Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,28

of ancient texts to sell on the open market for inflated sums.

“I traced the map he stole from the Walker Collection at Tulane to a man named Enrico Salazzo. He was a Hollywood set decorator in the thirties. I talked to some of his relatives—he’s dead now—and they knew nothing about any map. So I guessed that was a dead end.”

Jackie couldn’t keep the disappointment from showing on her face.

Maheu continued. “But I had a hunch. I went to Universal Studios, where he worked, and talked to some of the people in the art department there. I found this one old geezer who remembered working with him. He said that this Salazzo was a real practical joker. Said he liked to work an anachronistic prop into every movie he worked on. Something small so the audience wouldn’t notice unless they looked real close. But people are usually too busy watching the movie to pay that careful attention. And if they are, that means something’s wrong with the movie.”

He laughed, then caught himself and cut it off so as not to draw any unwanted attention to himself. Since the balcony was still empty, Jackie thought that this was a bit of unnecessary paranoia on Maheu’s part.

“So that got me to thinking,” Maheu went on. “With the help of the old geezer, I went through the property logs for the movies Salazzo worked on. And there were a lot of them, I can tell you. Looked at them till my eyes glazed over.”

Jackie wanted to tell him that her eyes were about to glaze over if he didn’t get to the point soon. But she was too polite to say anything and just let him tell the story in his own way.

“Have you ever heard of the Mexican Dracula?” Maheu asked Jackie, abruptly changing the subject.

Really, Jackie thought, how many detours can this man make in one conversation? She tried to hide her growing frustration and shook her head. “I barely know about the regular Dracula. Bites necks, drinks blood—isn’t that right?”

“In a nutshell,” Maheu agreed. “Well, at any rate, it turns out that there are two different versions of Dracula. The one with Bela Lugosi that everyone knows, made in 1931. And one that was done at night, on the exact same sets, with a different director and a Mexican cast. The studio decided to do it that way rather than show the American version dubbed or with subtitles in Spanish. The movie’s actually supposed to be better than the American version. The Mexican lead actress is sexier, and the movie is supposed to be scarier.”

Jackie tried to figure out a way to signal to Maheu that he was really getting off the beaten path here. But before she could, he found his way again.

“Well, at any rate, I found out that Salazzo worked on the Mexican Dracula. And do you know what the property log for the movie shows?”

Before Jackie could answer, Maheu infuriatingly went on.

“It shows that Salazzo inserted Metzger’s treasure map on a wall in Dracula’s castle.”

This time, Jackie broke in before Maheu could cut her off.

“Then all we have to do is watch the movie, and we’ll see the treasure map?” She felt incredibly elated.

“Yeah, I thought of that too. Only one problem, though.” He paused for dramatic effect. “The reel that shows the map on the wall is missing. For some reason, the negative disappeared a long time ago, and it’s not in any of the surviving answer prints still in circulation.”

Coming hot on the heels of her relief, Jackie’s disappointment made her feel like a marionette being jerked up and down at the hands of a sadistic puppeteer.

Maheu just sat there as though another thought had crossed his mind. Taking advantage of his momentary pause, Jackie plunged right in and said, “Mr. Maheu, there’s one thing I don’t understand. What does any of this have to do with my assignment in Cuba? What’s my cover story supposed to be?”

“I’m coming to that,” he said in an aggrieved voice, as though unhappy at having his silent contemplation interrupted.

The screen turned momentarily bright, and in the sudden illumination, Jackie could see Maheu’s notepad open in his hand. The page she saw had three words on it:

THE THORNDYKE FUND

And they were underlined three times as though to denote their importance.

Jackie wondered what the Thorndyke Fund was and why it should be of such seeming importance to Maheu. And what was it doing in the same notepad that contained