by Thomas Perry
“Where can I meet you?” asked Elizabeth.
“How about here, if it’s just a few questions? I’ll be at the American Airlines desk in about twenty minutes. I’ll be in a light gray suit, looking impatient. And you?”
“I’ll be the lady carrying the Senator’s notebook.”
* * *
WHEN SHE SAW HIM HE was standing at the ticket counter staring at his watch, then craning his neck out of the stiff shirt collar with his mouth slightly open as though to demonstrate to anyone in his vicinity that he was a man who was being unjustly delayed by petty matters. When he spotted her striding toward him with the notebook, he leaned back against the counter and pursed his lips in a look of sardonic displeasure.
Elizabeth tried to remind herself that he probably was being delayed by petty matters—by a piece of evidence that wasn’t likely to be evidence of anything in particular—but she knew that the people in the ticket line were thinking that she was an incompetent secretary who had misplaced an important document and made her employer, the efficient-looking, carefully tailored and barbered man in the gray suit whose glasses were even now glittering little semaphores of disdain at her, late. She couldn’t forgive him that. So when she was still seven feet away she said, “Relax, Mister Carlson, you’re not under arrest. We just want to have a talk.” She spoke in a voice that sounded as though it was meant to reassure a man who was essentially a coward.
His reaction brought to birth a smile she had to stifle: it was as though he had been prodded from behind. He was off and walking and she almost had to run to catch up. He didn’t stop until he was no longer visible to the people at the counter. He was definitely annoyed. “Miss Waring, I thought you people were much more discreet.”
Elizabeth just gave him a puzzled look, then appeared to dismiss his odd behavior by placing it in some category well known to professional investigators who were accustomed to seeing people at their worst. She said, “Well, shall we get started? I’d hate to have you miss the next flight.” It was said with what could almost have been taken as sympathy if they hadn’t understood each other so well.
“All right,” he said. “Where?”
“I’ve made arrangements to borrow a conference room.”
They were expected at the airport courtesy desk. The room was off the main lobby and contained ten chairs, three of which looked comfortable, and a long wooden table. There were no windows, but a painting of an undifferentiated landscape was hung along the far wall. They both chose utilitarian chairs at the table. Elizabeth opened the Senator’s notebook and took out her own.
“Mr. Carlson, why were you going back to Washington today?”
“Because Senator Claremont is dead. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it and Agent Lang said I might as well go. You people were through with me. Am I under suspicion?”
“No, of course not,” said Elizabeth, as though the idea had never crossed her mind.
“That’s good, because if I am, we’ll stop this right now while I get my lawyer.”
“I’d thought of that,” said Elizabeth, “but that would be time consuming, and we didn’t want to delay you any longer than necessary. If you’ll just give me the best cooperation you can, I’m sure we can get through this quickly.
“Tell me what you know about this notebook.”
“It’s not really a notebook. It’s a scratch pad. The Senator liked to keep it by him so he could jot down things that occurred to him when he didn’t have time to do anything about them,” said Carlson. “He had a rotten memory and had the sense to know it, so he wrote things down.”
“Did it work?”
“Most of the time he’d remember to keep the rest of us informed. The appointments would get transferred to his calendar and so on. Sometimes he’d forget. Sometimes he’d even forget where he’d put the notebook—leave it in some hearing room or a press conference or someplace. But it always turned up.”
“I’d like to go through a few portions of it and see if you can help me understand it,” said Elizabeth.
“Sure,” said Carlson. He glanced at his digital wristwatch as though he were going to charge for his time beginning now. Then he opened the notebook and began to read it aloud. “Dinner the seventh—S.A. That’s the dinner the Saudi Arabian ambassador gave on the seventh of January. He never could remember the ambassador’s name, which is Ruidh, so he gave up trying. Call R.T.T., that’s got to be Ronald T. Taber, the congressman from Iowa. They were in on a farm bill a few years back, and now and then one or the other would call to compare notes on how it was working.”
Elizabeth wrote quickly, trying to catch as much as she could, and hoping that the order of it would help her put it back together later. Carlson went on, looking and talking as though it were a family album full of vaguely familiar faces. He was good, she had to admit. He seemed to know what everything was and how it came to be that way.
Finally he came to the list and stopped. “I don’t know what all this is,” he said. “It must relate to the tax hearings that he was planning for the fall.”
“Relate in what way?”
“Well,” said Carlson, “there was a special staff for the committee, which handled details for the hearings. They’re more likely to be able to tell you for sure than I am. This isn’t anything I handled.”
“But what does it look like?”
“It’s a list of corporations—all sizes and shapes. See? Bulova, General Motors, Eastman Kodak. Then you get ones nobody ever heard of—Gulf Coast Auto Leasing, Standard Hardware. North Country Realty. A few that are utilities: PG&E, Commsat, FGE, Con Ed.”
“What do you think he was going to do with them?”
“Maybe use them in a speech, maybe subpoena their books, maybe call somebody to testify. I don’t know. They have a staff for that.”
“Who would know?”
“Justin Garfield would. Staff counsel. This list is over a month old and if it has anything to do with the committee, he’d probably have been in on it by now. You can’t call in General Motors and tell them to be there next week with a shoebox full of receipts and tax forms. It takes time to get it together in a form that one person can look at.”
Elizabeth turned the notebook toward her and glanced down the list. “What does PG&E stand for?”
“Pacific Gas and Electric. Oh, yes, I forgot. You’re from the East.”
“And FGE?”
“Probably Florida Gas and Electric.”
“Where do I get in touch with Justin Garfield?”
Carlson pulled a leather address book out of his inside pocket and read, “(202) 692-1254, extension 2. Should we go on?”
“Please.”
Carlson returned to his translation, moving from page to page with renewed confidence. It was clear that senators didn’t get much time for solitude or much privacy either. Carlson knew whom the Senator had seen, whom he’d called, and what they’d talked about. Twice he had to turn to his own address book and match a telephone number with an initial, but that was only to verify. At last they reached the end of it and Carlson said, “Is that all you wanted from me?”
“Yes, Mr. Carlson. Thank you for your cooperation. Where can I reach you if we need to ask anything else?”
“For now, in the Senator’s office. If my situation changes, I’ll let the FBI know.” He glanced at his watch again and said, “Good-bye.” They didn’t shake hands before he went out, closing the door behind him.
AT THE CONSTELLATION HOTEL the only sign that there was anything that hadn’t been planned and provided by a solicitous and efficient management was that the elevator wouldn’t stop at the fourth floor.
It wasn’t until she closed the door to her room that Elizabeth realized she had forgotten to stop at the Bureau to return the Senator’s notebook to the lab. She cradled the telephone in her lap while she rummaged through her purse for Lang’s number. When the telephone rang she felt it and heard it at the same time. Her startled jump knocked the
phone to the floor.
“Hello?” she shouted into it.
“Hi, clumsy,” said the voice.
“Hello, Padgett,” she said. “What have you got for me?”
“A sore finger. I’ve been calling all day.”
“I was at the FBI working.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I don’t handle travel expenses. Making any headway?”
“We’ve got a little to go on, but it’s mostly hunches and shaky physical evidence. Enough to keep us busy. Have you got anything new on the Veasy thing?”
“Just what you asked for. The company pension fund has been mishandled, from the look of it.”
“Ah—”
“Just mishandled. Stupidity, not crookedness. They’ve dumped most of it into pie-in-the-sky stuff, hoping for a killing. A lot of it’s gone to the outfit you asked about—Fieldston Growth Enterprises. It looks legitimate, but they’re speculators, pure and simple. Buying up a lot of undeveloped land in resort areas, things like that. Been at it about eight years, picked up a lot of paper profit but not a dime you or the union or the IRS for that matter could put your hands on.”
“Where’s their office?”
“Las Vegas.”
“Why did I ask? Who owns it?”
“Biggest stockholder is Edgar Fieldston himself, at forty-two percent. There’s not much information on him. No arrests, pays his taxes and all that. He’s chairman of the board and draws a salary of seventy-five thousand. Second is the Machinists, who own fifteen percent. The rest are individuals, a couple of banks, all small percentages.”
“Where’d you get all this?”
“It’s all public information—their annual report, ‘FGE for the Future.’ Then I checked with a few people in the SEC and the FTC to corroborate—”
“FGE.”
“Sure. Fieldston Growth Enterprises.”
“Is Brayer nearby? I’ve got to talk to him.”
14He woke up to his own face; as though it were a separate entity that had moved into the room during the night and now filled a corner like a piece of furniture that would somehow have to be moved aside before anything else could happen. It was dry and angry and hot to the touch. He made his way to the mirror and confronted it.
It wasn’t as bad as it felt, he thought—not infected, anyway. But it was going to take some time and even then it would leave a scar. The bruises and bumps would go away in a couple of weeks, but not the cut. The knee was stiff, but he could feel the blood beginning to course through it and loosen it a little.
He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock already. He carefully shaved, ran the shower over his wounds, put on clean clothes, and went out into the corridor. It was time to pick up the watchers and get something to eat. They’d probably be waiting near the two most likely exits. He strolled along, testing the knee for hitches, but the elasticity of it seemed to have returned. He crossed the casino and made one circuit of the lobby before he turned to join the line at the ballroom. There middle-aged women in PTA dresses were ranged along a cash register to admit candidates for brunch, which they did with a stony and repellent efficiency, spotting hand signals from the waitresses with the impassive eyes of casino pit bosses.
The watchers weren’t easy to spot this time. He didn’t see any familiar faces, and he didn’t see anyone who made a habit of staring past him into the distance. He had known the old couple would be gone, but it hadn’t occurred to him that they might not be replaced by someone as obvious. He flashed a glance down the line for someone. If the watcher weren’t very good, he would pick that moment to turn away or adjust his glasses or at least touch his face; nobody did.
Inside the ballroom he found a banquet laid for the purpose of proving to the eye that any paroxysm of human greed or voracity could run its course and still be buried in inexhaustible plenty. Pyramids of champagne glasses filled beyond the brim towered over mounds of scrambled eggs and sausages; bleeding slabs of beef were being expertly shaved into pink pages by shining blades. Piles of chicken breasts seemed in danger of spilling over their silver bins to crush the ornately decorated layered pastries. People of all descriptions assaulted the tables in celebration of their acceptance into this place where there could be no such thing as lack or unfulfilled desire.
Mothers piled extra squares of pastry, oozing globs of hollandaise, and slabs of pate on the plates of their children; elderly people balanced second plates on their skinny forearms as they picked their way back to their tables.
They drank and ate and then rushed to the serving trays to accumulate more while their first plates still were heaped with untasted food. All around the ballroom the obsequious starch-coated functionaries circulated like gentle spirits, filling glasses, deftly clearing spilled food and broken crockery from the aisles, and always, unceasingly and untiringly, replenishing the splendor of the serving tables—all of it calculated to foster in each guest the illusion that he had somehow managed to encompass the whole banquet with the amplitude of his desires and to engulf all of it in his insatiability; the pitiful rodent-inroads he had accomplished on the feast were made to stand in his mind for the fulfillment of Gargantuan yearnings in the soul of a restless and heroic being. As it always did, the management had succeeded in concocting a substantial form to stuff into the yawning emptiness of the clients’ dimly perceived insufficiencies.
He had to wait a little longer because he was alone, and the management always balked a bit before devoting a table to one person. But he knew there would be a waitress who remembered that a man alone tips more generously than he does when his wife is watching. It took a few moments before one of them noticed him, cut him out of the gaggle of detainees, and conducted him to her region of the ballroom. It was a tiny table for two along the far wall, where he could survey the entire room without seeming to.
It wasn’t until he saw Orloff that he knew where to look for the watcher. Orloff’s short, corpulent body bobbed up into the line of people waiting for a table, and a man in a light blue cowboy shirt nodded to him and left. It was typical of Orloff, he thought—always in a hurry, always running three minutes late for an appointment somewhere else. He’d waste a face so he didn’t have to stand fidgeting in a line, his pudgy fingers wandering over the immaculate surface of his gray suit coat as though something important were in one of the pockets.
He watched as Orloff’s fat white hands fluttered impatiently at a passing waitress, then pointed at his table next to the wall. The waitress nodded and Orloff waddled rapidly down the aisle toward him. When Orloff reached the table there was a dewy mist of sweat on his face, as though he had just passed through a cloud. He was a little out of breath, but it sounded more like agitation than exertion. He was taking gasps of breath through his thin red lips and blowing them out his nose in nervous little snorts.
He pushed the chair opposite him away from the table with his foot and Orloff settled into it, his elbows already on the table.
“Have you lost your mind?” said Orloff.
“Why, have you found one?” he answered.
“It’s Wednesday, the fifteenth of February,” Orloff hissed, then paused to snort twice for emphasis. “Our agreement was that you would pass through here on Friday the seventeenth in the evening.”
“I finished early.”
Orloff’s face seemed to bloat suddenly with suppressed anger. At that moment a waitress appeared with a jug of coffee, which she poured with cool precision in a stream from the height of about a foot. When she disappeared Orloff pronounced with malicious triumph, “You’ve made a serious mistake.” Then he shook his head, making his jowls wobble. “It was not discreet. Not discreet at all.”
“Don’t worry,” he answered. “They don’t give a shit about you. They just wondered if I was here working, and I’ve taken care of that.” He took a sip of his coffee, which he decided was rather good. It was a shame Orloff was here to distract him. He was getting hungry.
“Oh, I’m sure you have,” Orloff sighed.
“You show up three days early looking like that and then give me your assurances that everything’s fine. You’ll pardon me if I don’t bubble over with confidence in your judgment.”
“Sure. I’m not your psychiatrist.”
Orloff almost smiled. “The condition of your face would indicate you’ve miscalculated before.”
“If you’re worried about it pay me now and I’ll go away.”
“It’s not that simple,” said Orloff, his hands beginning to flutter about in his suit coat again before he located his handkerchief and mopped his brow. “It’s a sizable sum and it isn’t here yet. Which, if you had lived up to our agreement, would have been here at the moment you arrived.”
“Don’t start talking breach of contract,” he said. “You may be a terrific lawyer, but save it for a court. Nobody refuses to pay me.”
“You’ve made it much more difficult. How do you imagine it’ll look to them when a large sum is passed from us to you? It’s much more difficult.” He shifted his eyes to his coffee cup, staring at it as though he were surprised to see it. “Much more difficult, more difficult and more expensive.”
“You’ll get it. Nobody refuses to pay me,” he smiled.
Orloff cocked his head and stared at him. “No,” he said. “I suppose they don’t.” He pushed his coffee away as though afraid he would spill it, then ascended to his feet like a freed balloon. “Friday,” he said. He rushed back up the aisle, glancing at his watch.
He watched the fat man out the door, then went to the serving area to select some food. It was too stupid even to think about, he told himself. Orloff was afraid because he knew they would see the connection as soon as the money came out. But the first thing Orloff had done was walk right up and sit down with him in a public place where they were sure to be seen. What was that for? Maybe to prove to someone he wasn’t afraid. Afraid of what?
