Where Evil Lurks

by Robert D. Rodman

  The water in the cistern is about two feet deep. That’s enough to give tourists the impression of what it must have been like when it was a functional reservoir some fifteen centuries ago, but not so deep as to be hazardous. I slid silently out of the boat into the water, holding the pistol in my hand to keep it dry. I needed to know if it was loaded and it was too dark to tell without opening the cylinder. I did so slowly, carefully, without a sound. I could feel the backs of the cartridges. It had a full load. I closed it with equal care, but the click as it reseated, magnified by the stone and water, gave away my location.

  The Medusa head pillars hid me from the view of the approaching man, now alerted to my presence. He came slowly, scanning the water and peering around each column. I sidled round the Medusa heads the way a squirrel sidles round a tree to keep it between him and a predator. As the man turned the corner, I gave the dory a shove in the direction he now was walking. He grunted and sped up to pursue the boat.

  I climbed out of the water onto the walkway. I had a clear path to the exit. But it was impossible to run quietly as my sneakers were full of water and made squishy sounds with every step. I tiptoed warily towards the stairway, taking every opportunity to shroud myself in the shadows cast by the supporting columns.

  I was halfway to safety when he caught up with the boat. Seeing it was empty, he saw my trick. He shouted to his partner and started to run back. I sprinted forward. I had a good lead on both men but not, I feared, good enough. I shouted in Turkish that I had a gun, hoping to make them hesitate. To make the point, I fired it toward the second man who was running to cut me off, and then turned to fire over my shoulder at my immediate pursuer.

  I had as little chance of hitting a man as those deputies in old westerns have of hitting the bad guys they’re chasing while seated on the backs of galloping horses. It was a wonder to me that they didn’t shoot their own horse in the head half the time. But my shots had the desired effect. Both men stopped in their tracks. Unfortunately, as I twisted back round, I slipped on the wet stones and went sprawling. I lost my grip on the pistol and it slid into the water with a kerplunk.

  I didn’t even have time to say, “Shit!” The man behind me, quick as a ferret, tackled me as I rose to my feet. I threw an elbow at his head and stunned him but he kept his grip long enough for his partner to arrive and overpower me.

  “You come with us, please,” said one of them in Turkish, “or else we cut you up and drown you in the dark.” He brandished a combat knife with a nasty-looking serrated blade.

  They frog marched me to the foot of the stairs but before we started up we heard footsteps descending. Both men cursed under their breath but it was too late to retreat. I felt them tense for a fight.

  They let go of me just as Uncle Husnu accompanied by two burly men in hotel uniforms came out of the darkness of the stairway. My kidnappers were about to spring when I stepped up to Uncle.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  “I can explain, Uncle,” I said. “I just wanted to show my two friends the cistern, but it’s closed to the public. I took the liberty of using the hotel’s private entrance. I’m terribly sorry if I did the wrong thing.”

  Uncle looked skeptical and said, “One of the bellmen noticed that the door to the cistern was open and asked me about it. Did I hear gunshots?”

  “Certainly not, Uncle. You know the echoes down here can magnify sound. It might’ve been one of the boats bumping.”

  Uncle looked around. “Where are the boats?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’ll explain that in a minute. The boys here need to get back to their, uh, jobs.”

  I addressed the two hoodlums. “Thanks for coming to visit me, guys. It was great seeing you. You won’t mind if I don’t walk you to the lobby? I need to change my clothes.” I gave each man a friendly squeeze on the arm and a gentle push up the stairs. They edged by the two bellmen, more than happy to leave.

  With an ever-growing look of disbelief on his face, Uncle asked, “Why are you soaking wet, my little porpoise? And why did that man’s face look as though it had been run over by a dolmus?” Then, in a more avuncular manner, “You must change your clothes and come to the office and have a raki, my dear. You will explain it all to your simpleton uncle.”

  Uncle sent his two men to retrieve the dories and the two of us climbed up to the hallway in front of my room. I promised to join him downstairs for a drink as soon as I’d cleaned up.

  The raki warmed me both physically and mentally. I had to be evasive with Uncle, and Uncle knew it. All I could do was to explain that I could not afford to get mixed up with the police. Inevitably, it would postpone my return to the States. I pleaded for his understanding and silence in the matter.

  He insisted only on one thing, “…and to this I will not take the answer no. My two men will accompany you if you leave the hotel, and they will drive you to the airport tomorrow, and they will stay with you until you board your plane. Do not argue with me, my little donkey.”

  He sighed, sipped his tea, and went on. “I’m sorry those men could walk into the hotel unchallenged. If anything happened to you because of my negligence, Dagny, I could never enjoy another moment of happiness in this life. I thank Allah for your safety. God is great!”

  Uncle had dinner for the two of us brought to my room that night. His chef prepared one of my favorite Turkish dishes called adana kebap, which means spicy-hot roast meatballs. When the meal was over, Uncle rang for a bellman, and over my protests posted him outside my door. There was no arguing with Uncle, who could be as mulish as he thought I was.

  Alone in my room, under the protection of the sturdy bellman, I brought the Ashley files up to date. There was plenty to say about “Tom.” I entered the physical description of the assailants who had twice tried to kidnap me, and wrote a synopsis of those events. I speculated that the two hoods had been hired by Beck for the purpose of revenge. I shuddered to think of what form that might have taken.

  I reviewed the wisdom of letting them go rather than pressing charges and having them arrested. While I hated to leave the two criminals at large, I also didn’t want Uncle or his men injured in the fight that would surely have ensued had we tried to restrain them.

  More selfishly, I had to admit, I didn’t want the police involved. Apart from detaining me as a material witness, they’d almost surely discover my connection to Beck. That might lead to questions about my own conduct. For all I knew, Beck had enough influence to get his guys off, and me charged with a crime. Why shouldn’t he tell the authorities that I had tried to seduce him as a bribe to help me cheat the adoption process, and assaulted him when he refused to go along? Everything considered, letting them go free still seemed like the best thing I could have done. Ironically, the worst effect of my decision would soon befall the two men whom it appeared to benefit.

  True to his word, Uncle had me escorted to the airport the next morning. His men stuck to me like paparazzi, relinquishing custody only when I entered the passenger secure area. I was paranoid enough to scan my fellow travelers for anyone resembling Beck’s hit men. Beck would have to be nearly prescient to guess I was on this flight, and thirsty for revenge indeed to send someone to America to get even with me.

  The flight to New York was uneventful, if long, and there was no pleasure in getting back on a plane to complete the trip to Raleigh. I nearly missed my connection because JFK was so mobbed, what with it being Sunday and people flying everywhere to start the workweek. Even in my relatively short lifetime, globalization had turned the once rare and exotic occasion of a transoceanic flight into a mundane practice.

  I called Janet from my car on the way home from the airport to ask her to drop off Hank and Midas. I missed them and I didn’t want to spend the night alone. When I got home, Janet was just leaving. She took one look at me and said, “Boy, do you need a good night’s sleep!” Then, as an afterthought, “and a hug.” She administered the latter while telling me how good the greys had been,
except Hank had lacerated an ankle and had had to be bandaged.

  When Janet left, I cuddled with them, giving Hank some extra rubs because, like me, he had a wounded limb. Greyhounds are thin-skinned, which makes them susceptible to all sorts of superficial injuries. I lectured them both on the need to take better care of themselves, but received only quizzical looks.

  I called Ashley. She had exciting news. DNA testing had confirmed that Harry was the father of Jeanne-Renée.

  “But not of Benton?” I asked with surprise.

  “No,” said Ashley. “I might’ve been unclear on that point. The children are fraternal twins. It’s not all that uncommon—about one in a hundred births, so I’ve been told. Two distinct eggs are each fertilized by individual sperm. In my case, the sperm came from different men.”

  When I asked her what, if anything, she intended to do about Harry, she was evasive. It wasn’t my office to pry into her affairs, though the opposite was not true. She was keen to hear about every detail of my activities in Turkey. I promised her a written report, but under prodding gave a sketch of my actions. She was particularly pleased with how I finally obtained the DNA sample, and said several times how she wished she could have done it, and how much he had it coming.

  Ashley asked if I’d drive to Kinston to deliver the vial of hairs. “It’s not that I mind dispatching a courier,” she explained, “but we ought to have an in-person talk before you embark on your final quest. ‘Third man pays for all,’” she quipped cheerfully as she rang off.

  BOOK THREE

  DICK

  CHAPTER 21

  In the morning I slogged through my s-mail and e-mail, trashing the junk and triaging the rest into do-now, do-later, and do-much-later. I slashed and burned my way through the do-now list. The last message was from Ashley and had directions to Hatfield Hall. I printed it and stuffed it in my handbag.

  Kinston, a city of 25,000, is a marketing and shipping point for agriculture some 80 miles southeast of Raleigh. Ashley told me her ancestors settled there before the American Revolution, trading first in tobacco, cotton, corn and livestock, and later in chemicals, textiles and china. Her ancestor, Fremont Bloodworth, was so ardent a patriot that in 1776 he insisted that the chartered name of the city, Kingston with a “g,” be changed to Kinston to sever any associations with the British king.

  According to Ashley, the Bloodworths had fallen on hard times recently. You wouldn’t have guessed it from seeing Hatfield Hall, the family estate. It was so grand that a major Hollywood studio had paid them a large fee to use its façade for external shots of Tara in a remake of Gone with the Wind that was never completed.

  Hatfield Hall stood at the end of a quarter-mile-long, oak-lined private drive. Halfway to the house a spur led off through the trees to a helicopter pad. Beyond that was a great expanse of land containing orchards, a corral, and dozens of acres under cultivation.

  Ashley was awaiting me on the steps of the grand front entrance. She wore jeans, a white turtleneck of luminous material, a loose fitting black cardigan, and cowboy boots—perfect attire for the brisk autumn day. When she saw my car, she came down to the driveway and showed me where to park.

  We entered the house through a side porch full of hanging plants, and passed through a large sliding-glass door to an inner room whose décor was that of a CEO’s office. The walls were mahogany-paneled and generously covered with richly framed artworks. Bookcases and credenzas of polished wood lined two of the walls. A graceful ivory-colored sculpture of praying hands stood on a majestic pedestal of carved ebony in one corner. In another corner was a cluster of upholstered, leather armchairs. A grand executive desk and chair faced out from one wall to command the entire room.

  Ashley invited me to take one of the leather chairs while she settled into another, crossed her legs, and drew a lime-green cigarette out of the gold cigarette case. A Grateful Dead song played softly in the background through invisible speakers. Sunbeams glinted off the leaves of the hanging plants as they swung gently in the autumn breezes.

  Though I had told Ashley a good part of my story on the telephone, she nonetheless had me retell it again in its entirety, seeming to draw pleasure from the words as she drew down her cigarette. I concluded by handing her a written report, the final page of which was a schedule of my fee plus expenses.

  She read the report carefully while I watched, and when she had finished she stepped over to her desk and wrote a check for the full amount. She included the $4,000 bonus for the two DNA samples. “We should be square now, except you still have the original advance.”

  “That’s right,” I acknowledged.

  I’d earned some good bucks for a few weeks’ work, but Ashley left me little time to celebrate.

  “Does that bring us up to date, then?” she asked, immediately upon my putting the check in my wallet.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” I answered.

  “Tell me,” she said, standing in front of me so I had to look up, “Do you have any leads on tracking down number three? I guess we can call him Dick, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I really haven’t had a chance to work on it. I’ve had some luck up to now. If it keeps up, yes, I’ll have some leads.”

  “And you’ve not told anyone that you’re working for me, I assume, per our agreement?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Especially not this Harry Angelica or J. T. Beck?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said, annoyed.

  Ashley was undisturbed by my pique. She played the boss’s role well, right down to her body language. She took some steps backward and half sat on the edge of her desk and folded her arms.

  “So, what do you think Beck thinks about what you did to him?”

  “I can’t imagine he thinks anything other than that he met a woman who would fight rather than be raped.”

  “But you let him get so far. I wonder whether he asks himself why you didn’t just kick him in the balls earlier, since he knows you’re capable of it. Maybe he wonders why you jerked out half his pubic hair.”

  “Look, he can wonder away. I tell you that he wasn’t aware of my purpose, nor that I had any knowledge or connection to some girl he assaulted ten years ago. You’ll just have to trust me to do my job. As to hair pulling, isn’t that how women fight? He probably thinks I’m the vixen from Hell.”

  She slid up to sit fully on the edge of the desk and lit another cigarette with the harp-shaped lighter. She inhaled deeply, a look of skepticism on her face, and exhaled a long stream of bluish smoke.

  “Then why send those men after you?”

  “Revenge,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows, not satisfied with my one-word answer.

  I repeated, “Revenge, pure and simple, and certainly nothing that has anything to do with you.”

  I gave her my “any more annoying questions?” look.

  She had one. “What do you think Harry thinks about his missing shaver?”

  “Oh Christ, Ashley, I don’t know, but unless you tell him, he can’t possibly associate it with you.”

  “I don’t want him to know about Jeanne-Renée, or that I know who he is, that’s all.”

  “He had a lot of people in and out of his place. Anyone could’ve borrowed or stolen the damn thing. I didn’t leave tracks.”

  “What if Angelica and Beck compare notes?” she said, punctuating the air with her cigarette.

  To this question I did not have a pat answer. The two men knew each other. They were friends and cousins. Yet they had little in common. The one was a filmmaker and the other ran an orphanage. They lived in different countries. How far apart can you get? And even supposing they corresponded, say by e-mail, would Harry be likely to tell his cousin that he ordered his bodyguard to eliminate some female and it backfired? Would J.T. Beck be likely to tell his cousin that he tried to rape some babe and ended up getting kicked in the balls? And even if all that communication occurred, would one of them describe me so accurately that the
other would say, “Hey, that’s the cunt who got my bodyguard killed,” or “Hey, that’s the she-devil who bashed me.”

  I shared these thoughts with Ashley, and she was about to pursue it further when someone knocked at the door, opening it at the same time. A distinguished-looking man with graying temples and wearing a blue, pinstriped shirt open at the collar appeared in the doorway.

  “Oh, excuse me, honey, I didn’t know you had a guest. How’d you get by me unnoticed?”

  “We came in through the verandah, Daddy,” said Ashley. “This is Dagny Jamison. She’s doing some private investigation for me.”

  Her father came into the office. His steely blue eyes, ramrod-straight back and deep baritone voice as mellow as aged Kentucky bourbon fit the image of the family patrician.

  “I’m Taylor Bloodworth,” he said, “Please don’t get up.”

  I stood up anyway to shake hands. “I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” I said.

  “I’m pleased to meet you as well,” he said. “Tell me, what do you investigate, Miss Jamison?”

  Ashley slid off the desk and walked over to us. “Dagny is doing some background checks for some of my investments, Daddy. We’re just finishing up.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, you’re welcome to Hatfield Hall, Ms. Jamison. If I can do anything to help you in any way, please don’t hesitate to ask.” With that, Mr. Bloodworth left us standing alone in the office.

  “If you’re not comfortable with my investigation…” I began, picking up where we’d left off, but Ashley waved me aside.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “You’re doing just fine. Keep me apprised of your progress with the third man.”

  I took that to mean the meeting was over. I asked to use the washroom and indeed, consistent with the CEO aspects of Ashley’s office, there was one artfully concealed in the paneled wall behind her desk.