Lorraine was beside him. “Is it your ex-wife?” she asked softly.
McGarvey looked up into her eyes. She seemed like a kind, sensitive girl, genuinely concerned for him. She was one of the good ones, he supposed, who cared. Unless she watched her step very carefully, she wouldn’t last long in this business. The kind ones never did. There was no room for such sentiment.
“She’s with Yarnell,” he said, and he stepped away from the scope.
Lorraine watched him for a moment or two. “She couldn’t know about him.”
“I don’t think so.”
Lorraine looked through the scope for just a second, then straightened up. “Looks like they’re putting on a show down there.” She turned to Sheets. “We’ll stick around at least until Mr. Trotter shows up. Did he say when?”
Sheets had already backed off for whatever reason. “He’s in town. Said he’d be here in a minute or two.”
McGarvey lit a cigarette. He stood beside the window looking out into the night, the city glowing in every direction, even up toward the Naval Observatory in the center of its own big park along with the vice president’s mansion. The only darkness seemed to be in his own mind. Unwanted light was everywhere else. Strange and unfair, he thought. Thankfully Elizabeth was away at school. At least she would be spared the immediate hurt. Once again he was reminded of the women in his life: his sister, his ex-wife, his Swiss police watchdog, and Evita Perez, waiting for him in New York. They were all of a kind; judgmental women who in the end were very weak. Or, he wondered, was it merely his own chauvinism which made him think so?
Trotter was all out of breath when he barged into the apartment, as if he had just run up the eight flights of stairs. He stood puffing in the center of the room while he mopped the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. He was flushed, and his glasses were steamed up. McGarvey noticed that he hadn’t shaved since this morning and that he still wore the same clothes he had worn at their lakeside meeting with Leonard Day. He had to wonder what his old friend had been up to.
“I need time, John,” McGarvey said.
“You were there this morning!” Trotter cried, his sudden emotion all out of proportion with what he was saying. “You heard him!”
“Forty-eight hours is all I need.”
“To do what—?” Trotter started, but then realizing exactly what it was he was saying, and in front of whom, he cut it off.
“I’ll get you and Leonard your proof, and you won’t have to do a thing except keep watch on Yarnell from here. Just like you’ve been doing for the past three days. Just like you’ve done today.”
“We can’t, Kirk, don’t you understand? It’s over now.”
Someone had gotten to Trotter. It was written all over the man’s face. “What happened, John? Today? Who’d you see? Who else knows about this now?”
“We cannot go on.”
“My wife is down there!”
Trotter seemed genuinely pained. “I’m sorry, Kirk. My hands are truly tied. In this you must believe me. Just get out while you still can.”
“Disappear, you mean?”
“Yes.”
McGarvey shook his head. “Who was it who got to you, John? Who’d you see today?”
“I have my orders …”
“From the bureau, John? From Day? Who?”
Trotter was cornered. He seemed to be all arms and legs. Gangly. “The president,” he whispered. “The president told me to stop.”
27
Time had truly and honestly run out. Winter, spring, day, night; it no longer made any difference to McGarvey. He was a man who had finally come face to face with his own demons, who had come foursquare against his own inner voice, which whispered like some troll in the scuppers that he was not master of his own fate let alone the future of others. Kathleen would say — and had — that he was a man driven by unseen forces. Insanity or simple willfulness, who could say. In the morning he took the shuttle flight up to New York after spending an intense evening with a new Trotter; a Trotter he’d never imagined existed, a man beside himself with fright, cowed into submission by the awfulness of the situation. “Here we have the potential for the ultimate disaster,” he’d cried at one point, not knowing where to turn or in whom to seek comfort or solace. All the forces were aligned against them. What did it matter if they believed they had the blessing of being right right on their side? What did it matter the distance they had come? Or the lives that hung in the balance? Trotter had no answer. No guarantees, in the end — and who among us could expect such assurances, had any right to expect such assurances? — but Trotter would do what he could. Basulto would be held for another forty-eight hours and the team at the Washington safe house would unofficially continue their surveillance. (They’d volunteered for it, with no backup should the situation fall apart!) Lastly, Basulto would be released on McGarvey’s recognizance with travel funds and documents when the time came. “If he ran, I would say good riddance,” a defeated Trotter said. “Nor at this point do I wish to know what you have in mind, where you would be taking him, or for what purpose.”
“We may not be much, John, but we are honorable men.”
Trotter shook his head. “There is no such animal, didn’t you know?”
“Did the president talk to you directly, John? Did he telephone you, send you a memo? Did a messenger come? What?”
But Trotter never answered, and as he entered the city through the Midtown Tunnel, he put his old friend out of mind. Just for now, just until he had all the pieces lined up. By then what he was setting in motion would have a life of its own. He would be able to step back and watch and wait for the end of the world or for his salvation, for all their salvations, though he didn’t think there’d be any thanks handed round at the end.
He paid the cabbie on the corner around the block from Evita’s club and went the rest of the way on foot. SoHo was not a morning neighborhood in the sense of daylight. There were people out and about, workmen, students on their way to school, mothers with their children, but the majority of the residents, the well-to-do artists, the connected businessmen, the chic women with their entourages, were still indoors, sleeping.
The front door to St. Christopher’s was locked. There was no bell and it took nearly five minutes of pounding before the big black man who acted as Evita’s bodyguard opened the door to McGarvey’s summons. He wore a gray jogging suit and a sweatband around his massive forehead. He had a permanent scowl on his face.
“She’s asleep,” he said before McGarvey could say anything. “You’ll have to come back tonight.” He started to close the door, but McGarvey blocked it.
“I have to talk to her. This morning. Now.”
“Motherfucker,” the big man said, the word drawn out. “You don’t hear so good.” He yanked the door all the way open and poked a massive paw into McGarvey’s chest, shoving him backward and nearly off the step. “Come back tonight.”
“I don’t want any trouble with you, Harry,” McGarvey said, spreading his hands in front of him. “So if you’ll just be a good boy and run upstairs and tell Ms. Perez that I’m here …”
The big man shoved McGarvey back another step. “I’m getting powerful tired of you, white boy. I want your lily white ass out of here now.”
McGarvey didn’t want this. It was stupid, and yet he had been feeling a confrontation building up inside of him ever since Trotter had shown up in Lausanne. Even before that.
“This is important, Harry,” he said, trying one last time to be reasonable. He put his overnight bag down on the stoop.