The influence of power on some people still amazes me. I let Villay wait three days-giving him time to whip himself into a frenzy of uncertainty and excitement-before I call. He talks to me like I’m a long-lost friend. I invite him to bring his wife to a small dinner at my lake house upstate in Skaneateles the following week, and he says he can’t wait.
“I used to have a place on Skaneateles Lake, gosh, fifteen years ago,” he says. “Have you eaten at Krebs?”
“No, but I’ve heard about it.”
“Are you on the east side or the west?”
There is a strain in his voice.
“I think east,” I say.
He clears his throat and says, “So you get the sunsets. My place was on the west side. Actually, it belonged to my first wife’s family.”
“I can’t believe more people don’t know about it,” I say. “The first time I saw it-that aqua green color-it reminded me of the Caribbean.”
“We used to drink the water straight out of the lake,” he says. “I don’t know if they still do.”
“They do,” I say. “Haven’t you been back?”
“No. That’s kind of my past life.”
“Great,” I say. “There’s nothing like the old days.”
47
WHEN I WAKE UP, I am sweating. My spine is rigid and my fingers are clenched. I open my eyes and realize where I am. Sometimes, in that moment between being asleep and awake, I think I’m still in the box. I turn my head into the feather pillow to wipe away the dampness. The sheet and pillowcases are combed cotton.
I don’t like to sleep. Not just because I sometimes forget I’m free, but because I have already lost so much time. I inhale the smell of the tall pines whispering outside my window and wonder if any of my weekend guests will appreciate the smell and sound of those trees as much as I do. I wonder if Lexis still would, or if the cesspool she’s chosen to live in has deadened her senses.
I push her from my mind and get out of bed. I do my pull-ups on the doorframe, working my arms until they’re numb. Now I’m sweating and ready for a run. As I descend the carved wooden staircase, I run my hand over the smooth shiny railing, admiring the work. The foyer has newly laid tile and a crystal chandelier the size of an armchair that throws bite-size prisms of light across the face of the oil paintings on the paneled wall.
Outside, I stretch for a few minutes. A male bluebird boasts from his treetop and swallows twitter and swoop in the pale light. I start in an easy lope down the curving drive and look back up through the thick old maples at the gleaming yellow house flanked by blue spruce. The white trim around the lancet-arched windows and the new slate mansard roof is crisp and clean.
Out on the blacktop road, a colorful troop of cyclists passes me, drafting one another up the long country hill. To my right, a tractor rumbles across a field, spraying manure. The smell turns my stomach, but at the top of the next rise, the wind from the south brings me a face full of fresh lake air and I can see for twenty miles to the south end. Out on the water a handful of triangular sails glides back and forth in the dawn.
I love to run without stopping. Sweating. Free. Gliding like the boats. Soon the sun turns the sky from red to pink, then white before it rises in a blinding ball. I am numb. The sound of my breathing and the steady stream of sweat seem far away. When I reach Mandana, a small hamlet halfway down the lake, I turn back. Bert has seen to it that the staff has breakfast waiting for me at the small linen-dressed table on the back porch. Even though he is cleanly shaven and neatly dressed, there are bags under Bert’s bloodshot eyes.
“Bad night?” I say.
He glares at me and says, “You expect me to sleep good here?”
“What about soaring with the spirit of the night?” I say. “Isn’t that what your grandmother used to say?”
“The night sky in this place is too thick with crows,” he says. “I’ll sleep tomorrow night. If it comes.”
I take a sip of coffee and say, “Our guests haven’t even arrived and you’re ready for it to end.”
Bert sits down across from me and puts a napkin in his lap before taking a piece of grilled salmon off the serving plate and eating it with his fingers like a bear.
“I just hope that you don’t go so far down this river of darkness that you can’t get back,” he says, looking steadily at me without blinking his big dark eyes. “Because you know where that river goes.”
“I think with the money I have,” I say, taking a bite of toast, “that I can buy a boat with a motor.”
“Even a boat with a motor can’t go up a falls,” he says.
“I thought you hated the man,” I say.
“I do hate him,” he says. “I’d like him dead, but I wouldn’t invite him to stay at my house before I killed him. Besides, I don’t think you should mess with the spirits, man. Make them angry.”
I look at my watch and say, “Speaking of angry spirits, Mr. Lawrence should be here by now.”
“You better hope the real spirits don’t get mad,” Bert says.
“They’re okay with it. I checked,” I say.
I smell the smoke from a cigarette. A moment later, a man in dark slacks and leather jacket with long red hair rounds the corner of the house. He waves without speaking and tosses what’s left of his butt down on the grass, grinding it with his toe. Chuck Lawrence was recommended to me by Vance. He’s a former government employee. Very smart. Very connected. Very effective.
Chuck and I go upstairs to the guestroom where the Villays will be staying. Chuck holds out his palm. In his hand is something not much bigger than a pin. He points to a spot high up on the wall.
“I inserted one just like this right here,” he says. “It’s a projection filament. I took off the baseboard and put the transmission unit in the wall. There’s another one over here that’s a camera so you can see what’s going on. There’s a speaker here and a microphone there.
“I’ll do the same thing in their house tonight,” he says. “I just wanted you to see that you really can’t detect it. They’ll have no idea. Come on, I’ll show you how it works.”
He draws the shades in the room and turns out the lights, shutting the door behind us. We go into my master suite, and Chuck sits down at the desk. He opens the laptop that’s hooked into the ISDN line and boots it up.
“I can call it up from my computer too. Everything is transmitted digitally,” he says. “Like a cell phone. The guy who put the artistic part of it together is a special effects genius out in Hollywood. You said spend whatever it takes. What till you see how good this looks.”
He shows me what the images will look and sound like, then gives me two small vials.
“Green is for him,” he says, closing up his computer. “Red for her. One drop on each of their toothbrushes. Just one, and remember, green for go, he’ll be the one up all night. She gets red. Stop. She’ll be out of it.”
“And you’ve got their maid in Hewlett Harbor all set?” I ask.
“Took some doing,” he said. “I had to go all the way to a quarter million, but we’ll be watching her and she knows it, so we should be fine. Now, they’re definitely out of there tonight, right?”
“Yes,” I say. “And if something happens, I’ll call you right away.”
“I’ll be in and out in a couple of hours,” he says, “so, as long as they’re on that airplane this afternoon, we should be fine.”
“I like it, Chuck,” I say. “I like it all.”
He shakes his head and says, “This one’s different, I tell you that. Could have had the guy terminated a lot quicker and a lot easier.”
“Too easy,” I say.
48
I FIND BERT on the back porch leafing through Travel amp; Leisure. “Find anything interesting?” I ask. “Not that you care,” he says, “but there’s a dude ranch out in Montana that I’d like to visit someday.”