Finally he had said, “Come with me,” and walked through the French doors into the library without looking back to see if she had heard him. When they were in the secret little room behind the walls of books where nobody would ever disturb them, he had spoken to her as he probably spoke to his contemporaries. “There are times in life when it’s useful to know of a place like this. Hiding places are extremely difficult to come by, so treat it with respect. You may come here whenever you please.”
She missed him now as she lay on the leather couch, staring up at the vaulted ceiling and wondering if she had seen the last of Michael Schaeffer. The whole day had degenerated from a succession of bright, vivid, jarring sights and sounds into a collection of events she was too exhausted to remember very well. He was gone already, back to a place where serious people had serious things to do, and engaged in awful, deadly struggles to accomplish some ephemeral advantage. It wasn’t so much his disappearance that disturbed her; it was the discovery that he really belonged to that life instead of hers. It didn’t even matter that he’d told her all those lies about being a spy. That she, of all people in the world, understood. He had only wanted to make it all seem nicer and prettier for her. If he came back, she knew she would probably marry him. She already was listed in Debrett’s as the last of the Holroyds, and she was a whole generation too late to do anything selfless about it. Perhaps she couldn’t do anything about the fact that he was obviously some kind of criminal, but she could be his place to hide. Gwendolyn’s aunt Clara would probably have said it was typical of her to fall in love with the worst person she ever met. She devoted a moment to hoping that Clara’s angels had volumes of black marks on her when she had died a few years ago, and this took her mind off the present just long enough for sleep to come.
As the passengers shuffled up the aisle toward the door, Charles Ackerman reached under his seat and retrieved his small suitcase. He had brought only one. The place to trap a man like him was in an airport baggage-claim area, when he had just stepped off an international flight that required going through metal detectors at both ends and was standing mesmerized in front of a turning carousel of luggage.
He joined the agonizingly slow queue with the others. Here it was only ten in the evening, but it was three o’clock in the morning for the load of prisoners straggling into the airport. This suited him perfectly.
When the tired functionary at the Customs and Immigration barrier looked at the passport, a hint of interest almost snapped him out of his lethargy. “You haven’t been home in some time, Mr. Ackerman.”
“No,” he said. “I live in England now.” He watched with fascination as the man placed his open passport on a machine that appeared to be an optical scanner. That was new. He was glad he had used the Ackerman passport. He had obtained it fifteen years ago on the strength of a bogus birth certificate, but the State Department had issued it and he had renewed it regularly, so it was real enough. The man read something on a computer screen that didn’t surprise him, then handed it back.
“Here on business?”
“No,” Ackerman answered. “I just haven’t been home in a long time.”
“Anything to declare?”
“Nothing.” It was all negatives, all denials: I’m nobody, doing nothing here, bringing nothing with me; forget me. The man ran his hands inside the suitcase quickly and moved on to the next person in line.
He latched the suitcase and moved into the open terminal, where rows of faces glanced hopefully at him, scrutinizing his features, and then, instantly failing to recognize the right configuration, discarded him and looked behind him for the brother, the father, the business associate. He passed the waiting throng and moved toward the lockers built into the far wall. He saw one with a key sticking out of it, then remembered he had no American coins. He moved on to the gift shop. There was a woman who seemed to be an Indian behind the counter, staring intently at a garish tabloid she had draped over the cash register. As he approached, she set it aside and he could read the headline: RUSSIANS FIND WORLD WAR II BOMBER IN CRATER ON THE MOON. Meg would have said it had something for everyone she knew.
“I need to change some English money,” he said.
She pointed out into the hall. “The yellow booth.” Then she added confidentially, “They give you more at the bank.”
“Thank you,” he said, and turned to go.
“Haven’t you got an ATM card?”
He had no idea what an ATM card was. There was probably another name for it in England, but he certainly didn’t have one. “No.”
“They’ll screw you out of ten percent. I’ll do it for five.”
He resisted the temptation to smile. New York. It must come from the air or the water. They’ll screw you, but I won’t; we’re in this together. Even the ward politicians got elected that way. “How much can you give me for five hundred pounds?”
“Seven-fifty.”
He had read in The New York Times on the plane that the pound was $1.89, so her five percent was about twenty percent. He counted out five one-hundred-pound notes and accepted the money from the till. He asked for the last ten in singles and the last three in quarters and she gave them without reluctance or an attempt to palm a bill; having taken her fair usury, she wasn’t interested in stealing.
He used the coins to free the locker key, left his belongings in the locker, then strolled to the ticket counter and paid more pounds for a ticket to Los Angeles leaving at seven in the morning. He looked up at the big clock on the wall and reset his watch. He still had almost nine hours.
Out in the street, the cabs were lined up, with an airport policeman flagging them forward whenever a prospect stepped up. As he presented himself, a dirty yellow Dodge shot ahead crazily and rocked to a stop on its useless shock absorbers.
The ride into Manhattan hadn’t changed much in ten years. The buildings were a little older and dirtier than he remembered them, and the cars seemed a little better and cleaner. He was thinking about Antonio Talarese.
The young idiot with the gun had been Mario Talarese. There was no question that he was a relative. More than twelve years ago he had met Antonio Talarese in the back of a small gourmet-food store in lower Manhattan. There had been three men waiting when he had arrived. One had been the owner of the place, an eager shopkeeper type who was standing at a cutting board making a tray of salami and cheese and opening a bottle of wine, as though this were a little party. Talarese had said, “Leave us now,” and the man had gone out to the front to wait on his customers.
He had come to the store to talk about a job with Paul Santorini. At that time Santorini was an upwardly mobile manager for Carlo Balacontano, who had been running a Ponzi scheme on the side, taking money first from a greedy New Jersey real estate agent, then from the agent’s friends, telling them he was putting it out on the street at astronomical rates of interest. He had paid the man inflated interest for months, long enough to be sure he would brag to his friends about his profits. Then they were hooked too, a group of doctors and engineers, even a couple of lawyers who obviously hadn’t spent any time defending criminals. Among them they had given the real estate agent about two million dollars to pass on to his underworld friend. Santorini still had about a million and a half of it in hand, and it was time to make the real estate agent disappear.