“Yes,” Devereaux said. “Perhaps I’ll come around and show this photograph to your staff. Perhaps they’ve seen this man.”
Devereaux stood very close to Trevor and saw the effect of his words.
“Well, we can arrange something, I suppose,” Trevor said. “I don’t like my staff bothered by the police. They have nothing to do with this.”
“But what is this, Trevor?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What is this really about, Trevor?”
“You break into my house and put rude questions to me. By what authority, Mr. Devereaux?”
Devereaux waited a moment longer to let him at least feel the intimidation in his presence. And then he turned.
“How will you get out of here?”
“With your permission,” Devereaux said. “Whatever it is you’re doing, Trevor, you don’t want to draw the attention of the London police to yourself. In case I am who I say I am.”
“And if you are an… agent of this… whatever it is, a legitimate representative of the United States, why aren’t you cooperating with the police in the first place? Hiding in the trunk of my car like that?”
Devereaux smiled. His smile lighted the wan, gray face in a strange way that unnerved Trevor. He felt the beginning of a tremor in his left hand, the one that held his drink.
“Yes. That’s the problem. We make decisions all the time. I’ll leave by the front door and it’ll be your decision, whether to call the police guard on me. And on yourself. Good night, Trevor.”
He walked to the front entry hall and opened the front door. The policeman on the sidewalk turned to look at him and at Trevor standing behind him in the door.
“Good night, Trevor,” Devereaux said. He started down the three steps to the walkway. He turned again, standing in front of the policeman, and said, “I’ll see you soon.”
Trevor said, “Yes.”
Devereaux said to the policeman, “Good evening.”
“Good evening, sir,” the policeman said.
And Devereaux knew then that Trevor Armstrong was going to complicate the matter of getting Henry McGee.
43
Maureen pushed the barrel against his ear. The street lamp was out because she had seen to that. They were scarcely a hundred feet from Trevor’s front door and she could see the policeman there, although he could not see her.
“Good evenin’, fella, and don’t say a word in reply or you’ll lose your hearing and a few other faculties.”
Devereaux stood still.
“Walk round the corner with me, love, and don’t even think of running away.”
Devereaux walked around the corner and they were out of sight of the town house. A blue Ford Escort sat on the curb in a yellow-striped no-parking zone. A ticket was affixed to the windshield wiper.
“Open the boot, fella,” she said in her throaty voice.
“You could have picked a bigger car,” Devereaux said.
“I told you about talkin’.” She slapped the side of his head with the pistol barrel and he crumpled half into the trunk. She put the pistol in her raincoat and picked up his legs and crammed him into the rest of the trunk. She closed the lid.
Maureen drove out to Maida Vale and then down the Edgware Road to the street where Marie Dreiser waited for her. It was part one of the plan, to get the money and to get Henry McGee at the same time, and it had worked so smoothly that Maureen was sure the rest would work as well. Henry had been right about one thing: You couldn’t go on with a person like Marie, she was crazy as a bedbug, and once they had fixed matters with Trevor Armstrong and with Henry, there’d be no splitting of the five million. Five million cash and she’d have no trouble financing the revolution and finding the volunteers. Only this time, they’d follow her plans and her way of thinking. There was only one enemy and the way to get that enemy was to target them, not pub crawlers in Belfast. Kill the English bastards and start at the top with the governors of the state, the ministers and toadies and MPs who voted the wrong way consistently on the question of Ulster. Oh, she had some big ideas all right and Marie wouldn’t figure in them so she’d have to be a victim. And what did it matter anyway? She was just a terrorist-for-profit, corrupting Matthew O’Day in his greed to betray the farm and the cause.
By the time she reached the flat, she had justified herself to herself completely.
The street was dark, gloomier than the average residential block in London because of the excess of trees and the absence of street lamps, all knocked out by Maureen.
She opened the trunk and held the pistol against his head. He was awake.
“D’ya see, fella, the way it is?”
“I see.”
“Then crawl out careful like and we’ll go inside.”
They went up the steps to the door. “Ring the bell,” Maureen said, putting the prod of the revolver in his back.
He rang the bell.
Marie opened the door. She stared at him.
Maureen grinned viciously. “Mister Trevor Armstrong, at your service,” she said.
Devereaux looked at the girl he had known in Rome more than a year before. The woman whose life he had saved. She stared back at him.
“Well, ain’t ya gonna say nothin’?”
Devereaux’s cheek was bruised. His eyes were terrible and gray and sick.
“What should I say?” Marie said. “You got the wrong man, Maureen. You stupid bitch, you got the wrong man.”
Maureen’s face fell.
Devereaux stood between the two women.
“He come out of that house, he talked to the copper on the walk, he—”
“He’s the wrong man. He isn’t Trevor Armstrong,” she said.
“Then who the hell is he then?” She prodded him with the pistol and reached into his pocket. She found the automatic.
“A fookin’ gun? He’s from the fookin’ police then? I picked me up a fookin’ copper,” Maureen said. The smile began again and it wasn’t very nice. “A fookin’ pig, love, I got me a pig to make squeal—”
“Be quiet, Maureen, are you crazy, you want to fire that thing in here?”
“Then I’ll cut his throat—”
“And we’ll walk around a corpse for the next week? Get rid of him someplace else, I don’t care.”
Devereaux looked at her. Her eyes were tough. What did she owe him? Another fucking policeman, the world had too many to start with. What had he done for her?
But save her life.
“I don’t owe you anything,” she said to him.
Maureen pulled back the gun. “You know him? You know this copper?”
“He’s no copper,” Marie said. “I knew him in Berlin. Ein volk, eh?”
“Ein volk,” Devereaux said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“He was in the American consulate there. He picked me up and gave me candy, didn’t you, lamb? We were all the same, eh? Ein volk.”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“Then he’s a fookin’ American diplomat? Is that it?”
“That’s it,” Marie said.
“And he’s carrying a pistol?”
“He carried a pistol in Berlin. I suppose it’s the same here, eh? You never know when you’re going to be kidnapped.” And Marie laughed. “You never know where and when and by whom. Us, lamb, it was a couple of girls that did it.”
“The point is, what do you do now?”
“Why were ya talkin’ with Armstrong?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? The matter of Flight One forty-seven. The plane that went down.”
“Jesus,” Maureen said. She had fucked up. “Jesus,” was all she could think to say.
“Oh, no,” Marie said. “Maybe we can turn this thing around for us.”
Maureen said, “We’re gonna have to off him, no matter what.”