Two Women

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 doing 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.

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.