Free Vulture Peak by John Burdett Page B

I were penetrating a mystery that was not really mine. I didn’t believe Vikorn ever got this far. “What’s her name?”
    “Polly.”
    I let a few minutes pass in silence. “Which one are you?”
    She took another bite out of the apple. “Not telling you.”
    I groaned. “Just tell me this, are you the same woman I met this morning, sold one thousand seven hundred sixty-four eyes to, and went to Starbucks with?”
    “Excuse me one minute,” she said, and stood. I watched her walk through an arch at the other end of the suite, I supposed to the masterbedroom. I was left alone with the giant fruit bowl and the view. Those two sailboats were starting to seriously get on my nerves: Why didn’t they move? Didn’t mankind invent sail for exactly that purpose? Was everything upside down in toy town?
    There was a movement beyond the arch. A woman appeared. So far as I could tell, it was the same woman I met this morning, done up in the same
Vogue
costume, exhibiting the same HiSo hauteur, but with a sly smile flickering over her face. So now I had to restate the conundrum: Was this one woman posing as two, or two women posing as one? And what did it all have to do with the market price of kidneys? Nothing in my background had prepared me for this kind of challenge—perhaps if I’d gone to an Ivy League college or a Swiss finishing school, I would have had the appropriate social response at my fingertips. (
Is that you, darling, or are you the to-die-for little doppelgänger?
) As it was, I simply stared like a spaced-out peasant.
    She walked over to me in an exaggerated catwalk gait, carefully smoothed her backside, then sat demurely next to me, laid an impeccable hand on my forearm, and said, “Forgive us, but if you want to work with us, you’ll have to get used to our little
jumelles
ways.” Then she broke out into a grin that belonged to the other one—if there was another—reached for the apple she—or the other—had half-eaten, took a huge non-Vogue bite out of it, and burst into hysterics.
    All women are aware of the debilitating power of subtle mockery; this one (or two) had it down to a fine art. In my preferred persona as police officer, I have always known how to handle it: male authority figure trumping female frivolity with a higher, realer purpose. As apprentice organ trafficker, though, I had to confess it was doing my head in. Somehow she’d managed to shrink me, and I thought it best to retreat and regroup. I stood, as an inevitable response to my own thought process, without having figured out an excuse to leave. “Ah, I, ah, forgot something—I’d better go back to my hotel,” I mumbled like an embarrassed kid.
    “Oh, if it’s only
something
, surely it can wait?” Lilly said, also standing.
    Now she blocked off one avenue of retreat with her tall, elegantform. I turned to walk around the coffee table in the opposite direction, and was just in time to slip past her as she tried to head me off. It seemed we were engaged in a noncontact form of martial art in which each protagonist occupied an inviolable personal space, which was to be used as a kind of colonizing gambit. Lilly was very good at this silent game, which had me searching for a nonviolent way of getting out of there, and her cleverly dominating the ground zero of the door. We had chased each other from the tropics of the coffee table to the northern reaches of the fridge before I was able to slip away and walk with huge strides (running would have been an admission of defeat and probably against the rules) to the door. I had the latch under my finger when she arrived and jammed the door with her foot. I cannot do justice to the expression that flickered across her face for a split-second, as though she had been taken over by an ungovernable rage, which nevertheless passed in a flash. Now with a sudden change of heart, she opened the door and said with a big chummy smile, “Please do come back this evening about nine