by Davis Bunn
He shut the door firmly behind him and hurried over to where the chauffeur was opening the door. He seated himself and kept his face pointed straight ahead. But out of the corner of his eye he saw Stefanie open the sliding glass door and call down to him. He gave no sign of having noticed. The car pulled away. He could hear her call faintly through the closed window.
He smiled. That really had gone rather well.
WHERE THE TAXI LEFT VAL OFF, THE SKYSCRAPERS FORMED A steel-and-concrete noose. He was the only pedestrian who bothered to look upwards, searching out a glimpse of the dull grey sky. Val crossed the street and entered Grand Central Station. From where he stood on the upper veranda, the space looked larger than the outdoors that he had just left behind. The four-faced brass clock rising from the central information booth said he was five minutes late. He crossed beneath the distant ceiling’s mythical star chart and asked directions from the hostess at the Michael Jordan Steakhouse above track thirty. He took the side passage to the western balcony and spotted the entrance to the Campbell Apartment. There he stopped.
“See, that’s why I like this place for the meet-and-greet.” A voice by his elbow said, “The first-timers, they come in here and do their gawk, and you know them straight off. You tell me you look like this or that, it doesn’t matter. You need directions to this place, you know the fellow is going to come in here and freeze.”
The man’s hair was dyed a ridiculous orange. He had a crooner’s voice. Everything else about him was mummified. He scarcely reached Val’s shoulder. “You have also kept me waiting.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s going to cost you.” He pointed Val to a table opposite the bar. “The drinks in here are horrendously expensive.”
The room belonged in a European palace, not a New York train station. The galleried hall was perhaps seventy feet long with a gothic fireplace dominating the far wall. The ceiling was thirty feet high and ribbed by hand-painted beams.
“Campbell was a man with power and an ego to match. He took this space because it was the city’s largest ground-floor office. When he moved in, it was a barracks. He copied the salon of a thirteenth-century Florentine manor. He installed a pipe organ, a piano, and over a million dollars in antiques. That was back in the twenties, when a million dollars meant something.” He held out his hand. “Let’s have your ID.”
“Excuse me?”
He gave a mirthless smile. “My, but we are new to this game, aren’t we. The only ID that matters. Guess what that might be.”
Val glanced around the room. No one seemed to be watching.
“Don’t worry about them. This is New York, remember? Land of the professionally blind.” He snapped his fingers. “The clock is ticking.”
Val dipped into his pocket and pulled out his roll.
“Fan the pages just enough to show me this isn’t a pack of ones I’m seeing. Okay.” The man drained his glass. “You’re after what, social security card, plastic, birth certificate, total makeover?”
“Just a passport.”
“Expensive. What about the name you aim on using. Is it clean?”
“Yes.”
“It better be. On account of the authorities, these days they do a computer search every time you pass through the border.”
“It’s clean.”
“Sorry, I need a little more assurance than just your say-so.” The scars where his face had been cut and surgically stretched ran from above his ears to his turtleneck. “See, if you’re lying to me, they’ll ask you where you bought your paper. They’ll ask you very hard.”
“I was arrested two nights ago. The police ran me through the national system. The name came up clean.”
“Vince will vouch for that too?”
“Call him and see.”
He tapped his finger on the glass, studying Val hard. “Nah. Like the man said, you got an honest face. So where did you buy your new tag?”
“My . . . I don’t remember.”
The surgical scars refused to move when he smiled. They formed two flat creases down each side of his face. Which was perhaps why his smiles came and went so swiftly. “Look there, you’re learning. Okay, let’s see what you got.”
Val passed over his driver’s license.
The guy pulled a set of reading glasses from a pewter case and lifted the card up to where it reflected the neighboring lamp’s light. “This is good work. Almost as good as mine.” He slipped off the spectacles. “Five thousand.”
Val snagged the driver’s license and stuffed it back in his pocket. “Four.”
The man flashed his false smile. “Aren’t we cute. Look, this is not bargain basement land. You want, you pay.”
“All right. Five.”
“My studio is just around the corner. Not nearly as nice as here, I’m afraid. The lighting’s too strong and it smells like a lab. But you’ll be in and out in no time. Me, I’m still looking for my ticket to paradise.” The man rose to his feet. “Where did you say you were headed?”
“I didn’t.”
“No, silly me. Of course not.” He pointed Val toward the bartender. “I should have said, five plus tip. Pay the man and let’s do business.”
TERRANCE MET THE EX-COP, SUZANNE WALTON, IN A MANHATTAN diner made for the blues. They sat in the corner booth. Beyond his grimy window, the street was a concrete canyon filled with grinding traffic and sullen faces and smoking vents. To his other side, the chef leaned against the kitchen windowsill and yelled at the lone waitress in some gutteral tongue. Terrance asked, “Why are we here?”
“You mean, so far from the parts of the city we all know and love?” She had a cop’s voice and ate like a feral beast, watching him over her sandwich. “You sure you don’t want anything?”
“I’ll wait.” His suite had been reserved at the Plaza. Their wine list was legendary.
“Number one, because up here we’re faceless. Number two, I wanted you to see this terrain for yourself. My guess is, your man came in here and disappeared.”
The woman’s blunt manner helped enormously. Her attitude suggested that any problem could be handled and disposed of. “Which means he knows we’re after him.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. I talked to a buddy at the precinct. This Jeffrey Adams character claimed to have lost his memory.”
“What?”
“I’m just telling you what I heard. Jeffrey Adams was so drunk or drugged or both he took a swing at a cop trying to save him from getting rolled. The cop promptly clocked him. The next day Adams checked out of the holding cell claiming amnesia.”
Wally Walton was not an unattractive woman. For someone fascinated by life’s seamier side, she would even be classed as alluring.
Terrance guessed her age at early to midthirties. She wore a jacket and skirt of midnight blue. A matching silk T-shirt did nothing to hide her feminine curves. She had mannish hands and strong wrists, but her nails were buffed and polished. Her dark hair framed a face of uncompromising angles. Her eyes were her worst feature, large and brown and utterly without bottom.
Terrance asked, “He doesn’t remember? Not anything?”
“He didn’t then. No telling about now.” She used the grimy napkin to clean the sauce from her hands and mouth. She balled it up, dropped it in her plate, and pushed the plate aside. “I checked the neighborhood. They’ve pegged me for a cop. Probably vice, since I’m not showing them a badge. Which means I don’t get much help.
But he did check in at a local street clinic. That cost me a hundred, by the way. Head banged up, complaining of amnesia, everything checks out with what the cops said.”
“They don’t know where he went after that?”
“Either they don’t know or they aren’t saying. I’ve gone by all the hotels and boarding houses in the area. But these places, it’s not like downtown. They play loose with the records around here, Terry.”
“Don’t call me that.”
She caught the edge to his voice and smirked. “If you’r
e right, what you said about him wanting to leave the country, he needs a passport. The precinct shows him as only holding a driver’s license. That won’t get him far. Not these days. He’s going to have to get hold of false papers.”
“Can’t you get flight records?”
“Not a chance. Since 9/11 you got to go through Homeland Security. My guys would face FBI scrutiny for even asking. Our best bet is to locate his source for false papers. There aren’t so many of those around. I’m working on that as we speak.”
A fist formed from the diner’s grimy smoke gripped his gut. “So he might already be gone.”
“Put that aside for a second and focus on what we know. The guy is alive, right?”
“Yes.” Terrance swallowed against the bile being forced up his gullet. “Which is why we still need you.”
“Let’s take a look at that. You don’t just want this guy dead.”
“No.”
“We’re way beyond that now.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve gone public. Which means you need this guy to vanish. You need him to disappear so completely it’s like he never came back from the dead in the first place.”
“And fast.”
“What do I call you? And don’t give me d’Arcy. I can’t say that with a straight face.”
“Terrance.”
“Okay, Terrance. This is going to cost you. This is going to cost you big.”
“You’re only being asked to do what you should have—”
“Stop right there.” She planted an elbow on the table and jabbed the air between them with her forefinger. Dried sauce from her sandwich collected around her fingernail like unnoticed blood. “I did the hit exactly as ordered. The bank is gone. Not just your guys. I was ordered to destroy the bank’s records, computers, files, the works. Which I did, correct?”
“Yes.” They had needed to destroy all banking records. The only ones that survived were held by the parent company on Jersey. The island was beyond U.S. reach. Jersey banks answered only to Jersey law. Jersey banking records were open to no one. The only records available now to the SEC investigators were those in Insignia’s hands. Which contained some of Terrance’s best work. “Why couldn’t you at least be sure they’d actually entered the bank?”
“Come on, Terrance. Stay with me here. First off, the place is a warren. Rockefeller Center has, what, nineteen street entrances spread over two city blocks. Second, I had to set the charges after the cleaning crew had been through. Me. Working alone. Don was very clear on this. I asked for a team and he said this was to be a one-woman job. So you gave me the where and the when. And I followed orders, right?”
There was no way Terrance could hedge the facts. Not and meet this woman’s gaze. “You did exactly what we asked of you.”
She relaxed a trace. “So you’re still playing it straight with me.”
“We need you.”
“I know that. But it’s good to hear you know it too.”
“I assume you’ve checked on Marjorie Copeland?”
“First thing I did after hearing about your guy. Night before the blast she stayed in and did room service. Hotel clerk noticed her leaving on account of the time, six in the morning sharp, and because she hung around the lobby for a while like she was looking for somebody. Used the hotel phone twice, paced awhile, then left on her own.”
“Which brings us back to Val Haines.”
“Right.” She leaned forward. With him now. “The problem, Terrance, is your guy has probably left the country. Which means bringing in outside help.”
“You can do that?”
“I know people. But it’s going to be expensive.”
“It already is.”
“What you’ve paid so far, that’s nothing. That’s chump change. We’re talking serious money now.”
“This is your windup?”
“This is fact. There’s nobody else you can turn to but me. So listen very carefully to what I’m telling you. First we’ve got to find the guy. Then we’ve got to make him disappear so there’ll never be a trace he even surfaced in the first place. This means a lot of legwork. Especially if he knows we’re after him. Does he?”
“Let’s assume the worst.”
“Which means we don’t need a guy with a gun. We need an organization. Let’s break this down. First you’re going to have the upfront. Call it the conversation charge. Then there’s the fee for finding this guy. And finally the vanishing act.”
“You’re forgetting your portion for all this extra work.”
The first glint of humor he had ever seen entered Wally’s eyes. “I haven’t forgotten anything, Terrance. You have a clean picture of this guy?”
“In the car. You’re sure you can get in touch with the right people for this work?”
“I already did. I figured if your guy was on the move, the faster we hit, the better. Right?”
“Yes. Definitely.”
“So I contacted some people I know in England. I’ve done business with them before. They’re tops. And connected. They’re watching the airports. This guy shows up, they’re on him. Any idea where he’ll be headed?”
“Jersey.”
“Where?”
“It’s an island in the English Channel.”
“But first he’s got to go to England like you told me on the phone, right?”
“Yes. Or France. But he’s been once before and went through London.”
“Okay. So we’ll stay with England for the moment, and if he doesn’t show then we’ll move to this island. It’s really called Jersey?”
“Yes.”
“You bring cash with you?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“I doubt that, Terrance. I doubt that very much.”
Here it comes, Terrance thought. He willed himself not to move a muscle.
She spoke the words almost lovingly. “A million dollars.”
“What?”
“I’m not done. A million now. A million the day this guy disappears from the face of the earth. In return, I bring you in contact with people who can do this job. I make sure they take their money and vanish too. While all this is going down, I make sure the cops don’t pinch you.” She breathed the words in a soft murmur, her face inches from his. “Then I make like smoke and evaporate too.”
He leaned back. Crossed his arms. She remained where she was, but there was a constricting about her. The muscles drew in tight around her eyes, her mouth, her shoulders. Her fingers looked ready to claw hunks from the table. Prepared for battle. Terrance said, “Here’s my counteroffer. I’ll give you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash now. To spend as you see fit. A million dollars will be wire transferred wherever you tell me by the close of business today. From that you will pay the new hired help whatever you see fit.”
“That’s not—”
He raised his hand. “Allow me to finish. A million and a half more will be paid to you the day Val vanishes for good. Again, you pay your cohorts whatever is correct. They deal only with you. I am simply along as an observer.”
Terrance leaned back over the table. “And another two million at the end of two years. Just to make sure you stay our very own silent lady.”
The tensile power eased from her shoulders and neck and face. “I’m not a lady, Terrance.”
“No. But the situation hardly requires one, does it?”
“This deal you’ve got going down.” They might as well have been lovers sharing secrets across the scarred linoleum, they were that close. “It’s very big, isn’t it?”
Terrance just smiled.
“How—” She was interrupted by the pinging of her phone. She leaned back, checked the number on the screen, then flipped it open and said, “You got something?”
She listened intently, showing him the mask. “Give me a name.” She made notes on her napkin, then slapped the phone shut and said, “I need to get moving here.”
“Who was that?”
“Maybe a lead. Maybe nothing. But I got to check it out.”
“I’m coming too.”
“You sure?” She didn’t quite smirk this time. Just a slight tightening to the edges of her mouth and eyes. “This is a long way from the Plaza, where we’re headed.”
“I’m ready,” Terrance said. And he was.
Outside on the street she told him, “I need some cash.”
“How much?”
“Ten grand should cover it.”
Terrance stopped, ready to play the money guy and beat her down. It was his nature. He was good at this game. But again he caught the taut battle fire in her features. He gave a mental shrug. Why bother? He might as well get used to a little outgo. “My valise is in the car.”
She slid into the back seat beside him. While the driver shut her door and went around to the front, Terrance flipped the locks on his briefcase and handed her two banded sets of hundred dollar bills. He gained a little satisfaction from her being disconcerted again by his ready agreement. Not ten thousand dollars’ worth, mind. But some.
She stowed the money away before the driver slipped behind the wheel. She said quietly, “Five is for the information. The other five is to ease our way inside.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“That’s right. I don’t.”
“But you do need to tell our fellow where we’re headed.”
She turned to the driver and said, “Find a place on South Park down by Murray Hill where you can pull over and wait.” When the car pulled into traffic, Wally gave him that cop’s smile. “You’re okay, Terrance.”
“From this point on, whatever you spend comes from your share.” Terrance leaned back in his seat. He did so love the hunt.
THE CLOUDS WERE TOO LAZY TO HANG IN THE SKY ON THEIR OWN. Instead, they leaned upon the highest towers, compressing the upper elevations and packing the city even more densely. There was no open space in any direction. No horizon upon which he could focus and find respite.
Val emerged from the subway and headed south from Douglas Circle. He turned left and walked to Morningside Avenue. The clinic was three blocks further north. In the distance the road dipped where the subway emerged from underground. The rail network rose to an overhead station, supported on painted steel beams. The sense of entering a man-made cavern was almost overwhelming.
