"Not much chance of either," she said. "Well, thanks. I owe you another one." She turned and left his office.
As Elizabeth walked along the hallway, she pressed the wheel on her phone to automatically dial home. After a moment she heard Amanda's voice. "Hello?"
"Hi, honey. I'm still at work. I'm afraid something new has come in and I've got to deal with it tonight. Can you and Jim cook something up for dinner between you? There's plenty in the refrigerator."
"Sure. It was getting to be that time, so I already took a look in there and have my eye on a few things. We'll see what his majesty wants."
"Tell him I said he has to help. Or if you cook, he cleans up."
"We'll work it out," Amanda said. "I'll see you later."
"Yes," said Elizabeth. "But don't wait up for me. Tomorrow's a school day, and this could be a late one."
When they'd hung up, Elizabeth spent a minute or two walking along the nearly deserted hallway of the big building, feeling a kind of emptiness. Even the phrases were formulaic-something came up. Don't wait up for me. She sounded like a cheating husband, not a devoted mother. When things calmed down, she would do better.
She rode the elevator down to the computer rooms in the basement. She was going to see what the old men were up to. If the Butcher's Boy was right, tonight was the only chance to learn where they were going to meet. The day after tomorrow, they would all be back in their houses behind the high walls and at the ends of quarter-mile driveways. But tonight, if her source was correct, they would be on the move, like hermit crabs out for a walk without their shells. The trick was to pick them up before they could scuttle back in.
10
As Schaeffer drove through the night back on the Canadian highway again, he thought about the life he had lived in England, and about the Honourable Meg. The Honourable Margaret Holroyd was the only child of Lord David Holroyd, Marquis of Axeborough, and Lady Anne Holroyd of Harrelsford, and she had been brought up in a house that looked like a castle and had secret rooms and a passageway that emerged outside the walls across a pond. Nonetheless, she claimed to have been a poor, sad, runny-nosed creature through most of her childhood. It was apparently true that she and her social set, all of whom seemed to share the coloring and facial characteristics of near relatives, had been ignored by their parents most of the time and sent early to cruel stone boarding schools where the rules involved being hit with sticks and bathing in cold water.
She had told Schaeffer about a friend's hideous Aunt Gwendolyn who caught Meg telling a ghost story at a party and stood her up as an example to the other children while she told them that liars went to hell. Meg told him, "But I wasn't sure I was on the Devil's side until I heard he'd invented sex. It seemed he had invented it just for me, to conform to my temperament and taste."
Even though the Holroyds and their complicated network of relations had large amounts of money that seemed to appear in their bank accounts magically from rents and royalties and interest, he was fairly certain that in being raised by Eddie Mastrewski, he had been the privileged child.
Eddie was a very tough man, and he never hid from the boy that the world they lived in was an unforgiving place. He raised the boy with foul language but no harsh words, and they spent most of their time together. He wasn't against schools, and knew that not going would lead to trouble, but he wasn't about to enforce anything the school said the boy had to do.
Eddie was born in a small Pennsylvania coal mining town, and he had started out working in the mines. He was not a genius, but at eighteen he knew that life in the mines was harder than anything he was likely to find elsewhere. He was drafted into the army, and when they let him out a couple of years later, he had learned a skill. He could kill people. He moved to a big city where there were men who would pay him well for killing people, and with practice, he got better at it. He also needed to have some profession that was legal, so he got a job working in a butcher's shop and learned to be an expert butcher. Later he passed both skills on to the boy.
Schaeffer didn't meet the Honourable Margaret Holroyd until he'd already had a fairly long career in killing. After a bad experience involving the Balacontano family, he had flown to England and retired to the picturesque and ancient city of Bath. He bought a comfortable old house and remodeled it in ways that would have horrified the architectural preservationists. He replaced perfectly functional old windows with arrays of glass bricks high on the walls that let in light but would frustrate snipers. He had unobtrusive, locked cabinets installed at various points in the house and stocked them with loaded firearms of several types. He had closed-circuit television cameras mounted on all sides of the exterior, and had impermeable steel doors on the entrances and on the room where he slept. When he had satisfied his sense of security, he settled in and began to live a quiet, solitary existence.
At the time Meg Holroyd was a bored, aristocratic young woman who spent all of her time going to parties and outings with a shifting group of highborn young men and women who appeared to have known her since birth. The moment he first saw her he was captivated. She was not merely pretty. She had something far rarer. She was perfect. Her skin was like a baby's, but the shape of her face was a sculpture in polished ivory with delicate, straight features and brilliant, knowing eyes. She was well educated, witty, and clever. But as she freely admitted to him, she was a liar. She invented fanciful scandalous stories about her friends, neighbors, even national and historical figures.
On the day she met him at an educational lecture in Bath, she made him take her to tea and told him she had been thrown out of the local antiquarian society. She had gone to the last meeting, where she'd announced that she had put a powerful Peruvian aphrodisiac in the punch, and set off an orgy. She said the power of suggestion had caused a mass shedding of clothes as the members helped one another to disrobe and became a tangle of limbs. The respectable ladies and gentlemen, believing themselves compelled by the exotic South American drug, had lost all inhibition. Later, they had voted her out of the scholarly society on charges of mass sexual assault and adultery-by-proxy.
Her stories were always too outrageous for even a naive stranger from America to believe, but always amusingly recounted in the most vivid detail, with the names of the most unlikely people attached. He liked her stories for the same reason she told them-they should have happened. He became her favorite audience because he always listened patiently to the whole story before he laughed.
It had been a pleasant existence for him until the day, on an outing with her friends to the races at Brighton, he had been recognized. It had been an unlikely accident. He had never been to Brighton before, and he was seen by a person who fit in there as badly as he did, young Mario Talarese from New York City. The Talarese family had a connection with the Cappadocia brothers, a pair of Sicilians who ran some gambling enterprises in London, and the Cappadocias had taken on New York underboss Tony Talarese's nephew as an apprentice. When Mario Talarese saw the man who was once called the Butcher's Boy, he made a terrible error. Instead of placing an international call to his uncle, or even talking to the Cappadocias, he had gone after the Butcher's Boy with only one of the Cappadocias' waiters, who carried a straight razor, and a British bookie named Baldwin who secretly had no interest in getting into a fight with anyone who had once killed for a living. Baldwin had been right to worry, because in an hour he and the others were dead.
Afterward, Schaeffer had told Meg a lie of his own, that the men he'd just killed in front of her eyes had been Bulgarian secret agents who had recognized him as a CIA agent in deep cover. He said he needed to rush back to the United States for a few weeks to complete the mission the Bulgarians had been sent to thwart.