by Thomas Perry
She was confident about the identification she had picked up from her safe-deposit box in Chicago because it was real. Once, six years ago, she had helped a little girl disappear from Ohio. There were three people who had known she had done it—the girl, Jane, and a social worker from Children’s Services.
The woman had been frantic with worry, so Jane had needed to explain to her all of the steps in advance: the way she would slip the girl out of town, how she would get her across the country, even where the girl’s new birth certificate had come from. She had told her about the man in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, who had invented people and registered their births.
Later, when it was over, Jane had come back to tell her the little girl was safe. The social worker had begged Jane to accept money. Jane had said, “Send me a present,” then forgotten what she had said until a few months later, when the present had arrived. It had been the birth certificate of a woman named Donna Parker. The social worker had a friend in the county clerk’s office. About once a year for the five years since, the woman would send other presents. Sometimes the certificates were for girls, sometimes for boys, sometimes for men or women. But Jane had already begun to cultivate Donna Parker. She had applied for a driver’s license and Social Security card under that name, obtained credit cards, and then a passport.
Jane kept her head down, pretending to read a magazine until her flight to Dallas–Fort Worth was announced. She boarded with the crowd, then closed her eyes and tried to relax through the flight. The wait for the second flight was shorter, and she felt a temporary relief, but as soon as the plane landed in Miami, the feeling that she was being watched grew more oppressive. Jane had long been aware that no airport was a good place for her.
Jane checked the television screens above the concourse to find out which gate her next flight would be departing from, then walked to it. She still had a half hour before her flight was ready for boarding, and she had a feeling that the waiting area here was too exposed. It was midway along the concourse, and the seats all faced the open floor, where she could be seen by hundreds of people walking back and forth. She kept going until she reached the gate at the end of the concourse, where the traffic was much thinner, found a seat, and stared out over the darkened runways.
The woman’s voice on the loudspeaker announced Jane’s flight to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. She stood up and walked toward her gate. She did not feel foolish for having walked a few hundred extra feet. It had used up some of the time, and had cost her nothing.
She was nearly to her gate when she saw the man. He was sitting in one of the seats that faced the open walkway, holding a newspaper in his lap and watching the passengers disappear into the boarding tunnel across the concourse. He didn’t show any sign of getting up to join them, and he made no move to see anyone off. He looked at each of them in turn, then returned to his newspaper.
Jane turned to the right and walked up to a little cluster of pay telephones placed in a hexagon. She took a phone off the hook and kept her eyes on the man. She was sure she recognized him. He was one of the men who had been hunting Nancy Carmody a few years ago. There had been a moment, after Jane had gotten Nancy into a car, when the three men had been running to keep them from driving off. Jane had stood still for five or six seconds with the car door open, looking at their faces as they ran toward her. She had done it because Nancy Carmody’s life might be in jeopardy if she was unable to recognize the faces the next time she saw them.
The next time had not come until now. This man was definitely one of the three. He had worked for Frank Delfina, so tonight, he was probably in the airport watching for Rita. But that was not a problem, because Rita was safe in San Diego. The problem was that if Jane had seen this man’s face so clearly that day, how could he not have seen hers? He was sitting in a seat between Jane and her departure gate. She studied the area behind him, to see if there was any way she could slip past, but there was not. There was a wall that screened the side of his waiting area, and trying to get around it would bring her within ten feet of him.
She heard the announcement repeated. “Passengers on TWA Flight 6645 to Tortola, please report to the boarding area.” Maybe she could slip past him if she could insert herself into the middle of a crowd. She looked behind her to see if there were any large groups of passengers coming in her direction. There were not. She had prevented that by going to the most sparsely populated corner of the airport. She looked back toward the man.
He watched the last of the passengers disappear into the tunnel to board the flight across the concourse, looked down at his newspaper, and sighed. He stood up, stepped to the nearest trash can, and stuffed the newspaper inside. Then he looked up the concourse and began to walk.
Jane hung up her telephone and stepped slowly, warily after him. She watched him walk into the wide entrance of a store that sold magazines, books, and newspapers. As he turned to face the big magazine rack along the wall, she hurried past him to her gate. There were only a few passengers ahead of her at the doorway. She kept her eyes straight ahead while she waited, and when her turn came she handed the airline man her ticket and walked quickly into the tunnel with the others.
It was only after she was in her seat and the hatch had closed that she was finally able to breathe normally. She pushed the man to the back of her mind and tried to think about what she was going to say.
It was after midnight when Jane walked beside the long seven-foot wrought-iron fence and stopped at the high ornamental gate. She pressed the intercom button on the left gatepost and waited. She had expected to have to ring many times, but a woman’s voice said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t receive visitors at this time of the evening.”
Jane said, “Please tell George that my name is Jane, and I need to speak to him now.”
“Mr. Hawkes has retired.” The voice had an edge to it now that was more than annoyance. There was a tightness in the throat that sounded a bit like jealousy. Servants might get irritated, they might be self-important and officious, but they didn’t get jealous.
“I’m sorry to come to your house so late,” said Jane. That was a good start—“your” house. “But my business really is urgent.” She hoped that the use of the word “business” might help dispel the tension.
This time it was his voice. “Jane?”
“Yes, George?”
The intercom cut off, there was a beeping sound, and the gate swung inward. Jane started walking up the long, curving cobblestone driveway. She could see the tile roof of the huge three-story white villa beyond a distant stand of trees. A bright light went on at a spot that she judged must be the front entrance.
Jane followed the driveway across the middle of a flat lawn the size of a golf course fairway, then between tall, umbrella-shaped trees with flowers blooming among the leaves that she could smell but not quite make out, through a zone of short, bushy citrus trees, and then into the open again. When she could see the lighted entrance, she smiled. There were a couple of twisty baroque pillars that looked as though they had been stolen from Saint Peter’s in Rome, and between them, a pair of doors that were a full two stories high. One of them had a man-size door cut into the bottom of it, and that was what was open.
George stepped out wearing white shorts, a pair of sandals, and a striped T-shirt. His merely human size and the childlike clothes he wore made him look ridiculous next to the imposing building he lived in. The little figure began to walk toward her quickly, the sandals slapping on the cobblestones. Jane thought of Richard Dahlman’s comment on the place. “It was the sort of villa you would expect to find on the Mediterranean, but wouldn’t.” Dahlman had been summoned here in the middle of the night, led here by a waitress from his hotel because Dahlman was a surgeon and George was in pain. He had taken out George’s appendix at the local hospital. Since Dahlman wouldn’t accept money, George had insisted on giving him the name and address of a woman who could make him disappear if he should ever have the need.
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p; George saw Jane emerge from the little forest and began to trot awkwardly toward her. Finally, he stepped out of his sandals and went the rest of the way barefoot. He stopped abruptly in front of her. “Jane!” he said. “I can’t believe it!” He hugged her, then held her at arm’s length to look at her in the dim light from his doorway. “Come inside. Is anybody chasing you, or did you get out clean?”
“Nobody’s chasing me,” said Jane. She was already looking over his shoulder for the woman whose voice she had heard. She saw the face in an upper window—a brown, perfect oval, with large black eyes. It turned and disappeared from the window. Jane moved her eyes to the next window and caught a glimpse of a tall, thin shape clothed in a gauzy white nightgown as it passed by. “As far as I know, I’m not being chased, followed, hunted, or watched … until now.”
George feigned disappointment. “Oh, I was hoping to return the favor you did me.”
Jane said, “You’ve been well—other than the appendix?”
“You know about that?” He frowned. “Then the doctor did get himself in trouble. I knew it. American doctors and lawyers are down here all the time hiding money from the IRS. I told him that someday he might have a problem. He wouldn’t believe me.”
“He’s all right now.”
George Hawkes looked at Jane affectionately. “I feel wonderful, since you asked. I feel like I’m in the story about the lion and the mouse. The lion spares the mouse, and later the mouse gnaws the net so the lion can go free.” He bared his teeth and gnawed feverishly. “Ngyah-ngyah-ngyah.”
Jane looked at him through half-lidded eyes.
He said, “You’ve been here for thirty seconds, and already you’ve made my night.”
“I think there was somebody else upstairs who wanted that job,” said Jane. “Who is she?”
“Clara?” His smile returned. “She’s my wife. Local girl.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“Spectacular,” said George. “You should see the kids that woman produces … of course, you will, when they wake up.”
“George,” said Jane. “I’m afraid I won’t be here that long. I came this way because I needed to talk to you with no chance of being overheard or having a call traced.”
He turned to contemplate Jane’s face in the light. “I thought you weren’t in trouble.” He began to pull her toward the house, but she resisted.
“I’m not yet. This is business, and I need to keep it secret. I’d like to be on a plane for home before daylight.” She stared at him. “I’m sure that if you’ve lived up to the agreement we made, your wife hasn’t heard this kind of conversation before.”
When she had met him, George Hawkes had not been his name. He had been a travel agent for money, who specialized in sending it on complicated world tours. He had just managed to leave his building in Los Angeles as the police were coming in the front door, and he had done it masterfully: he had brought with him a suitcase full of his clients’ cash and some enormous checks made out to their Los Angeles company. George’s clients had misinterpreted his escape as an attempt to rob them, and he had come to Jane. She had negotiated a treaty. Under its terms, the clients’ capital would complete its round trip, with George’s regular percentage deducted. George would go out of business, so they wouldn’t worry about his being caught and trading them for a light sentence. They, in return, would never do him harm, search for him, or mention his existence to a third party.
George said, “She doesn’t know where the money came from. She thinks I was the heir to the Wright brothers’ fortune.”
“There’s a Wright brothers’ fortune?”
“How could there not be?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I can do this quickly. I just need a name.”
“A name of what?”
“I need a person who can make some unusual financial transactions for a friend of mine.”
George squinted. “Unusual means illegal. I understand that. But I think I need to narrow it down a bit.”
Jane shrugged. “It has to be somebody who knows his way around, but can also get lawyers and bankers and brokers to cooperate in some moves that might make them curious. In other words, it has to be somebody I can trust absolutely, but nobody else can trust, even a little.”
“What are you paying?”
Jane shrugged again. “I don’t know what the going rate is. He would have to devote himself to this for a few weeks, and at the end of it, he never heard of me or my partner.”
“How much money are you moving?”
“About ten billion dollars.”
George stared at her in silence for a moment. “Ten billion. You have it already?”
She said, “We know where it is. Nobody else does.”
She watched George’s eyes narrow. They burned into her for a few seconds, then turned up toward the window of his house where Jane had seen his wife. He shook his head, and it grew into a shiver. “It’s better if you don’t tell me where it came from. I can’t afford to know that kind of thing anymore.” He sighed, as though he were saying good-bye to something. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The answer would be the same. Henry Ziegler, CPA.”
“Henry Ziegler,” she repeated. “I take it he’s somebody you dealt with in the old days?”
He shook his head. “I was never big enough to be worth his time and trouble, but he was a friend, so he helped me out a few times.” He amended it. “More than a few times.”
Jane couldn’t help looking away from George’s face at his house. It was bigger than the high school she had gone to in Deganawida, New York. The walk she had taken from his front gate had been longer than the distance from the end of the track to the girls’ locker room. “That gives me a new worry. There will be some men who start getting very dangerous the second that the money starts appearing. If he’s that big, they might know him.”
“That’s the way it is when you handle money, love,” said George. “The more there is, the more people there are who have an interest in it. But Henry Ziegler is discreet. Even if he passes on the deal, he’ll never mention it.”
“What is he, anyway?”
“The reason you never heard of him is the same reason he never heard of you: he’s no more interested in getting famous than you are. He’s an accountant. When I met him twenty-five years ago, he was going to law school at night and handling small accounts in the daytime. He wasn’t doing it so he could go argue cases, it was so he couldn’t be called on to testify against any of his clients. So he’s a lawyer, too.”
“Who are his clients?”
“He once told me there are about a hundred. I was one of his first, and he doesn’t forget the people who knew him when times weren’t so good. I’ve known him all this time, but I can’t name any of the others. I just know who they are.”
“Who?”
George looked up through the clear black sky at the stars. “How do I describe them? Picture this: the Mayflower arrives and eighty people step on Plymouth Rock, jump down and kiss the ground—the land of religious freedom! This gives the next guy off the ship a chance to pick their pockets while they’re bent over. He uses the money to buy rum and guns to sell to the Indians. He uses the profits from that to buy a ship so he can get into the slave trade. Four hundred years later, the descendants of this guy are still around. Have they changed? They dress better and have bigger houses. They’ve got a few more last names, because the daughters married too—mostly to people just like them. These are the people who got in at the head of the line. If you wanted to build a railroad, have a war, or buy up land and put suburbs on it, they had the capital. Henry’s clients aren’t the current crop of computer geeks from California or discount-chain rubes from the South, people who love to read their names in the papers. Henry’s clients don’t like to be visible, except when it suits them. That’s what Henry does these days.”
“You mean he handles their money?”
“Not just their money, but everything that can be done
with money. And he keeps it quiet. Say some foolish citizen sues the family. Does Henry grease this citizen’s palm? No. He knows the senior partner of the law firm representing this citizen. This lawyer is the fund-raising chairman for the symphony orchestra. He quietly gives the committee a big donation. The law firm advises the client to settle cheap. If the case gets to court, the citizen’s lawyer certainly doesn’t say everything about the other side that he might have. Or, maybe the family has a teenaged son who needs help getting into the right college. Henry goes in politely and has a talk with someone on the board of trustees, someone who knows the family name and might even be distantly related—these people inbreed like chinchillas. He has a talk about new buildings and endowments. If it’s a tough case, he might bring a check with him.”
“How did he help you?”
George shrugged. “He just steered a little business my way. Somebody in one of these families died unexpectedly: he was about forty. Henry needed to make some money disappear from the dead guy’s accounts and get spread to relations before the death got reported. Otherwise there would have been a huge inheritance tax. Another time, he needed to have some money come out of nowhere and land in a politician’s pocket.”
“I don’t suppose Henry Ziegler’s got an ad in the Yellow Pages. How do I get in touch with him?”
George said, “If you’re as hot as you deserve to be, don’t try. He’ll meet you somewhere tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
“Can you get to L.A.?”
“All right.”
“He stays at the Bel-Air Hotel. He’s there now. I’ll tell him to expect you.”
Jane hugged George Hawkes. “Thanks, George.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got a plane to catch.” She took a step backward. She looked up at the windows of the house, but saw no sign of the woman. “If I were you, I’d go in now. The longer you’re out here with me, the worse it will be for you. You can rest easy, though. No matter how this goes, I’ll probably never see you again.”
