The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [132]
Impressed, despite herself, Annie nodded. “It looks real.”
The eyeless silver baby in the crook of Mary’s arm wore a crown too, but a crown of silver thorns. On the mother’s breast a little silver door opened into her heart cavity. The cavity, a 3-inch cube, was silver and was empty. “Inside here—” Raffy touched his fingers to the cavity, “was the heart of the Queen. Your papa gave it to me to give to my mother.”
“The ruby?”
“More precious. The Thorn.” Raffy cradled the Queen in his arms, rocking her softly. “When the Immortal Bard told us, ‘All that glitters is not gold,’ he couldn’t have been more monumentally in complete and absolute error.”
Annie held out her hand. “Give me back those emeralds.”
Raffy pulled the gems from his pocket. She took one of them. It was, he told her, an emerald of at least forty carats. She held it against one unfilled rectangle at the tip of the gold rods, then she moved it to next, then to the next. The holes were all too large for it, except for the last one, near the statue’s right ear. The emerald fit perfectly into the smallest setting on the crown of La Reina Coronada del Mar.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Annie.”
She touched the queen’s golden smile. “And in the sea too, apparently. At least we’re supposed to think so.” Annie placed the two other emeralds into the casings that fit them.
The Cuban brushed his hand against the thin gold rods so that they quivered. “It isn’t that thinking makes it so but thinking opens your eyes to see what is otherwise in your blind spot.” He hunched his thin shoulders. “At least in my opinion.”
All the way back up to her room, they argued about what to do next with the Queen. Annie wanted to turn over the statue to Daniel Hart immediately, in exchange for his help in resolving her father’s troubles with the police. Raffy wanted to take the relic to show Jack. Exhausted, she finally agreed. They’d go in the morning. She asked Rook to leave so she could get to sleep. With a blush, he declined. With apologies, he couldn’t leave the Queen and if she wouldn’t give it to him—
“I won’t,” she agreed.
“Then I must stay.” He made a short bow.
“Fine,” she told him. “Sleep on my floor then.”
“Floor? This is a carpet. This is comfort.” He ran his hand in the soft plush. “When I was in the cell in Cuba with your papa? Now that was a floor to sleep on. Hard, cold stone. Like the hearts of policemen.”
Raffy lay down propped against the door of her hotel room with Malpy in his arms. Suspicious that he would steal the courier case, she locked it inside her duffel bag and tied the bag under the bed.
They rested a while, but then Raffy complained he was hungry so they returned to the restaurant, where over a late meal, he continued to argue his opinion that Sergeant Hart was absolutely 100 percent not to be relied on, despite his good looks, which had clearly blinded Annie. Without a blink, Hart would throw Jack and Raffy (and Annie) in jail for so long that they’d drown in their cells when global warming flooded Miami. Instead of giving up the Queen, Annie should honor her father’s dying wish by going to Havana to collect the gems from the bank where Raffy’s second cousin was first assistant manager. Putting those gems back in the Queen’s crown would save her father’s last days, because if Jack did not quickly pay off his debts to Feliz Diaz, his life was not worth a zuzu.
“What debts to Feliz Diaz? Is that why Diaz is looking for my dad?”
“Pretty much. Jack took an advance payment from Diaz on the Queen, sort of. Seven-card-stud.”
Annie asked how much he’d lost.
“Considerable,” admitted Raffy. “I am not party to the specifics.” As for Raffy himself, a single emerald from the crown would be ample reward. The Queen was Jack’s discovery and Jack deserved the reward for it. Raffy was only a minor player, a brief shadow, dust.
After they went back up to the hotel room, Annie put the courier case under her pillow, like, she thought, a tooth for the tooth fairy. And she hadn’t believed in that either.
She gave Raffy