Two Women

by Brian Freemantle

  Burcher was ashen and there was a tremor in his hands, the middle finger on his left tapping against his thigh as if he were sending a signal. How could it have gone this wrong? How could everything – his coup, his dismissal of the Deliocis – go so wrong?

  Delioci’s head came around to Carver. ‘So you’ve got a copy of the tape, which means you’ve got a copy of everything you’ve given back today and you’re going to tell me that if we don’t let go, you’re going to turn it all over to the Feds, right?’

  ‘I want the separation of my firm,’ rasped Carver, hoarsely.

  ‘Let me tell you what you’re going to do,’ said the man, controlled again. ‘You’re going to drive back into Manhattan, to the bank …’ He nodded towards the finger-tapping lawyer. ‘You’re going to take him with you, right into the safe-deposit room and completely clear your box. I want everything …’ He turned towards Burcher. ‘You hear that? I said everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Burcher, almost a whisper.

  The man came back to Carver. ‘And when you get back here I’m going to tell you how you’re going to work for us for the rest of your goddamn fucking life. But here’s the thing I’m going to tell you right now, give you all the time you need to understand. You ever try – think of trying – another half-assed move like this and you’ll get a choice. The choice will be who gets killed, your wife or your girlfriend. Yours to pick …’ He switched to Burcher. ‘And when you get back I’ll have spoken to a lot of people who’ll sure as hell want to speak to you …’

  With only two of them in the rear of the car there was room for Carver to sit apart from Brescia and Carver did, as far as he could. Burcher hunched forward next to the driver, rocking very slightly back and forth.

  Brescia said: ‘You fucked up big time, Stan. Good job we’re around to look after you.’

  It was payback time, Burcher accepted. They were going to make him pay for every insult, real or imagined. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ said the other man.

  Burcher stopped rocking, swivelling almost completely around in his seat to face Carver. ‘Is everything in the box?’

  Carver nodded, not speaking, his mind too jumbled to even think of words except those that echoed again and again in his head. You’re going to work for us for the rest of your goddamn fucking life. And then: The choice will be who gets killed, your wife or your girlfriend. You pick … The car swept up on to the expressway and began going over the bridge, back into Manhattan.

  ‘Everything that was hacked?’ persisted Burcher.

  ‘Everything I copied,’ managed Carver. But the printouts were in the box! He’d have to say he did it, to save Alice. But they’d ask him how and he didn’t know. Didn’t know what Alice had meant about using English cut-outs – what a cut-out was, even – and they’d find out it was Alice and they’d kill her, because she had knowledge that could destroy them. And because they’d imagine it to be a fitting punishment for him.

  ‘I suffer, you suffer, asshole,’ confirmed Burcher. ‘It all gets settled today. All of it.’

  He had to fight, determined Carver. And then at once the questions. How? With what? The bank. That was the chance. His only chance. Last chance. Get Burcher into the vault with the security man, for the two-key opening procedure. Jump the lawyer there. Hold him and yell for the security man to help. Subdue Burcher and call the police, the Bureau, whoever. Get these other two in the car arrested. Then the shouting man back in the warehouse. Get protection. Alice had been right. The only way.

  They turned into Wall Street. Carver could see the bank. He felt sick. He’d never fought anyone before. Not punched a man, wanting to hurt him. He wanted to hurt Burcher: hurt him as much and as badly as he could. And he could do it. He knew he could do it. He was physically bigger, stronger, than Burcher. It would help that he’d seen the security people, less than three hours ago. They knew who he was. Would react, when he called for help.

  ‘You ready, asshole?’ demanded Burcher.

  Carver nodded. He was definitely ready.

  The driver said: ‘We get moved on, I’ll go round the block.’

  Carver saw the blue and white of the police car as he began to get out of theirs. It was coming in the opposite direction, slowed by other traffic. The decision was instant, unthinking, panic-spurred. He thrust the waiting Burcher as hard as he could out of his way, sending the man sprawling on to the pavement, and ran around the front of the car waving his arms and shouting, seeing the police driver and the observer turn in his direction, their lips moving, both frowning. Then Carver heard the bellow of the air horn behind him and twisted to see the truck for the briefest second before it hit him, knocking him beneath its tandem-mounted front wheels, which ran completely over his chest, crushing it far worse than George Northcote’s had been crushed.

  The frantically waiting Alice Belling saw the coverage on Live at Five, the story angled on the astonishing coincidence of the fatalities. She ran – literally – grabbing a case already packed. She didn’t know how they’d done it to look like yet another accident: all she could think of was that they knew her name and that she would be next on the list.

  Seventeen

  The uniformed sergeant frowned up at Hanlan’s entry, gesturing to a chair already set out, and said: ‘The Bureau doing traffic accidents these days?’

  ‘All kinds of things,’ said Hanlan.

  ‘Coffee?’ The nameplate on the desk said Sergeant P. David Hopper. He was a small man bulged from sitting too long behind a desk and living even longer off relish-filled torpedo sandwiches.

  ‘Coffee’s good,’ accepted Hanlan. It was like the hundred other police offices in the hundred other police precincts he’d ever been in, a scuffed, chipped, overused cell without bars in which people like P. David Hopper filled the drawers and cabinets with the stuff they brought from the previous scuffed, chipped, overused cell before moving on to the next. Hopper didn’t have sufficient citations or plaques or souvenirs to cover all the clean patches left by previous occupants, leaving the wall pockmarked white. The coffee, from a percolator on top of a filing cabinet, came in an I Love NY mug.

  ‘So what’s all kinds mean?’

  The apparent friendliness and immediate readiness to see him – rare from police to Bureau and vice versa – would be from curiosity, Hanlan knew. There’d been a lot of attention as he passed through the front hall and he guessed his presence would already be known about on the top floor. ‘John Carver.’

  Hopper shrugged. ‘What can I tell you? Total mystery, why it happened, how it happened.’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk about, the mystery.’

  The frown came back. ‘I meant why a guy like Carver suddenly runs in front of a thirty-five-ton truck.’

  ‘Doesn’t it seem an odd coincidence that his father-in-law died in such a similar accident so very recently?’

  Hopper shook his head. ‘I don’t know anything more about Litchfield than I’ve read in the paper and seen on the news. But I know about Carver because I’ve got the reports right here in front of me …’ He patted some papers on the right of his desk. ‘Which you’re welcome to see and have a copy. I’ve got eight reliable witnesses – two trained squad-car cops from this very precinct whom I know and whose judgement I trust completely – all telling roughly the same story. For no reason, Carver suddenly runs off the sidewalk in front of a car, yelling and shouting, in the direction of the police car. The truck driver doesn’t stand a chance. Can’t be anything but an accident.’

  ‘Roughly the same story?’ pressed Hanlan.

  ‘Couple of the witnesses thought they saw Carver push by some guy, knock him over.’

  ‘The squad-car guys?’

  There was another head shake. ‘They only saw him when he started coming towards them. The two who saw the guy go over heard the first shout.’

  Hanlan hoped that Ginette up in Litchfield and McKinnon, out in Brooklyn, were doin
g better than he was. ‘What was the shout … the words?’

  Hopper got up to refill his mug. Hanlan held up his hand against the gestured offer. Hopper said: ‘No words. Just the noise.’

  ‘What about the guy who might have got pushed over. Is he one of your witnesses?’

  ‘No,’ conceded Hopper. ‘On balance I don’t think there was such a guy. You know how it is, situation like this. Guy gets squashed into the ground, everyone screaming and shouting, people’s memories play tricks.’

  ‘What about the car?’

  ‘Car?’

  ‘You said Carver ran in front of a car before he went under the truck. How come he didn’t get hit by the car?’

  There was the familiar head shake. ‘Haven’t thought about it. Had time to get by, I guess. But not the truck.’

  ‘I don’t see the sequence,’ protested Hanlan. ‘The truck has to be following the car, right? So if he gets clear in front of the car, how come he’s hit by the following truck? Unless, that is, the car’s stopped and the truck’s overtaking. Any of your witnesses make that clear?’

  ‘Gene, I’m trying to do all I can to help here. I truly am. So how about a little in return. You want to tell me why the Bureau’s here, making traffic reports?’

  Hanlan recognized the beginning of the usual resentment. ‘We got a tip, sounded good. Big-time money laundering. The Northcote firm was referred to. We didn’t get the promised call back, with more information, but the new head gets killed not a month after Northcote himself …’

  ‘What workable evidence you got?’ broke in Hopper.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find,’ admitted Hanlan.

  The uniformed man spread his hands. ‘Best of luck getting into a firm like Northcote’s. But you ain’t going to do it with what happened on Wall Street. Like I told you, I don’t know what made John Carver jump in front of a truck the size of Manhattan itself: I guess we never will. What I do know is that Carver’s actual death was a one hundred per cent kosher accident …’ That shrug came again. ‘You want me to tell you amazing coincidence stories or do you watch them on television?’

  ‘I’ve got an instinct about the tip.’

  ‘Run with it then.’

  ‘I need more.’

  ‘Times like this I’m glad I do what I do and not what you guys do. You want I introduce you to our detective division along the corridor?’

  ‘The crimes, if there are crimes, are federal.’

  ‘Just a thought.’

  ‘Anything comes up, you give me a call?’

  ‘Nothing’s going to come up, Gene. I got an arm-waving jaywalker didn’t look where he was going.’

  ‘Towards a police car, trying to attract their attention.’

  ‘Best of luck. You’ve got my number.’

  Hanlan offered his card across the battered desk. ‘And here’s mine.’

  ‘Like to think I could help you by calling it,’ said the other man.

  Martha hadn’t made contact when Hanlan reached Federal Plaza but George McKinnon was back from Brooklyn and Ginette Smallwood had called in to say that she was on her way from Litchfield. Hanlan and McKinnon were just finishing their review of the crime report on Janice Snow’s hanging when Ginette came into the office and at Hanlan’s insistence they went completely through it again in the hope that Ginette would isolate something they’d missed. She didn’t. Every time the telephone rang they paused and looked up, hopefully, and every time got a mouthed ‘no’ in return from whoever in the support staff answered. It took them longer to go through the dossier on George Northcote’s death, because the autopsy report was more detailed and there was the additional house-trashing burglary, which they studied just as intently.

  There still hadn’t been any contact from Martha by the time Hanlan reluctantly and finally pushed all the files aside, looking from one to the other of the two field agents for a reaction.

  McKinnon said: ‘Enough for a Saturday-night movie mystery, with some mighty jumps of logic to link it all together. But not enough, objectively, for us to initiate an official investigation.’

  Ginette said: ‘I agree. I don’t know – but I’d sure as hell like to sweat Mystery Martha to find out – how and why she comes on to us two hours before John Carver throws himself in front of a truck …’ She waved to the file Hanlan had brought back with him. ‘But we can’t buck the evidence of eight reliable witnesses, two of them police officers, that that’s what happened. We’ve got more than enough for suspicion but not enough to move on it officially.’

  ‘I still think we visit the Northcote office, see how they react to us,’ suggested Hanlan.

  ‘However and whichever way they react to us would be – or could be – explained as the shock of losing their founder and his successor, as they have,’ insisted Ginette, who’d gone through all the psychological training courses at Quantico. ‘We wouldn’t be able to make any sort of assessment from whatever anyone said or did.’

  ‘What sort of harassment or grief-intrusion action can you imagine they’d bring, if one of us said something just a tad wrong or out of line?’ demanded McKinnon, his retirement benefits in mind.

  Hanlan tapped the Carver file and said to Ginette: ‘We got the addresses there of the two who say they saw Carver push a guy over. Go see them, talk to them again. Hear it the way they want to tell it.’

  ‘OK,’ sighed the woman. It was better than chasing all over Manhattan trying to catch Martha on the telephone, she supposed.

  ‘I’ve got a feeling,’ insisted Hanlan.

  ‘Then take it to Washington DC,’ said McKinnon. ‘Set it all out, let legal counsel decide if we can risk looking at George W. Northcote International. They say no, it’s no. But it’s not our asses on the line if they say yes.’

  ‘Where the hell is Martha?’ said Hanlan.

  Alice Belling was, in fact, hunched foetus-like in a cushioned chair that smelled of too many previous users in a plywood-furnished room of a tourist hotel on Eighth Avenue where security guards confirmed key tags at a turnstile between the reception area and the accommodation and upon every floor of which there were CCTV monitors. She’d balled herself up in the chair with her arms clutched tightly around her, unsleeping, throughout the previous night, for most of it crying so hard and so uncontrollably that her stomach and ribs ached by early morning. Until then she had refused to think, her mind locked on a single awareness. John was dead. Arrogant, stubborn, stupid, wonderful, loving John was dead. Gone forever. She didn’t have him any more. Would never have him any more. Gone. No goodbye. She couldn’t remember if they’d kissed when he’d left her apartment for the last time. Never kiss him again. Touch him again. Feel his body again.

  John was dead.

  She had finally to get out of the chair to use the bathroom. When she moved her body ached more and she felt sick, from not eating. Something else she couldn’t remember, when she’d last ate. Her mirrored reflection was almost grotesque. Her hair was straggled and lank around a face gaunt with grief, tear-red eyes sunk dark-ringed into sallow, greasy skin. It was almost difficult for her to recognize herself.

  It was that thought which brought Alice back to something approaching reality, looking around the cheap room for the first time, trying to remember how she’d got there, why she’d chosen the place. She hadn’t chosen it. Those first minutes, hours, had been driven by panic. There was the memory of the Live at Five coverage with the stills photographs of the partially sheeted-off truck and then a studio portrait of John and the commentary about the tragedy of coincidence and of the unique place in the city held by the firm of George W. Northcote. She had the recollection of fleeing the building, but not in blind panic, because she’d grabbed the packed case, still unopened on the bed beside the money satchel. How she’d got here was a blur. It had to have been by cab but she had no memory of it: of getting into this room or of trying to curl herself into the smallest ball and closing her eyes and hoping … Hoping what? That she’d go to sleep
and never wake up again, to confront – exist with – what lay ahead.

  Alice sat again in the unsteady chair, but properly now, with her back against its back so that her face wasn’t against its tainted cushions. What did lie ahead? An impossible, far too complicated question. But she had to confront it. Not totally. That was definitely impossible. Isolate the priorities then. Staying alive, she thought at once, coherently at last. Whatever the empty, unknown future, she was going to live it. Exist in it. Endure it. Not curl up and die. Who would be pursuing her? John had warned her they actually knew her name. It was a miracle they hadn’t already got to her, snatched her, whatever it was they did. Her salvation had to be that their total concentration until less than twelve hours ago had been John, not her. She’d had one miracle. She wouldn’t get another. As she’d tried to get across to John, who hadn’t listened and who was now dead – her breath caught and tears welled up and she strained against crying again – there’d only be one chance. So it had to be right. More than right.

  She couldn’t work it out here, in this flea pit where things were literally moving – noisily now – around her. The cabin was the place. The cabin which she believed now to have been somewhere in her mind when she’d fled Princes Street. The cabin was where she could safely hide until she’d completely worked out how to go on living.

  Alice knew she should eat something to quell the nauseous hunger pangs but couldn’t face the hotel’s babbling self-service cafeteria. Instead she checked out, walked past the already assembling city tour buses and found a reasonably clean deli just past a news-stand where she bought the New York Times. Her coffee cooled and the Danish stayed virtually uneaten as she read the story and studied the photographs. The portrait of John was the same as that used on television the previous evening and she had to swallow heavily, using the cover of sipping her near-cold coffee, to keep down the emotion. There was something about the stills pictures of the scene that Alice believed should have some significance but she couldn’t decide what and kept the paper with her, to study again later.