“Are you at the old address in Chester County, Mr. Griffith?”
“Yes, Miss Scobey, we’re still in the same place, R.D. #1, Black Velvet Lane.”
“Then you may expect me about ten Saturday morning...”
Eric Griffith had been expecting approval from Tony Saxe, had quite frankly, in fact, been anticipating a pat on the back for a job well done, but when he completed his account of the meeting with Miss Scobey, Saxe looked despairingly at the ceiling of his office and said, “Goddamn amateur night! You sitting there telling me—”
“What the hell do you mean ‘amateur night’?”
Tony Saxe stood and paced behind his desk, a hand massaging his tanned jaw, light refracting in brittle slivers from his ringed fingers. “It’s just what I figured — you don’t want it bad enough, Griffith.”
A knock sounded and the door opened.
Benny Stiff — stocky, in his forties, with broad, hammered features and skin that looked like it had been baked too long in the sun — held a piece of paper in his thick, muscular hands.
“I just took a call from Chicago, Tony.”
“Yeah, yeah, what is it?” Saxe said irritably.
“They gave us a name. Simon Ethelroyd. Britisher working out of—” Benny glanced at the paper in his hand. “—a place on the east coast of Ireland, Ardglass, the man calls it, about thirty or forty miles south of Belfast. Handles imports, exports, with a boat at St. John’s Point.”
“That’s about as useful as last week’s newspaper,” Tony Saxe said.
Eric said angrily, “If you’d stop this infantile posturing, Saxe, and just tell us—”
Saxe cut him off with a gesture — an abrupt, chopping motion with a glittering hand. “You still haven’t thought the damned thing through,” he said. “You pulled a little showboating con game on this dumb broad, and you think that hacks it. Just tell me this, Eric, just tell me one damned thing,” Saxe said. “What’re you planning to do when she shows up at your house? Sprinkle salt on her tail and grab them records when she turns around?”
“I’m glad you haven’t lost the light touch, Tony. I’ll tell you exactly what I’m going to do,” Eric said, speaking in measured accents. “I intend to take those files and notes from Miss Scobey and destroy them. End of scenario. What in hell did you expect me to do?”
“Christ!” Saxe slammed the palm of his hand down on the top of his desk. “So what do you think she does then?”
“It sure ain’t the end of the script,” Benny Stiff said.
“You think she’ll just drive back to Philadelphia and forget the whole business? Take a nap, watch television, and never mention to anybody that some crazy madman named Eric Griffith gave her a big snow-job about a dying wife and then snatched a bunch of official records from her? You think she won’t mention that to her neighbor, her boss, her boyfriend maybe? Hell, no. She’ll drive to the nearest police station and blow a whistle you could hear all the way from City Hall out to the Main Line.”
“Well, ultimately it would be only her word against mine, which is a risk we’ll just have to take.”
“You still don’t understand. We can’t afford any risks in this deal. No flaps, nobody blowing whistles.” Tony Saxe was speaking slowly and quietly, but with bitter intensity. “Maud filled me in on how it was when that old broad came out to interview you and her. Told it back with all the trimmings. So just you try to make a play toward the kid, Eric! Try for adoption or power of attorney, or just to get her confidence — with shrewd lawyers and accountants watching your every move—”
Saxe made a helpless gesture with his hands, then let them drop to his sides. “That’s when this Scobey character is pure poison, because she can finger you for a phoney and a liar. Christ, do I really have to spell all this out?”
“I’m afraid you will,” Eric said. “Frankly, I know no way to guarantee her silence.”
Tony Saxe exchanged a tight smile with Benny Stiff and said, “You don’t have much of an imagination, Eric.”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Eric said, but his throat was suddenly dry because he saw now what was expected of him.
“It’s like I figured,” Tony Saxe said. “You just don’t want it bad enough. You like the idea of you and Maud living it up like royalty, putting the con on a helpless kid. But for the hard work that’s got to be done, you got a pair of blinders on. Because you won’t face the problem staring you in the face.”
“Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that I—?”
“I’m not suggesting one damned thing. Benny? You hear me suggest anything?”
A smile flared across Stiff’s hard face. “Not a damn thing, boss.”
“I’m not telling you anything, and I’m not suggesting anything. Maybe you understand the problem now, maybe you don’t.”
Tony Saxe leaned forward over his desk, supporting his weight on his hands, staring evenly into Eric’s eyes. “But I just got one more thing to say. My gravy train just stopped, Eric, and it don’t move until you solve your little problem. Otherwise, I can’t risk it.”
“I think we understand each other,” Eric said at last, relieved at the solid timber of his voice. “Of course, a bit of plain speaking would have cleared matters up at the outset. Still, the sunburst of the English language never shone too bright on the Levant, did it, Tony?”
The grinning black face, the rolling white eyes, the tittering malice of Coralee’s laughter shot in a frightening fashion through the clouds of perfume, the smothering weight of furs and gowns, the unendurable pressure of the walls closing in on her, constricting her lungs and throat, compacting her body into a squeezed and hobbled mass on the floor of the musty closet...
Maud struggled to free herself, her lips flattened over her teeth, a strangling sound breaking past her corded throat muscles.
And Coralee was laughing at her, the sound rolling like thunder through her dream.
Striking out with her arms and legs, Maud kicked the sheets and blankets into a tangle at the foot of her bed. She lay still then, gradually waking as the dread, familiar dream faded away into the depths of her mind.
There were tears on her cheeks, and she could feel her heart racing and striking against her ribs. She turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the pills she laid out each night beside a glass of water. Two blue and two yellow and four sips of water... after which she lay breathing deeply and waiting for the residual fear of the dream to disappear and her poor laboring heart to slow down.
“Eric,” she said. “Eric, please. Hold my hand.”
There was no response, no sound from his bed. When she raised herself on an elbow, she saw he wasn’t there, saw his robe and pajamas neatly folded over the bedstead.
She lay back, darker thoughts streaking her mind, remembering last night. Eric had been preoccupied at dinner, hardly touching his food, and then had shut himself off in the small bedroom he used as a study, drinking and playing old jazz records until at last Maud had guessed the reasons behind his strange behavior. Even now, the memory of the scene with him held blurred edges of terror, an awareness of implications their strained words had only hinted at.
“Would you please turn that damned music down?”
“I’ll do precisely what I like, Maud. I’ll do what I must.”
“And I know what that must is, don’t I, Eric...? What you and Tony Saxe are planning.”