The Consignment (14 page)

CHAPTER 17

“Trevanian’s trying to screw everyone,” I told Channon. “But the only thing he’s really screwing is our operation.” The shadows from the cypresses cut sharp lines across the manicured lawns of West Point as we walked down the gravel path toward the parade ground. Channon had hardly spoken a word since my arrival at his office door. I’d given him most of the story across his desk, but then a meeting of the Infantry instructors convened in a neighboring room and Channon decided it might be better if he heard the rest of my story elsewhere. “So now Lagundi’s got the diamonds, Rossiter’s got the bill of lading, and Trevanian, if we can believe him, has got the goddamn money,” I concluded.

“You could tell Rossiter about Lagundi’s offer,” Channon said. I shook my head. If Rossiter thought Lagundi was still involved in the deal, he’d back off fast. He simply didn’t trust her anymore. Channon asked me if I’d told Rita my story yet. I explained that she was calling me at home later. Then a couple of West Point cadets walked by, they saluted Channon, he raised a hand briskly to the peak of his cap.

“If you tell Durranti what you’ve just told me,” he said, dropping his hand, “she might decide the situation’s bad enough for her to call time. She could impound the cargo before it’s legally changed hands, just to cover her butt.”

“She won’t.”

“She might. And if she does, Rossiter’ll throw half a dozen lawyers at her.”

The worst of all possible outcomes. Hawkeye finished without success, the true cause of Dimitri’s death undiscovered, and my undercover life wound up in something like ignominy.

“I have to tell her something,” I said.

“You could tell her the money’s been paid. You could tell her the deal’s proceeding to schedule.”

I stopped and faced him. “You mean lie to her.”

He nodded. I raised a brow, but my relief must have shown. Relief that he wasn’t calling me in. “I’ll back you up,” he said, then he turned and we walked again. “You were afraid I was going to shut Hawkeye down,” he remarked. When I glanced across, he smiled wryly. “I missed my chance. I should have done it the day Dimitri was killed.”

We wandered along the edge of the parade ground. Cadets in dress uniform were beating the square, the sergeant major was drilling them hard. The crump of boots on the tarmac, and the mindless bellowing, brought back memories of Beast Barracks. It brought back more recent memories too, of the graduation parades that tolled out the deadening years of my instructorship at West Point, parades that invariably left me feeling depressed for weeks. I knew that I was wasting the prime years of my soldiering life. I knew it every day when I went in to work, when I drilled the cadets on the range, when I booked their weapons in and out of the armory like some uniformed office clerk. But the parades brought the brutal fact home to me in a way that nothing else could. Cadets were becoming officers, taking on real soldiering duties all around the world, while I was locked in the dreary nine-to-five of the average office-bound civilian.

It was killing me. I was dying inside. With every graduation parade, I became more certain that it couldn’t go on, that I couldn’t go on, that, whatever Fiona’s objections to me serving as a real soldier, I had to get back to it before I lost the last shred of my self-respect. I had to get back to it before I was too old to even try. When Channon assured me that Hawkeye was strictly short-term, and covert, it had seemed to be the ideal solution to my problems. I didn’t need to tell Fiona. That was a calculated risk. I figured there was no chance of her finding out I was back on active service, though, if she had, I knew our marriage could have imploded. But if Hawkeye didn’t work out after six months, I told myself, I had a failsafe. I could step back then and reassess my life. Instead, six months had become two years, Fiona had become convinced I was having an affair, and Dimitri had died. In short, nothing had worked out remotely like I planned.

Now Channon and I watched the cadets wheel around the parade ground while we spent a few minutes discussing some operational matters. Channon warned me not to access the Biron account, the one the DIA had set up in Switzerland for Dimitri and me. From what the DIA accountants had seen, Dimitri hadn’t been stupid enough to use the funds inappropriately, but they’d advised Channon that while the IRS was crawling all over Dimitri’s financial affairs, it would be best to keep Biron inactive. I agreed. He also told me not to send him any more written reports. He said that in the future he wanted anything I discovered to be reported to him verbally. I agreed to that one too.

Then we talked about his plan for the Haplon materiel. Channon intended to trace the Haplon containers, courtesy of the bugs I’d planted, to their off-loading point in Africa. A Special Forces unit would be stationed on one of our carriers off the West African coast, and other operatives would be alerted in Liberia, Nigeria, and the Congo. He wanted the materiel to travel as far down the supply chain as he could safely let it go, after which he’d have it destroyed. Either by an air strike while the cargo was still at sea, or possibly a Special Forces raid if the materiel went inland. After that, anyone who’d been involved in the supply, anyone who’d facilitated the trade—Rossiter, Trevanian and Lagundi, the
Sebastopol
’s captain—would be arrested and brought to justice in a U.S. court. I would be required to give testimony. He really seemed to have thought it all out. And he hadn’t forgotten my purported personal motive for going on with Hawkeye either, because then he asked me, “So what are you hearing about Dimitri?”

“Talk. Nothing we don’t already know.”

“Anyone still blaming the Springfield rangemaster?”

I turned my head, no. I told him that a couple of Fettners guys were talking like Dimitri wasn’t as straight as he might have been. I’d picked this up over lunch with clients. The initial speculation over Dimitri’s death had fallen away, but without a final judgment from the FBI, suspicion lingered. The sudden appearance of the IRS in Fettners’ accounts department had been widely noted. Many clients preferred not to place themselves anywhere in the vicinity of a federal investigation, or the IRS, and Haplon had consequently landed some small orders that normally would have gone to Fettners. “Frankly,” I told Channon, “nobody’s got a damn clue.”

“What’s your guess?” When I shrugged, he pressed me. He said I must have given it some thought. “Your best guess? Don’t tell me you haven’t got one.”

We passed by a podium that had been erected temporarily for some big parade. Now a team of grunts from the Engineers was dismantling the wooden frame and wisecracking about the cadets still beating the square. I waited till we were out of earshot before I gave Channon my answer.

“Rossiter or Trevanian. Maybe both.”

“Any reason?”

“Trevanian’s past business with Dimitri. The way they’ve both pushed this order. What other candidates have we got?”

“Lagundi?”

I shook my head. I’d seen her a few times now since her sharpshooting exhibition at the Haplon range, and I didn’t trust her. Maybe on her home territory in Africa she might even have had it in her to kill someone. But in the U.S.? She could shoot straight enough to have done the job, but where was her motive for murdering Dimitri? I said all that to Channon.

“The Bureau guys found a bullet,” he told me. “They dug it out of the Springfield tarmac. A nine-millimeter shell from a Beretta.” I stopped. Lagundi’s gun. “You still think she’s not a candidate?” he said, straight-faced.

I asked him if he’d seen the Bureau’s ballistics, or if he’d shown them ours, from Lagundi’s gun.

“They haven’t got any. The shell splintered, it’s unreadable.” He watched the cadets. His eyelids drooped, his expression was drawn and tired. “If we point the Bureau at Lagundi now, they’ll pick her up. When they find out she’s working on a deal with Trevanian, they’ll pick him up too.”

In other words, no, he hadn’t shown them our ballistics. He didn’t want to imperil the Haplon deal.

“What if she killed Dimitri?”

“What if she did?” he said. “It’s not our job to call in the police, Ned. Our job is to do our job. You were the one who didn’t want Hawkeye shut down. Well, you got that. Now we’re seeing it through. If that means letting Lagundi wander around free a few more days, then that’s what it means.”

“She could leave the country.”

He rounded on me. “She could, and no one’d be more pissed about that than me. Maybe Dimitri was an asshole, but I was responsible for him. He died on my watch. Hell, look at the damn stink you made when those men of yours bought it in the Gulf. Am I any different? No, if she killed Dimitri, she should suffer. But that’s not the priority here. The priority is to finish the job we started.”

“She might decide she needs someone else dead.”

“I’m not ordering you to go on with this, Ned.” He turned to the parade ground. “That’s your decision. If you want to bow out now, fine.”

Out on the square the bugler blew reveille, the Stars and Stripes came down the flagpole, fluttering, twisting around the wires. The company of cadets stood to attention in neat, clean ranks, like a field of toy soldiers. When the flag was ceremoniously folded, there was a brisk exchange of salutes. The bugler snapped his bugle arm down to his side. As the cadets marched off the parade ground, Channon faced me again.

“I can’t order you.”

“I want to see it through.”

“A smart soldier never volunteers,” he said, and I made a face. It was way too late to be recalling rule number one of every boot camp in history. He clapped a hand on my arm and held it. His grip was like iron. “Do us both a favor. Don’t take Lagundi for any more unaccompanied drives in your car.”

CHAPTER 18

There was a white van parked in the drive at home. I pulled up alongside it and got out and walked around. Stenciled on the rear door was the name of a local company, Parkes Catering, the outfit Fiona usually hired to do the Christmas party at Geometrics. Parked in front of it was another car, an old blue Ford. Olympia’s.

“That you, Ned?” Fiona called from the kitchen as I dropped my car keys in the tray in the hall. It had been weeks since my entry into the house had been greeted with anything other than silence, so now I loosened my tie and undid my top button as I went down the hall and into the kitchen. Fiona was seated at the breakfast bar. A young guy wearing jeans, a canary yellow T-shirt, and a wraparound white apron was dicing vegetables over by the sink.

“Hi,” he said, lifting his knife. I nodded in his direction and he started dicing again. I turned to Fiona.

“From Brad,” she said, holding a card out to me. Really curious now, I took it. Fiona explained that the young caterer had brought it, he’d arrived unannounced just half an hour earlier.

Dear M and D, I’ll be in Kinshasa by the time you get this, and probably enjoying myself more than you are, so don’t worry.
Please.
I wanted to get you a present before I left, but just like normal I left it to the last moment so I didn’t have the time to get into town. So this is it, my present. These Parkes Catering guys are going to do you a fine meal. (They suggested the menu, don’t blame me if it doesn’t work out.) It’s paid for, so all you have to do is enjoy it. Maybe put some candles on the table, have a glass of wine, and think of your son eating burnt beans by a campfire somewhere in Africa.

I’ll call in a few days when I’m settled in.
Don’t worry.
Brad

I closed the card. It said “Get Well” on the front, the words framed in red roses. Irony wasn’t Brad’s strong suit, my best guess was that he’d innocently fished the card from the odds-and-ends box in the pantry. I gave it back to Fiona.

“Olympia’s here?”

“She’s out back with Laurence. I’ve given them both a drink.” When I raised a brow, Fiona went on, lowering her voice. “Brad called them before he left and told them to come over tonight. He told them not to tell us. Keep it a surprise.”

A catered dinner at home with my wife and the Maguires. I felt like going straight upstairs and crawling into bed.

“I was going to lay the table in the dining room,” Fiona said. “I thought we could change first, do it properly like Brad wants.”

Dressing for dinner, in my own house, with everything else on my mind, did not hold a huge appeal. But when I grimaced, Fiona’s disappointment was painful to see, the hurt registered in her eyes. For a moment we looked at each other as if from opposite sides of a chasm across which Brad had flung the first slim rope of a fragile bridge. When she made to rise, I reached quickly and placed my hand on hers. She looked down at my hand, at the wedding ring on my finger.

“I have to make a few calls,” I told her. “Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll change and come back down.”

The meal went better than I’d expected. The young chef doubled as a waiter, ferrying food from the kitchen into the adjoining dining room, where the four of us sat sipping wine and talking, and behaving like civilized adults. I’d dimmed the lights. Candles flickered from the silver candelabra that we used about once every five years. Fiona had laid out the silver cutlery and the white linen napkins, and she’d put a pale lily into a glass vase on the table. It was a long time since she’d done anything like that.

We didn’t talk about anything in particular. The latest movies. Mutual friends. Nobody came straight out and mentioned Dimitri, but a couple of times Fiona had to quickly steer the conversation aside when it seemed to be heading in that direction. Mostly we talked about our respective children. At the end of the meal Olympia congratulated us on Brad’s thoughtfulness, the fact that it even crossed his mind to organize the dinner.

“Our two ever come up with something like this,” she said, gesturing to the empty dessert plates the chef was removing, “I’ll declare a national holiday.”

“They’re okay,” said Laurence mildly.

“Sure they’re okay,” she told him, smiling. “They don’t have to do anything yet. Wait till they’re Brad’s age.”

Laurence glanced in my direction and raised a brow. He was bald and thin, and since the chemotherapy his face had never really looked right. His cheekbones protruded and his dark eyes seemed to have receded into their sockets. Before cancer struck, he spent his spare time working in his garden and serving on some local neighborhood committees, and though he was a good husband to Olympia and stepfather to her children, he just wasn’t really my kind of guy. Olympia couldn’t have picked a second husband less like Dimitri if she’d tried. He helped the chef gather up the plates now, despite Fiona’s protests, and took them into the kitchen.

When he was gone, I leaned back in my chair, the knots in my shoulders easing, while Olympia and Fiona drank some more wine and got started down memory lane. Fiona was more relaxed than I’d seen her in months. How she was meant to be, I thought as I watched her. How she always was. A few times she laughed out loud, threw her head back, and palmed her eyes. Fiona had a weakness for crude jokes, the kind I brought back from West Point by the truckload. In the old days, with some drink in her, among friends, she used to retell the jokes better than I ever could, and get everyone laughing. Then the next morning, if she needed to, she could jump on a plane, fly out to the West Coast, and give an erudite lecture on metamorphic geology to a bunch of sharp young mining analysts. In those days, we’d made each other happy. Now I found myself staring at her. She was tired, but still vivacious. Eyes sparkling. Intensely alive. I stared at her and wondered why in hell I’d done what I’d done, and doubted I could ever make it right.

“Ned?” I turned and found Olympia tapping my arm and looking at me strangely. She nodded to the kitchen, from where I now heard Laurence calling for my assistance.

I went and found Laurence loading coffee cups on a tray, the young Parkes Catering guy was getting ready to leave. I slipped the Parkes guy twenty bucks, let him out, then came back to help Laurence. I got cream from the fridge and put some beans through the grinder.

“Great dinner,” he said, fiddling with the cups on the tray. “Lovely evening.”

“Brad’s work, not mine.”

“Yeah. Nice boy. You’re a lucky man.”

Something in his tone made me glance across. Was he implying that he wasn’t so lucky? Or was I simply overreading an offhand remark? I nodded and poured the coffee powder into the percolator.

He switched on the kettle. “Olympia said she told you about this trust fund.”

“Ah-ha.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Truthfully?”

When he nodded, I lowered my voice. “Dimitri wasn’t the total asshole Olympia makes him out to be. I’m not sure she even believes that herself.”

“Oh, she believes it.”

“Then how does she explain Dimitri leaving the girls the money?”

“She doesn’t,” Laurence said, his eyes dropping. “She can’t.”

I put down the percolator and faced him. He’d invited the moment. I wasn’t going to let it pass. “You’ve never asked me about Dimitri. I understand that, I’m not saying you should have. But listen, Laurence, there are two sides to every story. And now that Dimitri’s dead, I don’t think it’s fair his daughters—I mean your girls—” I said, suddenly awkward and out of my depth, “the twins, I don’t think it’s fair they should go through their lives believing their natural father was an asshole who never felt anything for them.”

“I’ve never told them that.” He looked straight at me. Not my kind of guy, but in his own way, absolutely decent and honorable.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m sure you haven’t.”

“You want the truth,” he said. “Dimitri’s never been an issue with the girls. I mean, they know I’m not their natural father, but they know I’m their dad. They were so young when I came on the scene. It was like I stepped into another guy’s life. His wife. The kids. I used to wonder how it might be when they got a little older, if they’d want to meet him. But now . . .” He shrugged, perplexed.

I went over to the kettle, we both watched it in silence till it boiled, then I poured the water into the percolator.

“Maybe if they want to speak to someone about him when they’re older,” he said suddenly, “I could send them to you.” I looked up. He was serious.

“What would Olympia think of that?”

“Olympia’s not asking you,” he said. “I’m asking you.”

“So you don’t believe he was as bad as Olympia makes out?”

“For Olympia, he was. For me . . .” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “I mean,” he said, “he gave me Olympia. The girls. Everything.”

I said I doubted that an extravagant act of generosity was actually Dimitri’s intention. Laurence’s expression became pained, and I realized then that any stab at humor was completely inappropriate. He wasn’t a well man, and he was speaking to me in a way he’d never spoken to me before, from the heart. I turned my hand over. “I’ll speak to them, okay? If that’s what you want. But I won’t gloss anything. If the girls want to hear about him, I’ll tell them what I know.”

“Sure.”

“I think Dimitri’s owed that.”

He dropped his head, a brief nod.

I turned from him, picked up the percolator, and pointed to the cups on the tray. It had been a long day and I wanted it over. When we went through to the dining room Fiona was rounding off some story, Olympia hooted with laughter as Laurence arrived with the cups.

When Olympia and Laurence had finally left, I bolted the front door then went around the house, locking up. At last I returned to the living room, where Fiona had retreated. She’d put an old Kenny G tape on the player, and she was sitting in the big armchair, sipping cognac, her legs curled beneath her. A photo album lay open on the arm of the chair, I glanced down as I walked by. Scenes from the eighties. Me and Dimitri in uniform, goofing off on the roof of his Chevy. Fiona and Brad crawling over rocks, up near the shack. I crossed to the sofa and slumped down. Kicking off my shoes, I stretched back and lifted my feet onto the cushions. We listened to the music awhile. A false peace.

“You asleep?” Fiona said after a minute.

When I opened my eyes, she closed the album.

“Olympia was asking if you’d looked through the things she sent you.” The paperwork relating to the trust fund. Olympia’s parcel had arrived the previous day.

“I’ll call her about it tomorrow.”

“Is it about Dimitri?”

“He set up a trust fund for their girls. Olympia’s concerned it might somehow be tied up with his death.”

“Is it?”

“No.” The paperwork Olympia had sent me was straightforward. Over the previous eighteen months, Dimitri had made two payments into the trust, the first for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the second for two hundred and fifty. The money had been placed into a stock fund, Dimitri had gotten lucky and the fund had grown to half a million. The money, as Olympia suspected, must have come from commission payments from Fettners or kickbacks from some of his clients. But the most recent payment into the trust was six months earlier. That, and the very public nature of Dimitri’s death, finally convinced me that Olympia would be safe just hanging on to the money and keeping quiet. I hadn’t mentioned the trust fund to Channon. Now that I’d seen the paperwork, I’d decided that I wasn’t going to. “She’s got nothing to worry about,” I said.

Fiona reminded me that Olympia had a husband in remission from cancer, and two tearaway daughters. Nothing-to-worry-about, she said, didn’t do Olympia’s situation any real justice. I eased my head into the sofa cushions and focused on a picture across the room. My mind, I admit, was already moving on from Olympia’s problems. It was drifting down to the New Jersey docks, to the
Sebastopol
and its cargo. In less than twenty-four hours the ship would sail, with or without the Haplon arms. I ran through a mental checklist of everything we’d done, trying to see if anything had been overlooked.

“Ned?”

“Mm?”

“I thought this might be a good time for us to talk.” When I looked up, Fiona was studying me over the rim of her glass. There was no need for me to ask what subject she had in mind.

I took a breath. The only pleasant evening we’d shared together for months was about to end. “Can we leave it just now?”

“Delaying it won’t change anything. A little more time, what’s that going to change?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nothing.”

“Okay. Let’s just say I’m beat.”

She set down her glass. “You may not find this easy, Ned. But imagine what it’s like for me.” I didn’t need to imagine it, it was etched on her face. It had been written there for months, an insurmountable disappointment and unhappiness. I found I couldn’t hold her gaze, couldn’t even look her in the eye. “I can’t go on pretending everything’s going to work out,” she said.

“It’s been a rough week.”

“It’s not just this week. It’s been months. You know what? If we’re going to be honest, it’s been nearly two years since things have really been right.” At that I made a face, turned my head in denial, but Fiona went on, “I’m not blaming you. But that’s the truth. I’ve thought about it a lot, believe me I have. I’m not just saying this because of what’s been happening lately. It’s since you left the Army. When you joined Haplon.”

“You said you supported my decision.”

“I never knew what that meant. Not then. I mean, it’s not like I’m saying it’s been totally awful the whole time. That’s not true. I’m just saying, well, something changed with you somehow. With us.”

“I’m the same guy.” Fiona didn’t reply, a silence that was way more eloquent than words. I put down my glass. Elbows on my knees, I spread my hands. “I am the same guy.”

She looked at me long and hard. “Who is she, Ned?”

“Oh, Jesus.” I threw up my hands and got to my feet.

“You can’t walk away from it. It’ll still be there tomorrow. You have to face it sometime.”