Father Night (11 page)

“When was the last time you bowled?” Alli asked as they set themselves up.

Vera laughed. “I know fuck-all about bowling.”

Alli showed her the essentials. As in everything, Vera was a quick study, and by the third frame she had gotten a spare to Alli’s two strikes and a missed spare. They were about to order Cokes when Caro appeared and sat down beside them.

“What did I miss?” she said, glancing at the score sheet.

“We talked about you incessantly, obsessively,” Vera said.

“Happy I didn’t hear any of it,” Caro said with the same degree of astringency. “And now,” she added without turning around, “my contact is about to arrive.”

“How very mysterioso!” Vera cried in mock excitement.

“None of that while he’s with us,” Caro said, all banter abruptly drained from her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Vera said, staring at her hands clasped demurely in her lap.

Caro snorted, and Alli, hearing a
click-click-click
approaching and thinking of Ahab walking the deck of the
Pequod,
turned her head to see a small man, so unprepossessing he might have been the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, leaning on a hickory walking stick, making his way to their lane.

“Alli Carson,” Caro said, acting as MC, “this is Werner Waxman.”

*   *   *

A
T THE
top of the stairs they found the floor as silent as a library. Jack had expected a warren of executive offices, but instead was confronted by a cavernous space, divided only by two rows of thick fluted columns with Doric capitals. Instead of half walls and desks, there were bristling stands of electronic equipment, grouped like copses of trees. The space was so vast that its far end was shrouded in a kind of haze, caused by dusty sunlight lancing through small panes of glass. The place smelled faintly of disinfectant and the peculiar but indefinable odor given off by heated electronics.

He walked forward now, into the dusty sunlight, circling around until he faced the islands of electronics. He turned and saw Annika bending over her grandfather’s body. She must have done something, given him another drug. Dyadya began to move. He said something to Katya, who was standing beside him. She bent down and kissed him. Then he said something to Annika and she helped him into a sitting position. He swung his legs over the side of the gurney. When he saw where Jack was standing, a smile creased his face.

“You see, Annika, it’s as I predicted,” the old man said. “Jack knows you triggered our backup plan.”

S
IX

A
S WAS
his wont, Mr. Waxman inclined his head in the formal European style at Vera’s introduction. “Charmed.”

“And her friend, Vera Bard.”

“Equally,” Mr. Waxman said with the precise economy of age.

His face was long and thin, with a nose like a knife blade and thin lips the color of fried liver. Incongruously, he wore a natty porkpie hat similar to the sort sported by fifties jazz musicians and current hipsters. Just below hung elephantine ears, filled with whorled cartilage. He sat with some difficulty between Alli and Vera, as if any movement of his bones pained him.

Turning back to Alli, he said, “Ms. Simpson has apprised me of your current situation. Also of the information she has been able to glean from her scouring of the Internet. She has taken the investigation as far as she can.”

“I understand that, and I’m grateful.” Alli had to remind herself that Caro’s current identity was Helene Simpson. “Can you help?”

“Allow me to explain.” Waxman’s lips compressed to pencil lines as he smiled. “Ms. Simpson came up against a firewall and she ceased her work immediately. It wasn’t that she couldn’t get through this particular firewall. On the contrary, I have every confidence that in time she would have breached it if she tried. She chose not to.”

Alli glanced at Caro, but she spoke to Waxman. “Why not?”

Waxman had hands like a marmoset, small and neat. He wrapped them over the knobbed head of his walking stick, so that his knuckles, swollen with arthritis, stood out, white as birch bark. “Why not?” he echoed. “Well, for one thing, she’s an exceedingly clever creature. For another, infiltrating a government military firewall is a treasonable offense.”

Le Tigre had finished, the loudspeakers effortlessly segued into “Who Am I to Feel so Free,” from their new incarnation, MEN. The song scarcely registered on Alli; she was too shocked. Her thoughts chased each other madly, her head pounding. Her lips felt glued together.

“I don’t…” Clearing her throat, she was at last able to speak coherently. “Are you saying that the person who put up that site works for the federal government?”

“Military intelligence,” Waxman said, “not to put too fine a point on it.”

Alli bent over, head in her hands. Now she understood how this person knew the intimate details of her kidnapping—he was working for the government, protected by it. Which meant that he had been at the crime scene or had been privy to the eyes-only report. She shuddered to think that he had stood in the same room where she had been bound and psychologically beaten by Morgan Herr. A dreadful chill rippled through her. Did that mean he knew her as well as Herr had?
Please, God
, she thought,
don’t make it so
.

“Alli?” Vera came and sat next to her, a sheltering arm pulling her close. “Come on. We’re all here to help you.”

“She’s right,” Waxman said. “Listen to your friends.” His smile was benign, reassuring. “We’re all here to help.”

Alli shuddered again, her nightmare past roaring back at her full-throttle, overtaking the present. “I think I’m going to be sick.” Bolting up, she ran down the aisle behind the lanes, through the lounge, and into the ladies’ room, past a pair of girls snorting coke and giggling like madwomen. Slamming into a stall, she had just enough time to bend over before regurgitating the entire contents of her stomach and then some. She held herself up by pressing her palms against the side walls, but her knees felt weak, her consciousness whittled down to the few square feet she currently inhabited.

She was shocked out of her sickly trance by a commanding voice out in the w.c. proper, saying, “Get out! Get out now!”

A moment later, a cool hand pressed itself against her forehead, brushed damp wisps of hair from her forehead and temples. Grateful, she turned, expecting to thank Vera. Instead, she was surprised to see Caro’s fierce face.

“The past is a helluva thing, isn’t it?” she said.

Pulling on Alli’s arm, she directed her out to the line of sinks where the girls had been snorting just a few moments ago. The w.c. had now been swept clear. Caro had made certain of that.

As Alli bent over one of the sinks, washing her face and rinsing out her mouth, Caro stood beside her. “Believe me, I know.”

Alli spit out water. “Sorry, but you have no idea what being held against your will feels like. You know what I went through.”

“Oh, but I have been held hostage.”

Alli picked her head up and stared at her cousin.

“I got trapped into working for a man—”

“That’s hardly the same.”

“Let me finish,” Caro said. For a moment she stared at herself in the mirror above the sinks. “This was a very dangerous man,” she said after what seemed a long time.

“Who is he?”

Caro took a paper towel and wiped off the last stray beads of water from Alli’s face. “I was, in effect, held hostage by him. And for far longer than a week.” She raised both hands. “Not that the amount of time matters. I’m just saying.”

Someone shouted on the other side of the door and there was a loud knocking. Caro broke away, crossed to the door, and opened it a sliver. “Fuck off, bitches,” she said, and slammed the door closed.

Returning to where Alli stood, she took up where she had left off. “We’re similar, you and I, maybe more than you know.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Our fathers—the Carson brothers—yin and yang.”

“My father was nothing like Uncle Hank.”

“Well, no. But Uncle Edward enabled my father to be who he is today.”

Alli shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

Caro crossed her arms over her breasts. “Your father was a good guy—too good, in a way. He covered up for my father. Edward adored his older brother, so much so that he deliberately ignored my father’s penchant for power-grabbing, no matter who got hurt. Henry Holt was the doer, Edward was the fixer. Together, they made the perfect team. Trouble was, Edward made an art of looking the other way when Henry skated on the left side of the law or made the most despicable of deals with people he had no business being in bed with.”

Alli stared wide-eyed at her cousin. Why hadn’t she known this deplorable family history? And then she found herself wondering whether she, in fact, did know, but, like her father, had chosen to turn her attention elsewhere. Her whole family had been in the business of following Edward’s lead in idolizing Uncle Henry. Why, she wondered, was it so easy to go through life with blinders on? Humans had the uncanny ability to absorb only what they wanted to see and hear, while blocking out anything and everything that contradicted what they felt was in their best interests.

“Is that why you ran away from home?”

Caro nodded. “Though it wasn’t that simple. My father is a determined man with almost unlimited resources.”

“It sure it took a shitload of ingenuity and guts,” Alli said.

“If only that’s all it took.” A wistful smile wafted like a cloud across Caro’s beautiful face. “I was thirteen. I had raw talent, it’s true, but I hardly had the skills I have now.” Her gaze turned inward. “I needed help, and the only people who could help me—the only ones powerful enough—were very bad people indeed.”

“But you escaped.”

Caro’s eyes snapped back into focus. “The fact is, I could not have escaped without your help.”

Alli took a breath. “
My
help?”

“That’s right.” Caro nodded. Her eyes glittered. “I was working for the Syrian.”

*   *   *

T
HE
G
ENERAL
was not a man to suffer either fools or latecomers. As a result, when Leonard Bishop showed up seven minutes late for dinner, the vampire-thin hostess, following orders to the letter, held him at the podium for precisely that amount of time before she took him to the General’s table. During that time, she busied herself answering numerous calls, informing guests at the bar that their tables were ready, and checking the reservations of incoming groups. Beneath theatrically made-up eyelids, she observed Bishop’s growing impatience with the waspish schadenfreude endemic to her kind. However, when the required seven minutes had elapsed, she approached Bishop with a warm smile and an outsized menu under one arm. With a ceremonious sweep of her wire-thin arm and a cheerful “This way, Chief Bishop,” she led him a circuitous route past closely packed tables, frantic waiters, and loaded-down busboys to the left rear corner of the room, where the General sat, drinking Greenore, Ireland’s oldest single-grain whiskey, in a colossal cut-crystal glass the restaurant kept specifically for him.

Bishop took it as an evil sign that the General said not a word as he seated himself in the chair opposite.

“Drink?” the hostess said as she handed him the menu.

“Greenore,” Bishop said, a ploy to placate his host. He detested whiskey, and in particular Irish whiskey, which he found lacked the bracing medicinal bite of a fine single-malt scotch.

“Very good,” the hostess said, though she was preoccupied taking mysterious visual cues from the General.

Dinnertime swirled around them in a sea of voices, laughter, the chiming of glasses, the clink of cutlery against plates. At the next table, a waiter recited the evening’s specials. Bishop heard all of this peripherally; all his attention was focused on the General, who continued to stare at his menu as if it were the Bible.

A waiter set down the glass of Irish, and left.

Bishop, his anxiety level now running off the charts, cleared his throat and said, “What looks good to you, General?”

“A good, heaping helping of being on time,” the General said, his head still buried.

“Apologies. The Mall traffic—”

“I don’t accept apologies, you know that.” The General’s eyes snapped to attention and Bishop was immediately in their crosshairs. He carefully laid the menu aside and in a lower tone of voice said, “I only ask for little things, Leonard.” He took a sip of his Greenore, savoring the liquor on his tongue, then in the back of his throat, before setting the glass down on the tablecloth. “Understand, when I ask you for something more, it’s already too late.”

“Understood.” Bishop ground his teeth. The humiliations he suffered to get ahead and maintain his edge had turned him into someone who needed to inflict the same on others in order to verify his own worth. He had no other signposts by which to judge. Judge and be judged—if he thought about it that way, his life was simple, bearable, even.

“I think I’ll have the shrimp cocktail,” the General said to the waiter who had magically appeared tableside. “And then the porterhouse, bloody. Creamed spinach and house potatoes. And don’t forget to butter the steak the moment it’s taken off the fire.”

“Very good, sir.” The waiter turned his inquiring face to Bishop. “And you, sir. Have you made your choice?”

Bishop felt a bit panicky, as he always did when sitting down to a meal with the General. He wished his host would give him a clue as to what he should order. His first instinct was to follow the General’s lead, but he’d already done that with the drink; continuing down that road was too obvious. His stomach was jumpy anyway, and the damn Irish whiskey had only added to the problem.

“Come on, Bishop,” the General snapped. “Out with it.”

“A salad and the Dover sole,” Bishop said a bit breathlessly. He hated fish, but the sole was the first item his eyes latched onto.

“Any vegetable, sir—or potato?”

“Nothing.” Bishop almost shouted in his extreme discomfort.

“As you wish, sir.” The waiter gathered the menus and departed.