Noelle snapped, with more sharpness than her frail condition would allow, “A reporter?”
Manchester was too involved in his own problems to notice Noelle’s slip. He said, “The cruise line company won’t permit unescorted reporters, so I just want to do a fly on the wall kind of thing. Not negative, just fun.”
Carlow said, “So you’re going around looking at things, making notes
“
“And taking pictures, too,” Manchester said. “When nobody’s looking.” To Noelle he said, “That’s why I was coming to you anyway, to get your name.”
Noelle said, “You have pictures of me?Oh, I wouldn’t like that, the way I look”
“You’re beautiful,Miss Jane Ann, is it?”
Carlow said, “But then something else happened. What?”
“There’s a VIP on the ship, I don’t know if you”
“Yeah, we’ve seen him,” Carlow said, thinking, this is it. This is it right here. “What about him?”
“Well, he sayshe’s a state assemblyman named Kotkind,” Manchester said, “but he isn’t. He’s a fake. I knowAssemblyman Kotkind, I’ve interviewed him.”
“Ah,” Carlow said.
“What I can’t figure out,” Manchester said, “is why anybody would dothat. Did the real assemblyman send this guy in his place? He is handing out the assemblyman’s business card. If I say something, mycover is blown and maybe I just make a fool of myself. Or maybe something’s wrong, and the cruise line should know about it. What do you think?”
Noelle said, “I think” and began to cough. She tried to go on talking through the coughs that wracked her poor frail body, and Manchester leaned closer to her, concerned, trying to make out what she was trying to say.
Carlow kept his wallet in his inside jacket pocket because he kept his sap in his right hip pocket; a black leather bag full of sand. It was one smooth movement to reach back, draw it out, lift it up, drop it down, and put Mr. Manchester on ice.
Noelle’s left arm shot out, her hand splayed against Manchester’s chest, and she held him upright on the bench. “Don’t kill him,” she said.
“Of course not,” Carlow told her. He knew as well as she did that the law goes after a killer a lot more determinedly than it goes after a heister. If it were possible to keep this clown alive, Carlow would do it. He said, “I need a gag, and I need something to tie him.”
“You hold him for a minute.”
Carlow pushed the wheelchair a few inches forward, and sat on the bench beside the clown. He put his left elbow up onto the guy’s chest and said, “Okay.”
Noelle was wearing all these filmy garments out of a gothic novel, so now she reached down inside and gritted her teeth and Carlow heard a series of rips. Out she came with several lengths of white cloth, and handed them to him. “I’ve got him now,” she said, and put her hand on Manchester’s chest again.
Carlow bent to tie the ankles together, then tied the wrists behind the back, then stuffed a ball of cloth into Manchester’s mouth and used the last strip to make a gag.
Noelle said, “What are you going to do with him?”
“Lifeboat.”
They’d watched that damn safety drill every night for over a week, so Carlow knew exactly how to open the sliding glass door and how to open one segment of the top of the enclosed lifeboat just below. “You keep him,” he said, and started to rise.
“Wait!”
“For what?”
“Damn it, Mike,” she said. “Get the camera. That’s myface he’s got there, and probably yours, too.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Carlow sat again, and patted him down, and found first the cassette recorder and then the Minolta. “Nice camera,” he commented, and pocketed both.
He looked around. The half-asleep couple were still in the same spot. Toward the stern, three or four people were looking out and downriver at where they’d been, talking together. Carlow stood, crossed to the outer glass wall, slid open a panel, stepped through onto the curved roof of the lifeboat, leaned down, gave the stiff handle a quarter turn, lifted, and a rectangular piece of the roof opened right up. Then he crossed back to Noelle, sat beside Manchester again, and said, “Now I have to get him over there.”
“Put him on my lap,” she said, “and wheel us over.”
“Nice.”
He held Manchester while Noelle wheeled herself backward out of the way. Then he stood, picked up Manchester under the armpits and placed him seated on top of Noelle. “So this is what they call a dead weight,” Noelle said.
Carlow wheeled them both across the promenade to the open glass door, where the cool night air now drifted in. He stopped, and she shoved, and Manchester went toppling out and down into the lifeboat. Carlow winced. He’d land on a stack of life preservers, but still. “Goodbye,” Noelle said.
“He’ll have a headache in the morning,” Carlow commented, as he moved the wheelchair to one side so he could shut everything up again.
“Let him take a picture of that,”she said, unsympathetic. “Asshole.”
7
Susan Cahill didn’t really like Morton Kotkind, Lou Sternberg could tell. She smiled at him, she waved her tits at him, she smoothed the way for him as they made their long slow inspection tour of the ship, she even went out of her way to chat with him during dinner at the captain’s table, since the captain himself was making every effort notto be friendly and accommodating but was instead doing a very good impression of an iceberg from his native land; and yet, Sternberg could tell, Susan Cahill didn’t really like Morton Kotkind.
Which was fine with Sternberg, who hadn’t liked Kotkind either, during those days in the lawyers’ bar on Court Street in Brooklyn, getting to know the man, getting to know him so well it was an absolute pleasure to feed him the Mickey Finn yesterday. Probably, Sternberg thought, Cahill would be just as happy to feed a Mickey to me,and the thought made him smile.
Cahill picked up on that, and smiled right back, across the dinner table. “Mister Assemblyman,” she said, “I believe you’re enjoying yourself.”
“I’m not here to enjoy myself,” he snapped at her, and put his pouty brat face on again, which she bravely pretended not to see.
But in fact he was enjoying himself, hugely, which was rare on a heist. For him, pleasure was at home, his little town house in London 2, Montpelier Gardens, SW6 with its little garden in the back enclosed by ancient stone walls, with roses to left and right, cucumbers and brussels sprouts at the back. There he lived, and in that city his friends lived, people who had nothing to do with any kind of criminality, except possibly in the tax forms they filled out for Inland Revenue.
That was an extra bonus in Sternberg’s living arrangements; he filled out no tax forms anywhere. To be resident in the U.K. for more than six months, legally, one had to sign a statement that one will be supported from outside the country, will neither go on the dole nor take a job away from some native-born Englishman. Howthe foreigner supports himself from outside the country doesn’t matter, only that he does. So there was never a reason to deal with Inland Revenue. At the same time, since he didn’t live or work in the U.S., didn’t even pay any bills or credit accounts or mortgages there, he also flew below the IRS’s radar. Which meant there was no one anywhere to say, “Just how doyou support yourself, Mr. Sternberg?” Lovely.
In fact, it was the occasional job with a trusted associate like Parker that took care of his material wants, while the house in Montpelier Gardens saw to his spiritual needs, so except for the occasional soulless transatlantic airplane ride he was a reasonably happy man, though you could never tell that from his face.
The airplane rides were necessitated by his iron rule that he would never work and live in the same territory. London in fact, all of England was out of bounds. Whenever it was time to restock the bank accounts, it was off to America once more, with Lillian the char left behind to see to the roses and the cucumbers; the brussels sprouts took care of themselves.