Brainquake (17 page)

When she told Max her idea, he knew he was sitting next to a dead woman. So he asked her what she wanted him to do with her body. Bury or cremate it?

He couldn’t blame her for what she did. She owed Barney a lot. Max wouldn’t have done that for anybody’s son. Not even for his brother’s son. Or would he have?

It was the first time in Max’s life he was about to be an accessory to suicide. He didn’t have to tell her how he felt. His face was a corpse. He hadn’t and never would talk about Samantha’s existence to his superior. He promised if he ever did meet Samantha, he would take her to Rebecca’s phony grave with a phony gravestone in a legitimate cemetery and explain how her mother had died in an auto crash.

It was time.

“Thanks, Max.”

“Goodbye, Rebecca.”

She got out. Max drove off. She strode to the slim man. He helped her into the launch, then jumped in himself.

On the deck of the yacht, three men watched the launch approaching in the moonlight. With Hampshire were two of his lieutenants. He told them to leave him. They left.

Alone, he saw her coming closer. He could have asked Father Flanagan to handle her, but curiosity about what she’d done stayed his hand. Max, always the go-between, had filled him in with only the particulars Rebecca had shared.

Hampshire helped her aboard. The launch turned around, headed back to the lights of Manhattan.

“You came to make a personal pitch,” Hampshire said. “Make it.”

The Boss couldn’t hide the surprise in her eyes.

“I owe a lot to his father. Paul was like my son. He fucked up—but he didn’t do it to hurt us. Or to help himself, or to get rich. He fell in love.”

“You’re making the pitch to give him time.”

“It’s my only chance to help him.”

“You struck out before you came to bat. I knew who Paul was early this morning.”

The Boss reeled.

“When an indie cab driver’s wanted by the cops, Security checks the names of every bagman in the five boroughs. He and the widow’ll probably make their move tonight to get out of the country.”

“Max knew nothing about the widow.”

“I know.”

Hampshire put his hands on the rail, looked at the skyscraper lights.

“You were dead the minute the bagman broke the rules. You didn’t phone Max. But you didn’t run off, you came head-on, hoping having the guts to face me would be of some help to Paul. It was a wasted gesture. Ten million isn’t important. Opening the bag for himself is. Pictures of that thief have been faxed to every office we have, and put in the hands of informers all over the world. If the police get him carrying ten million dollars, they’ll know it’s bag money, and they’ll resort to old-fashioned methods to make him talk, and he’ll talk, and he’ll name names. He’ll name Pegasus and the FBI will move in and then he’ll name Mr. Railey and Mr. Railey is jello and he’ll name me—all this because of a bagman with a bankrupt brain.”

All the Boss could say was: “He’s sick.”

“Who isn’t?”

He raised two fingers toward the cabin.

A few minutes later the two lieutenants finished binding the Boss with rope and iron weights. She never tried to struggle. She showed fear in her face but didn’t fight to live. The two lieutenants threw her overboard. The last face she saw was Hampshire’s. It was a cipher face.

Through the moonlight, fish investigated the distorted eyes and distorted open mouth of Rebecca Plummer being pulled down into darkness.

Facing the camera for his passport photo, Paul was unrecognizable. Bronze makeup masked the tape tugging down his left cheekbone, changing the contour of his eyelid. Long-haired dark wig with ponytail. Dark brown beard. Earring, necklace. Battered brown leather jacket.

His picture was taken.

The baby was asleep in the chair.

Paul removed the gear, scrubbed off the makeup, removed wig, beard, tape, and donned his clothes.

Michelle checked her makeup, line of her mouth made slightly fuller, shiny black wig, gypsy earrings, gypsy necklace, gypsy blouse under old blue men’s jacket.

Her picture was taken.

She removed wig, makeup, jewelry, slipped back into her clothes. On his passport typewriter, Johnson had entered their new names and U.S. birthdates, making Paul one year older and Michelle two years younger.

Paul placed both wigs in a cardboard box, the jewelry in a small leather pouch, shoved them in with the makeup box and clothes in the bulging suitcase.

Johnson pasted their photos in their passports.

Paul signed Henry Smith on his. Michelle signed Gaby Smith on hers. Johnson stamped the date, then
ENTRIES/ENTREES, POLICE NATIONALE, CHARLES DE GAULLE, FRANCE
in both passports and looked at his watch.

“Time to go,” Johnson said. “Got the two hundred grand ready, Paul?”

Paul nodded.

“Twenty thousand for the car?”

Paul nodded. Then he opened his black bag. “Take some.”

Johnson stared at all that cash, pulled just the top $100 bill from one stack.

“That all?” Paul said.

“Enough for ice cubes.”

* * *

Johnson’s pickup passed Van Cortland Park, veered through a heavily wooded area, pulled up under a clump of trees. They got out, heard engines warming up.

Paul had the suitcase. Michelle held the baby and the blue diaper bag.

“Minute I get back I’ll get rid of that roadster.” Johnson pointed. “You’re going behind those trees. Hangar near a dirt runway. Go to their office. You’ll see two men, Woody has a beard, Cappy doesn’t. Give Cappy the two hundred grand and say only two words to him: Brobant farm.”

* * *

Silhouetted against the full moon, Cappy’s small two-engine plane headed toward Newfoundland. The steady drone had put the baby to sleep in Michelle’s arms. To make it more comfortable for her, Paul sat across the aisle by the window.

Michelle wasn’t disturbed. She’d had no chance to be alone to phone Eddie, but there was time. Paul was looking out the window. He turned toward her. His face was blank. She smiled back. Not a word had been exchanged between them. They were as silent as Cappy, at the throttle of the six-seater, staring out into blackness.

Michelle’s eyes roamed to the suitcase on the floor behind Paul. In it was their future. Hers. Eddie’s. The baby’s. It was a future that could only be created by angels, and each of them had a private angel. Thus far she didn’t even have a sliver of guilt about her plan. Paul had told her about the tinge of red in the pink brainquake. He had told her how his father’s brainquake exploded in red just before he died. He said he wanted to write a poem about how the slow change from pink to red meant death.

She wondered how long it had taken for his father to see the gradual change of pink turn to red. At the right moment, she would ask Paul if his father had told him. She felt so relieved that Frankie and Al were dead.

She missed Eddie. She remembered how hesitant he was when he had to bruise her face to make it look like Al had assaulted her. Eddie couldn’t. They were fighting time. She had called Al and asked him to come over early, telling him she was sorry she had attacked him, she wanted to apologize, make it up to him, wanted to see him alone.

That was why they were fighting time—he was coming. It was Eddie’s plan. But Eddie couldn’t do it. She lost her temper, got him mad enough to slap her, hit her, make her mouth bleed.

Clipping her on the cheek was accidental. He apologized, kissed her. Got her blood all over his mouth. He washed it off quickly and left.

When she phoned him that Paul’s boss was going to have him and Al hit on the street, he said the time had come. One of them had to take the fall so the other two could get away. It wasn’t going to be him and it wasn’t going to be her. That left Al. His own brother! He hesitated for the slightest fraction of an instant, remembering some day when they were both in diapers or playing in the yard. But it passed. Al was dangerous, to all of them. Al dead was safer than Al alive. So, sayonara. Goodbye Me-hee-ko, hello France.

When Al came in alone, she attacked him with such animal fury he got all mixed up. She saw the confusion on his face as he warded off her blows. And then she shot him. Even dying, his eyes popped animal astonishment.

The drone of the engines made her close her eyes. Paul tapped her on her shoulder, lifted the baby, returned to his seat. Michelle fell asleep.

Paul loved to hold the sleeping baby. He watched reflections of the plane’s blinking lights and waited for his fear, but it didn’t come. Not even when they took off. Not even when he was higher than the highest skyscraper did that fear of height seize him. Maybe if he saw the ground from this altitude in the daytime his fear would return, but in the darkness it was just like being on the ground.

His head began to ache in a different way and he knew what it was. He had kept the thought away as long as he could. He thought about the Boss and wondered if she’d been killed because she covered for him. Maybe she was still alive. She should be. No. She had to be dead.

But a flash of hope shot through him.

The Boss was smart.

She was smart enough to come up with the ten million and have another bagman deliver it to Railey in Philadelphia. Who would get mad at her if she found a way to replace the money?

He wished Johnson had taken more—a grand, ten grand. Of course, he knew Johnson would spend the hundred he did take on opium. Paul couldn’t understand why people sniffed or shot the needle or smoked poison when they knew it was killing them.

Holding the baby snugly, Paul dozed off. The jolt on the ground startled him and Michelle but not the baby. The plane had stopped somewhere to refuel. The pilot told him it was Iceland. Then the plane took off again.

At dawn Paul held his breath, waiting for the fear to slam him. It didn’t. His face hesitantly pressing against the window, he looked down, passing over thousands of gravestones. All the gravestones were the same. Beyond them he saw the English Channel. Then nothing but land under him, almost close enough to touch. The plane landed on another dirt road like the one near Van Cortland Park and came to a stop where trees flanked the road.

They taxied up to a Normandy house, part stone, part wood. Out of it, a grim-faced woman emerged. An old shawl was over her shoulders. A dark apron was over her long dress. She wore sandals.

They got out of the plane without a word from Cappy, who had jumped out and gone into the house. The woman gestured to follow her. They did, Paul lugging their gear, Michelle holding the baby. The woman led them around to the back of the wooden side of the house. An old blue sedan was there.

“Twenty thousand,” the woman said. “American.”

Paul paid her. She gave him the key, vanished around the house. Paul put the suitcase in the trunk, helped Michelle and baby into the front seat and climbed behind the wheel. After a few tries, the engine came to life, sputtering.

Waiting for it to warm up, Paul looked around at the desolate area’s small rocks, dirt mounds, few trees and great deal of brush.

“We’re in Normandy,” Michelle said. “It’s in France.”

“Near Paris?”

“Not far. That road runs along the beach. We’ll find a sign.”

They bumped along the narrow rutted road. Some houses dotted the rolling hills on their left. The English Channel on their right. They approached a massive boulder. Paul stopped behind it because it shielded them from the houses. He got out, spotted a dump heap twenty feet below in the brush hollow.

He opened the trunk, pulled out the suitcase. She put the baby on the floor of the sedan. Paul pulled out the makeup kit and the box with beard and wigs.

Both ignored German graffiti on the shell-pocked boulder. The swastika was faded.

Guided by his passport photo, Michelle made up his face, arranged his wig, rubbed the adhesive on his beard, fitted it on his cheeks. She put on her own makeup and wig as Paul set aside the clothes they were to change into, placed their sneakers on the pile, dumped out their extra changes, pulled out his black bag and the big folded backpack.

He put his bag into the backpack, dumped the extra clothes on top, then stuffed in the diapers, bags of baby food cans.

They stripped in front of the faded swastika, put on the clothes Johnson had gotten them. He put the clothes they shed into the trunk of the sedan, slammed the trunk shut.

Michelle took the baby and stepped away from the sedan. She watched Paul drive over the empty suitcase, going back and forth until it was a mess. He carried the mess down the slope to the dump, jammed the remains between rusty scrap iron and tin cans, bottles, all kids of refuse.

They drove on until he spotted another dump. He dumped their old clothes and shoes in this one. Now there was nothing to link the bagman and widow with this couple of American travelers.

Except the baby.

* * *

Omaha Beach was bristling with tourists. Some sort of folk music festival was going on. Some of the women had children or babies slung on their backs. Beards and faded clothes. Paul breathed easier: they’d fit right in. Guitars were playing as the blue sedan poked its way past several big buses parked off the road.

Jammed traffic waiting to uncoil forced Paul to stop. Hawkers with postcards, maps, brochures, small American and French flags moved through the sea of cars and crowds of people.

Michelle spotted a booth that said
CHANGE
among the many stands selling souvenirs, sandwiches, cold drinks. She pushed her way through and returned to the car with francs, as well as a
jambon-et-beurre
baguette and a liter of some sort of flavored water. They’d also warmed the baby’s bottle for her.

A guide with a flag in hand was loudly telling a group about the invasion, pointing out landmarks on the beach. Paul and Michelle bit into their sandwich and the baby enjoyed the bottle. The traffic jam moved by inches.

“Americans?”

Half-poking his head in the driver’s-side window, the uniformed French policeman held a hand out. Behind him, a plainclothes detective was waiting.

Paul nodded.