Two Women

by Brian Freemantle

  Alice was sure there was no possibility of her pursuers discovering her long-term parking facility for her precious Volkswagen, because she had been of no interest to them when she’d last used it, more than a month earlier. She still approached cautiously before recalling her embarrassment at trying to isolate surveillance on the Space for Space cybercafe but still she didn’t hurry, lingering on the long-stay floor before directly approaching her car. She tensed at the slowness with which the engine turned but after two attempts it fired. She made the usual stop-start cross-town journey but the flow was easier on West Side Highway and she crossed the bridge before midday. She made Paterson her marker and reached it just before two. Before buying supplies she forced herself to eat scrambled eggs with milk at a drugstore diner. There was a newscast on television but this far from the city it was local.

  It was four before she finally reached the cabin and the nostalgia engulfed her the moment she crossed the threshold. She let the packages stay where she dropped them, slumped in the all-encompassing chair in which she and John had wedged themselves together, just holding each other, the last time they had been there, and wept at the memories until she ached again. This chair smelled, too: smelled of him and his cologne and of them together. She said, aloud: ‘I don’t know what to do, darling. I’m so frightened. So very frightened.’

  Gene Hanlan caught an evening shuttle to Washington DC, the appointment with the regional director and legal counsel arranged for nine the following morning.

  They were back in the rear room of the Thomson Avenue restaurant in Queens but the atmosphere was very different and the phrase ‘payback time’ echoed in Burcher’s mind like a litany. Emilio Delioci, strangely strong-voiced with no hint of asthma, conducted the meeting like a trial, which Burcher supposed it was, demanding individual explanations and questioning each of them with the expertise of a trial lawyer. Burcher recognized the trial lawyer’s technique of patronizing humiliation in every demand directed at him.

  ‘So in an unreachable New York safe-deposit box there’s a bomb that could blow into oblivion our entire organization throughout the United States of America?’ judged the old man, after an hour’s inquisition.

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ agreed the son, at once. ‘It’s a complete fuck-up.’

  ‘Which might have been prevented if you’d gone back,’ said the father, relentlessly. ‘Just as the needless killing of Northcote might have been prevented if you’d moved your ass and gone up to Litchfield.’

  Burcher stirred at the accusation, reading from it. Everyone else in the room was definitely treating this humiliation as his payback time. But Emilio Delioci was assessing it properly – as a Don should assess it – and acknowledged that what remained in Carver’s safe-deposit box did have the destructive capability of more atomic weaponry than existed in the world’s arsenals. With himself and his Family as the first potential casualties even before it all exploded. ‘We have quite rightly had the inquest. It was an accident that should have been prevented but wasn’t. That’s in the past. Now we have to go forward.’

  ‘We will go forward,’ declared Enrico, looking at the lawyer. ‘But without you. Northcote was ours. The operation was ours. We’ll put it right.’

  Burcher didn’t have to force the derisive laugh. ‘That’s not a decision for you or for this Family. Don Emilio has quite rightly identified the potential risk that exists, to every Family in this country. It is they – in the form of the New York ruling Families – who should decide upon who should resolve the problem …’ He staged the pause. ‘… and who should not. Which is why, before coming here tonight, I requested a meeting with those Family representatives. You will do nothing until you hear from them. Through me.’

  No one was patronizing him any more, Burcher recognized. Just as he recognized that having made the challenge he had to survive it.

  Eighteen

  Jane Carver knew they were talking about her, could hear most of what they were saying and recognized from it that the stranger was irritated with Paul Newton but it didn’t seem to matter, although she wished they weren’t doing it as if she wasn’t there, non-existent despite being propped up between them against supporting pillows. She’d never liked being ignored. She disliked even more how their faces kept receding, blurring like their words, and then coming back so that she could properly see and hear them again. It was important to hear what they were saying because it was about her.

  ‘Mrs Carver?’

  Jane turned towards the stranger, who’d sat by the bed. It was one of her clear moments and she could see he had a heavy, drooping moustache and very thick black-rimmed glasses. He was bald at the front but his hair was long at the back.

  ‘Mrs Carver? Jane?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’ What sort of stupid question was that? Of course she could hear him now: she hoped the words wouldn’t drift off, making it difficult to hear them again.

  ‘My name’s Mortimer, Peter Mortimer. I’m a psychiatrist.’

  Jane smiled but didn’t bother to say anything. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Why was there a psychiatrist, as well as Paul Newton? He was their doctor in Manhattan, not somebody with a drooping moustache and long hair.

  ‘What did I say my name was?’

  Jane frowned. ‘Mortimer.’ Then she smiled. ‘Cat’s name.’

  The man smiled back. ‘That’s good. I want to talk to you about something. Will you talk with me?’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘An accident. There’s been an accident.’

  Jane’s face creased, briefly. ‘I know.’

  From the other side of the bed Newton said: ‘I told her last night: tried to tell her.’

  ‘What do you know?’ asked Mortimer, ignoring the intervention.

  ‘My father.’

  ‘No, Jane. Another accident.’

  ‘What other accident?’

  ‘John. John’s had a very bad accident.’

  She shook her head against the pillow. ‘No. It was my father. He’s dead.’

  ‘John’s dead, Jane. A street accident.’

  She shook her head again, wishing his face would come back so that she could see and hear him properly. ‘It was Dad. Dad died. It was his tractor.’ Where was John? She couldn’t remember seeing him last night. Just the nurses fussing, holding her hand, stroking her hand, talking in low voices that she couldn’t hear, giving her pills to take. She hadn’t liked it. ‘Where’s John?’

  ‘Dead,’ insisted Mortimer. ‘It was a bad traffic accident. A truck.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me!’ Jane insisted back. ‘It’s Dad. He’s dead. What time is it?’

  ‘Quarter of ten,’ said Paul Newton, from the other side of the bed.

  ‘John’s at the office,’ said Jane. ‘That’s where he’ll be. Get him there if you want him.’

  The man with the moustache stood and went to the end of the bed. Newton followed. Mortimer said: ‘You see! She’s blocked. Chlorpromazine was too strong.’

  ‘I thought it was what she needed, in the short term,’ said Newton.

  ‘I can’t hear you!’ protested Jane. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your father,’ avoided Mortimer. To Newton he said: ‘Everything I’ve read in her file and that you’ve told me indicates Jane’s a strong-willed, self-reliant woman. Chlorpromazine is entirely the wrong medication. On a strong-willed person it’s like a medical lobotomy. I don’t think Jane needs medication, apart perhaps from the mildest of tranquillizers. What she needs is counselling.’

  ‘After losing her father and her husband!’ demanded Newton, resenting the professional criticism, although it was he who’d called the psychiatrist in, as worried as the nurses at Jane’s near-catatonic reaction to the drug. ‘My diagnosis was that her grief needed to be suppressed.’

  ‘It didn’t,’ rejected Mortimer. ‘It needed to be faced, with the help of counselling. We should have
talked first.’

  ‘Now we are talking,’ said the doctor, still hostile. ‘What’s your suggestion?’

  ‘Getting her off chlorpromazine right away, which of course we can’t,’ said Mortimer. ‘We’ve got to wean her off, gradually reducing the dosage.’ He spoke now looking at the duty nurse. ‘Make sure everyone on your twenty-four-hour roster knows. Reduce by a quarter each day. That understood?’

  ‘Completely,’ said the woman.

  ‘I’ll come in, every day, to monitor the withdrawal. I want to judge the time when she’ll comprehend. Which she’s obviously got to do by the time of the funeral.’

  ‘I’ll come in every day, too,’ said the family physician.

  ‘Anything else we need to do, apart from reduce the chlorpromazine?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘Get her out of bed,’ said Mortimer. ‘She’s not an invalid, just mentally closed-down. Maybe take her for a walk in the park, introduce her to the outside world she’s got to get back into.’

  ‘There’re no relatives,’ said Newton. ‘She’s by herself now.’

  ‘So are thousands of people in this city,’ said Mortimer. ‘Adjusting isn’t going to be easy: I don’t know – no one knows – how long it might take. But however long, that’s what it’s got to take. Adult, strong-willed adjustment, not chemical barriers. That’s the way to dependency and irrational fixations. As closed-off as she is – and it’s a judgement at this early stage largely based upon your case notes – I don’t have Jane Carver in my book as a dependent person.’

  She wasn’t, decided Jane, who’d only heard snatches of the exchange and therefore didn’t properly understand what they were talking about. Except that it was about her and that she wasn’t included and that not including her was very definitely rude. She’d complain to John when he got home.

  ‘So how’d it go?’ greeted Patrick McKinnon as Hanlan entered the Federal Plaza office, forewarned it hadn’t gone well because Hanlan hadn’t called before leaving Washington officially to establish a formal investigation.

  The agent-in-charge slumped down into his chair, his back to the cacophony of Broadway, seeking explanations and maybe justifications for himself. Hopefully, Hanlan said: ‘Our girl called?’

  ‘No,’ said McKinnon, shortly.

  Hanlan looked at Ginette. ‘Washington is with you. She’s a crazy, got lucky with coincidence. No sanction to proceed any further, unless she comes in with a whole bunch of incontrovertible evidence. No bullshit with newspaper cuttings or conversations with people she can’t identify; the usual crazy stuff. Total refusal of any legal warrant application to look into the activities of George W. Northcote International. Washington counsel say a firm with Northcote’s clout would sue us from here to China, with tollbooths on the way.’ He paused. ‘It’s political and it sucks.’

  ‘Always,’ agreed McKinnon

  Ginette said: ‘I found the two witnesses. They’re good. Woman’s a floor supervisor at Macy’s, guy’s a bank teller. Both say a guy was definitely pushed over …’ She paused, smiling. ‘That’s their word, pushed deliberately, not accidentally knocked over when Carver ran past … and guess what?’

  ‘What?’ asked Hanlan, indulging her.

  ‘The teller’s positive Carver got out of the car that he ran around, in front of the truck, which was overtaking. And that the guy he pushed over was originally in the car, too.’

  Hanlan came forward in his chair. ‘You got statements?’

  ‘Full and free, from both,’ said Ginette. ‘And both say – and this is independent of each other, not reminding each other – that Carver was yelling for help. The bank teller insists that’s exactly what Carver was shouting – “Help me, help me!”’

  ‘What about the guy who got pushed over? The car?’

  ‘There’s the confusion, when the truck sounds its air horn and Carver goes underneath. They’re looking at that, obviously. But both say the guy gets up off the kerb, runs back to the car and the car takes off before the traffic gets blocked, which of course it did.’

  ‘Make?’ queried Hanlan.

  ‘Blue Ford. No registration.’

  ‘Shit! The guy?’

  ‘Small. Nondescript. Both said they couldn’t make any sort of image reconstruction … a description even.’

  ‘You did good,’ praised Hanlan. Better than he had, he conceded.

  ‘Better than good,’ prompted McKinnon. ‘She’s saved the best for last.’

  ‘Tell me,’ demanded Hanlan, wishing they hadn’t need for the pretence.

  ‘The teller works at Citibank, on Wall Street,’ announced Ginette. ‘Outside of which it all happened: he was on his way back in from late lunch. I went in, on a hunch. John Carver has an account there. And had already been there once that day. To the safe-deposit vault.’

  ‘I should have waited,’ admitted Hanlan. ‘I went to Washington too soon.’

  ‘You can always go back,’ said McKinnon.

  ‘Not without more than this,’ refused Hanlan. He had knee-jerked too soon and now it was a matter of filed record and the only way to recover was to make the case for that second visit total and irrefutable.

  Alice hadn’t moved very much from the womb-like seat the previous night – just to the bathroom and on her way back to raid one of her dropped bags for a cracker from a convenient box – but eventually, she didn’t know when, she’d gone to bed between sheets that felt damp from not being aired, and in which she’d last slept with Carver, and cried again, although not a lot, at that realization. And then, surprisingly, she’d slept uninterrupted until it was fully light, and outside she could hear the competing chirping and calls of birds she and Carver had bought binoculars and long-discarded books to identify – and failed – and leaf-shuffling moving things. She’d gone out on to the deck, in only the short nightdress she couldn’t remember taking from her bag but which was all she’d often worn with Carver for their breakfast coffee, and she’d taken hers on the bench they’d always sat on looking over the narrow river and she didn’t choke up at that memory, which she was glad about. The river would be cold, as it was always cold, because it fed from the Bearfort mountain tributaries, which they’d discovered when they’d tried, the first time they’d used the cabin, to skinny dip – and had never tried again.

  Alice felt safe, alone, and wanted to feel that way forever. Never wanted to see Manhattan – any city – again: hear its sirens and its jostling people and their noise. Stay here, with the birds and the scurrying in the undergrowth, and hide forever, live in the past forever. This past, this very special past only she and John had shared – intruded upon by no one else. Could they find her, all alone up here? The cabin wasn’t in her name. Or John’s. John rented it, paying cash for an entire year, from a distracted bookshop owner in West Milford: there had to be at least six months left on the rental. The phone was in the bookshop owner’s name. So were all the other utilities. She’d be safe forever here: lost forever here.

  Alice forced herself out of the fantasy, refusing its cocoon. There was only one way she could ever be safe – lost forever – and that was by becoming an entirely new person, with a new name and a new – but sustainable background and a new passport and all the other new official documentation that said who you were, to those who felt it their business to know.

  And who better than she to become a new person? Alice asked herself. She had no one. No family. No ties. And she no longer had John. No one. At the flick of a pen or a computer command Alice Belling could disappear forever – vaporize – to be reborn a new, ready-made, unknown person. Nothing to look back for. Nothing, either, to which to look forward. But there was something in the middle, something between what she was leaving behind – fleeing from – and the reborn future. Revenge. Alice wanted revenge. Each and every possible retribution upon whoever it was who had done what they had done to John. She was more determined totally to achieve that than she’d ever been to achieve anything in her so far totally achieving life.


  And she’d opened the way: knew the way. That’s why she was hidden up here, not to gaze out over a river and a forest, soon to become another memory, but to ensure she didn’t make any mistakes guiding the FBI towards those who had to be punished. So what did she have to guide them? Not as much as she’d hoped: less in fact than she’d once had, because John had taken all her computer printouts. Could she risk trying to duplicate them, as she’d told herself she could? Not the companies. They’d have built stronger firewalls: almost inevitably set traps and snares to identify her more quickly, even if she tried to piggyback internationally as she had before. And caused the deaths of three innocent people, she reminded herself, unnecessarily. She was going to have to admit that, at some stage. And all the hacking. Not her immediate focus. Her immediate focus was upon convincing an unconvinced FBI agent in his Broadway office that she had evidence of a crime. Which she didn’t actually have, Alice admitted to herself objectively. She had knowledge of crime but no way of proving it. Yes there was! Those local IRS offices – in which lay the proof of the step-by-step money laundering – didn’t know they’d been accessed. No one was looking for her there, setting traps and snares. She could access them again and download everything she’d given to John. It wouldn’t matter that illegally obtained material wasn’t admissible in a court. She wouldn’t be offering court evidence. She’d be handing it over as her proof, for the Bureau to confirm independently. And legally.

  Alice felt a surge of confidence, a welcome difference from the hollow nausea it replaced. Because the IRS were unsuspecting, she wouldn’t need the protection of a cybercafe, either. She could work from the cabin, although she’d take her usual precaution of making her Trojan Horse entry through someone else’s system. All she needed was a laptop to replace the one she’d left in Princes Street in her panic to get away.

  The thought of calling the Bureau’s New York office came as she was driving back down into Paterson, to distance herself from the cabin before buying the computer. It was sensible, necessary, to keep in touch. She was going to need them very soon: need them to accept her the moment she made the request, which made it vitally important to convince them she was genuine.