“Why?” I had to know if he felt the same way I did. There was no reason for the question beyond that.
“She was right,” he said. “I had no dignity.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Quiller?”
“Are you an intelligent man, Mr. Oliver?”
“Compared to what?”
He smiled and then nodded.
I was escorted out by only one guard. His name tag read SILAS. I wondered if that was a first or last name. At the entrance to the visitor center I was about to walk off when Silas touched my forearm.
“This is the last time you’ll be able to see him,” the guard told me.
“Why is that?”
“The tit’s run dry.”
They were waiting at my car. Two men. Both white and of normal build, wearing suits and standing at ease.
“Mr. Oliver,” the one in the lighter-colored cloth said.
“Yeah?”
“What did Quiller say to you?”
“Don’t you have a microphone on him?”
“He put an electric fan in front of it,” said the man in the darker clothes. “He’s smart.”
“He’s my client,” I said lightly. “I wouldn’t want to betray that trust.”
“You’ll never get your money,” the first man said.
“Some things are more important than money.”
“Not if you’re smart,” said the second man.
“Who are you guys?” I asked.
“What did he say?” asked Second.
I took a moment, pretending to consider the request. But there was no choice.
“He asked me to put an ad in the online magazine People-for-People, from an interested aardvark.”
“What was it supposed to say?” asked First.
“T-F-I-A-B-O-A-three-two-one-N.”
“Did he tell you what that meant?” asked Second.
“No,” I lied.
The men stared at me, maybe expecting a mental breakdown under the pressure. I had no doubt that my life was on the line.
“Be careful, Mr. Oliver, these are dangerous times,” Second said.
“You want me to put the ad in?”
“No. We’ll take it from here.”
I drove home happy to be alive and outraged at the kind of world I had to live in.
30
Oliya was waiting for me. We squandered three or four sentences and then I showed her the blowup mattress Aja stored in the closet of her office space. She thanked me and was about the process of making her bed when I went into the office. There I logged onto a bogus activity board and entered the real code Quiller gave me for his wife. The website was TINNY-TINY-AND-WRONG-614. I included my name and a temporary phone number. Then I lowered the rope ladder that led from the trapdoor to my upstairs apartment.
Before I could start the climb the cell phone dinged. The entire text consisted of one symbol—∞.
I camped out in the bedroom upstairs, not sleeping all that much. Those intermittent naps were dominated by the dream of having to split a thousand-pound boulder more or less evenly. There were no tools, and even if there had been I didn’t have the skill or experience to accomplish such a task.
When I finally got up I sat at the end-edge of the bed so tired that standing seemed impossible.
One of my many burner phones was in a pants pocket on the floor at my feet. I snagged the slacks with a toe, lifted the phone, and texted the word RED to a number I knew by heart.
Six minutes later the little radio-phone chirped.
“Hey, Mel, what took you?”
“I just dropped Yuri off in Montreal. Drove the sucker up in the trunk. Gave him a little cash and a few addresses.”
“How much cash?”
“Fifty thousand.”
“I can cover it but it’ll take a few weeks.”
“Don’t worry about it, brother. I like having you in my debt.”
“You coming back down?”
“Thought I’d spend the night and cruise back in the morning.”
“I’ll call you.”
Oliya and I got to Silbrig Haus by 8:30 a.m. The front gate knew us and our car. My grandmother met us at the front door. She was using a hollow silver walking stick, but that was the only concession she made to the wound.
“Who’s this?” Grandma B asked, her wide eyes taking my bodyguard in.
“Oliya Ruez,” she replied. “I’m here helping your grandson.”
“He could sure use the help of a good woman,” GB agreed.
“Daddy.” Aja was coming through a middle foyer door.
There was lots of kissing and hugging, relief that everybody was still alive.
After a while the little crowd made it to the breakfast room. I wasn’t surprised that the exploded window had already been replaced.
“Roger joining us?” I asked.
“No. He had to go out of town,” Brenda said.
“Where to?”
“He didn’t say.”
We were halfway through the celebratory meal when Monica showed up. She’d lost at least five pounds. Her hair was wild and there was a button missing on her blouse. She moved woodenly and her eyes were glazed. Looking almost as bad as Quiller had in the bowels of Rikers, she lurched to a chair and sat down on it, somehow askew.
“He’s dying out there,” were her first words to me.
Looking at her, I understood that what we had was never love. Pure love, like distilled nicotine, was as deadly as a bullet through the brain.
“He’s fine,” I said.
“No, he’s not!” she yelled, knocking her heavy chair over as she leapt to her feet.
“Monica!” Grandma B commanded.
“It’s okay, Grandma. She’s worried about her man.”
“It’s not a joke, Joe,” Monica said, trying to keep her words in order.
“I solved the problem,” I said. “Oliya here is gonna take you out to Brownsville, pick up Coleman, and then go to Art Tomey’s office. There your husband can tell them everything he’s done. He’ll lose the money and he’ll probably get fired, but at least he’ll be free and nobody will come after him. You might have to get a job.”
Monica righted the chair and sat back down. Her fists were clenched. Her eyes, like fish eyes, were perpetually stunned and unblinking.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“More than I should have, that’s for sure.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Joe. I need to know what to tell him.”
“Oliya knows how to get there. Art has already made the deal with the feds.”
“And what about the people after him?”
“They’re not gonna be a problem anymore. You’re just gonna have to take my word on that.”
Her startled look turned to hatred. If she had a loaded gun I am sure she would have used it.
“I need to go to him now. Now,” Monica insisted. “Now.”
“Mom, we haven’t finished breakfast yet.”
Standing up again, Monica said, “Now.”
I turned to Oliya and nodded, saying, “You can take the Lincoln.”
The lethal jack-of-all-trades stood too. She motioned to my ex and the two left without another word.
“What’s wrong with her?” Aja asked the universe.
“She’s in love.”
I found Forthright’s observation center on the third floor of the mansion. There were a dozen monitors watched by a single sentry who moved her head back and forth across the screens like a barn cat on the hunt for her next kill.
Forthright was smoking a cigar, seated in a big blocky chair pressed up against the far corner of the large room. The outsize piece of furniture most resembled an old-time electric chair.
“I was just getting ready to come down and find you,” he announced.