Gasping, choking, he made it to the emergency stairs and almost fell through the door. John Convertino was waiting for him. The others had gone. Convertino quickly patted his hair and his shoulders to extinguish the sparks, like a fussy mother sending her son off for his first job interview.
‘Slyman?’ he asked.
Conor coughed and shook his head. Then he bent forward and painfully retched, and spat out a chestful of soot-colored phlegm.
‘You go on,’ he told John Convertino. ‘The cops’ll be here any second.’
‘No, you’re coming with me.’
‘Forget it,’ Conor protested, but that was all he could manage to say. John Convertino took hold of his arm and led him down the echoing concrete stairs.
‘I know this dump. We can get out of the back. The fire department will be coming in the front. And they won’t let the cops in till they’ve cleared out all of the rooms.’
They reached the ground floor. They hurried along a narrow corridor and through a heavy gray-painted fire door. Suddenly they were out in the open air. Conor took two or three enormous breaths, and then retched up even more soot.
‘Come on,’ John Convertino urged him. ‘You can cough your lungs up later.’
They crossed a small shadowy yard stacked with packing-cases and overgrown with horseweed. Then up a rusting metal fire escape, across the roof of what appeared to be a laundry, with a puffing aluminum steam vent, and down another fire escape which dropped them onto the sidewalk on West 26th Street right outside S. Levitz Discount Carpets.
They started walking. Several passers-by stopped and stared at Conor as he hobbled past. His face was blacked up, his eyes were red-rimmed and his shirt was scorched. The backs of his hands were burned scarlet where he had tried to protect his head, and they were beginning to hurt badly.
From West 25th Street they heard more fire sirens honking and wailing, and over the rooftops, illuminated by criss-crossing fire department search-lights, a brownish haze of smoke was rising.
‘Some plan, hunh?’ remarked John Convertino. ‘Next time I want to flush somebody out of some hotel room, I’ll do it in the time-honored way, you know? Kick the damn door down and go in shooting.’
‘I didn’t want Lacey to get hurt, that’s all.’
‘Sure you didn’t. But sometimes, you know, you can’t afford to be sentimental. You got to follow your what’s-its-name.’
He hurried Conor across the street, taking his Motorola mobile phone out of his back pants pocket as he did so. ‘Tony? You got O’Neil’s girl with you? OK, that’s terrific. Meet us on Ninth at twenty-fourth Street.’
He put the phone away, and said, ‘Tony says your girlfriend’s fine.’
Conor nodded in relief. ‘I guess I have to say thank you.’
‘Not to me, you don’t. I know what it cost you, that Golf Club thing. Putting those other cops away.’
‘I still wanted to put you away, too.’
‘Sure you did. But, you know, no hard feelings. If Mr Guttuso says you’re one of us, that’s good enough for me. Hell, you should ask him for a job. He may have chickened out of torching hotels, but you – I mean, you’re good at it.’
They crossed West 25th and Conor glanced down at the gathering of firetrucks and ambulances outside the Madison Square Marquis. Red lights flashed and hoses were uncoiled everywhere across the glistening street: Conor was reminded of a snakepit.
One of the black Buicks was waiting for them on the corner of the next block. John Convertino opened the door for him and Conor climbed in. Lacey was sitting there with Bruno. She didn’t say a word, just put out her arms and clung to him, and kept on clinging to him all the way to Bleecker Street.
Chapter 23
He was up early watching the news when Lacey came into the living room. She stood next to the window wearing one of his shirts, her hair still greasy and tangled from yesterday’s ordeal.
‘You want some coffee?’ he asked her.
She shook her head and continued to look out of the window.
‘The fire was on the news. It looks like the fire department managed to confine it to the fifth floor. Not too much damage.’
‘And Slyman?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t see how he could have gotten out of there but there were no reports of anybody found dead. Victor Labrea’s critical – gunshot wounds and second-degree burns.’
There was silence between them. He watched her but he had the feeling that she didn’t want to be approached. She had slept badly, and there were plum-colored circles under her eyes. After all of the trauma of being kidnaped by Victor Labrea and his associates, she had come back to Bleecker Street to learn that Sebastian and Ric were both hurt, and that Sidney was still fighting for his life.
‘How are your hands?’ she asked him.
He lifted them up. They were bandaged with gauze and adhesive tape. ‘Still sore, but that ointment helped.’
‘You could have been killed. We all could have been killed.’
‘The fire got out of hand, that’s all. If I could have hypnotized him—’
Lacey wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I don’t know, Conor. This is more than I can take.’
‘You’re safe now. Nobody can touch you here.’
‘I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. I want our life to go back to normal, the way it was before.’
‘It can’t, sweetheart. Not at the moment. Even if Slyman’s dead, I’m still wanted for extortion, and the cops are still going to want to talk to me about what happened at the Waldorf-Astoria.’
‘But so much damage, Conor! So many people hurt! It’s like you’re self-destructing, and you’re bringing everybody else down with you.’
‘So what do you suggest I do? Give myself up? I wouldn’t last an hour in police custody, and you know it.’
She turned to him and there were tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘It’s too much, Conor. It’s all too much. I don’t think I can bear it any more.’
He stood up and walked across to her, but he didn’t touch her, partly because of his bandaged hands and partly because he knew that she wouldn’t want him to. ‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked her, his voice hoarse from smoke inhalation and emotion.
‘I don’t know what else I can do. I’m going to go back to Minnesota for a while to stay with my uncle and aunt. At least, in Minneapolis, I won’t be in any danger of being kidnapped.’
‘But, sweetheart, I told you. You’re safe now.’
‘Safe? Hiding in somebody else’s apartment? A gangster’s apartment? A man you spent years trying to put behind bars? What’s happened to you, Conor?’
He lowered his head. ‘I don’t know. Another of my conjuring tricks, I guess.’
Without turning around, Lacey said, ‘I’m going to have to leave you, Conor. There doesn’t seem to be any way out of this. How can you prove you’re innocent if you won’t give yourself up? And the longer you keep on running, the more people seem to get hurt.’
At that moment Eleanor came into the room. She had her hair clipped back with diamanté barrettes and she was wearing a simple Indian dress of purple linen with gold-blocked patterns on it. She said, quite crisply, ‘You know what would happen if Conor gave himself up.’
Lacey turned and stared at him. The hurt in her eyes was almost more than he could bear. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to tell you. I can’t stop you going if that’s what you feel you really have to do. But if you could stay here … I need your love, Lacey. I need your support.’
Lacey wiped her eyes with her fingers. ‘I’m sorry, too. I really am. But I’m exhausted, Conor. I’m frightened. You don’t know what it was like, shut up in that hotel room with those awful men. The things they said to me. I thought they were going to rape me; and then kill me; and they told me all kinds of ways in which they could get rid of bodies, so that nobody would ever find them.’
She took a deep, trembling breath. ‘And then the smoke, an
d the fire. And everybody panicking. And then coming back here and finding out what’s happened to Sebastian and Ric and Sidney. It’s all too much, Conor. Nobody can live their life like this.’
Eleanor said, ‘I just heard from the hospital. Sidney’s stable. He may be out of intensive care sometime tomorrow, if he continues to make good progress.’
‘Well, thank God for that,’ said Conor, but he could tell that it wasn’t going to change Lacey’s mind.
‘Is it OK to make calls from here?’ asked Lacey. ‘I need to call my uncle. Then I’m going to book a flight.’
Conor reached up with one gauze-wrapped hand and touched her hair. He suddenly realized that he had already forgotten the tiny mole on the right side of her chin. How quickly was he going to forget the rest of her? You think you’re going to remember people for ever, exactly as they were, but once they’ve gone they flow away like water, and all you’re left with is glimpses, and occasional disconnected moments, and photographs.
‘I – Goddamnit, Lacey. It doesn’t have to be like this.’
She said nothing. She waited. It was plain that her mind was made up. He stepped back, and said, ‘Go on … you can use the phone.’
Eleanor came over and stood beside him as Lacey went through to the kitchen to make a call Her chin was slightly tilted up and she was holding her right wrist with her left hand, proudly, a little demurely.
‘Don’t say a word,’ Conor warned her.
‘I wasn’t going to. If I were her, I’d probably do exactly the same thing. She’s young. She has a life to look forward to. She doesn’t want to get involved with death and killing. Not real death. Not real killing. You and I are used to losing the people we love. She’s not.’
They stood in silence for a while. Then Eleanor said, ‘You are going to find the people who robbed those safety deposit boxes, aren’t you? You are going to prove your innocence?’
Conor sat down. He felt as if ten sacks of sugar beets had been loaded onto his back, one after the other. Crushed, exhausted, unable to carry on. In the kitchen, he could hear Lacey saying, ‘Uncle Jurgen? Uncle Jurgen? This is me, Lisbeth! Yes, from New York!’
When she had finished, Lacey came out of the kitchen and gave Conor a challenging look, but there was nothing he could say to her. He waited until she had gone to the bathroom and then he picked up the phone himself. As he punched out the number, Eleanor watched him with a mixture of sympathy and caution.
Michael Baer was at his gym. He must have been running on the treadmill because his voice came in breathless jiggles.
‘Michael?’ Conor asked him. ‘That money… did you send it to Oslo yet?’
‘Ninety per cent of it, yes. Where are you?’
‘That doesn’t matter. If anybody asks you, tell them I called you from the Yukon.’
‘The Yukon? What the hell are you supposed to be doing in the Yukon? Digging for gold?’
‘Something like that.’
‘He put down the phone. ‘What now?’ asked Eleanor.
‘What else? Oslo, here I come.’
Lacey left just after ten o’clock. She was booked to fly out of La Guardia that afternoon. Her uncle had paid for the flight in the name of Bengtsson.
Conor took her to the door. ‘What can I do to change your mind?’
She brushed her freshly washed hair away from her forehead. ‘Do you know what I thought? I thought that when you and I met, we could both make a totally clean break with the past. But nobody can shake the past off, can they? You can’t pretend that it never happened. And the past has destroyed our present; and our future, too.’
‘Lacey, nobody can make a clean break with the past. It isn’t possible.’
‘Well, I know that now.’
‘If you know it, why are you running off to Minnesota?’
She looked up at him and her face was beautiful, but defiant, too. ‘Because I’m scared, Conor, that’s why. Because I’m very, very scared.’
On the lunchtime news, CNN reported that fire investigators had discovered the seriously burned body of a man crammed into a service closet on the fifth floor of the Madison Square Marquis Hotel. A police service revolver had been found not far away, every shell discharged because of the intense heat. Medical examiners had taken the corpse away for examination, but it was clearly going to take some time before it could be positively identified.
It was quickly confirmed, however, that the revolver belonged to an experienced robbery detective, Lieutenant Drew Slyman, but there was no confirmation from the NYPD that the body was his. Dental checks would have to be carried out, because the corpse – not to put too fine a point on it – was ‘charcoal’.
Conor switched off the television. He closed his eyes and prayed for Drew Slyman’s soul. He had wished many things, but he had never wished Drew Slyman dead. Maybe Lacey was right. He was fatally damaged below the waterline, and now he was sinking like the Titanic, dragging everybody down with him indiscriminately, both enemies and friends.
He came back to Luigi’s apartment early in the afternoon and it was so bright that it looked like an ante-room to Heaven. There were dazzling reflections everywhere – from mirrors, from chrome-plated chair legs, from doorknobs, from picture frames. There was an array of white lilies in the center of the living room and the crystal vase in which they were standing was filled with sunlight, like a 200-watt light-bulb.
Eleanor was leaning over the kitchen table writing in the small notepad which was kept by the phone. She had just poured herself a long-stemmed glass of cold white wine. That shone, too, and so did her silver hair.
‘Well?’ she asked him. ‘How did it go?’
Conor poured himself a glass of wine and swallowed a large mouthful. ‘Throat’s still dry,’ he explained, when Eleanor raised an eyebrow. ‘What are you writing?’
‘A diary, if you must know. A diary of everything that’s happened since you first walked into my office. I reckon I could make a play out of it, given the right cast. A tragedy in three acts. But how did you get on? Did you manage to book your ticket?’
‘Unh-hunh. Everything was fine until I came to pay for it. They’ve blocked all of my credit cards. Amex, Visa, Mastercard, everything.’
‘Who has?’
‘The police. It’s standard practice. Stops fugitives from running too far.’
‘Don’t you have any money in the bank?’
‘It’s going to be the same story. They’ll have frozen my accounts. Do you think you can manage to pay for them?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘Things haven’t been going too well lately. I’m maxed out on all my credit cards.’
‘This is going to be a problem,’ said Conor. ‘I mean, the airfare is only twelve hundred and fifty dollars coach. But who knows how long I’m going to have to stay there. And from what I’ve heard about it, Oslo isn’t exactly the cheapest city in the world.’
‘What about your friend Mr Guttuso? Can’t you touch him for some money? After all, he is your brurrther,’ she added, mimicking Luigi Guttuso’s accent.
‘Come on, Eleanor. It’s bad enough my using his apartment, without asking him for air tickets and spending money. He’d give it to me, for sure. But supposing I manage to clear my name and get back to work in the security business? I’ll always have that skeleton in my closet, won’t I, that I took money from the wise guys.’
‘You need an angel, that’s what you need,’ said Eleanor. ‘An investor, just like we have on Broadway.’
‘Jesus, I’m not much of an investment.’
‘But think about it, you could be. I mean, why do you want to go to Oslo? Because all of the blackmail money was sent there. And if you manage to track down the people who framed you for the safe deposit robbery, you’ll track down the money, too.’
‘Of course,’ said Conor. ‘And with any luck at all, I’ll be able to give it back to the people it was extorted from.’
‘Davina Gambit,’ they said, almost in unison.
; ‘Mr O’Neil! I’m sorry I’m so late. I had a charity lunch at the Macklowe. Estonian orphans.’
Davina Gambit was dressed today in a scarlet silk moiré suit with a deeply décolleté top and pants that looked like wildly exaggerated jodhpurs. Around her neck she wore a gold-and-diamond star. She sat down at their table and ordered herself a mineral water with a twist of lime. ‘I could kill a vodka.’
Conor had arranged to meet her at IBM Garden Plaza on Madison Avenue at 56th Street, under the sprouting bamboo trees. It was airy and cool in here, and it clattered with the sound of conversation and footsteps and coffee cups. Over in the far comer, a four-piece jazz band in Derby hats and humbug-striped vests played ‘Pasadena’. Conor had brought Eleanor with him, partly because she was feeling claustrophobic after two days in Luigi Guttuso’s apartment; and partly because – accompanied by an elderly woman – Conor looked much less like a dangerous fugitive.
‘Ms Gambit, this is Eleanor Bronsky, the theatrical agent. She’s been giving me a whole lot of help to sort this situation out.’
‘Well, I don’t know. It’s a mess, isn’t it? I don’t understand it at all. But I got all my papers back, all my letters, all my photographs. There was nothing missing.’
‘Nothing except four and a half million dollars, which you had to pay to get them back.’
‘What else could I do? If Jack had seen them … I would have been left with nothing, nothing at all, except for the one pink dress I wore when I first arrived in America. I still keep it, you know. It reminds me.’
Conor said, ‘Believe me, I did everything I could to get your papers back. But I’m sorry, I ran out of time, and there’s much more than blackmail going on here. These people wanted your money, yes. But they didn’t want it simply to make themselves rich.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because the guy co-ordinating the robberies is a character called Victor Labrea, and Victor Labrea is an agent for the Reverend Dennis Evelyn Branch.’
Davina Gambit shook her head. ‘I never heard this name.’
Holy Terror Page 26
