Ghost Music (35 page)

Jack let himself in, and slammed the door behind him.

The afternoon passed, and it began to snow—very lightly at first, but then thicker and thicker. I finished off my score for
The Billy Wagner Show
and worked on a few ideas for Diet Pepsi. It grew so dark that I could barely see my keyboard.

I tinkled away at what I hoped would be a light, bubbly melody, which would make everybody who heard it feel like drinking low-calorie cola. But somehow my fingers strayed into playing “Snow Blind.” I played it, and sang it under my breath, and I felt a terrible sadness for Elsa and Felicia and all of those other families whom Victor and Jack had destroyed. One way or another, I had to give them justice. If I didn't give them justice, they would never be at peace.

“The snowflakes fell so thick and fast . . . I couldn't see where you had passed . . . you left me far behind . . . so many miles behind . . .”

I still hadn't heard from Kate. I missed her, like an ache, and quite apart from that, I needed to ask her why there were none of her clothes in Victor's apartment. It was obvious that she didn't live there anymore, and I needed to know why she had been deceiving me. If she wasn't living downstairs, then where was she living, and whom with? I didn't want to get myself tangled up with people like Victor and Jack unless I was absolutely sure that I wasn't being used as a patsy. This whole situation was looking darker and more complicated and infinitely more dangerous by the minute.

Around 6:15
PM
, Margot called me.

“Why aren't you here?” she demanded.

“Why aren't I where?”

“Here—at Down the Hatch. I've been waiting for you for twenty-five minutes.”

“I didn't know I was supposed to meet you at Down the Hatch. When did we arrange that?”

“About two o'clock this afternoon. You texted me.”

“I texted you? I don't think so. I've been working all day.”

“Well, somebody did. Somebody who signed themselves Lalo.”

“Not me, sweetheart. But I can meet you there if you want me to. I could sure use a drink.
And
a plateful of atomic wings.”

“Okay . . . I'll give you ten more minutes. But then I'm going. I've already been approached by five different guys who think I'm a hooker.”

“Come on, Margot . . . you'd make a
great
hooker.”

I put on my Timberland boots and my overcoat and wound my scarf around my neck. Through the living room window, I could see that it was snowing furiously now. I was just pulling my gloves on when there was a brisk, staccato knock.
Kate
, I thought. Thank God.

I opened the door, but it wasn't Kate. It was Victor. His hair was slicked back and he was wearing a brown chalk-striped suit and a bronze necktie with zigzag patterns on it. He smelled strongly of Aqua di Selva.

“Victor!” I said. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“Mind if I come in?” he asked me. Somehow he gave me the feeling that it wasn't a request.

“Well—I was just about to go out, but sure.”

He walked into the middle of my living room on shiny brown leather shoes and his heels clicked like deathwatch beetles. He looked around, and sniffed.

“You've done the place nice,” he said. “Kind of minimalist for
my taste, but nice. Better than old Mr. Benjamin had it. Doesn't smell of geriatric anymore either. I hate the smell of geriatrics. Elderly smells worse than dead, in my opinion.”

He picked up the statuette of Pan and then put it down again. “Did you want something?” I asked him.

He looked at me sideways and gave me a wolfish grin. “I could ask you the same question, Gideon. For instance, why pretend that you're Franklin Coleman, and ask about the Palazzetto Di Nerezza? Why follow Jack, in Venice? And why go poking around my apartment?”

“I, ah—”

“You're going to
deny
it? You broke into my apartment today and you spent over ten minutes going through my stuff. I have closed-circuit television, Gideon, triggered by movement. Mostly, I use it for personal amusement. But now and then it records something even more exciting than some dumb cocktail waitress polishing my pecker. Like you, for example, rummaging through my desk.”

I shrugged. I didn't know what to say. I couldn't even think of a plausible lie.

Victor came up to me and looked me directly in the eye. I realized now that he was trembling with rage, even though his voice was completely controlled. “If you're going to stick your nose into other people's private business, Gideon, you need to be wilier than they are, if you get my meaning. Like you don't make calls from your own personal phone that they can trace back to you. And you don't have face-to-face confrontations with people who are perfectly capable of ripping your face off. And you certainly don't break into my apartment and go through my fucking desk.”

“Well, I'm sorry about that,” I told him. “I didn't take anything, I swear it.”

“Oh, you didn't
take
anything? That's good. But I'll tell you what I think, Gideon. I think that you overheard something about
me and Jack Friendly that didn't concern you. I don't even pretend to know what, or how. Maybe you just got extrasensitive ears. But you decided to find out more, didn't you? And that was your big mistake.”

I said nothing. I wasn't going to tell him about Kate, and how she had arranged for me to fly to Stockholm and London and Venice—especially since she didn't seem to be living with him anymore, and I had absolutely no idea where she was, or how to get in touch with her.

Victor prodded my chest with his index finger. I really hate it when people do that, but I could hardly pretend that I hadn't searched his apartment or phoned his office or challenged Jack Friendly when I met him in Venice.

“Whatever you think you know, Gideon, you don't know it no more. You get my meaning?”

“Listen—I've forgotten it already.”

“And you think I trust you? I don't fucking trust you one inch. You're up to something and I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, it's going to stop.”

I raised both hands, as if his index finger were a gun. “It's stopped. I promise you. Period.”

Victor smiled. “And I'm supposed to take your word? I don't think so. So let me tell you this. (A) You're going to keep your nose out of my business and (B) you're going to give me your apartment.”

I frowned at him. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. You are going to transfer this apartment over to me, for a nominal fee, i.e. one hundred dollars. I am going to allow you to live in this apartment for as long as you keep your lip zippered up, but the second I hear that you've tried to take this matter any further, you are out on your extrasensitive ear.”

“You're crazy,” I said. “I'm not going to give you my apartment—especially not for a hundred dollars! Do you know how much this place
cost
?”

“Of course I know how much it cost. Which is why I think I'm getting myself a bargain.”

“There is absolutely no way, Victor. No way whatsoever. I'm going to the cops.”

“No, Gideon, you're not.”

“Try and stop me. What are you going to do, tell Jack Friendly to throw me in the East River, tied to a mattress? Or set fire to me, in my own backyard?”

Victor covered his eyes with his hand for a moment, as if he were suffering from eyestrain. Then he covered his mouth, as if he didn't know what to say. Eventually, though, he took out his cell phone, and punched in a number with his thumb. The phone rang, and he listened for a moment.

“It's me,” he said. “Put her on, will you?”

With that, he handed the phone over to me. “Go on,” he coaxed me. “Ask her how she is.”

Oh my God
, I thought,
it's Kate
. But then I heard a man's voice blurting, “Talk to him, will you? Tell him we ain't pulled your fingernails out. Not yet, anyhow!”

“Kate?” I said.

I heard a gasping, panicky voice. “Lalo—Lalo—it's me! They just grabbed me, when I went to the restroom!”

“Margot?”

“I was waiting for you and I went to the restroom and there were two of them there and they grabbed me! Please, Lalo—help me! I don't know where they're taking me!”

“Where are you now?”

“I'm in a car! They're taking me someplace but I don't know where! Please, Lalo!”

The phone was abruptly cut off. Victor smiled and said, “There—you didn't think that I wasn't going to take out some kind of insurance policy, did you? What did I say to you, Gideon? If you're going to stick your nose into other people's business, you need to be wilier than they are. And I'm pretty wily. I'm surprised
my beloved momma didn't christen me ‘Coyote,' God rest her soul.”

I was so angry that I could have hit him, very hard. I could have put him over my upraised knee and broken his back, so that he never could have walked again. I don't know how I managed to control myself, but I guess there was something in the back of my mind that warned me what would happen to Margot, if I beat up on Victor, or called the police. I didn't know where she was, or who had abducted her, and they could easily kill her before anybody could find her. That's if they could ever find her at all.

“Okay,” I heard myself saying, almost as if somebody else were talking for me. “What do you want me to do?”

Victor laid his hand on my shoulder. “You don't have to do nothing, Gideon. Nothing at all. I'll have all of the paperwork drawn up, and all you have to do is sign.”

“I'm not signing unless you let Margot go free.”

“Oh . . . we won't keep her for longer than we have to. But you don't go to the cops, Gideon. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. This is one of those secrets that you carry to the grave, you got me?”

I looked at him. I felt utterly defeated. I had never been in the presence of pure evil before, and it was like that moment when you've been climbing a very steep hill and you realize that you simply don't have the strength to climb any farther. Your legs just won't work.

“What would your beloved momma think of you, Victor?” I asked him, in disgust. “What would your beloved momma think of you, if she could see you now?”

“My beloved momma was a fat stupid cow,” he replied. “If there's one thing she taught me, it was greed. Take what you want, and as much as you want, and never
ever
feel guilty about it.

“But I think my beloved poppa taught me an even better lesson than that. My beloved poppa taught me that if anybody ever does
you harm, you should never let them get away with it, ever. Never forgive nobody for nothing, that was my poppa's motto. And make sure you do a hundred times worse to them as they ever did to you. If they take something away from you, you make sure you take everything away from them.”

I took a deep breath. “If you hurt Margot, I will kill you. I don't care what happens to me. I don't care if they give me the death sentence. But I swear to God that I will kill you.”

Victor let out a sharp bark of laughter, and squeezed my shoulder again. “No, you won't, Gideon. It takes a very special sort of selfishness to kill people, and you just don't have it.”

* * *

What else could I do but take off my coat and my scarf and my gloves and pour myself a very large glass of wine? Victor had said that he would arrange for the property transfer as soon as possible, but it would still take several days, and he wasn't going to let Margot go free until I had signed it.

Several times during the evening I picked up the phone and thought about dialing 911. I knew that it was the right thing to do. But I kept thinking of Margot, broken and covered in blood or drowned or cremated, and I simply couldn't risk her getting hurt. I had seen what Jack Friendly had done to the Westerlunds and the Philipses and the Cesarettis. I was sure that he wouldn't have the slightest compunction about doing the same to Margot.

The nightmarish visions that I had seen in Stockholm and London and Venice had been frightening enough, but at least they had seemed detached from reality, and Kate had been there to reassure me that they had some kind of a purpose. This was real, and I had nobody that I could turn to for help.

* * *

I refilled my glass and switched on my laptop. For at least the twentieth time, I Googled the Westerlunds and the Philipses and the Cesarettis, searching through their backgrounds for any fragment of information that might connect them with Victor Solway or Penumbra Property.

I came across a BBC website story about the disappearance of the Philips family, and how their relatives had made a brokenhearted appeal for anybody who had seen them to get in touch. But the Westerlunds and the Cesarettis had disappeared so completely that it was just like they had evaporated, like patterns of steam on a window.

For the first time, I looked for the families on Google Image, too, to see if there were any photographs of them. I found six or seven pictures of Axel Westerlund on a tour of hospitals in Angola; and a blurry black-and-white image of David Philips to accompany some
Financial Times
article about international investment. But I almost missed the most important photograph.

It was a group picture of thirty-five delegates at a conference in Geneva in June 1997, hosted by Worldwide Surgical Solutions, Inc. I enlarged it, and there was David Philips standing on the right-hand side of the picture, looking younger and trimmer and smiling broadly. But right next to him, in a smart gray suit, was Enrico Cesaretti; and on the other side of the same group—wearing a neatly trimmed beard but still instantly recognizable—was Axel Westerlund. I peered at the picture even more closely, and then I printed it out. This was no coincidence, it couldn't be. These three men knew each other.