The Pretender's Gambit. Alex Archer

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      “Yes.” Broadhurst seemed a little surprised. “Somebody told you?”

      Annja pointed to the foil remains of the TV dinner sitting on the coffee table. “Single guy.” She pointed to the small television in the corner. It was an older set, not a flatscreen. “Older guy who listens to the television more than he watches it.” She pointed at the wall where a single black-and-white photograph of a young man and woman hung. “I’m presuming that’s the guy at a much younger age. He lives alone or there would be more photographs.” She touched the green easy chair that had seen better days and an equally battered, nonmatching couch. “And better furniture that wouldn’t be so dusty.”

      Broadhurst smiled a little more. “You could be a cop.”

      “She’s better than a cop,” Bart said. “She’s going to be able to help us with the elephant.”

      “Elephant?” Annja asked. “You’ve got an elephant in here somewhere? Now that would be a surprise. But if you’ve got an elephant in here, I’m sure that would have broken the lease. Maybe the floor.”

      Bart gestured to the back of the apartment. “This is where it gets bad.”

      * * *

      “HIS NAME WAS Maurice Benyovszky,” Broadhurst said. “According to a couple of the neighbors, he ran a small mail-order business out of his home. He sounds like a little old guy trying to get by. From the looks of the apartment, unless he’s got a safe deposit box stuffed full of money somewhere, Benyovszky wasn’t getting rich.”

      The dead man was in his seventies at least, and he might still have looked like the black-and-white picture in the living room if someone hadn’t beaten his face into pulp. Dressed in a faded red house robe and pajamas, the old man lay crumpled on the floor in front of a large desk covered with knick-knacks, a computer and a digital camera. Paper bags covered his hands, put there by the crime-scene techs to preserve evidence. He might have been five feet tall and weighed a hundred and ten pounds.

      Blood stained the back wall and curtains over the room’s window and the ceiling in a surprisingly straight line.

      “His killer beat him to death with what was probably a hammer of some kind.” Bart’s voice was calm and hollow, his professional tone when he was talking about a case. “We haven’t found the murder weapon yet, but that’s what we’re looking for. The cast-off blood tells us where the killer and his accomplice were standing.”

      “There were two of them?” After the initial shock of seeing the body, Annja’s mind slipped into problem-solving mode.

      “Yeah. The killer—” Bart pointed to large, bloody footprints that were far larger than the dead man would have made “—and the accomplice.” He indicated a second set of footprints that were smaller, yet still larger than the victim’s.

      “Nobody saw anything?” Even though this was the metro area and early in the morning, Annja still struggled to believe no one had come to the old man’s aid. He’d had time to yell for help.

      “Not till one of the neighbors came through and found the lock on the apartment door shattered. Then there was the blood in the hallway. He decided not to come in or announce himself, got back to his own apartment and called us. This is what we found.”

      “When?”

      “About twelve forty-five. When we found out about the elephant, I wanted to call you.”

      “Where’s the elephant?” Annja asked.

      Bart crossed the room over to the computer. “Here.”

      Walking around the dead man, Annja joined Bart at the computer. He moved the mouse and the monitor came out of hibernation, clearing to reveal a photograph of a white jade elephant. The image gave no indication of how large the piece was, but it was exquisitely rendered with a lot of careful detail.

      Taken from a side view, the elephant had its trunk curled in and sharp sheaths that covered its tusks. A thick rectangle lay across its back from its neck to its tail and hung down to almost the rounded stomach. Atop its back, a pair of warriors rode in a covered basket. One of the warriors held a spear. The other held a bow with an arrow nocked. A skullcap covered the elephant’s head. On the skullcap, a flowering plant stood out in worn relief.

      Annja’s interest flared up at once and she leaned closer to the screen. “The elephant looks Persian or Indian.”

      “How do you know that?” Broadhurst asked.

      Bart said nothing, just took out his field notebook and started taking down information.

      “The ears,” Annja replied. “Indian elephants have smaller ears than African elephants.”

      “Maybe the guy who made this just liked small-eared elephants.” Broadhurst shrugged. “Maybe large ears were harder to make.”

      Still amazed by the detail, certain that the piece she was looking at was really old and wishing she could examine it for real, Annja shook her head. “Whoever carved this went to a lot of trouble to get things right. Those ears are proportioned just right.”

      “Okay, I’ve heard of Indian elephants and the small-ears thing, but I haven’t heard of Persian elephants.”

      “That’s because the Persians used Indian elephants. Do you know much about war elephants?”

      “No. We don’t see much of them in New York.”

      “The Persians were the first to use elephants in wars. The first time historians know they were used was in the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC. King Darius II of Persia fielded fifteen elephants carrying mounted archers and spearmen at the center of his line. Seeing the elephants freaked Alexander the Great out, but it didn’t stop him from defeating the Persians and claiming Darius’s lands after he killed him. The Indians used war elephants a lot, too, but the possibility that this is a Persian elephant exists.”

      Broadhurst grimaced and looked a little frustrated. “The history lesson doesn’t help us with our murder. Don’t put us no closer to the creep that done this.”

      “Can I look through these files?” Annja asked.

      “Sure. Our techs have already been through it. We’ll be taking the computer back with us, but you can look through what’s up there.”

      Annja flicked through the photographs. There were nine more images of the elephant, all of them from different angles, none of them with any reference that would tell her how big the piece was.

      Before and after the images of the elephant were images of other objects—cups, pottery and toys. All of them looked old, but none of them looked as old as the elephant.

      “Can I have copies of these images?” Annja asked. “It’ll help me track down anything that might be out there in the archaeological communities concerning this piece.”

      Bart glanced at Broadhurst, who hesitated only a second before nodding.

      “Keep it on the down low,” Bart advised. “So far only we and the killers know about the elephant angle.” He let out a breath. “And the elephant’s only a clue if it wasn’t deliberately left on the computer СКАЧАТЬ