The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  It was here that the trail ran out, for the payment made through Gaud to the actual seller (following a deduction by Gaud for his assistance that was excessive to the point of extortion) was in the form of cash. The only clue that the current owners of the business were able to offer as to the identity of the men in question was that Gaud had indicated they were American soldiers. This was hardly surprising to Sekula, as the Allies were just as capable of looting as the Nazis, but he was aware of the twin massacres at Narbonne and Fontfroide. It was possible that survivors of the former might in turn have been involved in the latter, although the Americans were not present in the area in significant numbers by that phase of the war. Nevertheless, Sekula had identified a possible connection between the killing of a platoon of American GIs by SS raiders and the raiders’ deaths, in turn, at Fontfroide. Through contacts in the Veterans Administration and the VFW, he discovered the identities of the surviving soldiers based in the region at the time, as well as the addresses of those others who had lost relatives in the encounter. He then sent out over a thousand letters seeking general information on wartime souvenirs that might be of interest to collectors, and a handful containing more specific information relating to the missing Fontfroide trove. If he was wrong, then there was always the chance that the letters might still elicit some useful information. If he was right, they would serve to cover his tracks. The target-specific letters detailed the rewards to be gained for the sale of unusual items relating to the Second World War, including material not itself directly related to the conflict, with a particular emphasis on manuscripts. It contained repeated assurances that all responses would be handled in the strictest confidence. The real bait was the entry from the auction catalog issued by the House of Stern, with its photograph of a battered silver box. Sekula could only hope that whoever had taken it had held on to both the box and its contents.

  Then, late the previous morning, a man had called and described to Sekula what could only be a fragment of the map and the box in which it was contained. The caller was old, and tried to retain his anonymity, but he had given himself away from the moment that he used his home phone to dial New York. Now here they were, one day later, seated with an ugly drunk in polyester pants spotted with spilled vodka, watching as she got progressively more intoxicated.

  “He’ll be home soon,” she repeatedly reassured the visitors, slurring her words. “I can’t imagine where he’s gotten to.”

  Sandy asked them to show her the money again, and Sekula obliged. She ran a podgy finger over the faces on the notes, and giggled to herself.

  “Wait until he sees all this,” she said. “The old fart will shit himself.”

  “Perhaps, while we’re waiting, we might take a look at the item,” Sekula suggested.

  Sandy tapped her nose with the side of her finger.

  “All in good time,” she said. “Larry will get it for you, even if he has to beat it out of the old fuck.”

  Sekula felt Miss Zahn tense beside him. For the first time, his unthreatening façade began to fragment.

  “Do you mean that the item is not actually your husband’s to sell?” he asked, carefully.

  Sandy Crane tried to retrieve her mistake, but it was too late.

  “No, it’s his to sell, but you see there’s this other fella and, well, he has a say in it too. But he’ll agree. Larry will make him agree.”

  “Who is he, Mrs. Crane?” said Sekula.

  Sandy shook her head. If she told him, he’d go away and talk to Hall himself, and he’d take all that lovely money with him. She’d said too much already. It was time to clam up.

  “He’ll be back soon,” she said firmly. “Believe me, it’s all taken care of.”

  Sekula stood. It should have been easy. The money would have been handed over, the manuscript would have come into their possession, and they would have simply left. If Brightwell subsequently decided to kill the seller, then that was his call to make. He should have guessed that it would never be so simple.

  Sekula wasn’t good at this part. That was why Miss Zahn was with him. Miss Zahn was very good at it, very good indeed. She was already on her feet, removing her jacket and unbuttoning her blouse while Sandy Crane watched, her mouth hanging open and vague expressions of incomprehension falling dully from her tongue. It was only when Miss Zahn undid the last button and slipped the blouse from her body that the Crane woman at last began to understand.

  Sekula thought the tattoos upon his lover’s body were fascinating, even if he found it almost impossible to imagine the pain that their creation must have caused her. Apart from her face and hands, her skin was entirely obscured by the illustrations, the monstrous, distorted faces blending into one another so it was almost impossible to identify individual beings among them. Yet it was the eyes that were the most disturbing aspect, even for Sekula. There were so many of them, large and small, encompassing every imaginable color, like oval wounds upon her body. Now, as she advanced toward Sandy Crane, they seemed to alter, the pupils expanding and contracting, the eyes rotating in their sockets, exploring this new unfamiliar place, with the drunken woman now cowering before them.

  But it was probably no more than a trick of the light.

  Sekula stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. He went into the dining room across the hall and sat down in an armchair. It gave him a clear view of the driveway and the street beyond. He tried to find a magazine to read, but all he could see were copies of the Reader’s Digest and some supermarket tabloids. He heard Mrs. Crane say something in the room beyond, and then her voice became muffled. Seconds later, Sekula grimaced as she started screaming against the gag.

  The FBI’s New York field division had moved location so often in its history that it should have been staffed by Gypsies. In 1910, when it first opened, it was located in the old post office building, a site now occupied by City Hall Park. Since then, it had opened up shop at various points on Park Row; in the Subtreasury Building at Wall and Nassau; at Grand Central Terminal; in the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square; on Broadway; and in the former Lincoln Warehouse at East Sixty-ninth, before finally making a home at the Jacob Javits Federal Building, down near Foley Square again.

  I called the FBI shortly before eleven and asked to be put through to Special Agent Philip Bosworth, the man who had visited Neddo to inquire about his knowledge of Sedlec and the Believers. I got bounced around before ending up with the OSM’s department, or what used to be the chief clerk’s office before everybody got a shiny new title. The office service manager and his staff were responsible for non-investigative matters. A man who identified himself as Grantley asked me my name and business. I gave him my license number and told him I was trying to get in touch with Special Agent Bosworth regarding a missing person investigation.

  “Special Agent Bosworth is no longer with this office,” said Grantley. “Well, can you tell me where I can find him?”

  “No.”

  “Can I give you my number and maybe you could pass it on to him?”

  “No.”

  “Can you help me in any way at all?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I thanked him. I wasn’t sure for what, but it seemed the polite thing to do.

  Edgar Ross was still one of the special agents in charge at the New York division. Unlike SACs in most of the other field offices, the SAC wasn’t the final authority in New York. Ross answered to the assistant director in charge, a pretty good guy named Wilmots, but Ross still had a whole little family of assistant SACs under his command and was therefore the most influential law enforcement official I knew. Our paths had crossed during the pursuit of the man who had killed Susan and Jennifer, and I think Ross felt he owed me a little slack as a result of what had occurred. I even suspected that he had a grudging affection for me, but maybe that was the result of my watching too many TV cop shows in which gruff lieutenants secretly harbored homoerotic fantasies about the mavericks under their command. I didn’t think Ross
’s feelings about me went quite that far, but then he was a difficult man to read sometimes. One never knew.

  I called his office shortly after I was done with Grantley. I gave my name to Ross’s secretary and waited. When she came back on the line, she told me that Ross wasn’t available but said she’d pass on the fact that I’d called. I thought about holding my breath while I waited for him to call back, but figured that I’d have blacked out long before that ever happened. From the brief delay in our exchange, though, I gathered that Ross was around but had tightened up since last we spoke. I was anxious to get back to Rachel and Sam, but I wanted to accumulate all the information that I could before I left the city. I felt I had no option but to take an expensive cab ride down to Federal Plaza.

  The area was a peculiar clash of cultures: on the east side of Broadway there were the big federal buildings, surrounded by concrete barricades and adorned with weird rusting pieces of modern sculpture. On the other side, directly facing the might of the FBI, were storefronts that advertised cheap watches and caps while doing a profitable sideline in assisting with immigration applications, and discount clothing stores that offered suits for $59.99. I grabbed a coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts, then settled down to wait for Ross. He was, if nothing else, a man of routine. He’d confessed as much to me, the last time we’d met. I knew that he liked to eat most days at Stark’s Veranda, at the corner of Broadway and Thomas, a government hangout that had been around since the end of the nineteenth century, and I just hoped that he hadn’t suddenly taken to lunching at his desk. By the time he eventually emerged from his office I’d been waiting two hours and my coffee was long since finished, but I felt a touch of satisfaction at my investigative skills when he headed for the Veranda, quickly followed by the pain of rejection when I saw the expression on his face as I fell into step beside him.

  “No,” he said. “Get lost.”

  “You don’t write, you don’t call,” I said. “We’re losing touch. What we have now just isn’t the same as it used to be.”

  “I don’t want to be in touch with you. I want you to leave me alone.”

  “Buy me lunch?”

  “No. No! What part of ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?”

  He stopped at the crosswalk. It was a mistake. He should have taken his chances with the traffic.

  “I’m trying to trace one of your agents,” I said.

  “Look, I’m not your personal go-to guy at the Bureau,” said Ross. “I’m a busy man. There are terrorists out there, drug dealers, mobsters. They all require my attention. They take up a lot of my time. The rest, I save for people I like: my family, my friends, and basically anyone who isn’t you.”

  He scowled at the oncoming traffic. He might even have been tempted to draw his gun and wave it around threateningly in order to cross.

  “Come on, I know you secretly like me,” I said. “You’ve probably got my name written on your pencil case. The agent’s name is Philip Bosworth. The OSM’s office told me he was no longer with the division. I’d just like to get in touch with him.”

  I had to give him credit for trying to shake me off. I took my eye off him for just a second, and instantly he was skipping through oncoming traffic like a government-funded Frogger. I caught up with him, though.

  “I was hoping you’d be killed,” he said, but secretly I knew he was impressed.

  “You pretend you’re such a tough guy,” I said, “but I know you’re all warm and fuzzy inside. Look, I just need to ask Bosworth some questions, that’s all.”

  “Why? Why is he important to you?”

  “The thing in Williamsburg, the human remains in the warehouse? He may know something about the background of the people involved.”

  “People? I heard there was one guy. He got shot. You shot him. You shoot a lot of people. You ought to stop.”

  We were at the entrance to the Veranda. If I tried to follow Ross inside, the staff would have my ass on the sidewalk faster than you could say “deadbeat”. I could see him balancing the wisdom of stepping inside and trying to forget about me against the possibility that I might know something useful — that, and the likelihood that I would still be outside when he was done, and then the whole thing would just start over again.

  “Somebody set him up there, gave him a place to live and work,” I said. “He didn’t do it alone.”

  “The cops said you were investigating a missing person case.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “We get bulletins. I had someone call the Nine-Six when your name came up.”

  “See, I knew you cared.”

  “Caring is relative. Who was the girl they found?”

  “Alice Temple. Friend of a friend.”

  “You don’t have too many friends, and I have my suspicions about some of the ones you do have. You keep bad company.”

  “Do I have to listen to the lecture before you help me?”

  “You see, that’s why things are always so difficult with you. You don’t know when to stop. I’ve never met a guy who was so keen on mixing it up.”

  “Bosworth,” I said. “Philip Bosworth.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Someone will get back to you, maybe. Don’t call me, okay? Just don’t call me.”

  The Veranda’s door opened, and we stepped aside to let a gaggle of old women leave. As the last of them departed, Ross slipped inside the restaurant. I was left holding the door.

  I counted to five, waiting until just before he got out of sight.

  “So,” I shouted, “I’ll call you, right?”

  Mark Hall couldn’t stop vomiting. Ever since he’d come home, his stomach had bubbled with acid, until eventually it just rebelled and began spewing out its contents. He had barely slept the night before, and now his head and body ached dully. He was just thankful that his wife was away; otherwise, she’d have been fussing over him, insisting that a doctor should be called. Instead, he was free to slump on the bathroom floor, his cheek flat against the cool of the toilet bowl, waiting for the next spasm to hit. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. All he knew was that whenever he thought of what he’d done to Larry, the smell of Crane’s last breath came back to him, like Larry’s ghost was breathing upon him from the beyond, and a fresh bout of puking would immediately commence.

  It was strange. He had hated Crane for so long. Every time Hall saw him, it was as though he were watching an imp grinning at him from beyond the grave, a reminder of the judgment he must inevitably face for his sins. He had long hoped that Crane would simply crawl off and die, but as in wartime, Larry Crane had proved to be a tenacious survivor.

  Mark Hall had killed his share of men during the war: some of them from far away, distant figures falling in the echo of a rifle shot, others up close and personal, so that their blood had spattered his face and stained his uniform. None of those deaths had troubled him after the first, as the naive boy who had taken the bus to basic training was transformed into a man capable of ending the life of another. It was a just war, and had he not killed them, then they would surely have despatched him. But he had believed his days of killing to be far behind him, and he had never envisioned himself taking a knife to an unarmed old man, even one as odious as Larry Crane. The shock of it, and the disgust that it engendered, had sucked the energy from him, and nothing could ever be the same again.

  Hall heard the doorbell ring, but he didn’t get up to answer it. He couldn’t. He was too weak to stand, and too ashamed to face anyone even if he could. He stayed on the floor, his eyes closed. He must have dozed off, because the next thing he remembered, the bathroom door was opening, and he was looking at two pairs of feet: a woman’s and a man’s. His eyes followed the woman’s legs over her skirt to her hands. Hall thought that he could see blood on them. He wondered if his own hands looked the same way to her.

  “Who are you?” he said. He could barely speak. His voice sounded like the slow sweepings of a yard brush over dusty ground.

 
“We’ve come to talk about Larry Crane,” said Sekula. Hall tried to raise his head to look, but it hurt him to move.

  “I haven’t seen him,” said Hall.

  Sekula squatted before the old man. He had a clean, scrubbed face and good teeth. Hall didn’t like him one bit.

  “What are you, police?” said Hall. “If you’re cops, show me some ID.”

  “Why would you think we are police, Mr. Hall? Is there something you’d like to share with us? Have you been a bad boy?”

  Hall dry-retched, the memory of Larry Crane’s death smell coming back to him.

  “Mr. Hall, we’re in kind of a hurry,” said Sekula. “I think you know what we’ve come for.”

  Dumb, greedy Larry Crane. Even in death he had found a way to ruin Mark Hall.

  “It’s gone,” said Hall. “He took it with him.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “To hell with you. Get out of my house.”

  Sekula rose and nodded to Miss Zahn. This time, he stayed in the room, just to make sure that she understood the urgency of the situation. It didn’t take long. The old man started talking as soon as the needle approached his eye, but Miss Zahn inserted it anyway, just to be sure that he wasn’t lying. By that time, Sekula had looked away. The stink of vomit was already getting to him.