You remember Klebold, the quiet boy who went to school one day and started blasting away with a sawed-off shotgun and a TEC-DC9 semiautomatic. Before his big day at Columbine, Klebold wrote in his day planner, “The lonely man strikes with absolute rage.” And now here was Clarence Swift, scanning the landscape with a cold anger, as if everything his gaze alighted upon were about to be obliterated.
And then Clarence Swift was in the Volvo, and then he was pulling out of the circular drive. I ducked lower as his car passed mine and stayed down until I was certain he was gone. Not the bravest of acts, I admit, but something about that meeting in my office had told me to be cautious of the peculiar Mr. Swift. And it wasn’t just the threat of unpleasant consequences if I tried to see Julia that was causing my caution, though the flash of Klebold in his features added a little jolt to his warning. Swift had known about my meeting with Julia in a hotel bar. How had he known that if Julia wasn’t talking? And why did it bother him so much? Between the time he stepped out that door and the time he drove away, in my eyes he had morphed from an overmatched attorney to something far more frightening.
When I was sure he was gone, I popped up and stared again at the big green door. Was I going to go in and see her? Was I going to start it all anew, despite the fear that had blossomed along with the desire? As I dithered, someone else beat me to it.
A Jaguar, gray and predatory, passed my car, slipped into the circular driveway, stopped at the door. The rear passenger door opened, and a man climbed out, a broad bus of a man with a huge belly and a bushy black beard. He wore sandals and white pants and a loud print shirt, as if he had just stepped off the streets of Bangkok. He looked around, much the way Clarence had looked around, and then walked quickly, almost skippingly, to the door, lifted the serpent knocker, and let it drop loudly once, twice.
Gwen opened the door, gave him an astonished stare, and let him in. I checked my watch. When the door opened to let him out, I checked it again.
Seventeen minutes. Not much of a visit.
The way he was dressed, it wasn’t a business call, he wasn’t a plumber or the air-conditioner guy, he wasn’t a banker, he wasn’t anything I could figure. And for sure he wasn’t Julia’s normal type, pretty much the opposite, actually. Maybe he was a proctologist.
He climbed back into the rear of his Jaguar. It started to rumbling, pulled out of the driveway, and drove quickly away from the house. I started my car and followed.
I don’t know how quickly my tail was marked, but after turning left and right and right again, I followed him down a rather narrow street, where he disappeared. The street was blocked by a parked truck. I stopped the car, peered through the windshield, and then checked the rearview mirror, where I spied the gray Jaguar parked right behind me and two men striding toward my car, one on either side. The first was a thin, dark man with hooded eyes and a black leather jacket. The second was Julia’s visitor.
When he reached my window, he dropped his thick hands on the edge of the door and peered down at me with a strange, dull gaze, as if I were nothing more interesting than a fly buzzing harmlessly by his ear.
“Who are you?” he said. His voice was a gravelly, accented growl that seemed to have originated somewhere in a bad Cold War movie. Russia? Uzbekistan?
“I’m nobody,” I said. I glanced through the passenger-side window. The thin, dark man was reaching into his jacket, scratching his side. At least I hoped he was scratching his side.
“Why you following me?” said the man with the beard.
I turned my head back to him. “I liked your car?”
“You have good taste for a nobody, but I think you’re lying. What is your name, nobody?”
“Victor Carl.”
He continued staring at me for a moment with the same dull, uninterested eyes, before his mouth, beneath the black beard, opened and closed, as if he had just swallowed the annoying fly, and his eyes snapped into focus.
“I know you,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Yes, yes, I do. Victor Carl. You were the one she threw to garbage heap when she ran off with Wren. It was you.”
“Who?”
“Oh, don’t be silly man. Victor Carl, yes, yes. So let me guess. You were sitting in car outside her house, thinking romantic thoughts, when you saw me visiting and grew insanely jealous. For how could she prefer a skinny runt like you when she had chance with real man like me? So you decided to find out who I was. Isn’t that right?”
“That would be a little weird, wouldn’t it? Me sitting outside her house, just watching.”
“Yes, it would. Demented, actually. Are you demented, Victor?”
“Well, when you put it that way…”
“So, my friend. Let me introduce myself. Gregor Trocek, at your service. And my companion is Sandro. Go back to car, Sandro. Don’t worry. Nothing to fear from man like Victor, who can let someone like Wren Denniston steal his woman.”
Sandro stared at me for a moment, still scratching at something beneath his jacket, then nodded and bared his teeth like a hyena before heading back to the car.
“So tell me,” said Gregor Trocek. “What can I do for you, Victor?”
“I was just wondering who the hell you were?”
“A friend of the beautiful Mrs. Denniston. Through her husband. The doctor and I were business associates.”
“So you were merely giving your condolences to the grieving widow?”
“That, too.” He tilted his large head and narrowed his eyes. “But we should talk, yes. For you would not believe what wonderful coincidence this is. Even as you were following me, quite badly, I might add – you need work on your technique, Sandro could teach you – but even as you were following me, I, too, was looking for you. Are you hungry, Victor Carl?”
I quickly glanced at my watch.
“Never trust man who checks clock to see if he is hungry,” said Trocek. “Pleasure follows no timetable. What does gut tell you?”
I looked up at him for a moment. There was a merry sort of knowingness in his gaze. I wondered what it was he knew.
“That I’m ready to eat,” I said.
“Good boy. Follow me, I know a place.”
And from the size of him, I was sure he did.
11
We ended up in a busy Spanish joint in Old City called Amada, just the two of us at a high butcher-block table next to a bar with hams hanging from the ceiling and wooden casks in the wall. The décor was spare, the crowd was hip, the sign outside read tapas y vinos. Trocek was familiar enough with the specialties of the place to order for us both without a menu, providing us each a tall beer and a wide selection of appetizers on little plates. I pawed at the octopus and marinated white anchovies while piles of cod croquettes and crab-stuffed peppers disappeared within the maw hidden in Trocek’s beard.
“I love Iberia,” said Trocek with a lecherous growl. “The food, the sun, Portuguese girls. I have a home in southern Portugal, in the Algarve.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Nice? Nice is for schoolboys with pimples on their chests.”
“Have you ever been to Nice?”
He looked at me for a moment, pulled at his beard for a bit, and then stuffed a folded piece of Serrano ham into his mouth.
“Even thugs in Iberia, like Sandro, have special quality. A cruelty that comes from too much sun and not enough honest work. He is from Cádiz, the unemployment capital of Europe. He had much time to learn his current trade.”