by Davis Bunn
“Oh, and it’s ‘we’ now, is it?”
“Gerald,” Audrey said quietly.
The taut man looked down at his floor and went back to kicking the wall.
Audrey rose and gave Val a fraction of a head motion. The two hard-faced men watched him depart with blank stares. She exited the house by the front door and started down the street. As Val fell into step beside her, Audrey took an intense aim at something on the far horizon. She cupped her elbows with her palms and walked stiffly. Their footsteps formed the only discordant note to a lovely sunlit lane.
The previous evening, Audrey had driven him up the steep lane leading away from the medieval town and the sea. She had driven west about twenty minutes, to where a housing estate sprawled around an aging industrial park. Gerald’s unassuming house was made spectacular by its setting. Two dozen modest homes fronted a narrow lane marking the industrial township’s outer boundary. Behind the houses stretched an expanse of English myth, a great bowl of highland pasture shining in pristine splendor. Rising in the far distance was a steep-sided hill with veins white as old bones.
“Where are we?”
“The border to the downs.” But Audrey paid no attention to her surroundings. “Your plan failed, didn’t it? I can see it in your face.”
Val explained what he had tried to do. “I should have known Terrance would have shut down the company’s systems.”
“What can we do?”
“I’m working on that.” He gestured behind him. “They don’t want me here.”
“What do you expect? A stranger from head office declares they’re about to lose their jobs and that he’s stolen from a pension fund that won’t pay them a farthing?” She took hold of the fence. “Those are good men, Val.”
“The two guys look like they’ve had a hard life.”
“Bert and Dillon have both done time, yes. I met them through my work. They’re friends now.” She leaned heavily upon the words. “Good men, the both of them.”
“Gerald thinks a lot of you.”
“It seems like the entire town is busy making sure I am fully aware of that. We met in an Alpha course I’m teaching at the church. You’ve heard of Alpha?”
“I don’t—”
“Remember. Of course. How convenient.”
“It’s the truth.”
More than the morning light tightened her gaze as she inspected him. “Did you truly believe you could actually leave it all behind?”
The pressure mounted again, her words squeezing at him, working to dislodge what he could not quite grasp. “I thought . . .”
“Yes?”
“That you might come with me.”
The message was clear in her gaze long before she spoke. “What tore us apart before is still there between us now.”
There were a hundred things he could say. But he remained trapped in the moment, staring at someone who had once cared for him deeply. Despite all the worries and unanswered questions, he felt his life constrict to this lane, the rusted old fence fronting the downs, the birdsong, the sunlight that turned the pastures into a green mirror, these words, this love. How could he have ever left her? “Audrey—”
Whatever she saw in his gaze was enough to make her grateful when someone called from the house. Audrey stepped away. “We’d best go see what’s got them stirred up.”
The men said nothing to Val as he entered. But the way they watched him was clear as an oath. Bert said, “Something’s happening inside the town, love. Something bad.”
“Is it Terrance?”
Bert motioned to his younger mate in the doorway. “Tell her.”
Dillon carried himself with the hardness of streetwise life. “A mate’s just come off the hotel’s early shift. These men show up, not your basic run-of-the-mill toughs.”
“What do you mean?”
“He means trouble, love.” Bert was a hard man with the grime of years ingrained in his gaze and his voice. “Trouble that don’t bear thinking about.”
“One of them was an older guy with a funny sort of accent.” The young man looked pained by his news. “Another was a Yank.”
“Terrance?”
“My mate says he looks a lot like you.”
Gerald added, “Word’s come down from the works. There’s been visitors in and out, talking to the dodgy blokes on the shop floor.”
“I heard the same.” Bert aimed his thumb at Val but kept his gaze on Audrey. “They been asking for the bloke here.”
“Did they name him?”
“Not in so many words. But it’s him they’re after, all right.”
Gerald directed his words to Audrey, not Val. “What about the plan you told us he had?”
Val replied, “I can’t access headquarters. They’ve locked the system down tight.”
Audrey said, “We’ll just have to think of something else.”
The room’s silence gradually condensed around Val.
Bert was the one who spoke aloud what the men were all thinking. “Say we was to let them have the bloke.”
“No,” Audrey replied. “Val is our friend.”
“He’s a thief, Audrey.” This from Gerald. “He said it himself.”
“No.”
“What if . . .” Bert looked at the others, drawing support from two stone-hard faces. “What if they was to offer to give us our due and return the pension money? What then?”
“You don’t know Terrance. He’ll promise you whatever it is you want to hear. But he’ll give you nothing. He’ll take what he wants and disappear.”
“But if we was to get a guarantee, like.”
“Val knows the system. Val is our only hope of making things right.” Audrey gathered up her purse and keys. “I have to go see to Father.”
“Audrey . . .”
“I’m telling you that we need Val.”
The others parted to let her through, but Gerald remained where he was, blocking the hall. “We need him, or you do?”
“Val has told us nothing but the truth since he arrived. He came up with one possible option. He’ll come up with another.” She turned to look at him. The others followed her lead. “Won’t you?”
Val confirmed, “If Terrance is in town, there is definitely something we can try.”
“There, you see?” Audrey started to force her way past, then caught herself. “Terrance is here, Gerald. Father is by himself. I must go.”
“Perhaps I should come with you.”
“Stay and work out the next step. I won’t be long.”
Val felt the eyes rake him as he moved down the hall behind her. He waited until they were outside to ask, “You’re leaving me here?”
“I told you before, Val. These are good men.”
“They’d like to feed me to the wolves.” When she continued her march to the car, he asked, “Don’t you want to hear what I’m thinking?”
“I’m not the one who needs convincing, Val.” She slid behind the wheel. “Go in there and talk with them. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Audrey did something then, a gesture that pained him like a hook through his heart. He realized he had seen her do it many times before. She lifted her chin with a determined jerk and shook her hair back. It tumbled over her shoulders in a burnished cascade. The lines of her face and the cast of her eyes were caught clearly by the sunlight flooding through her open door. Her lips were a translucent wash of palest rose. A determined woman, bearing the weight of so many different things that were both out of her control and not of her liking. Val knew that he looked upon someone far stronger than he would ever be, and far better. The reasons he had insisted upon leaving her were lost. Even worse, they were meaningless. He loved her. He had lost her. The knowledge rocked him forward just as she restarted the motor and shut her door.
He called through her open window, “Audrey . . .”
But she was gone.
WITHIN AN HOUR OF THEIR ARRIVAL IN HASTINGS, THE BAND OF people surrounding the boss had
swelled to eleven.
Hastings’s finest hotel rose like a grey Victorian wedding cake where the old town met the port. Foppish towers and curlicues adorned the roofline. Flags made a colorful row beneath the second floor window. A doorman in maroon uniform with gold braid stood sentry outside the grand entrance. Josef Loupe had taken the two-bedroom penthouse suite as well as rooms to either side. Sunlight flooded the suite’s parlor like a persistent intruder. Terrance stood by the bowed portside windows and observed families at play on the rocky beach. The children raced through the sunshine, chasing seagulls and each other to the water’s edge. Many adults still wore streetclothes, their pants legs rolled up and their pale heads covered by handkerchiefs with corners tightened like four white pigtails. A pair of merry-go-rounds with diesel-driven calliopes stood at either end of the beach. Gaily colored stands sold Italian ices and grilled spicy sausages and draft beer. The benches lining the streetside sidewalk were jammed with old people. Families carrying buckets walked along the southern rock wall, searching among the seaweed for cockles. Terrance felt he had entered a time warp where there was no place for him or his ambition.
He turned away. Let the peons have their day in the sun. He was hunting bigger game.
The area around Arthur d’Arcy’s home had been staked out, as had the two entrances to the Insignia factory. Insignia employees who pilfered components or sold drugs on the factory floor or shook down the unions had all been contacted. Bribes had been offered. People came in and out of the hotel suite in a fairly constant stream. A house a quarter-mile from the hotel had been rented for Loupe’s men. It stood on a cul-de-sac, well removed from its nearest neighbors.
The boss sat in the center of his parlor suite like a cashmere-draped tarantula. He smoked his cigar, talked on the phone, and greeted each of the shadowy newcomers as brethren. Terrance felt encased in an exquisite tension. He observed Loupe’s face as through a magnifying glass, seeing every pore, all the avarice hidden beneath that genteel calm. He glanced at Wally, sitting in the far corner by the door leading to the bedroom, smoking a chain of cigarettes and staring at nothing. Terrance found himself pitying her in a mild way.
Loupe turned to him. “Are you sure I can’t offer you anything, Mr. d’Arcy? A fresh pot of coffee, perhaps?”
Terrance knew the old man shared his enjoyment of the mounting tension. “I think we should hit the house.”
Loupe nodded thoughtfully, as though considering this for the first time. “There are problems. It is a busy street. Your father’s home is connected on the south side to its neighbor. Any disturbance is bound to draw the wrong sort of attention. You said yourself we must act with discretion. I assume that has not changed?”
“There is a way.” He could feel the words linger on the tongue. Each held a distinct flavor.
Terrance found himself recalling a meal he had once had. A New York waiter had brought a fresh white Italian truffle big as two fists. Using a silver cheese serrator he had sliced off paper-thin wedges. The truffle had filled the entire restaurant with its perfume. The flavor had been unlike anything Terrance had tasted before. A superb nuttiness, almost musky in texture. An essence as strong as now.
Loupe watched him with eyes of wet agate. “Yes?”
Terrance realized that the man had known all along, and had been waiting for Terrance to make the move. Commit himself. He was, after all, the key. “No one would suspect a son coming to visit his own father.”
“You would do this thing?”
“I’ll need help.”
Loupe smiled benevolently. “You are a man after my own heart, Mr. d’Arcy.”
Terrance was almost sorry to draw the moment to a close. “We had better get moving.”
The air in the town held the same condensed ambiance as the hotel suite. The early wind had completely died. Every sound carried for miles. The sun pounded with uncommon strength upon Terrance’s head as he stood on the sidewalk before his father’s house. He had never been here before.
The place was exactly as Terrance had envisioned. A proper little slice of England, a miniature castle for a man who had never dared think big. The home was bordered by a front garden the size of a throw-rug. Rose petals, the color of dried blood, were scattered across the flagstone path. Terrance turned the polished brass handle. His father had never locked the door to any house they had ever lived in. It was one of the many things that had driven Terrance’s mother insane. And rightly so.
Instantly the scents threw him back to the impossible years when he had been young and helpless. Back when his father had elected to destroy Terrance’s life. He heard a scraping sound in the kitchen. His nerves began to crawl under his skin like angry electric worms.
His father shuffled into view. He was far older now, yet unchanged. The core of this man was exactly the same. A man who had never known the exquisite thrill of going for a kill. A stranger to his own son.
“I should have known you would come.” His father shuffled forward. He favored his right side, as though winded by a long run. “Perhaps I did, and tried to hide it even from myself.”
“Where is he?”
His father made no pretense of hiding his knowledge. “Not here.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You won’t find him.”
Terrance glanced at Loupe’s driver, standing by the open front door. Wally had elected to stay out front on guard duty. The driver wore his dark hair in a bowl cut plastered tightly to his skull, such that Terrance could see a shallow indentation at its center. The well-cut suit did nothing save accent his wiry strength. “Shut the door.”
The man slipped to one side and closed the portal. When Terrance turned back to his father, he saw fear in the old man’s gaze. The worms beneath Terrance’s skin thrashed about more wildly, feeding upon a lifetime of futile rage. “You think you can save him, is that it?”
In response, his father pulled out a dining room chair and slowly sank down. His gaze went to the floor by his feet and remained there.
Terrance’s movements were jerky as he crossed the front room. He could feel his muscles hungering for motion, a driving force to tear and rip and flay. “My entire life has been shaped by your spinelessness. Your futile yearning to avoid conflict of any kind is despicable. You cared so much for your rigid peace, you would sacrifice anything to keep it. Even me. Isn’t that true? Isn’t it?”
His father said to the floor by his feet. “They tell me you’re a thief.”
“Who says that—Audrey? Your dear self-righteous freak of a daughter? Why should I care what she says?” Terrance laughed, and to his own ears it sounded like the baying of wolves. It was beyond delicious, this ability to finally release a tiny shard of the loathing for this man he had carried for a lifetime. “What if I am? Who do you think brought me to this point?”
“No one is responsible for your actions but yourself.”
“What an utterly typical response. You let your own son languish in poverty rather than stand up for what was my rightful inheritance. You let my titles and my estate go to the offspring of the real thief. And you did it without raising a finger! Why? Because nothing mattered to you except maintaining this figment of your own imagination, this ridiculous sham of an existence.”
“That’s not true.”
“What nonsense.” Terrance’s panting breaths seared his throat. “Of course I steal! What choice did I ever have? I steal because I’ve been stolen from! Not by my grandfather and his floozy. By you! You wanted peace at all costs. You wanted calm. You wanted a myth of an English country life. Even if it meant sacrificing your own son!”
Arthur sighed and slumped further still. He might have said something. He might even have mentioned Terrance’s mother by name.
“This whole rotten mess comes down to your failure to be a father!” Terrance felt himself standing outside the situation, as if the years and his success and his power all had been stripped away in a single instant, by this man who was incapabl
e of any response. Terrance was both the raging banshee and the invisible observer. “You are going to tell me what I need to know.”
The front door crashed back. “You!”
Terrance whirled about. And smiled. “Hello, sister.”
She was taller than Terrance recalled, or perhaps it was merely her ire that added stature. She vaulted into the room, screaming as she raced for him. “You get away from him!”
Loupe’s driver moved like a cat. He came up behind her and pressed something to her neck. There was a soft zapping sound. Audrey jerked into a full-length spasm, then sighed quietly and came crashing to the floor by her father’s feet.
“No, please.” The words carried no strength, as though Arthur knew they were futile even before he uttered them.
The moment was just too delicious. Terrance touched his father’s shin with the toe of his shoe. “Look at me, Father.”
Arthur locked gazes with his son. Terrance opened the hidden door, the one he had revealed to no one before this moment. And showed his father the full extent of his rage-driven ferocity. Arthur flinched and looked away. “I don’t know where he is. They took him away somewhere. I can’t tell you anything.”
“Ah, but for your dear daughter’s sake, you must. You cannot possibly imagine what they will do to her if you don’t.” Terrance signaled to the silent man. The driver lifted Audrey as easily as he would an empty set of clothes. Terrance drew out pen and pad and wrote down his cell phone number. He dropped it into his father’s lap, between the unmoving hands. “Just give me Val.”
Terrance crossed to the front door. “I sincerely hope you find a way to help me. For once.”
THE HOME’S ATMOSPHERE WAS POISONOUS. DILLON GLARED AT him from the hallway, Gerald did sentry at the kitchen doorway. Bert stood by the sink and measured him for a coffin. Val forced himself to reenter the kitchen and sit at the table.
“I have an idea,” Val said. And waited.
Bert finally said, “Let’s be hearing it, then.”
Val did not respond. He remained as he was, crouched over the table, staring at his hands.
