Cut and Run

Seventeen

H endrik de Geer blew on his frozen fingers as he stood at the edge of Central Park opposite the Beresford. It would be a bitterly cold night. He longed for a bottle of gin, but he had forsworn drink. Sentiment and drink would make him careless. He couldn’t permit that to happen. It was clear to him, now that the coward Ryder had told Bloch everything, that the sergeant would have to find out for himself if the Minstrel was lost. He would never settle for anyone else’s word; the possibilities for the stone were too tremendous. Hendrik well understood that kind of thinking.

It left him with two choices. One, he could walk away. Two, he could act.

But first, before he made up his mind, he must gather information. He had already discovered that Catharina was being watched. Now he was at the Beresford, and he could see one of Bloch’s men standing out at the bus stop in front of the Museum of Natural History, stamping his feet in the cold.

So the daughter was being watched, too. Bloch was taking no chances-he never did-but he was not yet prepared to make his move. The sergeant was a hard, unyielding man with no apparent weakness. He was just starting out in this business, but already he had a solid reputation. He paid well and on time. That was what had drawn Hendrik to his employ. Profit and survival. They had been his chief interests for many years, and if Phillip Bloch wished to make them possible, then Hendrik would work for him.

Several well-dressed men and women, in tuxedos and furs, came out of the Beresford, followed by a stout old woman in an unremarkable wool coat, a scarf tied peasant-style around her head, and ankle boots.

Across the street, Bloch’s man threw down his cigarette.

Hendrik squinted as the woman came into the glare of the street lamp, and he saw the plain, square face.

Wilhelmina!

He almost laughed aloud. Of course she would be here! Even given the underworld in which he’d operated for forty years, Wilhelmina Peperkamp remained the most suspicious person he had ever encountered. Ah, Willie. He could see she’d already spotted Bloch’s man. Once Hendrik had been attracted to her bluntness and competence and had found her plainness comforting, even appealing. She was so reliable. For a while, that had been enough.

She went across West Eighty-first, walking at a good clip, and Bloch’s man started after her. Hendrik stayed where he was. He wasn’t worried. Willie had outwitted the Nazis for five years. She would have outwitted them until the end, had she not trusted Hendrik de Geer.

In a few minutes, Bloch’s man returned, looking dismayed and frustrated. This time Hendrik did laugh aloud. The man wasn’t necessarily incompetent; he simply didn’t know the kind of woman with whom he was dealing.

As he reached for a cigar, two men darted out of the dark, cold shadows of the park and came up on either side of the Dutchman. They flashed knives. Hendrik grunted, disgusted. Damned New York! He had no patience now for a mugging. Both men looked very fit, older than he’d have expected. Without a doubt, they thought they were fierce.

“Your wallet, old man,” one said.

Hendrik shrugged, thinking he must be getting old. He should have heard them coming, anticipated this. But now he was at a disadvantage, and he wished not to attract attention. His fingers cold and stiff, he removed his wallet from his trousers pocket and handed it to the man who’d made the demand. The second man kept his knife pointed while his comrade inspected the wallet.

“What are you doing?” Hendrik asked, suspicious. “‘Take the thing and go-”

Wait, he thought. If they were ordinary muggers, they would have taken the thing and gone. They would already have disappeared into the park with their booty. There was no need to check for identification.

They wanted to make sure who he was.

Before they obeyed Master Sergeant Phillip Bloch’s orders and killed him.

“Bastard,” Hendrik said without emotion.

“Huh?”

Their puzzled looks quickly changed to surprise, then pain and horror as Hendrik slammed his hand sideways into the throat of the man with his wallet. The second man sliced toward him with his knife, but the Dutchman was ready and dodged, the knife grazing his coat. While the other man choked and sputtered, Hendrik pushed his comrade down, moving fast, with an agility that amazed even him. His opponent had no chance to grab on to him.

He fled, running out into the middle of Central Park West. Cars screeched, horns blared.

Not until he was on the other side of the street in front of the Beresford did Hendrik look back. The two men had scurried away. In front of the museum, Bloch’s other man had disappeared. Hendrik grunted to himself without satisfaction.

Twenty years ago he would have killed them all.

Aunt Willie had found nothing to her liking in her niece’s kitchen and had gone out looking for something to eat. Juliana had taken no offense. Instead, with her aunt gone, she sat at the piano. She didn’t expect to be able to practice. There were too many distractions. Yet she did, with an absorption that had eluded her for months. With her uncle dead, her mother not talking, her aunt outside in the dark, her building being watched, with Matthew Stark and his black-brown eyes and leather coat tugging at her emotions, she began to make progress on the Chopin. The real world hadn’t thrown her off. It had become not something to escape, but something to express.

So simple.

If only Shuji would understand. But he never would. She remembered when she was eleven and she and her parents had gone to his magnificent Upper East Side house, and she’d thought him the handsomest, most incredible man she’d ever seen. She owned all his recordings, would listen to them late into the night, when her parents thought she was asleep. His ability had made her cry with rage and jealousy and amazement at all he could do and all she couldn’t, at least not yet. But when Shuji had taken her alone into his studio, her first words were not to tell him how wonderful he was but to tell him she’d worn white for their introduction because he always wore black.

More than anything else, he’d told her many years later, it was that comment that had prompted him to take her on as his student. He knew he was a strong personality. He had no interest in molding another pianist into a mini-Shuji. He had wanted, encouraged, demanded her development as an independent artist.

Now he couldn’t understand why she needed to color her hair pink and play jazz in a SoHo nightclub. He wanted her to be independent so long as she didn’t break any of his sacred rules.

“The bastard,” she muttered, still playing, “the goddamn bastard.”

She ignored the tears burning in her eyes and the fatigue gnawing at her muscles and the hollowness inside her, the cold, raw fear that had nothing to do with diamonds and coincidental deaths and men following her.

Shuji was gone. My God, she thought, what am I going to do?

Matthew drank a beer and watched part of a basketball game just to calm down, but neither helped. Weasel, Bloch-where the hell were they? He went for another beer, a Sam Adams, and took two sips as he sat down at the telephone in what passed these days for his study, of which the most notable items were his television and stereo system. His typewriter was covered and had about twelve issues of Sports Illustrated stacked on top of it. The bottom one, he noted, went back eight months. He didn’t own a computer. Working on one at the newsroom was enough. He didn’t like all those goddamn lights blinking at him.

He held the receiver in his hand and told himself not to do it.

He did it anyway. He had the number memorized, had already started to dial it twice this evening.

There were four rings, and then her voice came over the message machine. “I’m unavailable at the moment, but if you leave your name, number, and a brief message…”

“Juliana, if you’re there, pick up the damn phone. If not-”

The machine cut off. “Matthew.” She sounded vague, spaced. “What is it?”

The rigidity of his muscles began to ease as he listened to her. She had a beautiful voice. It made him able to envision her eyes, vivid and filled with energy. He began to imagine his mouth on hers. You’re slipping fast, buddy, he thought, and drank more beer.

“Were you practicing?” he asked.

“Mm, yes, I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I sort of lost track. That hasn’t happened to me in a while. I don’t think about where I am, what I’m doing, I just get totally absorbed. Then when I stop, it takes me a while…” She paused to take a breath, as if she’d been running. “A while to come back from wherever I’ve been, I guess. I was working on-what was it?” She sounded drugged. “I mean, I know what I was. It was the Chopin. It’s just not easy to articulate my thoughts after concentrating so hard. You should see what I’m like after I’ve been at it for seven or eight hours at a stretch.”

“Dizzier that you are right now?”

“Oh, much.”

Hard to imagine. But suddenly Matthew wanted to know what motivated this gorgeous, eccentric woman. What drove her to do what she did? What kept her at it? She had so goddamn much energy. She’d just returned from Antwerp, for the love of God. He could barely concentrate on a basketball game, never mind Chopin. He remembered how she’d been sweating after her Lincoln Center performance and yet still had been able to settle down. Did the woman ever just chill out?

In Vermont, he remembered. No piano there.

“I’m glad I’m not your neighbor,” he said, hearing the humor in his tone.

She laughed, that cool, sexy laugh with just a hint of nuttiness. “The Beresford has very solid walls-that’s one reason I live here. Aunt Willie doesn’t like it. Wouldn’t, I mean. But you were saying?”

“Juliana, this thing with the Minstrel, your uncle, Rachel Stein-it’s damn serious.”

“I know that.” Clipped, pissed. Back on earth.

“I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but it’s more serious than it was even yesterday. Listen to me, Juliana. I want you to stay in your apartment as much as possible, and I want you to play piano and stay the hell out this mess.”

“Is it Otis Raymond? Has something happened to him?”

He appreciated the note of worry and concern in her voice. “Not that I know of.”

“Then what?”

Phil Bloch knows your name, knows you were in Antwerp, knows you could have the stone. Never mind whether you do or you don’t. Never mind what you know and what you haven’t told me. Just get the hell out, sweetheart.

But he said only, “New information. I’ll explain another time. Watch yourself.”

“Matthew-”

“Do it, Juliana. Trust me on this, all right? God help me. I know what I’m talking about.”

For a few seconds she was silent. Then, “You know who’s behind all this, don’t you?”

She sounded breathless and excited and scared, and Stark knew if he gave her more, she’d be back on his doorstep, in deeper trouble than ever. He could almost see the brightness of those ice-cool emerald eyes. Christ, he had to find Bloch! But what good would that do? Coming down on Bloch’s head might only further endanger Weasel. Goddamn Ryder…

“I can’t talk,” he said. “Just watch yourself.”

“Won’t talk, you mean.” She was cool again, one tenacious lady. “You’re in Washington, aren’t you?”

“Take care of yourself. Why not take a trip to Vermont?”

She hung up on him.

Catharina sat at her bedroom window and looked down at the Christmas lights on Park Avenue. Tears streamed down her face, but she made no attempt to brush them away. Her thoughts had drifted back more than forty years, to the last Christmas with her mother and father in Amsterdam. She was just a teenager but had taken charge of the household. She’d planned for the holiday for weeks, scrounging up ingredients to make speculaas and appelbeignets, and Hendrik had brought rum and cocoa. What a feast they’d had! Johannes had managed to come, so tall and stoic, and Ann, so sweet and sad. Johannes had been marked for deportation to the Nazi labor camps and was in hiding, himself an onderduiker, and Ann, as the Jewish partner in a mixed marriage, was to report for sterilization procedures. She had refused and was in hiding too. Her family-her parents and younger sisters-had been deported the previous year and there had been no official word on where they were. The rumors were too dreadful to believe.

But that Christmas they’d ignored so much, laughing and carrying on, and afterward Catharina had sent goodies back with Wilhelmina for Rachel and Abraham. In a rare display of affection and pride, her mother had hugged both her daughters and told them they were fine young women. Hendrik had said he agreed, and when no one was looking, he’d kissed Catharina on the cheek. How she’d blushed! For hours after, her face burned. He was twenty-five and a hero in the Underground Resistance; everyone adored him.

Now, finally, she brushed away her tears, wishing her mother could be here with her. Catharina was nearing sixty herself. She was older than her mother had lived to be. And yet she wanted that stern, loving guidance, that soft lap, that strong shoulder on which to cry.

“You mustn’t blame yourself, dear Catharina…”

“Oh, Mamma,” she cried aloud, paralyzed with fear and indecision. Ever since her talk with Wilhelmina, she’d hidden herself away, looking for answers out the window, in the winter sky and the gray buildings and the Christmas trimmings. There were none. “If only you were here, Mamma, to tell me what to do!”

Drying her tears, she turned away from the window. She had a vision of her tiny daughter in pigtails and dirty sneakers, climbing up onto the piano bench, and she wanted to transport herself back in time and take that child in her arms and hold her, just hold her.

You must be strong, Catharina, she could hear her mother say. You must be strong.

She went into the library, where Adrian was sitting up late with a book. “Adrian,” she said, maintaining a deliberate air of nonchalance. Her stomach was tight, aching, hollow. “Adrian-has Juliana ever come to you about opening a safe-deposit box?”

He looked at her, his handsome face filled with tenderness as he studied her. He had to see how upset she was. But he hadn’t pressed her about the terrible tension that had gripped her since their daughter’s last Lincoln Center performance. It wasn’t that he didn’t care or that he didn’t want to know. Many times in the past he’d told her he wanted to know everything about her-everything she cared to tell him. But he’d also explained that he understood she was an intensely private woman, respected that, and had come to accept that there was a part of her he could never know. He blamed her family, the war. She’d been so young-old enough to remember, young enough not really to understand.

“Is she interested in getting one?” he asked, still watching her.

Catharina lifted her shoulders, her neck muscles crunching with the movement because they were so tense. Her carefree existence had spoiled her. She had her husband, her child, food, shelter, clothing. For so long she’d wanted for nothing.

“She has so many valuables,” she said lamely. “I was just wondering. Perhaps it’s something she should look into.”

Adrian sighed, and she could see the resignation in his eyes: he wasn’t going to get an explanation tonight, either. “I’ll talk to her about it, if you’d like.”

“Please.”

“Are you going to bed?” he asked.

It was another way of asking if she thought she’d sleep tonight; she hadn’t since Rachel’s visit. Adrian had tried to comfort her, but even after they made love she would lie awake, staring at the ceiling.

“In a little while,” she said, hearing the love in her voice, a love that went deeper than words-that could ignore half-truths. But her mind was racing. If Juliana has the Minstrel, what will she do? What will I do?

Yes, Mamma, I know, she thought; I must be strong.

Juliana had been unable to return to her trancelike state after Matthew’s call and had abandoned the piano. She was staring at the magnificent skyline, debating once more whether to tell anyone about the Minstrel’s Rough, when Aunt Willie stormed in, muttering in Dutch.

“Are you all right?” Juliana asked, climbing up from the couch.

“Of course. I was followed, but no matter. Do you have any binoculars?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I usually keep them at my house in Vermont, for bird watching, but I can’t identify many birds, just the usual sparrows and-”

Aunt Willie hissed impatiently. “Will you get them?”

“Why?”

“Achh!”

“All right, all right.”

She dug them out of a drawer in the library and returned to the living room, where Aunt Willie was peering down at Central Park West, her face pressed up against the window. “I know I saw him,” she said.

Juliana handed her the binoculars. “Who?”

“Hendrik de Geer.” Wilhelmina looked through the binoculars only briefly, handing them back in disgust. “As I thought, he’s gone.”

“He was out there? But why-”

“He has his reasons, I’m sure. He always does.”

“Aunt Willie, I’d like to know more about him. He betrayed you and Mother during the war, but how? What exactly did he do? Why’s he here now? Dammit, if he’s hanging around outside my window-”

“I’m tired,” Wilhelmina said, yawning. “I’m going to bed. I suggest you do, too. You’ll want an early start for Washington in the morning.”

Juliana groaned, but she didn’t say a word. Dealing with Matthew Stark couldn’t be any worse than dealing with Wilhelmina Peperkamp.

After Stark’s intrusion, Ryder forced himself to calm down. Sweat matted his shirt to his back and lined his face and armpits. He felt himself shaking as the old indecisiveness returned. My God, does Stark know everything? Ryder’s breathing was rapid and light, but slowly, with practiced self-denial, he pulled himself together and headed upstairs, where he showered off the sweat and the stink of his fear. Stark’s visit, he tried to tell himself, meant nothing.

He felt better when he put on his flannel robe and went down to his study. He got out a bottle of scotch and sat in front of his marble fireplace. Drinking and watching the fire die, his mind drifted back twenty years. Had it been that long? Every moment of that horrible, tragic day seemed so vivid to him, still so very real. When he swallowed, he could taste the same sourness he’d tasted when he’d first realized the Huey he’d permitted to fly into a hot LZ was going down.

He remembered thinking that he didn’t have to worry: Matt Stark was the pilot. Steelman had one month left on his harrowing year-long tour and had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The grunts felt secure when he was flying their slick.

This mission should have been easy and safe: the resupply of a platoon-First Lieutenant Samuel Ryder’s platoon-in a cold LZ. What could happen? But the landing zone had turned hot and no one had told Stark until it was too late-and they were shot down.

“No one’s fault,” Ryder mumbled aloud in the silent study. “It was war. Anything could have happened.”

Although he was the officer in charge, Ryder had been too dazed and terrified at first by what was going on to notice even that the Huey was receiving ground fire. The slick went down.

There was nothing even Matthew Stark could do.

Ryder remembered screams-heard them still in his nightmares. Too late, he’d rushed toward the downed slick…and he still could feel the icy grip of Otis Raymond as the door gunner had pushed him aside so a lieutenant wouldn’t get torn to bits by AK-47 bullets.

The survivors were picked up by a search and rescue team and taken back to base camp. As a platoon leader, Ryder had faced the Viet Cong and the NVA, but he’d never been so afraid for his life as at the moment when he’d had to face Matt Stark. But the Steelman, his young, knowing face showing no emotion, had only looked at Ryder with those black eyes and not said a word.

With commanding officers buzzing around him demanding to know what the hell had happened out there, Stark hadn’t made excuses or assigned blame to anyone other than himself. He accepted responsibility for his ship and its passengers. He had been in the pilot’s seat, no one else.

“We got shot at,” he said. “There’s a war going on out there, you know.”

The event, however, had scarred him as much as anyone, and as far as Ryder was concerned, Stark’s actions proved it. He didn’t go home a month later, but extended and got himself transferred-to Cobras for a while and then to a scout helicopter-the Hughes OH-6A Cayuse or Loach. He was assigned to a hunter-killer or “pink” team, with its primitive, effective strategy. The Loach-the hunter-would go in and draw fire to locate the enemy. Then the killer-the new Bell AH-1G Cobra or “snake”-would come in with guns blazing. The work, especially for the hunters, was dangerous; scout losses were huge. But they didn’t carry passengers, and CW-2 Matthew Stark and SP-4 Otis Raymond, who’d stayed with his hero Steelman, had survived.

Sam Ryder, back home in Florida, had hoped they wouldn’t.

Now, pouring himself another glass of Scotch, he put them out of his mind, his ability to repress well developed. He had to forget Steelman and Weasel; he had to make himself unavailable to Phillip Bloch. Regardless of what Matthew knew or didn’t know, he had no proof-nothing he could print. And he’d have to be very, very careful before he printed anything about Sam Ryder; there was history between them. Stark wouldn’t want to be accused of mounting a witch hunt.

Nothing had to happen. All Ryder needed was for Bloch to get hold of the Minstrel’s Rough. Then, at last, he’d be satisfied and get out of Ryder’s life.

Bloch had to get hold of the Minstrel.

But what will he do to get it? You gave him the names of the Peperkamps. He can find them. He can find Juliana.

“Juliana.”

Her name came out as a breath. Why couldn’t he stop thinking about her? She couldn’t be involved with this mess; she could have nothing to do with the Minstrel. Bloch had no reason to go after her.

Unless he has reason to believe she has the stone. He won’t be satisfied until he’s positive she doesn’t. Until he knows none of the Peperkamp women has the Minstrel, including Juliana.

Ryder inhaled deeply, then slowly swallowed a mouthful of Scotch. He had to hope Bloch would go to the mother and the aunt first and one of them would lead him to the Minstrel.

Besides, what Bloch did or didn’t do was not Sam Ryder’s responsibility.

He poured himself another glass of Scotch and took it to bed.