by Davis Bunn
A comforting breeze drifted down the little lane, flavored by wildflowers and the sea. The village was lost beyond two sharp bends and a hillside blanketed in spring finery. Overhead the sun played games with scuttling clouds. Undulating meadows shivered and sheened with the paintings of light and shadow. In the distance the waves wrote their own frothy script of farewell.
Val heard voices before the crowd rounded the corner and came into view. Bert and Dillon had volunteered to go down and meet those arriving with the afternoon ferry. Val pushed off the ancient stone and went to greet them. There were perhaps four dozen mourners, a motley assortment of polished gentry and rough trade, united now in grey cloth and grief.
Dillon pulled him to one side and said, “Gerald says you’re needed back at the cottage.”
“Terrance?”
“The bloke’s just sitting and staring at all the yesterdays he’s wasted. Needs a swift kick, if you ask me.”
“Not today.”
“No, suppose not. How is it you’re the only one who knows how to wind his motor?”
Val started down the lane without replying.
A copse of trees separated the hamlet from the parish church. Val arrived at the cottage’s front walk just as Gerald came out with Audrey, and resented the sight of another man standing where he wished to be.
Audrey made even grief look alluring. “Terrance says he won’t come.”
“He’ll be there.”
“He wouldn’t even look at me. I begged and he wouldn’t even meet my gaze.”
“Leave your brother to me. You’ve got enough to worry about already today.”
“He’s right, you know,” Gerald said. A truce had settled between Val and Gerald. Whatever else, they had been through enough to know the other’s measure. Their unspoken agreement was loud and clear. Audrey would have to decide between them. “If Terrance will mind anybody, it’s the lad here.”
Audrey’s hair caught the sunlight in a brilliant weave. “Perhaps I should just let him be.”
Val started for the door. “We’ll meet you at the church.”
The stone cottage was so old the lichen decorating the slate roof grew in layers. They had rented the place because it was within walking distance of the St. Helier hospice. The three downstairs rooms were more charm than comfort. The four upstairs bedrooms were closets with windows. Val found Terrance just as Dillon had said, seated on his bed and staring at an empty side wall. Val had accepted Audrey’s request to try and reform her brother, rather than send him to jail. Val had even suggested the method. And he did his best to do away with his burden of hate. Even when Terrance had confessed to doctoring the lab reports and stealing the child Val had always known was his. Even then.
During Arthur’s steady decline, Val had done what he could to ensure their future safety and Terrance’s ongoing obedience. Nights already turned sleepless by tending to Arthur had been extended even further. He had carefully quizzed Terrance and then prepared a script. In the backroom of a local photographic studio, Terrance had sat beside Val and read the script in the buzzing drone of a crypt dweller.
They had express mailed a copy of the DVD to an attorney in London, who had hand-delivered the package to the address the same attorney had located for Loupe. They had included no message. No warning. Nothing.
The fact that they were all still alive was the only evidence Val needed that the message had been received, loud and clear.
Arthur had held to his considerate nature right to the end, slipping away quietly six days after their arrival. Audrey was asleep by her father’s bed at the time, awakening to a glorious spring dawn and birdsong and a man who looked so very pleased to journey home.
Terrance gave no indication that he was even aware of Val’s presence. Terrance had not shaved since performing for the camera. Nor did it appear that he had slept. His eyes had retreated back into plum-shaded caves. Nowadays Val addressed Terrance in a prison warden’s manner, unemotional direct commands.
Val told him, “We leave for the church in ten minutes.”
Slowly Terrance’s head lifted. “What did you do with the money?”
“We’ve been through this a dozen times.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“I already have. I wired it back to Insignia’s accounts.”
“You couldn’t have.”
“Terrance . . .” Val had a sudden sense of staring into a mystic mirror, one that revealed how close he had come to living solely for vengeance.
“What?”
“Do this thing for Audrey,” Val said, still captured by the image of his journey to the brink. “I won’t make you come with me when I visit Stefanie.”
Terrance’s head sank back to his hands.
Val retreated from the room. “You’ve got ten minutes to shave and dress.”
The church’s interior was unpainted stone. The slate floor was washed by the tide of centuries. The windows were tall and narrow and set deep in slanted recesses. The priest’s robes were from another era, as was his chant as he lit candles at the coffin’s head and feet. Audrey sat between Val and Gerald. Terrance sat further along the same pew, sandwiched between Bert and Dillon. Incense wafted from two burners set to either side of the altar. The painted medieval frieze behind the priest’s lectern came alive in the smoke. In Val’s exhausted state, the ceremony’s measured cadence carried him back through time, joining him with centuries of worshippers long gone, yet with them still. Then he felt Audrey’s hand reach over and take his own. He wrapped her hand in both of his, and wondered if perhaps she recalled another time, when she had brought him to such a place and sought to give him only the best of what she had. And what she had, he needed as strongly as breath.
The priest invited those who wished to come forward and say a few words. Audrey rose and walked over to stand above the coffin. Val tried hard to hear what she said. But his heart spoke too loudly just then. Strange how such a time and place could generate such an overwhelming sense of gratitude.
As she returned to her seat, she glanced at Terrance. But he gave no sign he saw her. Dillon nudged the man. Still Terrance did not respond. Audrey sighed and shook her head, a single tight gesture.
Val rose to his feet, slipped from the pew, and stood at the coffin’s head. He said, “Arthur’s daughter told me recently that everything good in her came from this man. I can only say that he must have been a very fine man indeed. One I wish I had known better.”
He looked at her then. And said, “One whose example I can only hope to follow.”
VALARRANGED THE MEETING FOR SIX FORTY-FIVE IN THE MORNING, precisely the time he had been scheduled to be blown up. The sense of living irony helped steady his nerves as he stepped out of the elevator and walked through the penthouse foyer. The Insignia chairman’s office was empty, but he heard sounds emanating from the adjoining boardroom.
Jack Budrow was tucked into a sumptuous breakfast and surrounded by a lovely spring sunrise as Val stepped into view. The chairman’s expression was almost comical, his fork frozen in midair as he searched for an appropriate response. All he could think to say, however, was, “I can have security up here in thirty seconds.”
“Don’t bother.”
“You’re that man. What’s his name.”
“Val Haines.”
“I . . . I don’t understand. The call came from . . .”
“Terrance. He decided to remain downstairs.”
The mental tumblers flipped and spun. But nothing of worth came to mind. Jack Budrow pushed his plate aside. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see—”
“Save it.” Val walked to the front of the room and slid aside the shoji screen hiding the television, then slipped the DVD into the slot. “I want you to see this.”
It took him a moment to work out the remote’s unfamiliar controls. By the time the television and sound came to life, Terrance was already into his spiel. He heard Jack Budrow choke on the sight of Terrance seated there beside Val
.
“—Arranged with my two partners, Jack Budrow and Don Winslow, to defraud Insignia Corporation’s pension funds of four hundred and eighteen million dollars. We arranged to pin the theft on Marjorie Copeland and Valentine Haines.”
Terrance looked like a talking corpse as he read from the prepared script. His hands trembled slightly in time to his voice’s tremor. “Using the services of Suzanne Walters, we arranged to blow up the New York offices of Syntec Bank, destroying both the people we were framing, the banker through whom we had worked, and all records not held in-house and doctored by myself.”
“Turn that off!” Budrow sputtered. “I didn’t know anything about this!”
“But Val Haines did not die as expected in the New York blast,” Terrance droned. “With full support from Winslow and Budrow—”
“That is a lie!”
“—I flew to England with Suzanne Walters. We accepted the services of a local mobster, Josef Loupe.” In a cryptlike monotone, Terrance detailed their work, Loupe’s scheme to steal all the money for himself, and finally, “I personally witnessed Josef Loupe murdering Don Winslow with one shot from an automatic pistol to his chest.”
Jack Budrow stumbled around the boardroom table. He pawed the other chairs out of his way, leaving wreckage in his wake. He grabbed the remote from Val and hammered it with tight bursts of breath, as though throwing punches. When the television finally cut off, he threw the remote to the ground. “I knew nothing about any of that. Winslow and d’Arcy were acting completely without my knowledge—”
“Here’s how it’s going to play out,” Val said. He slipped the DVD from the machine, placed it back inside the jewel box, and slid it down the table. It sparkled in the growing sunlight as it spun and slid and finally came to rest beside Jack Budrow’s unfinished breakfast. “Today you are going to resign all your positions with Insignia.”
“You can’t possibly think I would even consider—”
“You will relinquish all retirement benefits. You will refuse any consulting position. You will turn over your stock options and all your shares in the company to the Insignia pension fund. It is a benevolent final gesture to repair the damages made to the hopes and futures of all your loyal employees.”
Jack Budrow’s face had drained of blood. One hand gripped his chest. The other used the doorjamb for support. “You’re insane.”
“If that announcement is not made public by tomorrow, copies of this DVD will be delivered to the chairman of the SEC. Others will go to the Wall Street Journal, the local papers, the television, and everywhere else I can think of.”
Budrow whimpered a protest that died before it was fully formed.
“One day,” Val repeated. “And one day more to make good on the promises. Otherwise I go public.”
Val slipped past the chairman and started for the exit. He turned back and repeated, “One day.”
When Val arrived back at the car, Terrance gave no sign that he was aware Val had departed, much less returned. His gaze carried the bleak emptiness of a man staring a life sentence in the face. Which, in a sense, he was.
From the rear seat, Audrey observed Val with cautious reserve. “How did it go?”
“Fine.” He started the car. At least she had decided to accompany them to America. Nor had she bothered to claim it was to keep an eye on her brother. Val started the car and said, “Everything is just fine.”
Forty minutes later, they pulled up in front of a mammoth steel-and-glass building, headquarters of the long-distance and cell-phone company that ran its international operations from this campus north of Winter Park. Outside, brilliant Florida sunlight splashed against the stream of corporate employees racing the morning clock. In the rearview mirror, Val saw that Audrey was still watching him. He hoped his sense that something was melting inside her was not just his imagination. Until he was certain, however, he was determined to wait it out. He wanted to give her whatever space she needed. This time he wanted to get it right.
Terrance touched the knot of his tie and murmured, “I suppose I should be reporting for work.”
Audrey leaned forward and said to her brother, “You’re doing the right thing, Brother.”
Terrance opened his door, grabbed his briefcase, and walked into the sunlight.
Audrey sighed and leaned back. Shook her head. Closed her eyes.
Val turned around in his seat. “Give it time.”
“He’s had a lifetime. That isn’t long enough?”
“You’ve reached hard cases before,” he replied.
She opened her eyes. “Have I?”
“Absolutely.”
After a long moment, Audrey opened the rear door, rose from the car, and slipped into the seat vacated by Terrance. She asked, “When do you leave?”
He started to say, when he could be sure she would be there when he got back. But that sort of statement was too far a reach into a tomorrow she had not yet offered him. “A few days. As soon as Terrance delivers the first batch of goods, and I can be certain he’ll be okay on his own for a while.”
She spoke the words with slow caution, as if needing to assess the texture of each individually. “Do you want me to do anything while you’re gone?”
“Does this mean you’re going to stay?” He swallowed, then added the words, “With me?”
“Let’s just take this one step at a time, all right?”
In reply, Val put the car into gear. Wondering if perhaps the faint stirrings he felt at heart level meant there really might be a future he could call his own.
VAL HAD THE CAB WAIT FOR HIM OUTSIDE THE HOTEL EVEREST. Vince watched him push through the doors. “If it isn’t Mr. Smith. How we doing today?”
“So far so good.”
“Glad to hear it.” Vince gave him a careful once-over. “I don’t see any open wounds. You meet any trouble?”
“Some.”
“There ain’t no partial when it comes to trouble. Either you did or you didn’t.”
“Yes.”
“And you came out on top?”
“Sort of.”
Vince gave that flicker of a smile, like he tasted something alien. “You come walking in here without a limp, I say you did okay.”
“So would I.”
“Way to go.” He glanced at the wall clock. “You got my money?”
Val took out the zippered pouch supplied by the bank and set it on the counter between them.
The final transfer request Val had given to the Jersey banker had been in regard to Marjorie Copeland’s funds. It had been her idea for Val to have signatory rights over her account as well. Just in case, Marjorie had said, asking only that Val make sure her child was taken care of. Just in case. The majority of the funds, after this sum for Vince and their expenses on Jersey, was now safely resting in a trust established in her son’s name.
Vince opened the pouch, peered inside, zipped it closed, and made it disappear. “What do you know. Looks like I was right to trust you, Mr. Smith.”
“The name is Val. Valentine Haines.”
“This trouble you were in. It’s officially over?”
“Getting there.”
“Which means you won’t need to be staying uptown again. You’re moving back to the other side of the park, right?”
“I’d still like to drop in from time to time, if that’s all right.”
Vince gave a fractional head-shake. “You don’t want to hang with me. I’m street. It might rub off.”
“Not a bad thing. Especially where I’m headed.”
“Yeah? Where’s that?”
“Looking for trouble.”
Vince liked that enough to offer his hand. “Feel free. You hear what I’m saying?”
The man’s touch was surprisingly light, as though Vince did not want to connect too heavily even through a handshake. “Thanks. For everything.”
“You’re not a bad guy, for a sucker. You need something, you say the word.”
Val sat in the ou
ter office, surrounded by New York bustle. He might as well have been invisible. Which he did not mind. A moment to rest in the eye of the storm was fine by him. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. The image was there again, the same one he had carried since traveling to New York by way of a certain Miami waterfront condo.
Val had stood by the living room window and stared out at the waterfront palaces and the floating wealth as Stefanie had cried her way through Terrance’s on-camera performance. Val had remained mute and motionless while she regained control. There were a num- ber of things that would have to be said. A multitude of legal matters to be rewritten, a myriad of issues to be resolved anew. But not this time. Val did not want to mar this moment with anything other than the reason for his coming. Which was not revenge. Nor to tell her that he had been right all along. None of that mattered. He could see just enough of his reflection in the sliding-glass door to know that this was not merely fatigue or momentary ruminations. He stared into eyes that seemed full of the day’s sunlight, a translucent image so powerful he could almost blank out the sound of his ex-wife sobbing behind him.
When he was certain the tears were over and her composure restored, Val turned around.
He said, “I’d like to see my daughter now.”
The aide ushered Val into the office. The SEC’s chief investigator eyed him with open curiosity. “You’re Haines?”
“Yes.”
“Valentine Richard Haines?”
“That’s right.”
“You got some ID?”
Val handed over his recently recovered passport. The man inspected it carefully. “You want coffee?”
“No. I’m good.”
He tossed Val’s passport onto his desk. “Now this is real interesting. First off, funds you supposedly stole suddenly wind up in Insignia’s petty cash account. Then, if that’s not good enough, a guy who’s supposed to be fully dead calls me up and says he wants to stop by, talk to me about a job.”
