A Stillness in Bethlehem(91)

“You could call me,” Franklin Morrison said.

Jan-Mark Verek ignored him, choosing to concentrate on Bennis instead. Bennis had come in last, behind the rest of them, and in the beginning Jan-Mark had not noticed her. Now he had, and his scrutiny was detailed and unmistakable. Gregor was used to men being attracted to Bennis. Men were constantly attracted to Bennis. They weren’t usually as nasty about it as Jan-Mark Verek. Gregor started to growl. Bennis shot him a look that said she knew perfectly well how to take care of herself. Which was probably true.

“Oh, you’re nice,” Jan-Mark told her.

“Only when I want to be,” Bennis said. Then she brushed past him and headed for the stairs, as quickly and unselfconsciously as if she’d been invited. The stairs were open-risered and open-railed and open to the windows. Gregor thought climbing them was going to make him dizzy.

“Come in,” Jan-Mark said, watching Bennis’s retreating back. “Come in, come in. We might as well all go upstairs and review the damage.”

“Damage?” Franklin Morrison asked.

“I’ve been robbed.”

Jan-Mark turned his back on them all and went off in the direction Bennis had taken. After a moment, Gregor and Franklin and Stuart followed. Everything was so open, it would have been impossible to get lost. Jan-Mark went up a single set of risers and then waited, near the kitchen, where Bennis had installed herself on a delicate chair. All the furniture Gregor could see was delicate and quasi-abstract. The art was big and bold and brightly colored and not of Jan-Mark’s making. Jan-Mark went in for trash collages and found objects. The paintings were all standard abstracts of the kind popular in the twenties. They suited the house.

Jan-Mark waited until they were all assembled just outside the tiled floor that marked off the kitchen and said again, “I’ve been robbed. It was the most amazing thing. I must have been robbed in my sleep.”

“You mean you think you were robbed while you were here?” Franklin Morrison sounded incredulous.

Jan-Mark didn’t take offense. “I was taking a nap. I’d had a long night and a long morning, and I was exhausted.”

“You must have been wired,” Stuart Ketchum said.

Jan-Mark threw him a look of contempt. “When I’m wired, I can’t sleep at all. No, that wasn’t it. I was just totally done in. I lay down just around eleven o’clock, and somewhere between then and when I set the alarm off, I was robbed.”

Gregor Demarkian checked his watch. “It’s about half past one,” he said. “Let’s say we first heard your alarm ten minutes ago. That gives your thief about an hour and twenty minutes to get in and out, assuming you fell asleep immediately and went straight past REM time into a coma—”

“Are you trying to tell me I couldn’t have been robbed?”

“I’m trying to tell you your story has some problems in it.” Gregor looked around the kitchen again. Everything was clean. Everything was white. Jan-Mark must pay a cleaning lady. “How did you find out you were robbed?”

“I went up to my studio. And there it all was. A mess and a half.”

“Your studio?”

“My late wife’s office. The studio and the office are two three-sided rooms in the loft.”

“This is above your bedroom,” Gregor said.

“Exactly.”

“And if I wanted to get there, I’d go how?”

“Up these stairs.” Jan-Mark patted the rail of the staircase they had all so recently ascended. “It goes all up and down the four levels, or maybe it’s five, I don’t remember. It’s like a dollhouse here. All the rooms are open to the window wall. All of them are reached by one staircase.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “that means that this thief of yours not only robbed you while you were sleeping, but robbed you while you were sleeping in a room open to the room he was stealing from, and then he had to go tromping up and down a lot of wooden stairs to get there and get out—I take it there isn’t an alternative route?”

“None.”

“That must have made the fire marshal have orgasms,” Franklin Morrison said.

“The fire marshal notwithstanding,” Gregor said, “Mr. Verek may have been robbed, but he wasn’t robbed the way he said he was. Which leaves us with three possible alternatives.”

“Tell me.” Jan-Mark was looking more amused by the second.

“The first one is that you weren’t robbed at all,” Gregor said.

“But I was.” Jan-Mark nodded vigorously. “At least, I ought to say that my late wife was. It’s her things that were taken.”