False Impression (2006)

by Jeffrey Archer

  And let’s never forget that it only takes one of us to lower our standards, and then the rest of us will suffer as a consequence.

  As Tina turned another page, she wondered just how much longer she could hope to survive as Fenston’s personal assistant. Since she’d thrown Leapman out of her office, a civil word had not passed between them. Would he have her fired only days before she had gathered enough proof to make sure Fenston spent the rest of his life in a smaller room in a larger institution?

  And may I conclude by saying that my single purpose in life has always been to serve and give back to the community that has allowed me to share the American dream.

  This was one document Tina would not bother to retain a copy of.

  The light on Tina’s phone was flashing and she quickly picked up the receiver.

  ‘Yes, chairman?’

  ‘Have you finished my speech for the bankers’ dinner?’

  ‘Yes, chairman,’ repeated Tina.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Fenston.

  ‘It’s remarkable,’ responded Tina.

  Jack hailed a cab and told him Lincoln Street, Queens. The driver left the meter running while he looked up the address in his much-thumbed directory. Jack was halfway back to the airport before he was dropped off on the corner of Lincoln and Harris. He looked up and down the street, aware that the suit he’d carefully selected for Park Avenue was somewhat incongruous in Queens. He stepped into a liquor store on the corner.

  ‘I’m looking for the Romanian Club,’ he told the elderly woman behind the counter.

  ‘Closed years ago,’ she said. ‘It’s now a guest house,’ she added, looking him up and down, ‘but I don’t think you’ll wanna stay there.’

  ‘Any idea of the number?’ asked Jack.

  ‘No, but it’s ‘bout halfway down, on the other side of the street.’

  Jack thanked the woman, walked back out onto Lincoln and crossed the road. He tried to judge where the halfway mark might be, when he spotted a faded Rooms for rent sign. He stopped and looked down a short flight of steps to see an even more faded sign painted above the entrance. The letters NYRC, founded 1919 were almost indecipherable.

  Jack descended the steps and pushed open the creaking door. He stepped into a dingy, unlit hallway, to be greeted with the pungent smell of stale tobacco. There was a small, dusty reception desk straight ahead of him, and behind it, almost hidden from view, Jack caught a glimpse of an old man reading the New York Post, enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  ‘I need a room for the night,’ said Jack, trying to sound as if he meant it.

  The old man’s eyes narrowed as he gave Jack a disbelieving look. Did he have a girl waiting outside? ‘That’ll be seven dollars,’ he said, before adding, ‘in advance.’

  ‘And I’ll also need somewhere to lock my valuables,’ said Jack.

  ‘That’ll be another dollar - in advance,’ repeated the man, the cigarette bobbing up and down.

  Jack handed over eight dollars, in return for a key.

  ‘Second floor, number three, and the safety deposit boxes are at the end of the corridor,’ the man said, passing him a second key. He then returned his attention to the New York Post, the cigarette having never left his mouth.

  Jack walked slowly down the corridor until he reached a wall lined with safety deposit boxes, which, despite their age, looked solid and not that easy to break into, even if anyone might have considered the exercise worthwhile. He opened his own box and peered inside. It must have been about eight inches wide, and a couple of feet deep. Jack glanced back towards the front counter. The desk clerk had managed to turn the page, but the cigarette still hadn’t left his mouth.

  Jack moved further down the corridor, removed the replica key from an inside pocket and, after one more glance towards the front desk, opened box 13. He stared inside and tried to remain calm, although his heart was pounding. He extracted one bill from the box and placed it in his wallet. Jack locked the box and put the key back in his pocket.

  The old man turned another page and began to study the racing odds as Jack walked back onto the street.

  He had to cover eleven blocks before he found an empty cab, but he didn’t attempt to call Dick Macy until he’d been dropped back at his apartment. He unlocked the front door, ran through to the kitchen and placed the hundred-dollar bill on the table. He then recalled how deep and how wide the empty box had been, before attempting to calculate how many hundred-dollar bills must have been stuffed into box 13. By the time he called Macy, he’d measured a space out on the kitchen table and used several five-hundred-page paperbacks to assist him in his calculation.

  ‘I thought I told you to take the rest of the weekend off,’ said Macy.

  ‘I’ve found the box that NYRC 13 opens.’

  ‘What was inside?’

  ‘Hard to be certain,’ replied Jack, ‘but I’d say around two million dollars.’

  ‘Your leave is cancelled,’ said Macy.

  9/23

  44

  ‘GOOD NEWS,’ declared the young doctor on the morning of the third day after he’d removed her sling. ‘Your wound is almost healed, and I shall be advising the authorities that you can be transferred to Jilava penitentiary tomorrow.’

  With those words the doctor had determined her timetable. He then changed her dressing and departed without another word. Krantz spent the rest of the morning going over her plan second by second. She slept soundly between the hours of three in the afternoon and nine that evening. After all, she only needed to be wide awake during the night shift.

  ‘She’s been no trouble all day,’ Krantz heard one of the guards report when he handed over his keys to the night shift at ten o’clock.

  Krantz didn’t stir for the next four hours, as neither a packet of Silk Cut nor a hundred-dollar bill would have elicited as much as a smile from the two older guards. They couldn’t wait to attend her funeral.

  She didn’t sleep.

  Anna left her apartment to set out on her morning run just before 6am. Sam rushed from behind his desk to open the door for her - a Cheshire cat grin hadn’t left his face from the moment she’d arrived back.

  Anna wondered at what point Jack would catch up with her. She had to admit, he’d been in her thoughts a lot since they had parted yesterday, and she already hoped their relationship might stray beyond a professional interest.

  ‘Beware,’ Tina had warned her over supper. ‘Once he’s got what he wants, he’ll move on, and it isn’t necessarily sex that he’s after.’

  Pity, she remembered thinking.

  ‘Fenston loves the Van Gogh,’ Tina assured her. ‘He’s given the painting pride of place on the wall behind his desk.’

  In fact, Tina had been forthcoming about everything Fenston and Leapman had been up to during the past ten days. However, despite gentle probing, hints and well-placed questions, by the time they left the restaurant a couple of hours later Anna was no nearer to finding out why Fenston had such a hold over her.

  Anna couldn’t help remembering that the last time she’d run round Central Park was on the morning of the eleventh. The dark grey cloud might have finally dispersed, but there were several other reminders of that dreadful day, not least the two words on everyone’s lips, Ground Zero. She put aside the horrors of that day when she spotted Jack jogging on the spot under Artists’ Gate.

  ‘Been waiting long, Stalker?’ Anna asked as she strode past him and up around the pond.

  ‘No,’ he replied once he’d caught up. ‘I’ve already been round twice, so I’m treating this as a cooling-down session.’

  ‘Cooling down already, are we?’ said Anna, as she accelerated away. She knew she wouldn’t be able to maintain that pace for long and it was only a few seconds before he was back striding by her side.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Jack, ‘but how long can you keep it up?’

  ‘I thought that was a male problem,’ Anna said, still trying to set the pace. She decided tha
t her only hope would be to distract him. She waited until the Frick came in sight.

  ‘Name five artists on display in that museum,’ she demanded, hoping his lack of knowledge would compensate for her lack of speed.

  ‘Bellini, Mary Cassatt, Renoir, Rembrandt and two Holbeins - More and Cromwell.’

  ‘Yes, but which Cromwell?’ asked Anna, panting.

  ‘Thomas, not Oliver,’ said Jack.

  ‘Not bad, Stalker,’ admitted Anna.

  ‘You can blame it on my father,’ said Jack. ‘Whenever he was out on patrol on a Sunday, my mother would take me to a gallery or a museum. I thought it was a waste of time, until I fell in love.’

  ‘Who did you fall in love with?’ asked Anna as they jogged up Pilgrim’s Hill.

  ‘Rossetti, or, to be more accurate, his mistress Jane Burden.’

  ‘Scholars are divided on whether he ever slept with her,’ said Anna. ‘And her husband - William Morris - admired Rossetti so much that they don’t even think he would have objected.’

  ‘Foolish man,’ said Jack.

  ‘Are you still in love with Jane?’ asked Anna.

  ‘No, that was my adolescent period, since then I’ve entered my modern period, and only fall for women whose breasts end up behind their ears.’

  ‘So you must have been spending a lot of your time in MoMA.’

  ‘Several blind dates,’ admitted Jack, ‘but my mother doesn’t approve.’

  ‘Who does she think you should be dating?’

  ‘She’s old-fashioned, so anyone called Mary who’s a virgin, but I’m working on her.’

  ‘Are you working on anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Like what R stands for,’ said Anna, almost out of breath.

  ‘You tell me,’ said Jack.

  ‘Romania would be my bet,’ said Anna, the words puffing out intermittently.

  ‘You should have joined the FBI,’ said Jack, slowing down.

  ‘You’d worked it out already,’ said Anna.

  ‘No,’ admitted Jack. ‘A guy called Abe worked it out for me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And both of you were right.’

  ‘So where is the Romanian Club?’

  ‘In a rundown neighbourhood in Queens,’ replied Jack.

  ‘And what did you find when you opened the box?’

  ‘I can’t be absolutely certain,’ replied Jack.

  ‘Don’t play games, Stalker, just tell me what was in the box.’

  ‘About two million dollars.’

  ‘Two million?’ repeated Anna in disbelief.

  ‘Well, it might not be quite that much, but it certainly was enough for my boss to drop everything, stake out the building and cancel my leave.’

  ‘What sort of person keeps two million in cash hidden in a safety deposit box in Queens?’ asked Anna.

  ‘A person who can’t risk opening a bank account anywhere in the world.’

  ‘Krantz,’ said Anna.

  ‘So now it’s your turn. Did anything come out of your dinner with Tina?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ replied Anna, and covered another hundred yards before she said, ‘Fenston thinks the latest addition to his collection is magnificent. But, more important, when Tina took in his morning coffee, there was a copy of the New York Times on his desk, and it was open at page seventeen.’

  ‘Obviously not the sports section,’ said Jack.

  ‘No, international,’ said Anna, as she extracted the article from her pocket and passed it over to Jack.

  ‘Is this a ploy to see if I can keep up with you while I read?’

  ‘No, it’s a ploy to find out if you can read, Stalker, and I can always slow down, because I know you haven’t been able to keep up with me in the past,’ said Anna.

  Jack read the headline and almost came to a halt as they ran past the lake. It was some time before he spoke again. ‘Sharp girl, your friend Tina.’

  ‘And she gets sharper,’ said Anna. ‘She interrupted a conversation Fenston was having with Leapman, and overhead him say, “Do you still have the second key?” She didn’t understand the significance of it at the time, but—’

  ‘I take back everything I said about her,’ said Jack. ‘She’s on our team.’

  ‘No, Stalker, she’s on my team,’ said Anna, accelerating down Strawberry Fields as she always did for the last half mile, with Jack striding by her side.

  ‘This is where I leave you,’ said Anna, once they reached Artists’ Gate. She checked her watch and smiled: 11 minutes 48 seconds.

  ‘Brunch?’

  ‘Can’t, sadly,’ said Anna, ‘meeting up with an old friend from Christie’s, trying to find out if they’ve got any openings.’

  ‘Dinner?’

  ‘I’ve got tickets for the Rauschenberg at the Whitney. If you want to join me, I’ll be there around six, Stalker.’

  She ran away before he could reply.

  45

  LEAPMAN HAD SELECTED a Sunday because it was the one day of the week Fenston didn’t go into the office, although he’d already called him three times that day.

  He sat alone in his apartment eating a TV dinner, and going over his plan, until he was certain nothing could go wrong. Tomorrow, and all the rest of his tomorrows, he would dine in a restaurant, without having to wait for Fenston.

  When he’d eaten every last scrap, he returned to his bedroom and stripped down to his underpants. He pulled open a drawer that contained the sports gear he needed for this particular exercise. He put on a T-shirt, shorts and a baggy grey tracksuit that teenagers wouldn’t even have believed their parents once wore, and finally donned a pair of white socks and white gym shoes. He didn’t look at himself in the mirror. He walked back across the room, fell on his knees and reached under the bed to pull out a large gym bag that had the handle of a squash racket poking out of it. He was now dressed and ready for his irregular exercise. All he needed was the key, and a packet of cigarettes.

  He strolled through to the kitchen, opened a drawer that contained a large carton of duty-free Marlboro and extracted a packet of twenty. He never smoked. His final act in this agnostic ritual was to place his hand under the drawer and remove a key that was taped to the base. He was now fully equipped.

  He double-locked the front door of his apartment and took the stairs down to the basement. He opened the back door and walked up one flight, emerging onto the street.

  To any casual passer-by, he looked like a man on the way to his squash club. Leapman had never played a game of squash in his life. He walked one block before hailing a yellow cab. The routine never varied. He gave the driver an address that didn’t have a squash club within five miles. He sat in the back of the cab, relieved to find the driver wasn’t talkative, because he needed to concentrate. Today, he would make one change from his normal routine, a change he’d been planning for the past ten years. This would be the last time he carried out this particular chore for Fenston, a man who had taken advantage of him every day for the last decade. Not today. Never again. He glanced out of the cab window. He made this journey once, sometimes twice a year, when he would deposit large sums of cash at NYRC, always within days of Krantz completing one of her assignments. During that time, Leapman had deposited over five million dollars into box 13 at the guesthouse on Lincoln Street, and he knew it would always be a one-way journey - until she made a mistake.

  When he’d read in the Times that Krantz had been captured after being shot in the shoulder - he would have preferred that she’d been killed - he knew this must be his one chance. What Fenston would describe as a window of opportunity. After all, Krantz was the only person who knew how much cash was in that box, while he remained the only other person with a key.

  ‘Where is it exactly?’ asked the driver.

  Leapman looked out of the window. ‘A couple more blocks,’ he said, ‘and then you can drop me on the corner.’ Leapman took the squash racket out of the bag and placed it on t
he back seat.

  ‘Twenty-three dollars,’ the driver mumbled as he came to a halt outside a liquor store.

  Leapman passed three tens through the grille. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes. If you’re still around, you’ll get another fifty.’

  ‘I’ll be around,’ came back the immediate reply.

  Leapman grabbed the empty gym bag and stepped out of the cab, leaving the squash racket on the back seat. He crossed the road, pleased to find that the sidewalk was crowded with locals out shopping. One of the reasons he always chose a Sunday afternoon. He would never risk such an outing at night. In Queens, they’d be happy to mug him for an empty bag.

  Leapman quickened his pace until he reached number 61. He stopped for a moment to check that no one was taking any interest in him. Why would they? He descended the steps towards the NYRC sign and pushed open a door that was never locked.

  The caretaker looked up from his sedentary position and when he saw who it was, nodded - the most energetic thing he’d done all day - then turned his attention back to the racing page. Leapman placed the packet of Marlboro on the counter, knowing they would disappear before he turned round. Every man has his price.

  He peered into the gloom of a corridor lit only by a naked forty-watt bulb. He sometimes wondered if he was the only person who advanced beyond the counter.

  Despite the darkness of the corridor, he knew exactly where her box was located. Not that you could read the number on the door - like everything else, it had faded over the years. He looked back up the corridor; one of his cigarettes was already glowing in the darkness.

  He took the key out of his tracksuit pocket, placed it in the lock, turned it and pulled open the door. He unzipped the bag before looking back in the direction of the old man. No interest. It took him less than a minute to empty the contents of the box, fill the bag and zip it back up.

  Leapman closed the door and locked it for the last time. He picked up the bag, momentarily surprised by how heavy it was, and walked back down the corridor. He placed the key on the counter. ‘I won’t be needing it again,’ he told the old man, who didn’t allow this sudden break in routine to distract him from his study of the form for the four o’clock at Belmont. He’d been fifty feet from a racing certainty for the past twelve years and hadn’t even checked the odds.