He was remembering the long train ride with his mother into Serbia. She had given him something. An ice pick, though he did not know what it was at the time. It was a long rounded and pointed instrument, made of metal, with a wooden handle which had once been painted, and from which the paint had been chipped away.
“Here, you keep this,” she’d said. “You use it if you have to. You stick it straight in…between the ribs.”
How fierce she’d looked in those moments. And he had been so startled. “But who’s going to hurt us?” he had asked. He did not know at this moment whatever became of the ice pick. Perhaps it had been left on the train.
He had failed her, hadn’t he? Failed her and himself. And now he realized-as this smooth car went up on the freeway, and gained speed-he had no weapon, no ice pick, no knife. Even the Swiss Army knife he carried he had left at home because he was taking a plane. They don’t want such things on a plane.
“You’ll feel better once you’ve communicated with the Elders, once you’ve reported in and been officially invited to return home.”
Yuri looked at Stolov, who sat there all in priestly black, with only a bit of white collar showing, and his large pale hands opening and closing as they rested on his knees.
Yuri smiled very deliberately. “You’re right,” he said. “A fax sent to a number in Amsterdam. It is so well calculated to inspire trust.”
“Yuri, please, we need you,” said the man with visible and heartfelt distress.
“I’m sure you do. How far are we from Aaron?”
“Only a few minutes. Everything here is small. Only a few minutes, and we will be there.”
Yuri took the black mouthpiece from the velvet-paneled wall. “Driver,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to stop at a place that sells weapons, guns. You know such a place? Not far out of the way for us?”
“Yes, sir, South Rampart Street.”
“That will be fine.”
“Why are you doing this?” asked Stolov, pale bushy eyebrows knitted, face almost sad.
“It’s the gypsy in me,” said Yuri. “Don’t worry.”
The man on South Rampart Street had an arsenal beneath the glass and on the wall behind him. “You need a Louisiana driver’s license,” he said.
Stolov was watching. This infuriated Yuri, that Stolov stood there, watching, as if he were entitled.
“This is an emergency,” said Yuri. “I need a gun with a long barrel, there, that’s fine. Three fifty-seven Magnum. A box of cartridges. Here.” He took the money out of his pocket, hundred-dollar bills, ten of them, then twenty, slowly counted out. “Do not worry,” he said. “I am not a crook. But I need the gun. You understand?”
He loaded it there, in the shadowy little store with Stolov watching. He put the rest of the bullets into his pockets, divided up in little handfuls, heavy, loose.
As they stepped into the sunlight, Stolov said: “You think it’s a simple matter of shooting this thing?”
“No. You are going to stop it, remember? We are going home, Aaron and I. But we are in danger. You said so. Terrible danger. And now I have my gun.” He gestured to the car. “After you.”
“You must not do anything stupid or foolish,” said the other man. It wasn’t anger this time, just apprehension. He laid his hand on Yuri’s hand. Yuri looked down. He thought how pale was the skin of this Norwegian, and how dark was his own.
“Like what?”
“Like try to shoot it, that’s what.” The man was exasperated. “The Order has a right,” he said, “to finer devotion than this.”
“Hmmm. I understand. Don’t worry about it. As we say all over the world where English is spoken, no problem! OK?”
He flashed a smile at Stolov and opened the door of the car for him and waited for him to get in. Now it was Stolov who was suspicious, uneasy, even a little frightened.
And I barely know how to pull the trigger, Yuri thought.
Twenty-six
MONA HAD NEVER thought her first days at Mayfair and Mayfair would be like this. She was at the big desk in Pierce’s spacious dark-paneled office, typing furiously on a 386 SX IBM-compatible computer, just a tad slower than the monster she had at home.
Rowan Mayfair was still alive now eighteen hours after surgery, and twelve hours after they’d taken her off the machines. Any minute she might stop breathing. Or she might live for weeks. Nobody really knew.
The investigation was forging ahead. Nothing to do right now but stay with the others, and think, and wait, and write.
She banged away on the white keyboard, faintly annoyed by the noisy click. “Confidential to File from Mona Mayfair” was her title. It was protected. No one could access this material except Mona herself. When she got home, she’d transfer via modem. But for now, she couldn’t leave here. This is where she belonged. She had been here since last night. She was writing down everything she had seen, heard, felt, thought.
Meantime every room in the vast complex of offices was occupied, busy soft voices speaking steadily and in conflict with each other, into different phones, behind partially open doors. Couriers came and went.
It was quiet, without panic. Ryan was behind his desk in the large office, as they called it, with Randall, and Anne Marie. Lauren was down the hall. Sam Mayfair and two of the Grady Mayfairs from New York were in the conference rooms using all three phones. Somewhere, Liz Mayfair and Cecilia Mayfair made their calls. The family secretaries, Connie, Josephine and Louise Mayfair, were working in another conference room. Faxes kept rolling in on every machine in the place.
Pierce was here with Mona, letting her have the big machine, on his mammoth mahogany desk, and looking rather defenseless at his secretary’s smaller, more humble computer, in his tie and shirtsleeves, his coat on the back of the chair. He was not doing much of anything, however. He was simply too sleepy, and too grief-stricken, as Mona herself ought to have been, but was not.
The investigation was entirely private, and it could not have been handled any better by anyone else.
They had begun last night in earnest an hour after Rowan had been found. Several times Pierce and Mona had returned to the hospital. They had been there again at sunrise. And then gone back to work. Ryan, Pierce, Mona and Lauren were the nucleus of the investigation. Randall and several of the others came and went. It was now some eighteen hours since they had commenced their phone calls, their faxes, their communications. It was getting on dusk, and Mona was lightheaded and hungry, but much too excited to think about either thing.
Someone would bring some supper in a little while, wouldn’t they? Or maybe they would go uptown. Mona didn’t want to leave the office. She figured the next piece of information would be from a Houston emergency room, where the mysterious man, six and a half feet tall, had had to seek some sort of medical help.
The Houston truck driver had been the most important link.
This was the man who had picked up Rowan yesterday afternoon. He had stopped in St. Martinville last night to tell the local police about the thin, crazed woman who had struck off on her own into the swamps. On account of him, they had found Rowan. He had been called, questioned further. He had described the place in Houston where she’d run up to his truck. He told all the things she said, how she was desperate to get to New Orleans. He confirmed that as of yesterday evening when he last saw her, Rowan had been right in the head. Crazed perhaps, but talking, walking, thinking. Then she had gone off alone into the swamps.
“That woman was in pain,” he’d told Mona on the phone this morning, recapitulating the entire tale. “She was hugging herself, you know, like a woman having cramps.”