“Oh, yeah. Like when Mr. Miyagi from Happy Days had Ralph Macchio wash his car. It was to teach him a greater lesson. I can’t remember what.”
“Television lessons tend to be fleeting,” Emerson said.
“What else did that Siddhar teach you? Did he teach you Kung Fu? I bet he taught you Kung Fu.”
“He didn’t teach me Kung Fu. Although I know many forms of martial arts.”
“Does he have a white beard and bushy white eyebrows? Does he wear a long white robe?”
“No, no, and yes. The robe was terry cloth and I believe he ordered it from Pottery Barn.”
“Did he do magic tricks? Walk on coals? Sleep on a bed of nails?”
“I don’t think you take this seriously. But I’m enjoying this repartee. You have an agile mind.”
“My agile mind is working overtime trying not to panic over the fact that we just committed a felony. Are you sure Irene doesn’t know about the gold bar?”
“There’s one way we can be sure if she does know about it.”
“What’s that?”
“If we’re arrested for stealing it,” he said.
Riley pulled the Mustang into Günter’s parking space at Blane-Grunwald and cut the engine.
“What are we going to do with the gold?” she asked Emerson.
“We’ll take it with us.”
“I’m not carrying that gold into the building.”
“No problem. I’ll carry it. I’ll put it in my rucksack.”
Emerson pulled the bar out of Riley’s bag and dropped it into his rucksack.
“Good riddance,” Riley said.
They took the elevator to the seventeenth floor, walked the corridor to Maxine’s office, and peeked inside. Empty. Riley stepped across the hall and asked a woman if she knew where they could find Maxine.
“At home,” the woman said. “She called in sick.”
Riley looked at Emerson. “Now what?”
“Now we visit her at her home.”
Riley got Maxine’s address from Human Resources, they returned to the Mustang, and Riley plugged the address into the maps app on her iPhone.
“It looks like she’s about fifteen minutes away,” Riley said.
She drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, turned right onto Thirteenth Street, and found herself in the gentrified neighborhood of Columbia Heights. The street was lined with expensive row houses built around the turn of the last century, but remodeled and refurbished and polished like antique jewelry.
“How can she afford a place like this on an executive assistant’s salary?” Riley asked as they stepped out of the car.
“Maybe Günter helps her out,” Emerson said.
“You think?”
“You’re speaking sarcastically as a way of agreeing with me, aren’t you?”