False Impression (38 page)

‘Romania would
be my bet,’ said Anna, the words puffing out intermittently.

‘You should have
joined the FBI,’ said Jack, slowing down.

‘You’d worked it
out already,’ said Anna.

‘No,’ admitted
Jack. ‘A guy called Abe worked it out for me.’

‘And?’

‘And both of you
were right.’

‘So where is the
Romanian Club?’

‘In a rundown
neighbourhood in Queens,’ replied Jack.

‘And what did
you find when you opened the box?*

‘I can’t be
absolutely certain,’ replied Jack.

‘Don’t play
games, Stalker, just tell me what was in the
box.
’

‘About
two million dollars.’

‘Two million?’
repeated Anna in disbelief.

“Well, it might
not be quite that much, but it certainly was enough for my boss to drop
everything, stake out the building and cancel my leave.’

‘What sort of
person keeps two million in cash hidden in a safety deposit box in Queens?’
asked Anna.

‘A
person who can’t risk opening a bank account anywhere in the world.’

‘Krantz,’ said
Anna.

‘So now it’s
your turn. Did anything come out of your dinner with Tina?’

‘I thought you’d
never ask,’ replied Anna, and covered another hundred yards before she said,
‘Fenston thinks the latest addition to his collection is magnificent. But, more
important, when Tina took in his morning coffee, there was a copy of the New
York Times on his desk, and it was open at page seventeen.’

‘Obviously not
the sports section,’ said Jack.

‘No,
international,’ said Anna, as she extracted the article from her pocket and
passed it over to Jack.

‘Is this a ploy
to see if I can keep up with you while I read?’

‘No, it’s a ploy
to find out if you can read, Stalker, and I can always slow down, because I
know you haven’t been able to keep up with me in the past,’ said Anna.

Jack read the
headline and almost came to a halt as they ran past the lake. It was some time
before he spoke again.
‘Sharp girl, your friend Tina.’

‘And she gets
sharper,’ said Anna. ‘She interrupted a conversation Fenston was having with Leapman,
and overhead him say, “Do you still have the second key?” She didn’t understand
the significance of it at the time, but...’

‘I take back
everything I said about her,’ said Jack. ‘She’s on our team.’

‘No, Stalker,
she’s on my team,’ said Anna, accelerating down Strawberry Fields as she always
did for the last half mile, with Jack striding by her side.

‘This is where I
leave you,’ said Anna, once they reached Artists’

Gate.
She checked her
watch and smiled: 11 minutes 48 seconds.

‘Brunch?

‘Can’t,
sadly,’ said Anna, ‘meeting up with an old friend from Christie’s, trying to
find out if they’ve got any openings.’

‘Dinner?’

‘I’ve got
tickets for the Rauschenberg at the Whitney. If you want to join me, I’ll be
there around six, Stalker.’

She ran away
before he could reply.

L
eapman had
selected a Sunday because it was the one day of the week Fenston didn’t go into
the office, although he’d already called him three times that day.

He sat alone in
his apartment eating a TV dinner, and going over his plan, until he was certain
nothing could go wrong.

Tomorrow, and
all the rest of his tomorrows, he would dine in a restaurant, without having to
wait for Fenston.

When he’d eaten
every last scrap, he returned to his bedroom and stripped down to his
underpants. He pulled open a drawer that contained the sports gear he needed
for this particular exercise.

He put on a
T-shirt, shorts and a baggy grey tracksuit that teenagers wouldn’t even have
believed their parents once wore, and finally donned a pair of white socks and
white gym shoes. He didn’t look at himself in the mirror. He walked back across
the room, fell on his knees and reached under the bed to pull out a large gym
bag that had the handle of a squash racket poking out of it. He was now dressed
and ready for his irregular exercise.

All he needed
was the key, and a packet of cigarettes.

He strolled
through to the kitchen, opened a drawer that contained a large carton of
duty-free Marlboro and extracted a packet of twenty. He never smoked. His final
act in this agnostic ritual was to place his hand under the drawer and remove a
key that was taped to the base. He was now fully equipped.

He double-locked
the front door of his apartment and took the stairs down to the basement. He
opened the back door and walked up one flight, emerging onto the street.

To any casual
passer-by, he looked like a man on the way to his squash club. Leapman had
never played a game of squash in his life. He walked one block before hailing a
yellow cab. The routine never varied. He gave the driver an address that didn’t
have a squash club within five miles. He sat in the back of the cab, relieved
to find the driver wasn’t talkative, because he needed to concentrate. Today,
he would make one change from his normal routine, a change he’d been planning
for the past ten years.

This would be
the last time he carried out this particular chore for Fenston, a man who had
taken advantage of him every day for the last decade. Not today.
Never again.
He glanced out of the cab window. He made this
journey once, sometimes twice a year, when he would deposit large sums of cash
at NYRC, always within days of Krantz completing one of her assignments. During
that time, Leapman had deposited over five million dollars into box 13 at the
guesthouse on Lincoln Street, and he knew it would always be a one-way journey
– until she made a mistake.

When he’d read
in the Times that Krantz had been captured after being shot in the shoulder –
he would have preferred that she’d been killed – he knew this must be his one
chance. What Fenston would describe as a window of
opportunity.
After all, Krantz was the only person who knew how much cash was in that box,
while he remained the only other person with a key.

‘Where is it exactly?’
asked the driver.

Leapman looked
out of the window. ‘A couple more blocks,’ he said, ‘and then you can drop me
on the corner.’ Leapman took the squash racket out of the bag and placed it on
the back seat.

‘Twenty-three
dollars,’ the driver mumbled as he came to a halt outside a liquor store.

Leapman passed
three tens through the grille. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes. If you’re still
around, you’ll get another fifty.’

‘I’ll be
around,’ came back the immediate reply.

Leapman grabbed
the empty gym bag and stepped out of the cab, leaving the squash racket on the
back seat. He crossed the road, pleased to find that the sidewalk was crowded
with locals out shopping. One of the reasons he always chose a Sunday
afternoon.

He would never
risk such an outing at night. In Queens, they’d be happy to mug him for an
empty bag.

Leapman
quickened his pace until he reached number 61. He stopped for a moment to check
that no one was taking any interest in him. Why would they? He descended the
steps towards the NYRC sign and pushed open a door that was never locked.

The caretaker
looked up from his sedentary position and when he saw who it was, nodded – the
most energetic thing he’d done all day – then turned his attention back to the
racing page.

Leapman placed
the packet of Marlboro on the counter, knowing they would disappear before he
turned round. Every man has his price.

He peered into
the gloom of a corridor lit only by a naked forty watt bulb. He sometimes
wondered if he was the only person who advanced beyond the counter.

Despite the
darkness of the corridor, he knew exactly where her box was located. Not that
you could read the number on the door – like everything else, it had faded over
the years. He looked back up the corridor; one of his cigarettes was already glowing
in the darkness.

He took the key
out of his tracksuit pocket, placed it in the lock, turned it and pulled open
the door. He unzipped the bag before looking back in the direction of the old
man. No interest. It took him less than a minute to empty the contents of the
box, fill the bag and zip it back up.

Leapman closed
the door and locked it for the last time. He picked up the bag, momentarily
surprised by how heavy it was, and walked back down the corridor. He placed the
key on the counter.

‘I won’t be
needing
it again,’ he told the old man, who didn’t allow
this sudden break in routine to distract him from his study of the form for the
four o’clock at Belmont. He’d been fifty feet from a racing certainty for the
past twelve years and hadn’t even checked the odds.

Leapman walked
out of the door, climbed back up the steps and into the light of Lincoln
Street. At the top of the steps, he once again glanced up and down the road. He
felt safe. He began to walk quickly down the street, gripping the handle of the
bag
tightly,
relieved to see the cab was still waiting
for him on the corner.

He had covered
about twenty yards when, out of nowhere, he was surrounded by a dozen men
dressed in jeans and blue-nylon windbreakers, FBI printed in bold yellow
letters on their backs.

They came
running towards him from every direction. A moment later, two cars entered
Lincoln, one from each end – despite its being a one-way street – and came to a
screeching halt in a semicircle around the suspect. This time passers-by did
stop to stare at the tracksuited man carrying a sports bag. The taxi sped away,
minus fifty dollars, plus one squash racket.

‘Read him his
rights,’ said Joe, as another officer clamped Leapman’s arms firmly behind his
back and handcuffed him, while a third relieved him of his gym bag.

Tou have the
right to remain silent...’ which Leapman did.

Once his Miranda
rights had been recited to him – not for the first time – Leapman was led off
to one of the cars and unceremoniously dumped in the back, where Agent Delaney
was waiting for him.

Anna was at the
Whitney Museum, standing in front of a Rauschenberg canvas entitled Satellite,
when her cellphone vibrated in her jacket pocket. She glanced at the screen to
see that Stalker was trying to contact her.

‘Hey,’ said
Anna.

‘I was wrong.’

‘Wrong about
what?’ asked Anna.

‘It was more
than two million.’

The clock on a
nearby church struck four times.

Krantz heard one
of the guards say, ‘We’re off for our supper,
we’ll
be
back in about twenty minutes.’ The chain smoker coughed, but didn’t respond.
Krantz lay still in her bed until she could no longer hear their departing
footsteps. She pressed the buzzer by the side of her bed and a key turned in
the lock immediately.

Krantz didn’t
have to guess which one of them would be standing in the doorway, eager to
accompany her to the washroom.

‘Where’s your
mate?’ Krantz asked.

‘He’s having a
drag,’ said the guard. ‘Don’t
worry,
I’ll see that he
gets his share.’

She rubbed her
eyes, climbed slowly out of bed and joined him in the corridor. Another guard
was lolling in a chair, half asleep, at the other end of the corridor. The
smoker and the philanderer were nowhere to be seen.

The guard held
onto her elbow as he led her quickly down the passage. He accompanied her into
the bathroom, but remained outside while she disappeared into the cubicle.
Krantz sat on the lavatory, extracted the condom, peeled off two more
twenty-dollar bills, folded them and hid them in the palm of her right hand.
She then slowly pushed the condom back into a place even the least squeamish
guards didn’t care to search.

Once she’d
pulled the chain, her guard unlocked the door. He smiled in anticipation as she
walked back out into the corridor.

The guard seated
at the far end didn’t stir, and her personal minder seemed as pleased as she
was to discover that there was no one else around.

Krantz nodded
towards the linen closet. He pulled open the door and they both slipped inside.
Krantz immediately opened the palm of her hand to reveal the two twenty-dollar
bills. She passed them over to the guard. Just as he went to grab them, she
dropped one on the floor. He bent down to pick it up – only a matter of a
second – but long enough for him to feel the full force of her knee as it came
crashing up into his groin. As he fell forward, grasping his crotch, Krantz
grabbed him by the hair and in one swift movement sliced open his throat with
the doctor’s scissors. Not the most efficient of instruments, but the only
thing she could lay her hands on. She let go of his hair, grabbed him by the
collar and, with all the strength she could muster, bundled him into the
laundry chute. With a heave she helped him on his way,
then
dived in behind him.