Two Women

Thirty

The two women looked at each other, Jane just inside the door, Alice at the interview table, head low although not quite slumped. Alice straightened slightly at Jane’s entry. Neither initially spoke. It was Alice who finally did, pushing herself further back in her chair as she did so. ‘We do meet again, after all.’ Somehow, irrationally, she’d expected Jane to be freshly bathed and groomed, as she’d been in the TV photograph, and was glad that she wasn’t but instead as dishevelled and crumpled as she was.

Jane came further into the room, her hand outstretched. ‘Here’s your three hundred dollars back. I got a ride, so I didn’t need it.’

When Alice made no attempt to take the money, Jane put it on the table.

‘I heard. I’m glad you’re safe.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Was it bad?’

‘It could have been. But it wasn’t.’ Jane sat on the facing chair, on the other side of the table.

‘That’s good.’ What did she want, wondered Alice.

‘Your car’s OK. The police or the FBI have got it. I don’t know which.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, I guess it doesn’t.’ This was like the strange politeness of the men who’d snatched her.

There was a long silence.

Alice said: ‘You wanted to see me?’

‘Hanlan isn’t impressed: doesn’t believe you.’

‘He told you?’

‘Enough.’ Jane hadn’t expected Alice to look so beaten.

‘It’s true! You know it’s true! Tell them!’

‘That’s what I want to talk about. Want to tell them.’

‘Thank you!’ Alice smiled, the relief moving through her.

‘What have they told you about protection?’ lured Jane.

‘Nothing, not yet. It’ll be all right when you tell them.’ Alice knew Hanlan hadn’t believed her, not completely. Thought maybe that she was holding something back, which of course she was, about England.

‘At the moment they’re ready to charge you with kidnap,’ announced Jane, bluntly. ‘They want a statement from me.’

Alice frowned. ‘I know. That’s why you’ve got to tell them the truth.’

‘You haven’t told them the entire truth, have you, Alice?’ This was the moment when she had to get it absolutely right, not give Alice the slightest indication she was bluffing.

‘Yes!’ Alice was tensed now, fully upright in her chair, both hands firmly against the table between them, as if needing its support, even seated.

‘What did you tell them about the hacking? Come on! Come on! Give me the guide I want!

‘I admitted it was illegal. Why I did it.’ Alice was frightened, the uncertainty churning through her.

‘That wasn’t the question,’ said Jane, relentlessly.

‘What is the question?’

Jane was as sure as she needed to be. She had to take the chance. ‘What about how you hacked? The self-protective route you took that wasn’t so protective for other people?’

‘What do you want, Jane?’ Why had she told her! Been so honest about everything!

‘What I’m due,’ declared Jane, flatly.

‘What’s that?’

‘Quite a lot.’

‘You would have been dead if it wasn’t for me!’ tried Alice.

‘I saved myself, all by myself. The FBI have got three of them and through them they’re going to get a lot more. Break Families. I’m very important to the Bureau. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t. And I’m guaranteed the Witness Protection Programme. You’re not though, are you?’

‘I asked you what you wanted.’

‘The baby. John’s baby.’

Alice stared across at the other woman, not comprehending. ‘What!’

‘I want what you have: what you’re carrying. John’s baby.’

‘But you’re…?’

‘Not pregnant. I might have been, if John had left a specimen for the tests he’d agreed to have – we were both going to have – but he died before that was possible. You any idea of the noise you made, throwing up all the time? I didn’t need the confirmation but I got it in that truck-stop shithole, while you were throwing up again. Found the tester you hid under your coat, showing positive. I was glad then that I’d pretended to be pregnant: convinced you. I couldn’t have let you beat me that way, like you beat me in every other way. And then as I drove away I realized how you wouldn’t beat me, not at all.’

Alice couldn’t think, find the words. Only one. ‘NO!’

‘Yes,’ said Jane, even-voiced, completely sure of herself. ‘If I tell the FBI about Trojan Horses and England – which you haven’t done – you’ll face murder charges there. Or some indictment, it doesn’t matter what. That’s as well as the kidnapping when I swear a deposition how you tricked me into leaving the apartment with you. Fed me more drugs to keep me at the cabin… threatened to kill me for not giving John a divorce so that he could marry you…’

‘No!’ protested Alice again, although it was a moan, not a shout. ‘You can’t do this. You can’t hate me this much.’

‘Yes I can. And I do,’ said Jane again. ‘I got snatched in Morristown, where your car was found and where you told Gene Hanlan you’d come from, to get here. How’d you imagine the Mafia knew I was there? And here’s another question, the real kicker. How high would you put your chances of getting into the Witness Protection Programme with all that coming down on you? I don’t think you’d stand a chance in hell, do you?’

‘If I get killed the baby dies too.’

‘Right,’ agreed Jane, easily. ‘Think of it as the judgement of Solomon.’

‘I won’t let you,’ said Alice, weakly.

‘I know you won’t have a termination. You won’t destroy John’s baby yourself. And let’s be realistic. It’ll be born, before all the Grand Jury hearings and court appearances are over. And go for adoption. This way the adoption is already properly and legally fixed – we’re surrounded by lawyers – and you get to live. I don’t tell Hanlan about England but I do tell him I came with you willingly from the apartment: that I truly believe you saved my life and that I wouldn’t have known about safe-deposit boxes – known about anything – if you hadn’t told me. I’ll even insist you get into the protection programme. We just got split up in Morristown and I’m as glad as I can be that you didn’t get picked up like I did, looking for you…’

‘You’re leaving me with nothing!’ said Alice, baldly.

‘You left me with nothing. Took everything. You expect pity from me!’

‘I won’t do it.’

‘Of course you will. Your way the baby either dies, with you. Or goes into an orphanage, to an unknown life. My way the baby lives and is loved and wants for nothing. And you live.’ Jane smiled. ‘It’s more than the judgement of Solomon. It’s the perfect resolution.’ She pushed her chair back. ‘I’ll deny all of this, of course, if you try and fight me, legally. No one will believe you, against me, the amount of trouble you’re in.’

‘How do I know you’ll love the baby?’

‘It’s John’s. What I inherit from him. Of course I’ll love the baby. Treat him as my own. Which he will be.’

‘He?’ challenged Alice.

‘It’s going to be a boy,’ said Jane, positively.

It was one of the bodyguards, the one who had broken his ankle, who collapsed almost at once under questioning that night, as Barbara Donnelly had predicted, although she hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. Guaranteed entry into the protection programme, a regular pension and paid accommodation ensured he identified the Genovese Family and Charlie Petrie as its consigliere. He also named the Cavalcante Family and Tony Caputo as its consigliere and the man who’d personally snatched Jane outside the Morris-town mall: they’d had inside information, he didn’t know from whom. Hanlan thought he knew and said to Barbara: ‘That nails Alice.’

By nine o’clock that night Caputo had been seized in a known Mafia-favoured restaurant by a Task Force from the FBI’s Trenton field office.

Caputo smirked and said: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Who you’re talking about.’

The Trenton agent-in-charge said: ‘You will, when you see her in court. Like she’s going to see and identify you in court, as the kidnapper. Is there the death penalty in New Jersey, for kidnapping? You know, I really can’t remember. Maybe your lawyer will remember. You’re going to need a lot of legal advice, Tony. All the help you can get.’

Gene Hanlan hadn’t expected such an early and certainly not such a sensational breakthrough, any more than Barbara: unlike her, he hadn’t expected any confession at all. Although it kept Jane pivotal to the investigation and eventual prosecution, it took the immediate concentration away from her, and took Hanlan on to the conveniently retained FBI plane to Washington and the J. Edgar Hoover building for a conference that included the Director himself. It was Hanlan’s assessment of the career potential of what he found himself in charge of that caused him that night to utilize every safe house and apartment available in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens to accommodate, under permanent armed guard, not only Alice and Jane but their lawyers, as well. He also installed armed protection upon the Northcote building, Citibank and East 62nd Street.

As he left Federal Plaza he told Barbara Donnelly: ‘We got the chance to nuke the New York Mafias.’

‘If they don’t nuke us first,’ cautioned the detective lieutenant.

Alone in the sterile Manhattan apartment assigned to her, tauntingly just two blocks from Princes Street, Alice Belling lay weeping on a cold bed, properly experiencing for the first time what life was going to be like in a protection programme.