slightly different points, like snapshots.
Finally she said, “There’s a library in Cambridge, Mass., called the Enclave. It’s a private institution that gathers collections of old books, documents, and letters. It is a very old organization funded by some of the wealthiest people in the world. Mostly people bequeath their libraries to the Enclave, but now and then they purchase a collection. A few years ago I donated a selection of my great-grandfather’s cache of forty-two-line Gutenberg Bibles. It turns out that, quite by mistake, mixed in with that lot was a thirteenth-century handwritten version of Herodotus’s Histories. It was never my intention to donate that book. It was my father’s favorite manuscript. It was turned over by mistake. I can prove this by my copy of the bequeathing letter to the Enclave.
“This Celia Landis worked for the Enclave and then left. When she departed, my great-grandfather’s manuscript disappeared. I want it back.”
“And are you sure this Celia Landis was the one who stole the book?” I asked. “It might have just been misplaced.”
“She sent me an electronic communication demanding money for the return of the book. She knew its value and that it was not consciously included in the gift.”
“May I see the e-mail?”
“I deleted it.”
“Oh. Okay. Well... let’s say I could do something for you,” I said. “What would that something be?”
“Bring this Landis woman to me.”