Booth hides in the woods as the dew collects on the matted leaves around him, seeming to refuse to dry in the emerging sun. He turns to the next empty page in the diary that he carries and begins to scrawl, and as he does he remembers his week in Montreal, irretrievably far to the north of this cursed swamp. “For six months we have worked to capture,” he writes. Some time ago he learned that his wardrobe trunk, containing his favourite theatrical costumes and an authentic Confederate sword, was lost when the Marie Victoria sank in a storm in the St. Lawrence. Patrick Martin was reported drowned. Booth pauses for a long time, then continues to write. He ponders how to finish, for he knows that from now on he is unlikely to be given respite.
“I bless the entire world. Have never hated or wronged anyone. This last was not a wrong, unless God deems it so, and it’s with Him to damn or bless me . . . I do not wish to shed a drop of blood, but ‘I must fight the course.’ ’Tis all that’s left me.”
PART FOUR
Twenty One
Fifty Four
Year in which the Na’vi rise up against the Earth invaders on the moon Pandora.
CHAPTER 45
No one emerged with laurels from the Carpenter Affair, as it came to be known around Sir Stephen’s office. A police force owes a debt to its fallen and Sir Stephen, dissecting everything in the file (even Peter submitted a complete report), concluded that only two of his people, Peter Cammon and Tommy Verden, had kept that principle uppermost in their thinking and their conduct. Or, as he unloaded onto his assistant, Lorelei, that young woman of surpassing efficiency whom Peter and Tommy both liked for her tempering effect on the boss, when she asked about the wrap-up to the case, “There was a murder to solve. It got solved, my dear.”
“But Cammon freelanced all over the place,” Frank Counter squawked in Bartleben’s office subsequent to their boss effectively sacking him three months to the day after the death of John Carpenter.
“When you trust somebody you let them freelance, off the leash,” Sir Stephen retorted. “If it bears results, you don’t call it freelancing.”
Counter’s antennae should have perked up when Bartleben started coining aphorisms but he was lost and sweating in a jungle of self-pity and he missed the signal. “Stephen, Cammon exceeded his mandate. And he let the girl escape — twice.”
Sir Stephen merely stared at Counter with contempt. John Carpenter, Dunning Malloway, and Neil Brayden had all met ugly, lurid deaths but Sir Stephen was confident that the tabloids and the politicians wouldn’t make a connection between Cammon’s role and the phone hacking and cricket bribery scandals, as long as no one in the hierarchy lost his or her nerve. New Scotland Yard had announced a fresh investigation into the News of the World mischief and parliamentary hearings into the matter were on the calendar. Cammon would be safe and Frank Counter should know it.
In his bitterness, Counter persisted in his denunciation of what he called Peter Cammon’s “meddling in Canada.”
Sir Stephen’s bloody-mindedness expressed itself in clipped sentences. “The deaths of our people won’t come out in the inquiry. Nor hopefully in the cricket mess. Peter saw the risk of all this exploding. You didn’t, Frank. And Peter did his best not to kill your boy, Malloway.”
“Didn’t succeed, did he?”
Class distinctions endure in Britain for a number of reasons, but one is often overlooked: members of higher echelons from time to time insist on the right to speak their minds brutally to those one step down in the hierarchy. Frank Counter liked to believe that he moved round the same circuit as Stephen Bartleben; he attended the right parties, belonged to some of the same clubs, and knew many people, a few of them inside the intelligence elite. But none of this held up when it mattered. Sir Stephen was no longer on the shelf, having graciously accepted the invented title of Coordinator, Special Projects.
Bartleben didn’t restrain his cruelty. “You failed to understand that the Minister has to be shielded at all costs. Nicola’s man went bad. Malloway turned. Wouldn’t have occurred if you had occupied Malloway with keeping Nicola Hilfgott under control, and kept your boy on a tight rein. It was your decision to send Carpenter and then Malloway to Quebec. You’re out, Frank. For now, at least. I’m putting Tommy Verden in charge.”
“What?”
“Only of the investigation into the deaths of our officers. The phone-hacking business is moving to a new phase with the announcement under the Inquiries Act, and I’ll handle that. I want the police investigation regarding Canada contained. Containment requires making sure the Sûreté and the FBI are happy, and maybe the municipal forces in D.C. and Buffalo as well.”
“I have solid contacts in the Bureau and with Deroche in Montreal,” Frank pleaded.
“Yes, but Tommy is especially good at the street-level stuff. Speaks their language. He will liaise with the Canadians and the Yanks. Mend fences.”
Frank unwisely took a different tack. “But Deroche can be myopic in his own way, I hear. What interest does he have in helping us?”
“Only that Cammon saved his life on two occasions.”
“So?”
“I’ve asked Peter to give an assist to Tommy.”
“But Verden aimed a gun at Carpenter’s brother inside a church. And again in a car park in Henley.”
Sir Stephen lost it completely. “Tommy Verden maintains self-control at all times. Unlike yourself in this confabulation. So Tommy and Peter are being put in to clean up your failures. Then we’ll see. By the way, as your final act perhaps you can find someone to go over and fetch Malloway’s remains back to England.”
When Frank Counter went to see Tommy Verden later that afternoon, the veteran inspector was already grinding away at the files. Sir Stephen had shown zero sympathy, but Frank had higher hopes for Verden. Counter walked into Verden’s tiny office, which was located one floor down from Bartleben’s sanctum. The orderliness of the room should have alerted him, for it betrayed a self-discipline and asceticism far from his own work habits. Tommy received him politely but coldly and listed the thirty or so contacts he had connected with in the first day and a half, just to make a point about who was on the ball.
Frank tried for an opening, slathering on a false concoction of collegiality and superiority of rank. “I think, Tommy, I can help you pin down the extent of Dunning Malloway’s sabotage of the cricket investigation. Mea culpa. But I understand a lot about this character the Sword, and the way he operates, and I have great contacts in India . . .”
At first, Tommy said nothing. He knew that a burgeoning file existed on the Sword and woe betide Counter if he had held anything back from it. Counter hadn’t got his head around the salient, stark fact that the Sword had promised Malloway £100,000 to execute Alida Nahvi. Someone in the Yard had to be sacrificed, even if out of public view. Tommy also respected the strict limits of his own mandate. He wasn’t to take control of the Yard’s public responses to the notw feature on the Pakistani cricket players but together with Peter, he would interact behind the scenes with all the operational players in four countries; he had already called Souma in the Indian police and Rizeman in D.C.
And so Tommy said nothing in response.
Frank Counter looked disconsolate. He leaned forward. “Tommy, I have contacts you don’t . . .”
Tommy’s raised eyebrow stopped him.
“Jesus, you know, I feel just like Napoleon exiled to that island,” Frank continued.
Tommy’s muscled body hulked forward. “Do you like palindromes?”
It was well known that Tommy Verden loved word puzzles, a habit picked up during long stakeouts in unmarked black sedans.
“Palindromes? Sure.”
“Well, able was I ere I saw Elba. Why the fuck weren’t you?” Tommy said.
The first of Tommy’s thirty calls was to Peter, now back at his cottage. They talked for two hours. Peter followed up with a call to S
ir Stephen in support of Tommy’s appointment. But it was Peter who suggested that he himself take on a special troubleshooting role in the match-fixing investigation. He preferred to leave the hunt for Alida in the Bureau’s hands, but what he could do was help to track down the Sword before another gunman was sent to execute the girl. He explained his thinking to Tommy on the phone.
“Malloway never cared about the three letters. The Sword was paying him to find Alida Nahvi and kill her, and the documents were Nicola’s sideshow. The Sword may continue to chase the girl. You’ll discover that no one but Henry Pastern in Washington still cares about the letters, though that will be enough to keep him looking for Alida.”
“Will Pastern look hard for her?” Tommy pressed.
“I don’t know. Inspector Deroche won’t. Oh, she’ll stay on the wanted list, but not his personal ten-most-wanted. I don’t think Deroche even believes that she exists. She’s a will-o’-the-wisp to most of us, I admit.”
But very real to you, Tommy wanted to say. He had caught the undertone of wistfulness whenever Peter discussed the young woman.
Peter changed the subject. “How is Tom Hilfgott?”
Nicola’s husband had survived. Tom Hilfgott and Neil Brayden had duelled with irons and woods until a No. 2 drove Tom to the floor, unconscious. Nicola had found him and called an ambulance.
“Put it this way, Peter: the Hilfgotts are back in England. She was quietly recalled and apparently he recovered enough to travel. Foreign and Commonwealth have been working overtime to keep all this out of the press. I talked to a fellow over in Whitehall yesterday, at Sir Stephen’s request, and they count themselves lucky that the media haven’t latched onto the story.”
“Better get News of the World onto it,” Peter said.
“Quote-unquote: ‘Tom Hilfgott’s wounds were so serious he may not play golf again.’ On the other hand, I hear he’s already angling for an appointment for Nicola as high commissioner to Gabon, since Gabon’s a full member of the Commonwealth, and apparently has some fine golf courses. Two of which Tom Hilfgott immediately queried by email, according to my sources.”
The death of Neil Brayden was covered up, because neither the Quebec authorities nor the British government saw any benefit in publicizing it. The inquest was perfunctory, with no questioning comments by Dr. Lowndes in the autopsy report this time. Even the separatist groups in Quebec found nothing to exploit when they learned of the death of an employee at the British consulate. Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs shipped Neil Brayden’s body home to his family in Bournemouth.
Peter’s report to London ran twenty pages but he failed to mention Alida’s naked apparition in Renaud’s townhouse. The omission made it difficult to explain why he hadn’t summoned Deroche that night. In Peter’s report, he merely stated that Alida had coerced Seep into summoning Malloway, promising that he knew Alida’s whereabouts.
Scotland Yard’s failure to confront Nicola Hilfgott early on was more condemning. Sir Stephen had made it clear from the beginning that she was his bête noire. Her fixation on the Booth letters obviously was a personal fetish, well outside the mandate assigned by Her Majesty. Even her unreasoning hatred of Olivier Seep should have been evident from the outset. For his part, Dunning Malloway should not have been surprised that Nicola would find a way to manipulate Brayden into going after Seep. Unfortunately, Brayden had arrived at the Seep house with his own lethal agenda. Dunning Malloway paid a heavy price for his one-night stand with the consul general.
CHAPTER 46
Olivier Seep survived the assaults by Alida Nahvi and Dunning Malloway, but only by about two weeks. Chief Inspector Cammon pieced together the facts from the Sûreté and his own recollections, and added them to his report.
That night at the professor’s house, Inspector Deroche, having confirmed the death of Neil Brayden in the yard behind the mansion, rushed to the dining room to investigate the blood-drenched scene. He left two men to minister to the professor while he secured the house. The officers struggled with kitchen towels to staunch Seep’s bleeding; it was touch and go for the ten minutes they had to wait, but the medics quickly assured the police officers that Seep would live. The ambulance attendants bundled him off to the closest hospital, the Jewish General, where Seep was aware enough to take umbrage when the emergency room staff began talking to him in English; by the time they switched to French to accommodate him, he had passed out. His foot was put in a cast and his bruises and multiple abrasions were treated. Two cuts on his chest, one under each nipple, were minimized on the chart as non-life-threatening injuries. The resident gave him Demerol, which had the odd effect of both reviving him and sickening him. He threw up three teeth.
The professor’s wounds stabilized rapidly, so that by the beginning of the second week he began to agitate to be sent home. By then he had also scheduled dental surgery.
Inspector Deroche visited the hospital every day for the first week. Peter advised him to lay charges immediately but Deroche hesitated. Finally, at the end of week one, the inspector concluded that Seep had no connection to organized crime, and turned his full focus on the Carpenter murder charge. Seep clammed up. Confession was not in the separatist’s curriculum plan. Deroche proceeded with the paperwork based on charges of second-degree murder and criminal negligence by drowning.
As time diluted Deroche’s momentum — the procureur général referred to the body of evidence as Swiss cheese and was reluctant to proceed — Seep improved enough to be shuttled home to his house with a private nurse. He broke into tears as she wheeled him through his hollow dining room, the floor stained with his own blood, the table gone for cleaning, and his valuable paintings stacked in a restorer’s studio. Seep ached to hold a press conference to somehow denounce the Anglos — and, he fantasized, the British, too.
The private nurse quit on the third day, and though in pain and alone in the house, Olivier Seep fell into a peaceful sleep that night — an extra Seconal did the trick — for the first time since the attack. In the early hours, two hooded thugs attempted to burn down the mansion with gasoline. Their intent wasn’t to kill the professor, since they had no idea that he had checked himself out of the hospital, but rather to send a warning so that Seep would reveal the whereabouts of the elusive Alida Nahvi. The fire gutted the downstairs (and thus began the sub rosa legend — for anyone who still cared — of the lost Civil War documents) but the firefighters saved the frame of the house. The professor perished of smoke inhalation. The arsonists were arrested at the scene after a neighbour called in the disturbance and were at once identified by Deroche as mob underlings. He vowed to prosecute the mafia soldiers to the maximum.
The morning after Malloway’s death, Peter, still in Montreal, gave a sworn statement covering everything he knew about the Carpenter case and the lead-up to the shootout, although again he held back the image of Alida Nahvi au naturel in his bedroom.
A fortnight after the fire at Seep’s place, Peter was surprised to receive a call at the cottage from Inspector Deroche, who offered a few new insights.
“Peter, I now understand who set fire to Club Parallel. It was not the Rizzutos.”
“And it was not Seep, Malloway, or Brayden,” Peter said.
Peter had figured it out soon after Leander Greenwell’s suicide. The club wasn’t owned by a mafia affiliate, and management denied paying protection money. Even the Rizzutos needed a good reason to torch a business. The mob soldiers behind the two arson incidents had to be part of a different, rival clan. Strictly speaking, their motive was removed from the internecine wars for control of Montreal.
“But, my friend,” Deroche said, “I don’t know why they would harass Seep or Greenwell.”
Peter responded to Deroche. “The same reason for both attacks. Intimidation. You remember I mentioned the Sword, the East Asian gambler who hired Malloway to kill Alida Nahvi? It appears that he didn’t trust Malloway to track her d
own by himself. Malloway failed to catch her in Buffalo. The Sword then hired some goons in Montreal to visit Greenwell and Seep both, to get them to reveal her location. Neither man knew where she was but the gang was being paid to locate her at all costs. After the Club Parallel fire Leander feared a second visit and took his own life.”
“Yes,” Deroche said, “but the attacks were also a display of power.” Peter granted Deroche his moment.
“Which clan were they, then?” Peter said.
“We believe they’re part of the ’Ndrangheta. Mob sects never make public shows of their strength unless they are sending a message to their rivals, and in this case the upstarts were issuing a warning to the established Rizzutos. The ’Ndrangheta took this hire job to show they can operate in Montreal under the noses of Nicolo and Vito. Things are just getting worse for the Rizzutos.”
Once the mafia connection was made, Deroche cooperated more in wrapping up the killings of Carpenter and Malloway, and the demise of Leander Greenwell. Tommy Verden pledged Scotland Yard’s fullest collaboration by providing the Sûreté with a complete briefing on the continuing investigation of the cricket scandal. Deroche was flattered. In London, Peter and Tommy spent several long days focusing on the career and perfidies of the man known as the Sword. Deroche joined in on two conference calls, thrilled to be included.
In the second week of November, Deroche was proven right in his prediction that the Rizzuto clan was doomed and would be eaten up, month by month. Sitting down to dinner one night, the patriarch, Nick, was assassinated by a rifleman waiting in the yard behind his mansion; the gunman’s first shot penetrated the plate glass window and terminated the ancient mafia leader. Deroche sent an email to Peter: “Nicolo should have hired the guy who installed Seep’s back window.”
The Drowned Man Page 41
