Holy Terror (35 page)

‘What about your friend Mr Guttuso? Can't you touch him for some money? After all, he is your
brurrther,' she added, mimicking Luigi Guttuso's accent.

‘Come on, Eleanor. It's bad enough my using his apartment, without asking him for air tickets and spending money. He'd give it to me, for sure. But supposing I manage to clear my name and get back to work in the security business? I'll always have that skeleton in my closet, won't I, that I took money from the wise guys.'

‘You need an angel, that's what you need,' said Eleanor. ‘An investor, just like we have on Broadway.'

‘Jesus, I'm not much of an investment.'

‘But think about it, you could be. I mean, why do you want to go to Oslo? Because all of the blackmail money was sent there. And if you manage to track down the people who framed you for the safe deposit robbery, you'll track down the money, too.'

‘Of course,' said Conor. ‘And with any luck at all, I'll be able to give it back to the people it was extorted from.'

‘Davina Gambit,' they said, almost in unison.

‘Mr O'Neil! I'm sorry I'm so late. I had a charity lunch at the Macklowe. Estonian orphans.'

Davina Gambit was dressed today in a scarlet silk moiré suit with a deeply
décolleté
top and pants that looked like wildly exaggerated jodhpurs. Around her neck she wore a gold-and-diamond star. She sat down at their table and ordered herself a mineral water with a twist of lime. ‘I could kill a vodka.'

Conor had arranged to meet her at IBM Garden Plaza on Madison Avenue at 56th Street, under the
sprouting bamboo trees. It was airy and cool in here, and it clattered with the sound of conversation and footsteps and coffee cups. Over in the far comer, a four-piece jazz band in Derby hats and humbug-striped vests played ‘Pasadena'. Conor had brought Eleanor with him, partly because she was feeling claustrophobic after two days in Luigi Guttuso's apartment; and partly because – accompanied by an elderly woman – Conor looked much less like a dangerous fugitive.

‘Ms Gambit, this is Eleanor Bronsky, the theatrical agent. She's been giving me a whole lot of help to sort this situation out.'

‘Well, I don't know. It's a mess, isn't it? I don't understand it at all. But I got all my papers back, all my letters, all my photographs. There was nothing missing.'

‘Nothing except four and a half million dollars, which you had to pay to get them back.'

‘What else could I do? If Jack had seen them … I would have been left with nothing, nothing at all, except for the one pink dress I wore when I first arrived in America. I still keep it, you know. It reminds me.'

Conor said, ‘Believe me, I did everything I could to get your papers back. But I'm sorry, I ran out of time, and there's much more than blackmail going on here. These people wanted your money, yes. But they didn't want it simply to make themselves rich.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Because the guy co-ordinating the robberies is a character called Victor Labrea, and Victor Labrea is an agent for the Reverend Dennis Evelyn Branch.'

Davina Gambit shook her head. ‘I never heard this name.'

‘He's a religious terrorist – the leader of an extreme evangelical movement calling itself the Global Message. He daren't stay too long on American soil because he's wanted by the FBI in connection with a number of bombings. So Victor Labrea does all his dirty work for him. Or
did
. He's hospitalized now.'

‘But why should this Dennis Evelyn Branch want so much money? We must be talking about hundreds of millions!'

‘He's talking about a worldwide crusade, and for that he needs funds. A war chest, I guess you'd call it. After all, he says he's committed to nothing less than the wholesale conversion of every man, woman and child on this planet to his own particular brand of fundamentalism.'

‘How could he do that? You mean
everybody
– Catholics and Muslims and Hindu people, too? It's impossible!'

‘Dennis Evelyn Branch doesn't seem to think so. I don't know what he's planning to do, but if he succeeds, he's going to start the biggest religious war in history.'

‘He sounds like a mad person.'

‘I don't know. He wasn't so mad that he couldn't organize one of the most original extortion operations this city has ever seen, and get away with it.'

‘You said on the phone that you could get my money back.'

‘I'm going to try, sure. I
have
to try. My whole reputation depends on it. My life depends on it.'

‘Then how much do you need to go to Oslo?'

‘I don't know. Oslo's pretty pricey, and I don't know how long this is going to take me.'

‘If I give you twenty-five thousand dollars?'

‘I guess that should cover it. Well, to begin with, anyhow.'

Davina Gambit turned to Eleanor. ‘I've heard of you, haven't I? You're a very famous woman. Very respected.'

‘I
was
,' Eleanor corrected her.

‘To me, you still are. Do you think I can trust this man?'

‘Conor? Yes. I trust him, and I'm a pretty good judge of character. It's my job, after all, characters.'

‘Then do something for me. You go to Norway with him. Look after him. Make sure that he doesn't do anything too ridiculous. I know men like him. They're always their own worst enemy.'

‘You want Eleanor to be my
nursemaid
?' Conor protested.

‘Absolutely. All men need a nursemaid. Somebody to remind them that they're only men. That was why I was good for Jack. And look at him now. All those bimbos on his arm, making a fool of himself.'

Conor said, ‘This could be very, very dangerous. We're dealing with fanatics here. We're dealing with people who are beyond fanatics.'

‘All the more reason you need somebody like Eleanor with you.'

‘What do you think, Eleanor? Wouldn't you rather stay here with Sidney?'

Eleanor shook her head. ‘There's nothing much I
can do for him, not just yet. It's going to be months before he's fully recovered. What happens after that … well, that depends on all sorts of different things, like how much nursing he's going to need, and whether he wants us to get back together and whether
I
want us to.

‘I'm not getting any younger, Conor. I wasted four years of my life loving Sidney before. I'm not so sure that I can allow that to happen again.'

Conor reached across the table and took hold of her hand. Davina Gambit laid her hand on top of both of them, so that they looked like the Three Musketeers. ‘You'll have your money in the morning. Give me your number and I'll call you tomorrow morning at nine.'

Conor was pouring himself a second cup of coffee when the phone rang. He picked it up and said, ‘Good morning, Ms Gambit. You're right on time.'

‘Right on time for what?' replied a woman's voice. It certainly wasn't Davina Gambit.

‘Who is this?' Conor demanded.

‘Conor – what's the matter?' asked Eleanor, through a wreath of cigarette smoke.

The woman said, ‘Your little friend at the Kaufman Pharmacy gave me your number. Don't blame him. He didn't do it voluntarily. I induced him.'

‘
Hetti
,' said Conor.

‘I'd prefer it if you called me Magda. Especially now that Ramon is gone. No more Hypnos: no more Hetti.'

‘I'm sorry about Ramon, no matter what he did.'

‘Don't be too sorry. Ramon was a fool. Bombastic. Thought so much of himself. I was always a better hypnotist than him. I don't know why I worked with him. I don't know why I loved him. It's crazy, isn't it, the things you do in spite of your better
judgment?' She pronounced it ‘yoodjment'.

‘I guess we all make mistakes like that,' said Conor. ‘What do you want?'

‘I want to meet with you, talk with you. I can tell you everything I know about the Spurr's Fifth Avenue robbery – about
all
of the robberies.'

‘And why would you want to do that?'

‘They want to kill me, that's why. I need your protection.'

‘Who wants to kill you?'

‘You know who they are. Dennis Evelyn Branch and all of his people. Those men with their black suits and their crucifixes. They're looking for me, to make sure that I don't say anything.'

Conor said, ‘All right, then, let's meet.'

‘Tomorrow?'

‘No, today. As soon as possible.' He didn't tell her why: that he was leaving for Norway in less than nine hours.

‘Where are you?' asked Magda. ‘Wherever you are, I can come to see you as soon as you like.'

‘I don't think so. You want to meet me, I'll tell you where to meet me. John's Pizzeria on Bleecker at Seventh Avenue.' He checked his watch. ‘Ten o'clock, precisely.'

‘Very well. Anyplace at all. This is a bad thing that has happened, Mr O'Neil. But I think that there is something worse to come.'

‘I don't doubt it, Ms Slanic'

‘Magda, please.'

‘OK – Magda.'

Eleanor gave him a long, old-fashioned look. ‘Are you sure this is wise?'

‘Maybe not. But we don't have anything to lose, do we?'

At 10:05 a dour bald man in sunglasses and a bright pink polo shirt arrived, and handed Conor a large brown paper postal bag. ‘Open it,' he said; and when Conor looked inside he saw that it contained bundles of $100 and $50 bills, all of them used.

‘Twenty-five grand,' the man told him. ‘You don't need to count it.'

‘You want me to sign for it?' asked Conor.

The bald man said, ‘I wouldn't bother. You lose this, your life's worth shit anyway.'

Magda Slanic was already waiting for him at a corner table in John's Pizzeria when he arrived. The atmosphere was sweaty, noisy, with music bumping and lines of lunchtime office workers waiting for takeout, so many that they had to form a crocodile into the street. The temperature was edging its way over ninety degrees, and the street was already distorted with heat.

Magda looked as striking as usual, with her white deadpan face and her startling eyes and her mouth that was almost invisible. Her jet-black hair was pinned up with a variety of silver stars, and her hands were clustered with silver rings. She wore a long black skirt and black high-heeled ankle-boots that were fastened by elaborate spiderwebs of thin leather laces.

‘You hungry?' asked Conor, as a waiter approached them with his pad at the ready.

Magda whispered, ‘No. But coffee maybe. Black. Strong.'

‘Two large espresso,' said Conor. The waiter kept his pen raised as if he expected them to order a pizza, but Conor said, ‘That's it. Two large espresso.'

Magda looked around her nervously. ‘You're sure we're safe here?'

‘It depends on your definition of safe.'

‘I never thought that they were going to kill us,' said Magda. ‘Victor Labrea was always so friendly, you know? Right from the very beginning he was always giving us money and treating us to meals.' She gave him a thin, quirky smile. ‘He called me the Romanian Raven because I always dress in black.'

‘How did you get to meet a scumbag like him?'

‘It was April. The first of April, stupid fools' day, I should have realized! But it was a very bad time. Ramon and I hadn't had any serious work in over two years and we had no money. Ramon was wanted for crack dealing and for stealing food from grocery stores. But how else could we live? We were living in a horrible apartment near the Bowery. In the winter it was enough to freeze your bones and there was damp running down the walls.

‘Being so broke, it hit Ramon very hard, even more hard than me. He came from a very poor family in Tijuana. To think that after all that fame and all that money he would have to go back to such a life…

‘Then Victor appeared on our doorstep. I never knew how he managed to locate us. He told us that he needed our help and that he was prepared to pay us very well for it. Thousands of dollars, if we did good.'

‘Did he tell you what you were supposed to do?'

‘He said it was charity work.'

‘So he didn't ask you outright if you were prepared to steal safety deposit boxes and confidential legal records, and extort money from their owners to get them back?'

Magda shook her head. ‘He didn't say it was anything like that. He said that he belonged to a religious movement that wanted to launch a worldwide crusade. The Global Message Movement. He said they had no money left because they had been persecuted by the government and the Southern Baptist Conference. All of their assets had been taken by the FBI, and none of the TV stations would carry their fund-raising broadcasts. But he said they weren't criminals, they were people who believed in God and believed in the Bible, that's all.'

‘Maybe. But it's a little difficult to see how he reconciled that with stealing other people's private property.'

‘He said that God had given him a sign.'

‘A sign, huh? What kind of a sign?'

‘It was like, what do you call it, a
vision
. He said he drove past a field and saw ears of wheat all waving the same way, and he suddenly realized that God wanted the world to be the same as that field of wheat. He wanted everybody on the planet to pray the same prayers together, and cherish the same beliefs, and only then would there be universal peace and goodness, for ever. He said that God gave him the authority to take money from sinners so that he could spread His word. God said that it was only right to make sinners pay for their sins, especially
when they had hidden their sins away and had never been punished for them. “Be sure your sin will find you out,” that's what he said.'

Conor sat back. Magda's eyes were so black that they looked like pools of oil, and they were quite unreadable.
What does she want
? he asked himself.
Why the hell has she come to me
?