Mystery

“Glen Upshaw and the island of Mill Walk came together at the moment when he could cause the most damage,” von Heilitz said.

They were downstairs in a restaurant called Sinbad’s Cavern, a dark hole with tall wooden booths and fishnets hung on the wall like spiderwebs. It had both a lobby and a street entrance, and a long bar ran along one wall. Above the bar hung an immense painting of a nude woman with unearthly flesh tones reclining on a sofa the color of the carpet in Tom’s room. At the end of the bar nearest the street door two uniformed policeman with blotchy faces were drinking Pusser’s Navy Rum out of shot glasses, neat. Their hats were placed upside down on the bar beside them.

“A generation earlier, he would have been tied in knots—David Redwing would have tossed him in jail or kept him straight. He wouldn’t have let Glen start up a system of payoffs and kickbacks, he wouldn’t have let him turn the police force into the mess it is.”

He took another bite of the seafood omelette both he and Tom had ordered.

“If Glen had been born a generation earlier, he might have seen what would wash and what wouldn’t, and imitated a respectable citizen all his life. He wouldn’t have had any principles, of course, but he might have seen that he had to keep his vices private. If he’d been born a generation later, he would have been too young to have any influence over Maxwell Redwing. Maxwell was just an opportunistic crook who was lucky enough to be born into a helpful family. He wasn’t as smart as Glen—by the time they were in their mid-twenties, Glen was operating almost like an independent wing of the Redwing family. And by the time Ralph came of age, Glen had so much power that he was sort of a permanent junior partner. He had the records and paperwork on every secret deal and illegal operation. If Ralph tried anything, all Glen had to do was leak some of those records to the press to make a stink big enough to drive the Redwings off Mill Walk. People here want to believe that David Redwing’s legacy is intact, and they’ll go on thinking that something like the Hasselgard scandal is an aberration and Fulton Bishop is a dedicated policeman until they’re shown different.”

“So what can we do?”

“I told you. We’re going to rattle Glendenning Upshaw’s cage. He’s bothered already—Glen didn’t know that Ralph’s bodyguards were dumb enough to go around breaking into houses. He isn’t going to want to face an extradition order, once Tim Truehart finds the man Jerry hired to kill you. There’s already been too much trouble on Mill Walk. Ralph Redwing is waiting things out in Venezuela, and if I were Glen I’d think about going there too.”

Von Heilitz dipped his chin in a nod like the period at the end of a sentence, and pushed his empty plate to the side of the table.

Tom shook his head. “I’d like to really hurt him.”

“Hurting him is what we’re talking about.”

Tom looked down at the cold eggs on his plate and said, “You don’t mean it the way I do.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I want to take everything away from Glendenning Upshaw—his peace of mind, his reputation, his freedom—eventually, his life. I want to see him hang in Long Bay prison. I’d be happy to put the rope around his neck myself.”

Tom looked up and met the old man’s eyes with a shock of shared feeling.

“We have to get him out of the Founders Club,” Tom said. “We have to scare him out.”

Von Heilitz nodded vehemently, his eyes still locked with Tom’s.

“Give me a pen,” Tom said. “I’ll show you what I’d do.” The old man took a fountain pen from his inside pocket and pushed it across the table.

Tom took the paper napkin off his lap and smoothed it out on the table. He unscrewed the cap from the pen and in block letters printed I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE on the rough surface of the napkin. Then he turned the napkin around and showed it to von Heilitz.

“Exactly,” the old man said. “He’ll think he’s being stung by a thousand bees at once.”

“A thousand?” Tom grinned back, imagining his grandfather’s living room overflowing with letters repeating the words Jeanine Thielman had written to him.

“Two thousand,” von Heilitz said.