Eddie's Boy Read online

  Eddie shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s a cop. Maybe she’s cheating on him or a friend of his. Maybe he’s nuts.”

  It seemed odd now that some of the biggest decisions in Schaeffer’s life were ones he hadn’t even made. They had just seemed to be the conditions for keeping life inside him, made before his mind began fitting sights, sounds, and thoughts into memory.

  4

  Schaeffer fought the forces of physics to keep the Bentley moving as fast as he could without hurtling off into a field or hitting something along the road. He hated that the British government kept adding new CCTV cameras from one end of the country to the other. He could be completely successful tonight, and there might be a video shot from the top of a pole in some out-of-the way-village, and there he would be, driving this opulent death wagon down the road.

  He could only comfort himself with the articles he’d read saying that the cameras had not had any effect on crime statistics. None. Since they’re no good at it, he told himself, he was probably safe. And in England, people who could afford cars like the Bentley often felt they had bought the right to drive them at full speed. Maybe that would keep the cops from assuming he was a criminal.

  Schaeffer turned his head and used the rearview mirror to check his passengers. He had pulled their seat belts as tight as he could so that none of them toppled over, but as he hit bumps or made hard turns, their heads nodded or leaned slightly.

  He wondered where Meg was driving now. Even thinking about her made him angrier. These killers had come all the way to England and then somehow figured out that this was the season when he and Meg went to the house in Yorkshire. They hadn’t tried to find him out alone somewhere and pop him with a rifle or something. They had come to murder him in his bed, which meant killing Meg too, after she’d seen them killing him first.

  He looked at the bodies again and resented them. But he was alive, and they were not. He told himself he should accept that fact as though it were a triumph. He didn’t imagine there would be any other triumphs this trip. Before long, he would probably be cornered, and then dead too.

  When he was still forty miles out from Manchester, he put the battery back in his phone and used it to make a reservation for the next flight to Sydney, which would leave at 8:00 a.m. He knew the Manchester Airport was south of the city center, but the details were fuzzy, so he used the map function, which showed him that he needed to get on the M56. He memorized the route, took the battery out again, and drove harder and faster.

  It was a bit after 4:00 a.m. now, and at this hour there were no delays. Once he switched to the main highways, most of the traffic was fast-moving trucks heading for the city to deliver the thousands of products that would be unloaded into the stores that morning.

  In less than an hour he was on the M56 passing signs that directed him to the big parking lots for the airport. He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, put on the knitted watch cap he had taken from one of the dead men in the dining room at York, and tugged it down to his eyes. He patted the body beside him and found a pair of tinted sunglasses. The man behind him had a scarf in his pocket with no blood on it, so he took that too, wrapped it around the lower part of his face, then drove on. He picked the first airport lot he saw, pulled in, took a ticket from the machine, and then drove to a remote section of the lot, where he parked the Bentley with the grille aimed off toward an empty field. A sign said there was a shuttle to the airport every fifteen minutes.

  He opened the trunk, and took his suitcase out, then spent a few minutes wiping down the car to get rid of his fingerprints. When he looked around him, there seemed to be nobody else waiting for the shuttle. Most of these cars must have been left here in the lot yesterday or even earlier. He walked away from the Bentley and its four dead passengers and toward the farthest sign for a shuttle stop.

  5

  If anyone was aware of where he’d driven from York, they hadn’t caught up yet, but he had to be alert and keep his eyes open. First, he needed to get to the terminal without attracting any attention. The shuttle would probably not be full at this hour and would probably make the rounds of every lot on the way. He would have to be patient. Nothing raised suspicion among watchers like impatience. Fugitives, terrorists, and thieves all felt each second like the stab of a needle, and today he would too. He couldn’t show it.

  In America there were always at least three sets of watchers at major airports. The local police forces always had older retired police officers there to watch for criminals and their bosses. The Mafia watched for people they were interested in—each other or the up-and-coming types who were working to replace them. The third group were thieves. They watched for women who set their purses or carry-on bags on seats around them, for people who didn’t pick up their bags right away when they came out of the X-ray machines or lost track of a bag in the bathroom. They would sometimes pick suitcases off the carousels at baggage claim. If a traveler caught them, they’d say they worked for the airline. He hadn’t flown out of the UK often, but he knew that British airports had the equivalent. He was eager to get past all those people and onto a plane.

  Meg had bought his bag as a companion to one of hers. It was a leather carry-on, designed to take a few worries out of travel. It had several zippered pockets on the outside and a shoulder strap consisting of leather sewn around a steel cable, so a thief couldn’t slash it and run off with the bag. This morning he carried it with the strap on his shoulder and kept his hands in his coat pockets as he waited.

  Waiting to be taken to a place he hadn’t wanted to go reminded him of working with Eddie Mastrewski. Eddie had told him, “If you’re not sure what’s there, don’t make a mad dash for the city. You can always sneak up on it. Go most of the way there and then stop to look around. Go past the neighborhood where you’re supposed to do the job. If there are people hanging around like they’re waiting for something, turn around and drive out of town. What they’re waiting for is you.”

  Michael had an American passport in the name Paul Foster. It was a relic of his last trip to the United States seven years ago. He had used it only once, and it had been intended for only that single use, to get him out of the United States. It had been obtained at a risk by someone who had owed him a big favor. He had not intended to ever use it again, but he had kept it, aware that he couldn’t predict the future.

  The time was weighing on his nerves, so he forced himself to think about other things. He had found that since getting older, he had a surprising number of unexpected thoughts and feelings. He didn’t like the prediction that in five billion years the earth would succumb to the sun’s gravity, fall into it, and burn up. This was surprising because it raised the possibility that he cared about Man, not just a few people. It put him in the category of the ants, which did brave and strenuous things while in the process of dying to preserve not just some ants but Ant. He had lived a life without being aware of species loyalty, partly because at no time after he was fifteen had he been confident of living for long.

  Sometimes it seemed to him that he had lived a long life—and done it with surprising success—without having learned anything about why things were as they were. He had met a beautiful and brilliant young Englishwoman by pure chance one day while he was trying to stay invisible in the ancient city of Bath. They had been attracted to each other in the first minutes, and became lovers just hours after that. Life-threatening circumstances that surprised even him—the attack at the Brighton races—had made the two of them cling to each other like drowning swimmers, and they had never relinquished each other since. He had experienced all those years with her and had never stopped being amazed and grateful that this woman, the Honourable Margaret Holroyd, now O.B.E., had given herself over to his keeping, allowed herself without visible hesitation to love him, and stayed faithful, loyal, and constant.

  He was frustrated that after so much time he still didn’t know much about women in ge
neral, or about Meg. She never overtly told him anything about her motives, her fantasies or desires, or what she really thought about him. All he knew was what had happened between them, and she seemed to think it was all he was entitled to know. He hoped that right now she was already safe in the house of one of her friends.

  The sky was still dark as a misty rain began to fall, putting tiny droplets on the windows of the cars nearby and turning the lot into a vast wet black pavement.

  After waiting about ten minutes, he assured himself that the shuttle would appear in another five. He knew that the shuttle had to enter at one of the entrances, and guessed it wouldn’t drive past a man standing in the rain, so he decided to walk toward the entrance he could see.

  He took a few steps toward the end of the aisle and heard an engine behind him.

  The engine was too loud. Michael had lived a long time by not assuming that things weren’t dangerous. He looked over his shoulder only once to locate the car and chart its speed and direction. He thought, This might be nothing. But the car had passed a number of open spaces and hadn’t taken one. It hadn’t moved toward a different part of the lot, or chosen one to begin with. It had turned to go up the same aisle as the only pedestrian in the lot.

  Michael walked on, using the sound of the car to gauge its distance. The car was closer now. He listened intently. If it sped up, it would be trying to hit him. If it slowed down, someone in it would be planning to shoot.

  Four more strides and he sidestepped to the right to put himself between two vans.

  There was the growl of the engine speeding up, then a loud squeal of tires as the driver braked, and then the tires spinning. There was the slam of a car door, then fast footsteps, leather-soled shoes dashing toward him.

  Michael knelt on the ground, looked under the van beside him, and saw the feet of the running man. He went up on the balls of his feet and waited, then launched himself into the space between the van and the next car. Like a football tackler, he hit the man with his shoulder and slammed him into the car. The man’s own speed, combined with the force of Michael’s tackle, made the impact hard and damaging. The man was hurt, and he was down. In a second, Michael had his legs wrapped around the man’s body like a wrestler would, and he was tightening the strap from his suitcase around the man’s neck.

  After a few more seconds of intense effort, Michael sensed a change and let go of the strap with his left hand. He pulled it, and it came off the man’s neck and the man lay still. Michael rolled the man’s body away from him and then knelt over it, rapidly patting its pockets and running his hands along the sides, the legs, the small of the back. He found a large folding knife, but no gun.

  He looked up from the man and his eyes went straight across the aisle of cars where he heard the engine again.

  He heard another car door slam, then more footsteps. This time he saw the reflection in a rearview mirror of a man moving from the direction of the car sounds to the opening between two cars where Michael had run.

  The driver seemed to have assumed that Michael had been killed by his friend and that now it was his responsibility to help clean up. Michael slid under the van beside him and slithered toward the front. Then he heard leather-soled shoes again, running this time, making that chuff, chuff sound when the balls of the feet hit the pavement. He used it to tell where to look for the man’s feet.

  When he saw them, he slid out on the other side of the van. He stood still and waited until the man was near the back, then came around the front of the van to approach him from behind. Michael hooked his left forearm across the man’s face at eye level, jerked his head backward, and brought the knife across the man’s throat. Michael quickly withdrew his arm and pushed the man hard with his other hand. Blood spurted out in a stream from the man’s open wound as he lay sprawled on the pavement between the cars, bleeding heavily.

  Michael ran along the aisle, got into the car the two men had left there, and drove it between two white lines into a parking space. He pressed the key fob to lock it and then ran back to where the first body lay. He picked up his leather bag, reattached the strap to it, and began to walk.

  His eyes caught headlights at a distance. It was the shuttle coming in the entrance. He trotted to the end of the aisle and stepped out to flag down the bus before it got close enough for the driver to see the two bodies lying between the cars.

  6

  Schaeffer checked in for his flight to Sydney as Paul Foster, received his boarding pass, and then used some of the waiting time in the airport shops buying clothes. He had gotten splashes of dirty water on the clothes he’d worn in the Long Stay Car Park. He was sure that he’d picked up some blood spray too, although he couldn’t see it. He also wanted to change his appearance as much as possible.

  He found a guidebook to Sydney in a tourist shop and looked up the weather. It was late autumn there now, with temperatures between 14.6 and 22.2 degrees Celsius—not much different from May temperatures in Manchester. He still automatically translated the numbers to Fahrenheit, even though he didn’t need to anymore: it was about 58 to 72 degrees.

  He replaced the clothes he’d been wearing and left those in the trash in the distant restroom where he got changed. He spent the rest of the wait near a gate far from the one where he would be departing. He approached his gate right as the plane was boarding, so he could minimize the time he spent standing still. As he approached the gate, he stared intently at each person, looking for watchers. He doubled back to be sure nobody was following him, then waited for his boarding group to be called and got in line. As soon as he had made it past the doorway into the boarding tunnel, he began to feel a bit better.

  He made it down the aisle of the plane and pushed his bag into the overhead compartment. Soon the airplane’s doors were closed, the plane pushed back onto the apron, and then it bumped along on the pavement, its wings vibrating slightly. It stopped, the engine noise swelled, and it roared off and upward into the sky.

  The flight was enormously long—fifteen thousand kilometers—and his first stop would take place after twelve hours. He would wait in Singapore for two hours and then endure eleven more hours to Sydney. After that, he would find his way to a section of Sydney called “The Rocks.” It produced no image at all in his imagination, but according to his guidebook, it was the right place to go.

  It was incredibly far, and that was the idea. It was his attempt to do things the way Meg wanted. At one time that would not have occurred to him, but he wasn’t just humoring her. For his whole working life and afterward, he had followed the strategy that Eddie Mastrewski had taught him: “If you learn there’s a contract out on you, don’t hesitate. Find out who it is and go after him. Don’t bother wasting bodyguards or underlings. Go right to the one who pays them all. Find him and stop his heart any way you can. You don’t get anything for giving his people an extra hour of open season on you.”

  In this situation he’d never done anything else. Maybe it was time to use Meg’s idea instead. He was alive, the ones who had followed him were dead, and he was flying away at over six hundred miles an hour. Maybe this was going to be the end of the killing. If Australia turned out to be safe and pleasant, she would join him.

  He lay back in his seat and thought about the start of his life as a killer. When he and Eddie had talked about it years later, they always called it “Opening Day.”

  The memory of that day nearly fifty years ago was clearer than the sight of it had been at the time. He could remember all that had led up to it, could see and feel the bright warm sunshine and the excitement and anticipation, and could hear the voices of the people around him that day. But this time through, he knew all the rest of it too. He knew what was going to happen, and he knew what it meant, and how the world was going to change, and how he was going to change. What would have surprised him at the time were the many ways in which he would be exactly the same. He would still be the boy, feeli
ng and thinking and wondering the same at sixty as he did that day at fifteen.

  He walked along the sidewalk with Eddie, aware of the difference in their sizes. Eddie Mastrewski was bulky and strong, not much taller than the boy was at fifteen, but broader, with a bull neck and big workman’s arms and legs.

  The boy wore a baseball cap that day with the letters N and Y superimposed on the crown, because it was New York and anything else would have seemed exotic, and he had a well-worn baseball glove folded under his arm as though he hoped to catch a foul ball. He was a walking story that day. Anybody who looked would have said, “This is a kid who loves baseball, and his dad is taking him to the opening home game.” Eddie had set it up. “You take the hat off afterward and you’re a different person. As soon as the gun goes off, that’s who you’re going to want to be.”

  It all happened fast, and even though he’d known it would, it was still faster than he’d expected. They came up on the man Eddie had agreed to kill, walking up from behind. Eddie stuck his hand out and the boy opened the glove to let him take the gun—a short-­barreled .38 DA’s Special. Eddie grasped it and took the shot—loud, bright like a hammer blow—and the man’s head jerked forward and the rest of him snaked downward after it onto the concrete.

  The boy accepted the gun back and folded the glove over it. People were already going, “What? What was that?” And Eddie did the rest of the pantomime. “Oh my God,” he said. “He’s bleeding,” and bent to look so that other people would look down too.

  The next seconds taught the boy a lot. The target was down and dead. But Eddie was not prepared for the man beside the victim to turn toward Eddie while digging a gun out of his coat. When Eddie had planned the hit, this man hadn’t existed yet.

  Eddie was too far away from the boy to snatch the gun back, and he knew it instantly. He stopped looking toward the man and looked at the boy—not a message, just a sad look, a goodbye look.