She put her suitcase down and came closer. “What is it, Kenneth?” she asked softly. “What’s happening between you and the Russians?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “You can stay here or go and have your news conference. It doesn’t matter. I have a lot of work to do, and I’m going to have to get on with it.” He looked at her. “There’s a phone in the living room. You can call your own cab if you want.”
He turned and headed for the stairs.
“Who’d you hire to replace my father?” Janice called after him.
“No one,” he said heavily.
“I want the job.”
He stopped and turned back.
“That’s right,” she said, her face intent. “I want the job. I’m certainly qualified. I have my degree in business. And experience.”
“You know nothing about the grain business.”
“You’d be surprised how much I know. I’m my father’s daughter. After my mother died, there were only the two of us, and he would sit and talk with me every night when he came home from work. I grew up in the business.”
“Impossible,” Newman said, although the idea was intriguing.
“Bullshit,” she swore. “I have a feeling that at this moment I’m the only person you can trust. Are you going to pass that up?”
“In trade for what?” Newman asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know goddamned well what I mean, Janice,” he shouted. “You don’t want a job with me. You want to pry into my business in the hopes it will lead to Paul’s killers.”
Her lower lip was beginning to quiver. “You can’t understand…”
“Oh, yes, I can!” he shouted. “But if you want your father’s murderer you’re going to have to go to Buenos Aires. You’re going to have to talk to my wife, and to a man named Perés, the chief of police down there. They’re working hand in hand.”
“Kenneth…”
Newman was hurting. He felt as if a Mack truck had run over his brain. “You want to know about the Russians? Last week in Athens, Dybrovik, the head of Exportkhleb, was murdered by the KGB. They’re probably going to be coming after me pretty soon, unless I continue to play ball with them.”
She didn’t move or say a word.
“You want murders? How about one hundred and forty killed in New Orleans when the Cargill elevator blew up? Cargill, you should know, is one of my competitors. Then we have Gérard Louis Dreyfus. I met a KGB colonel who admitted he ordered Gérard’s assassination. Louis Dreyfus was also one of my biggest competitors. How about Vance-Ehrhardt? Even being married to one of them didn’t help. Jorge and his wife were kidnapped. They found them dead in a Buenos Aires apartment.”
Still Janice said nothing. But her eyes were wide, and she was shaking.
“They were all my competitors for a corn buy the Russians have set up with me. So why was Paul killed? It was an accident, Janice. Simple as that. The Vance-Ehrhardt family wanted me dead. They figured I was behind the kidnapping. For all I know, my own wife ordered my assassination.”
“Christ,” Janice said, and she started toward him as the telephone in the living room rang.
Newman took a deep breath, then went to answer it. It was McCarthy from Abex.
“They’re in the middle of a revolution down there, Mr. Newman! Half of Buenos Aires is in flames!”
“How’d it start? Who’s behind it?”
“AP says it’s the Montoneros in combination with low-level military personnel. The UPI and Reuters say it’s a farmers’ revolution.”
Janice had come into the living room and was watching him.
“Anything on the Vance-Ehrhardt estate, or on Lydia?”
“Not a thing, sir,” McCarthy said.
“Keep trying, then, and let me know the moment you hear anything else.”
“Yes, sir,” McCarthy said.
Newman hung up the phone and turned. Janice screamed, and the table lamp next to him exploded in a million pieces, plunging the room into darkness.
27
“Get down,” Newman shouted to Janice as he lunged to the right and ducked down behind an overstuffed easy chair. Another shot was fired from the window, the sound soft and springy, like the noise an airgun might make. Newman had his pistol out, the hammer cocked back.
The house suddenly was very still. Newman peered around the side of the chair toward the window. At first he couldn’t see a thing, but then he thought he caught a movement.
“Kenneth,” Janice whimpered.
A third shot came from the window, and this time Kenneth caught the muzzle flash. He raised his own pistol and fired two shots, the noise deafening in the confines of the room. And then he waited, not at all sure whether he had hit his target.
The house was silent again for a moment, but then Newman heard a faint scratching sound. From outside. It was almost as if someone were digging outside the window.
“Janice? Are you all right?” he called softly.
“I’m all right. Did you get him?”
“I don’t know,” Newman said, relieved. He crawled over to where Janice was crouched down by the arch from the vestibule. She was trembling. “I’m going outside to have a look.”
She grabbed him. “Oh, God, don’t go out there.”
“We can’t just stay in here like this. If someone heard the shots, they may have called the police. I don’t want to have to answer any questions just now. Besides, I think it’s possible I hit whoever it was.”
It was too dark for him to make out the expression on her face. She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.
“Be careful… boss,” she said.
He looked toward the window, but could see nothing except a lighter rectangle. He felt strange.
“Stay here,” he said.
In the vestibule he got to his feet and hurried around the stairs and through the kitchen to the back door.
There was no one out there, as far as he could tell, but that didn’t mean much. The wide back yard led into a long line of thick hedges, and trees separating his property from the place up the hill. Half the Russian army could have been hiding in the shadows.
He didn’t think there was anyone else waiting, though, and after all he had been through the gamble didn’t seem to matter as much as it would have a month or two ago.
He stepped through the kitchen door and, gripping the pistol in his right hand, tiptoed down off the porch and hurried around to the side of the house, where he pulled up short.
He could see the street from here. At the bottom of his drive, across the street, a car was parked. He could not see if anyone was inside it.
He hesitated in the shadows at the corner of the house, staring at the car, wondering what would happen when he moved out to the front, into plain view. Then he decided he was being overly cautious. If there had been more than one person out here, then more than one person would have fired. Or one would have come into the house through the back door. There had been just one killer out here.
Newman took a deep breath in an effort to clear the tightness in his chest and started up the side of the house toward the front. Sweat was beginning to form on his forehead. He was a businessman, not cut out for this kind of adventure, and he wondered why he hadn’t called the police after all, and let them work it out. But what would he have told them? That he had been with a Russian in Athens who had been killed, and now he feared the KGB was after him?
The living room window was just around the corner. A dark bundle was lying in the bushes beneath it. Crouching low, Newman moved closer until he could see that it was a man. He had apparently tried to crawl away, making the noise Newman had heard in the house. But, Christ, he was dead now.