False Impression (36 page)

Anna turned the
small brass key over in her hands.
‘NYRC 13.

Got any ideas?’ she
asked.

‘Only the
obvious ones,’ said Jack.

‘New
York Racing Club, New York Rowing Club, anything else?’

‘New York
Racquet Club, but if you come up with any others, let me know, because I intend
to spend the rest of the weekend trying to find out if it’s any of those. I
need to come up with something positive before I face the boss on Monday.’

‘Perhaps you
could slow down enough on your morning run to let me know if you’ve cracked
it.’

‘I was rather
hoping to tell you over dinner tonight,’ said Jack.

‘I can’t. I’m
sorry, Jack, much as I’d love to, I’m having dinner with Tina.’

‘Are you?’ said
Jack. ‘Well, just be careful.’

‘Six o’clock
tomorrow morning suit you?’ asked Anna, ignoring the comment.

That means I’ll
have to set my alarm for six thirty, if we’re going to meet up about halfway
round.’

‘I’ll be out of
my shower by then.’

‘I’ll be sorry
to miss that.’

‘By the way,’
said Anna, ‘can you do me a favour?’

Leapman strode
into the chairman’s office without knocking.

‘Have you seen
this?’ he asked, placing a copy of the New York Times on the desk and jabbing a
finger at an article from the international section.

Fenston studied
the headline: Romanian Police Arrest Assassin. He read the short article twice
before speaking.

‘Find out how
much the chief of police wants.’

‘It may not
prove to be that easy,’ suggested Leapman.

‘It’s always
that easy,’ said Fenston, looking up. ‘Only agreeing a price will prove
difficult.’

Leapman frowned,
‘And there’s another matter you should consider.’

‘And what’s
that?’ asked Fenston.

‘The
Van Gogh.
You ought to have the painting insured, after what happened to the Monet.’

‘I never insure
my paintings. I don’t need the IRS to find out how much my collection is worth,
and in any case it’s never going to happen twice.’

‘It already
has,’ said Leapman.

Fenston scowled
and didn’t reply for some time.

‘All right, but
only the Van Gogh,’ he eventually said. ‘Make it Lloyd’s of London, and be sure
you keep the book value below twenty million.’

‘Why such a low
figure?’ queried Leapman.

‘Because the
last thing I need is to have the Van Gogh with an asset value of a hundred
million while I’m still hoping to get my hands on the rest of the Wentworth
collection.’

Leapman nodded
and turned to leave.

‘By the way,’ said
Fenston looking back down at the article. ‘Do you still have the second key?’

‘Yes I do,’ said
Leapman. Why?’

‘Because when
she escapes, you’ll need to make a further deposit.’

Leapman smiled.
A rarity, which even Fenston noticed.

Krantz wet her
bed, and then explained to the doctor about her weak bladder. He authorized
periodic visits to the bathroom, but only when accompanied by at least two
guards.

These regular
little outings up and down the corridor gave Krantz an opportunity to study the
layout of the floor: a reception desk at the far end of the landing manned by a
single nurse; a drugs clinic which could only be unlocked if a doctor was
present; a linen closet; three other single rooms, one bathroom and, at the
other end of the corridor, a ward containing sixteen beds, opposite a fire
escape.

But the outings
also served another, more important purpose, and it certainly wasn’t anything
the young doctor would have come across when reading his medical text books or
carrying out his ward rounds.

Once they had
locked Krantz into her cubicle, also windowless, she sat on the lavatory seat,
placed two fingers up her rectum and slowly extracted a condom. She then washed
the rubber container in the lavatory water, undid the knot at the top and
pulled out a roll of tightly wrapped twenty-dollar bills. She extracted two
from the roll, tucked them in her sling and then carried out the whole process
in reverse.

Krantz pulled
the chain and was escorted back to her room. She spent the rest of the day
sleeping. She needed to be wide awake during the night shift.

Jack sat in the
back of the taxi, looking out of the window.

The grey cloak
of 9/11 still hadn’t lifted from Manhattan, although New Yorkers rushing by no
longer stared upwards in disbelief. Terrorism was something else the most
frenetic city on earth had already learned to take in its stride.

Jack sat back
and thought about the favour he’d promised Anna.

He dialled the
number she’d given him. Sam picked up the phone.

Jack told him
that Anna was alive and well, and that she had been visiting her mother in
Romania, and he could expect her back that evening. Nice to start the day
making someone feel good, thought Jack,
which wasn’t going to
be the case with his second call.
He phoned his boss to let him know that
he was back in New York.

Macy told him
that Krantz had been taken to a local hospital in Bucharest to undergo an
operation on her shoulder. She was being guarded round the clock by half a
dozen cops.

‘I’ll be happier
when she’s locked up in jail,’ said Jack.

‘I’m told you
speak with some experience on that subject,’ said Macy.

Jack was about
to respond, when Macy added, “Why don’t you take the rest of the week off,
Jack? You’ve earned it.’

‘It’s Saturday,’
Jack reminded his boss.

‘So I’ll see you
first thing Monday morning,’ said Macy.

Jack decided to
text Anna next.
Told Sam U Ron way home.
Is he only
other man in yr life? He waited a couple of minutes, but there was no reply. He
called his mother.

‘Will you be
coming home for supper tonight?’ she asked sharply. He could almost smell the
meat stewing in the background.

‘Would I miss
it, Ma?’

‘You did last
week.’

‘Ah, yes, I
meant to call you,’ said Jack, ‘but something came up.’

‘Will you be
bringing this something with you tonight?’ Jack hesitated, a foolish mistake.
‘Is she a good Catholic girl?’ was his mother’s next question.

‘No, mother,’
Jack replied. ‘She’s a divorcee, three ex-husbands, two of whom died in
mysterious circumstances. Oh, and she has five children, not all of them by the
three husbands, but you’ll be glad to know only four of the kids are on hard
drugs – the other one’s currently serving a jail sentence.’

‘Does she have a
regular job?’

‘Oh yes, Ma,
it’s a cash business. She services most of her customers at the weekends, but she
assures me that she can always take an hour off for a bowl of Irish stew.’

‘So what does
she really do?’ asked his mother.

‘She’s an art
thief,’ said
Jack,
‘specializes in Van Gogh and
Picasso.
Makes a huge profit on each assignment.’

‘Then she’ll be
an improvement on the last one,’ said his mother,

‘
who
specialized in losing your money.’

‘Goodbye,
Mother,’ said Jack.
Til see you tonight.’

He ended the
call, to find there was a text from Anna, using her ID for Jack.

Switch your
brain on, Stalker. Got the obvious R. UR 2 slow 4 me.

‘Damn the
woman,’ said Jack. His next call was to Tom in London, but all he got was an
answering machine saying, ‘Tom Crasanti, I’m out at the moment, but will be
back shortly, please leave a message.’

Jack didn’t, as
the cab was pulling up outside his apartment.

‘That’ll be
thirty-two dollars.’

Jack handed the
driver four tens, and didn’t ask for any change and didn’t get a thank-you.

Things were back
to normal in New York.

The night shift
reported for duty at ten o’clock. The six new guards spent their first two
hours marching up and down the corridor, making their presence felt. Every few
minutes, one of them would unlock her door, switch on the bare bulb that hung
above her bed and check that she was ‘present’, before he turned off the light
and locked the door. This exercise was repeated at regular intervals for the
first two hours, but after that it lapsed to every half an hour.

At five minutes
past four, when two of the guards went off for their meal break, Krantz pressed
the buzzer by her bed. Two more guards
appeared,
the
grumbler with money problems and the chain smoker. They both accompanied her to
the bathroom, each holding an elbow. When she entered the lavatory, one
remained in the corridor, while the other stood guard outside the cubicle.
Krantz extracted two more notes from her rectum, folded them up in her hands
and then pulled the lavatory chain. The guard opened the door. She smiled, and
slipped the notes into his hand. He looked at them, and quickly put them in his
pocket, before rejoining his colleague in the corridor. They both accompanied
Krantz back to her room and locked her in.

Twenty minutes
later, the other two guards returned from their meal break. One of them
unlocked her door, switched on the light and, because she was so slight, had to
go up to the side of the bed to make sure she was actually there. The ritual
completed, he walked back into the corridor, locked the door, and joined his
colleague for a game of backgammon.

Krantz concluded
that her one chance of escaping would be between four and four twenty in the
morning, when the two older guards always took their meal break – the
philanderer, the smoker and the dozer would be otherwise occupied, and her
unwitting accomplice would be only too happy to accompany her to the bathroom.

Even before Jack
had showered and changed, he began to scour the New York telephone directory in
search of NYRC. Other than the three Jack had already come up with, he couldn’t
spot Anna’s ‘obvious one’. He switched on his laptop and Googled the words ‘new
york racquet club’. He was able to retrieve a potted history of the NYRC,
several photographs of an elegant building on Park Avenue and a picture of the
present chairman, Darius T. Mablethorpe III. Jack was in no doubt that the only
way he was going to get past the front door was if he looked like a member.
Never embarrass the bureau.

Once Jack had
unpacked and showered, he selected a dark suit with a faint stripe, a blue
shirt and a Columbia tie for this particular outing. He left his apartment and
took a cab to 370 Park Avenue.

He stepped onto
the sidewalk and stood staring at the building for some time. He admired the
magnificent four-storey Renaissance revival architecture that reminded him of a
palazzo, so popular with the Italians in New York at the turn of the century.
He walked up the steps towards an entrance with the letters NYRC discreetly
etched into the glass.

The doorman
greeted Jack with, ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ holding the door open, as if he was a
life-long member. He strolled into an elegant lobby with massive paintings on
every available space of suitably attired former chairmen dressed in long white
pants and blue blazers, sporting the inevitable racquet. Jack glanced up at the
wide, sweeping staircase to see even more past chairmen, even more ancient;
only the racquet didn’t seem to have changed. He strolled up to the reception
desk.

‘May I help you,
sir?’ asked a young man.

‘I’m not sure if
you can,’ Jack admitted.

‘Try me,’ he
offered.

Jack took the
replica key out of his pocket and placed it on the countertop. ‘Ever seen one
of these?’ he asked.

The young man
picked up the key and turned it over, staring at the lettering for some time,
before he replied, ‘No,
sir,
can’t say I have. It
could well be a safety deposit box key, but not one of ours.’ He turned and
removed a heavy bronze key from the board behind him. A member’s name was
etched on the handle, and ‘NYRC in red along the shaft.

‘Any
suggestions?’ asked Jack, trying to keep any sign of desperation out of his
voice.

‘No, sir,’ he
replied. ‘Not unless it was before my time,’ he added. I’ve only been here for
eleven years, but perhaps Abe might be able to help. He was here in the days
when more people played racquets than tennis.’

‘And the gentlemen
only played racquets,’ said an older man who appeared from an office at the
back to join his colleague. ‘And what is it that I might be able to help with?’

‘A key,’ said
the young man. ‘This gentleman wants to know if you’ve ever seen one like it,’
he added as he passed the key to Abe.

Abe turned the
key over in his hands. ‘It’s certainly not one of ours,’ he confirmed, ‘and
never has been, but I know what the “R” stands for,’ he added triumphantly,
‘because it must have been, oh, nearly twenty years ago, when Dinkins was
Mayor.’ He paused and looked up at Jack. ‘A young man came in who could hardly
speak a word of English and asked if this was the Romanian Club.’