Sleeping Dogs bb-2 Page 6

  Now Schaeffer wondered how he had forgotten about Danny Catanno. He had managed to set aside enough money, and he had nurtured the identities until they had sufficient patina on them to obscure their flaws, but he hadn’t done the rest of it. He had put off getting the plastic surgery, telling himself at first that he needed to get a feel for the country before he could be sure how to go about it. Surgery would involve spending a lot of time in London being photographed and examined by doctors who might wonder why a man with perfectly regular features would want something expensive and painful done to him in a foreign country. Then later, when he had learned to move around comfortably in England and was confident he could have accomplished it, he had developed other reservations. People in Bath knew him by now, and would wonder why he would suddenly do such a strange thing. He had put it off so long the dangerous time was probably past. If anybody had traced him here, they would have gotten him by now. And certainly all that time must have changed him as much as surgery would.…

  The truth was that hiding had made him reluctant to obliterate his face, because it was the last thing left that was part of who he really was. He had already destroyed or relinquished everything else. He would never have run out of excuses to put off the plastic surgery. For the first time he understood Danny Catanno.

  It was late afternoon. The southern outposts of London began to pass by the train, and brown brick buildings appeared that reminded him of the ride from Kennedy Airport through Queens. Then it struck him that the similarity wasn’t the reason he had thought of it. He was going back. As the train pulled slowly into Victoria Station, he calculated: assuming the police had found all five bodies by now and were questioning everybody at the racetrack, it would still take them a couple of hours to find out that the Bentley had stopped to let out a man and a woman. They would take still longer to satisfy themselves that the man and woman were no longer in Brighton, and that the only place that made any sense if they wanted to hide was London.

  Fingerprints didn’t worry him. In spite of the nonsense the police put out for public consumption, not one of them in a hundred could lift a clear print from anything more textured than glass or metal. Neither he nor Meg had touched the windows, and Peter had opened the door for them. And if they had idly grasped the door handles, the killers would have touched them afterward, and probably wiped the surfaces off before they left.

  His mind was already working its old, habitual, methodical way through the traps and snares. He turned to her as they stood up, careful to keep his face turned away from their companions on the train. “Keep looking out the window. You said nobody knew we were going there today?”

  “That’s right. I met them on the way to your house. They saw me on the street and told me when they’d pick us up.”

  He assessed the damage as they walked across the platform toward the gigantic enclosure of the station. It wasn’t so bad, really. If the police were lazy or stupid it was nothing at all. Their professional habit of seizing upon the most easily comprehensible explanation would make them overlook things that didn’t fit. They would assume a gang of thieves had murdered two wealthy citizens, then quarreled over whatever they had found on the bodies or in the Bentley. There would be no telling what that was, because somebody in the gang must have lived, and he would have carried it away with him. That part was inevitable: no matter how much they wanted to, the police would not be able to convince themselves that three men who had died of a broken skull, a knife up under the ribs and a bullet fired from five yards out had not required the services of at least one person who hadn’t been found on the scene. But even that much would take them a few more hours, because before they could commit themselves, they would have to go over everything with tape measures and cameras and sketch pads. And they would bring with them the assumptions that would make their efforts a waste of time. Because all the time they would be preparing to look for the missing man among the local street thieves, not among the acquaintances of the two wealthy victims in the Bentley.

  Just as he had at Brighton, he made Meg stay in the ladies’ restroom while he bought the tickets. He had to get her out of here without letting more than a few people see them together. He waited at the most crowded ticket window, then all he said was, “Bath. Two,” to hide his accent, and took the tickets without looking at the man inside.

  They met again and stood a few yards apart on the platform just before the train was to leave, and boarded separately as though they were unaware of each other. Later, if anyone remembered seeing a pretty young woman in a yellow dress, they wouldn’t remember seeing her with a man. As Margaret had walked across the huge nineteenth-century station, he had watched her. She came out of the ladies’ room with several other young women in bright, stylish dresses, and stayed within a few steps of them all the way to the platform. An observer might have said she was one of them, five girls who each merited a second glance, but who all drifted across the crowded place at once, a single vision of colors, stockinged legs, clashing scents, smooth white complexions, hair up, hair hanging long. Which one was blond and which dark? Who would remember? And the women themselves were laughing and talking with animation, too interested in themselves to pay attention to each other, let alone to someone who was simply walking in the same direction. He didn’t know if she had done this instinctively to fade into the herd of people who could hide her best, or had merely let the fear guide her, the terror of being alone attracting her to people as much like her friends as possible. It didn’t matter; they were going to get through this.

  On the train he found her again, but when he sat down beside her, he realized that she’d had time to think. “We’ll stop at your place and close the house,” she said. “Then you’ll stay with me.”

  When she conducted him into the library, he was envious. She had grown up here, in huge rooms with twenty-foot walls in two tiers, all of them lined with paintings and books. It didn’t matter what the books were about or who had written them. To him they were a symbol of privilege: the more ancient and eccentric they were, the greater the advantage. The room represented how many generations of people who had titles and money and manners and tutors and parents—ten?

  “Do you have to go? You could stay here and call for help. Or we could drive up to Yorkshire. Even if they’d been watching you, nobody could know about that, and lots of people must have been hidden there over the years. My forebears in the time of Henry the Eighth didn’t feel comfortable with the forced conversion and may have hidden a monk or two—lots of people did. I do know somebody hid from Cromwell there three generations after that. We were exactly the sort of people he was born to rid the world of—still are, to the degree we can manage it. It’s a huge, rambling place with lots of rooms, but the village is small enough so nobody could come after you without being spotted.”

  It entered Schaeffer’s mind that her ancestors really weren’t from the same planet he was. Time meant nothing to her, or to any of them, really. If he chose to stay at the family estate, she would feed him and bring him the daily newspapers until one of them died, and then he would be part of the story too. He opened his suitcase and pulled out his two passports. He looked at one of them and handed it to Meg. “I’ve got to go to the United States. When I’m ready to come back, I may call you and ask you to mail this to me.”

  She looked at it, then plucked the other one from his hand and read the name aloud. “Charles Frederick Ackerman. It hadn’t occurred to me that you might have another name,” she said, her voice a little hollow.

  “Michael Schaeffer is the real one.” He put his arm around her waist. The name already sounded strange to him, like the name of someone long dead.

  “What I’ve been trying to say is, are you going because you have to, or because you think being with me puts me in danger? Because I really don’t mind.” It struck her as an odd thing to have said, so she added, “Really.”

  “I have to find the mole.” He studied her face. There was no possibility of an
argument; of course he had to find the mole. Whose job was it if not his? She had read all the spy novels, then given them to him to read. He wished he had paid more attention to them, but he hadn’t. Her questions might grow more astute and penetrating, so he needed to think more carefully about what he said. But he also needed to think about reality, and time was passing.

  The Satterthwaites would stay on at his house indefinitely, keeping it open and clean and inhabited, and they would feed his cat. Mrs. Satterthwaite had understood that he sometimes traveled, and she would continue to pay the bills out of the household account. He had always been like a ghost in his own house, coming and going quietly without having any discernible effect on the daily business of the place. The Satterthwaites were the real occupants, living high among the rafters upstairs and showing little curiosity about anything he did. If he never came back, the will he had filed in the solicitor’s office a few blocks away would be revealed to them. Mr. Satterthwaite would paint a neat, hand-lettered sign that said BED AND BREAKFAST, and they would continue to care for the place and serve the food; the only difference would be that he would be replaced by other ghosts who came and went quietly.

  He closed his suitcase. “I have to get back to London tonight for the plane.”

  “I’ll get the keys to the Jag.” She moved to pull open the library door.

  He watched her go. He knew that someday, if he lived to be old and alone, he would look back on this moment and grind his teeth with anguish and remorse, straining his memory for the exact color of The Honourable Meg’s hair and the way her yellow dress swayed as she tugged open the big oak door.

  Charles Frederick Ackerman walked down the long accordion tunnel past the smiling flight attendants, all poised to dart out and block the narrow aisles and offer assistance. The travelers were barely able to negotiate the cramped space with their burdens of carry-on luggage, let alone balance dwarf pillows or chemical-smelling blankets. They paid no more attention to him than to any of the others. If they’d had to describe him to a policeman, one of them might have been perceptive enough to have judged that his coat was a good piece of English tailoring but not new, and that he was no longer in his twenties but wasn’t yet wearing the strangely driven look that men acquire on their fiftieth birthdays. He was, at this stop on the crew’s route, invisible through protective coloration: eyes and hair a dull brown; maybe English, maybe American, maybe German, not thin enough to be French or elegant enough to be Italian. They looked at him only long enough to assure themselves that he wasn’t disabled and probably spoke enough English to do what he was supposed to without exaggerated gestures on their part.

  He took his seat by the window and looked out at England with regret. But all the England he could see was a patch of lighted tarmac and part of a baggage rack. The ten years were already over. Michael Schaeffer had made his final appearance before this man had gotten onto the airplane.

  He settled back in his seat and meditated on the time that would come now. He knew only the name in the wallet of the man who had been carrying the pistol: Mario Talarese. That would be enough. As the rest of the passengers filled the seats around him, he tried to fathom the reasoning of the people who would send a pickup team of amateurs to find and dispose of a man like him.

  Somebody should have given it more consideration. If they remembered the contract, they should have remembered who he was. In all the councils that were intended to keep these men’s pride and ambition and greed from interfering with the steady, predictable profits they shared, wasn’t there one calm old voice left to remind them that if they killed him it would gain them nothing, and if they failed they might bring back old trouble?

  He had done everything he could to convince them that he had relinquished that life. Why hadn’t they just let him die? He knew the answer already: they had. There was nothing in it for the dozen old men who had the power and the right to decide things, and if they had decided, it wouldn’t have been two weasels with knives and a guy with a pistol designed to fit in a lady’s purse. The south of England would one day have filled up with quiet men who called themselves Mr. Brown or Mr. Williams, but each had return tickets to three American cities in other names. It couldn’t have been the old men.

  It had to be that an eager small-time underboss had decided to do it on his own. He even knew who it was. If the one with the gun was named Talarese, the man who had sent him had to be Antonio Talarese. That knowledge gave him one small chance to stay alive, and even that would disappear unless he took it now. If the idea had been to pull off a sudden triumph a couple of thousand miles from home and collect on a ten-year-old contract, then it had to be a secret until it was accomplished. Talarese couldn’t have told anyone else that he had found the quarry, or he would have had rivals he couldn’t hope to compete with.

  Ackerman had no choice now but to come back, and to do it as fast as he could. Because the minute Talarese told the rest of the world what he knew, it was over. Michael Schaeffer had not made the sort of preparations that would allow him to slip into another life in time. Ackerman had to get to New York before the news that Mario Talarese was lying behind a building in Brighton.

  Ackerman leaned back in the padded seat as the huge airplane lumbered down the long runway, its wheels bumping over the cracks faster and faster until its engines screamed an octave higher and lifted it into the night. Talarese had made a terrible mistake to fail in his first try. When a man’s peace and confidence and the tranquility of his home were gone, there wasn’t much left.

  * * *

  The Honourable Margaret Holroyd sat on her bed and looked at the clock on the nightstand. The clock had a red digital readout and had been manufactured no more than a year ago of microchips shipped to Japan from a company outside San Francisco. The nightstand had been made in France in the sixteenth century out of a tree that had been young at the time when Charles Martel was gathering his troops near Tours to rid France of the baneful influence of Islam. Michael would be midway across the Atlantic by now. It was very likely that a mile from here the Filchings were awake too, sitting up thinking, trying to discern a way that they could accept the rest of their lives after what had happened to Peter and his friend Jimmy. Tomorrow the telephone would ring and one of them would tell her what they knew. She would have to feign—what?—surprise, shock, horror … No, the horror was real enough. She had no choice about that. What she wasn’t prepared for was lying to those poor, sad people.

  She put on her robe and walked along the hallway to the back stairs, then down to the library, closed the door behind her and looked around at the familiar place. She wished her father were still alive, sneaking in late at night and sitting down at the old desk to pursue some perfectly dotty arcane study. He had been completely mad, of course. Even as a child she had known it, although her mother had behaved as though it were the furthest thing from her mind until she had known she was dying. Then she had sat Meg down and told her simply, “Take care of your father, if you can.” There had been no moment of doubt in either woman’s mind that Meg could. He had been beatific and peaceful much of the time, the way she imagined idiot savants must be.

  She remembered the day he had let her have the run of this place. She was ten, and she had been at a birthday party for Gwendolyn Ap-Witting. She had told one of her stories to Gwendolyn, a scary story with ghosts that came up out of the ancient mounds between their estates. Gwendolyn had told a duller, less-sophisticated abridged version to her aunt Clara while she was upstairs fixing her hair. The aunt had come downstairs and made a public announcement that the other children were to believe nothing that Meg said, and followed it with a lecture about Jesus sending angels to make indelible black marks in their books whenever little girls told lies. The children had been more terrified by this than by the ghosts, and they had spent the rest of the long afternoon maintaining a distance of twelve feet from Meg. Their rudimentary religious training had convinced them that God had a history of striking down sinners in groups
rather than singly. The criteria were vague; usually just falling into some broadly defined category like “the wicked” seemed to be enough, so self-preservation dictated that their status be unambiguous. Whenever she came near any of them, they would recoil and move away. As Gwendolyn opened her gifts in the drawing room surrounded by all the other children, Meg had hovered in the doorway, looking at all of them from an immense distance, as though she were one of the ghosts in her story, caught alone on the earth in daytime. When the driver had pulled up in front of the big manor house at four, little Margaret had appeared suddenly from behind a thick yew tree and clambered into the back seat as though the Rolls were the last steamer out of Krakatoa.

  At home she had sat alone in the garden contemplating the wreckage of her life when she had noticed her father standing nearby, staring at her. Probably he could see she had been crying, although she had taken pains to hide the signs because they were not only a consequence but also evidence of her guilt. It was unusual that he paid any attention to her, and often she suspected that he was unaware of her existence for long periods. But now he was absorbed in his study of her, looking down at her with the same benevolent curiosity that he was devoting that year to his list of medicinal herbs mentioned in ancient texts but not identifiable among modern flora.

  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.”