The Consignment (15 page)

I rounded on her. “There is no ’she.’ All right? Let it go. You’re driving yourself crazy. You’re driving me crazy.”

“You’re not the same guy.”

“What?”

“The guy I married could have faced it.”

“Fiona.” I leaned over her, speaking quietly. “You show me what I’ve got to face, and I’ll face it. Right now, you’re asking me to come to grips with a goddamn mirage.”

“I show you, and you’ll face it.”

“I’ll face it.”

She pointed at me, her eyes suddenly hard as stones, then she rose and left the room and I dropped onto the sofa. I’d been beat when I’d arrived home, but by this time I was finished. When Fiona returned a minute later, I raised a hand. “Let’s do this tomorrow night. Let’s not spoil the evening.”

She produced a plastic wallet from her purse and tossed it onto the coffee table. I looked at the wallet. “So?” she said.

“So what?”

“So are you going to face it?”

I looked up at her. Her arms were folded, she was wound up tight as a steel spring. Leaving anything till later wasn’t on her agenda. Reaching, I placed my hand on the wallet, tapped it with my finger a few times, then picked it up and flipped it open.

Shock. Like I’d touched a high-voltage wire. My muscles clenched, my heart momentarily seized. I stared down at the first picture in the wallet. A plastic-encased photo, in color, like a holiday snap, of me and Rita Durranti strolling around the Grant memorial plaza. Numbed, I flipped the photo over. The next one was of me and Rita too, this time seated together on the plaza bench. “You’ve been following me.” I lifted my head. “Taking goddamn photos?”

“I used an agency.”

“An agency? What agency?”

“Listen to you. What agency? Who gives a damn what agency, look at the goddamn pictures. There they are. Can you face it now?”

I dropped my head, tried to get a hold on this thing, struggled to pull myself together. I turned the photos over one by one. Me and Rita sharing a sandwich. Heads together over a file. Saying good-bye at her car. Each picture was dated, the record stretched back three months. I thought about that incident I’d reported to Channon, the feeling I’d had of being followed on my way to the 7-Eleven. I gave a soft groan.

“Who is she?” asked Fiona.

“Why don’t you ask the agency?” I said tightly.

“I want to hear it from you. I want to know if you’ve got the guts to look at me and say her name.”

“You’ve got this so wrong.”

“You can’t even say her goddamn name.”

“She’s a colleague.”

“Durranti. Her name’s Rita Durranti, and she’s not your colleague, she works at Customs. Don’t lie to me. I don’t want any more lies.”

“What else did this agency tell you?”

“What else can they tell me?”

“I work with her sometimes.”

“At Grant’s Tomb?”

When I hesitated, Fiona snatched the photo wallet from my hand. She located a picture of me and Rita and held it up to my face.

“Saturday,” she said. “The weekend before last. Do you remember where you told me you were going?” I stayed silent. “You were going into the office. And when you came home, I asked you about it. Everything okay? Sure, you said. Fine. Some new guy screwing up, but you’d put him right. Everything A-okay.” She made the sign with forefinger and thumb. “A-okay.” She flung the photo wallet at my chest, it struck, then fell to the floor. Kenny G blew a bright riff on the player.

I bent and picked up the wallet. I thumbed through the photos, seeing them now as Fiona must have seen them. The photographer had chosen his moments well, Rita and I seemed to be enjoying each other’s company in a way that Fiona and I hadn’t for months. Finally I put the wallet aside. “I’m helping her in a Customs investigation she’s running on illegal arms exports.”

“No more lies.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Look at me,” she said, her voice breaking. When my head stayed down, she shouted, “Look at me!” and I lifted my eyes. Her own eyes were filling with tears. “I can’t take any more.”

“Hey,” I said gently. I rose, reaching to put my arms around her, but she stepped back and held me off.

“I can’t take any more lies. I mean it.” She shook her head, then clasped her arms around herself. “Ned. I think I want a divorce.”

CHAPTER 19

In the morning I lay in bed, my hands behind my head on the pillow, and listened to Fiona in the neighboring room get herself ready for work. The shower. The sliding door of the closet. The hum of the electric toothbrush, then the retreat to her study before the hurried rush out the front door. I didn’t want to believe that our marriage might be over, and the deep familiarity of her routine was in some strange way a reassurance that behind our current troubles there were lasting verities, bonds that couldn’t be so easily broken or changed. When the front door banged shut, I climbed out of bed and went to the window and watched her, briefcase in hand, march down the front path. She turned left on the sidewalk and didn’t look back.

I took a raincheck on morning excercise, and I’d showered and dressed by the time Rossiter called. I knew it was him before I picked up the phone. I asked him if the deal was done yet, if he’d made the exchange.

“Nothin’s done. Trevanian hasn’t got the money.” I was silent. Dumbstruck. “Get yourself down to the docks.” he told me. “Get our materiel unloaded.”

“But he had the money yesterday. You spoke to his bank.”

“We spoke, but they never sent me a fax confirming it. And they haven’t transferred a dime into the Haplon account. Trevanian’s calling me every ten minutes. Wait, he tells me, the money’s comin’. I’m done waitin’. It’s over.”

I couldn’t let it be over. It had cost me too much. “Lagundi wants to make the payment,” I heard myself say.

There was a pause. “The fuck?” said Rossiter.

“With the diamonds.”

“Jesus H. Christ. We been there already, haven’t we? When did this come up? Did she call you?”

“Five minutes ago. She gave me an address downtown.”

“Why?”

“I agreed to meet her.” I screwed up my face. “To find out what she’s playing at. Why don’t I just go down there, see if she’s serious, then call you.” There was silence from Rossiter’s end. “If it doesn’t work out, I can go from there straight to the docks. The worst I can do is lose half an hour.”

He thought about it. “She can’t be serious.”

“There’s only one way to find out.” I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice. Instinctively I aligned my tone to Rossiter’s—pissed off, but reluctantly resigned. “Hell. What have we got to lose?”

Rossiter remarked that it was turning out to be the worst cocksucking deal of his life. “Christ. Go down and see her,” he decided. “Call me when you’re done.”

I hung up before he could change his mind.

Driving down to Manhattan, I had plenty of time to consider the possible outcomes, none of which had any appeal. Until this point, my role in the deal, if it came to a court case, had been secondary. Trevanian and Lagundi were unquestionably the initiators, and Rossiter had been their primary contact at Haplon. My role, basically, had been surveillance of the deal, even the most contorted lawyer’s argument couldn’t have twisted it into anything other than that. But if I now took it on myself to resurrect the diamond payment from Lagundi, I’d become a facilitator of the deal rather than a mere observer, a change that would leave us vulnerable to a charge of entrapment. And that, of course, was assuming that Lagundi could actually be persuaded to agree to an eleventh-hour deal that was also acceptable to Rossiter.

Channon wasn’t in his West Point office when I called, and as our range of code words didn’t stretch to the situation, I left no message. Instead, I called Rita and gave her the bad news. It was the first time I’d ever left her at a total loss for words. But when I told her how I was going to try to salvage the deal, she immediately started talking about entrapment. I cut her off.

“It’s not this or some better alternative. It’s this or nothing.”

“Well, let me tell you, right now
nothing
doesn’t seem so bad,” she said sharply.

I told her to keep her line clear, that I’d call again once I’d seen Lagundi. In the meantime I asked her to get hold of Channon and let him know what was going on. When she started in with her objections, I hung up, tossed the cell phone on the passenger seat, and drove.

The lobby of the Hallam Hotel was a domed atrium with doorways leading into the restaurant and bar. When I asked for Lagundi at reception, I drew a blank. I told them she was a recent divorcee, that maybe she’d registered under her maiden name, which I didn’t know. “She’s not American,” I elaborated when the guy looked skeptical. “She’s West African.” He arched a brow. I asked him, politely, if he could recheck the register, and while he did that, I looked around. The walls and floor were lined in pale marble. Discreet luxury was the prevailing style. The room rates weren’t listed, but singles must have started at three or four hundred a night, Lagundi hadn’t gone to ground in a dump. Then through an open door off the lobby, I saw her. She was in the restaurant, sitting at her table alone. As I walked across the lobby, the receptionist called me back. I told him it was okay, that I’d seen her. She didn’t see me till I was almost at her table. Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

“Friendly visit.” I slid into a chair beside her. Her glance flitted over my shoulder. “It’s just me,” I said.

“You followed me yesterday.”

“I’ve talked your proposition over with Rossiter. He agrees we might have the basis for a deal.”

“Who else knows I’m here? Trevanian?”

“No one.”

“Rossiter.”

“No one. Just me.”

She put down her fork. She glanced to the far side of the restaurant where four businessmen in suits were busy polishing off a late power breakfast. “Then if I get up and walk out,” she said, “there’ll be no one to stop me.” She made to rise, my hand shot across and gripped her wrist. “Let me go,” she said.

The waiter looked over. Then he started across, and I spoke quickly.

“The weapons, your whole order, it’s all set to be off-loaded from the ship. Unless we can work something out right now, your order is history. You can either play games, get mad and have me thrown out of here, or we can try and do something sensible.”

The waiter arrived at our table. “Madam?”

I let go of her wrist. The way she looked at me, it wasn’t too hard to imagine her shooting Dimitri down in cold blood. Finally she waved the waiter off and told me to come up to her room.

Her room turned out to be a suite somewhere near the top of the hotel, from the main window there was a view between the office buildings toward Central Park. The view alone must have cost her hundreds a night. She dropped her keys by her purse on the table. Then she turned to the mirror and pushed back a loose strand of hair. “Have you seen Trevanian?”

“He’s around.”

“Looking for me?”

I studied the back of her neck. Whatever was going on between her and Trevanian, it seemed pretty clear that their dispute wasn’t purely professional. But I didn’t want to get caught up in that. “If you’d screwed me around like you’ve screwed him around,” I said, “I’d be looking for you.”

She turned. “He was cheating us.”

“All I know is, he was due to make a payment on the order this morning, and he didn’t. That’s why I’m here.”

Her face bunched in real surprise. “But Trevanian has no money.”

“Your client’s money. Yesterday the bank said it was there. Today, they’re not paying.”

She frowned. She asked me which bank, I gave her the name, and her brow flexed down. When she went to the phone, telling me to wait, I protested, but she made her call anyway. A long number, outside the U.S. She spent five minutes being put on hold, then being transferred, before she got through to who she wanted, then she spent ten minutes holding a conversation in some African language I couldn’t even recognize, let alone translate. Trevanian’s name was mentioned several times, it came out of Lagundi’s mouth like a curse. I checked my watch. It was past nine. She was wasting time I didn’t have. Eventually the conversation ended, she put down the phone and faced me.

“Trevanian lied. He has no money. The client has not agreed to pay through that bank.”

I indicated the phone. “That was his client?”

“My client. He has given the diamonds. He will not be paying more.”

My heart dropped into my shoes. But then Lagundi said, “The client has instructed me to make Rossiter a final offer.” She watched me carefully. I told her I was still listening. “I can sell the diamonds immediately, then pay Haplon in U.S. dollars.”

Too easy. Way too easy. I said, “What’s the catch?”

“To sell the diamonds quickly, they will have to be discounted.”

“Greenbaum’s cut?”

“Nobody’s cut. And not through Greenbaum. Another trader. One my client can trust.”

“I don’t suppose you want to give me a name.”

She turned her head. “The discount will be twenty percent.”

I made a sound. That was never going to play with Rossiter.

“Negotiable,” she added.

“The time for finessing is gone, Cecille. Way gone. If your client hasn’t given you authority to make a better offer than that, there’s no point in us wasting more breath on it. The Haplon goods are coming off the ship inside two hours.” I opened a hand. “Make me your best offer. I can’t guarantee Rossiter’ll accept it, but if you want to stop the unloading, I need to take it to him right now.”

She thought that over. Then she went back to the side table beneath the mirror and put her hand in her purse. I moved around to where I had a clear view. But it wasn’t her Beretta she brought out, it was a pen and a notepad.

“The twenty percent discount is a real loss for us on the stones.” She scribbled on the pad. “The best my client can do is split the loss with Rossiter fifty-fifty.”

“Rossiter won’t go for that.”

“We get ten percent less for our diamonds. You reduce the price of the shipment by ten percent.” When I screwed up my face, she finished the note, and signed it. “It is our best offer.”

“I’m not sure it’ll work.”

“Our final offer.” She came over to me, stopped uncomfortably close, and pressed the note into my hand. Her perfume was strong. “Try,” she said.

When I couldn’t raise Rossiter on the phone at his apartment, I called Barbara, his secretary, at the office. He wasn’t there, but Barbara said she’d spoken to him ten minutes earlier. She said he’d called from his apartment and told her he’d be working there all morning, so I got in my car and drove over.

There was no answer when I knocked on his door, but I thought I heard voices inside so I knocked again, harder. Still no answer. I turned my ear to the door, there were definitely voices, but then a burst of music came through and I realized it was only the TV. I rested a hand on the door and studied my shoes. I didn’t know if Rossiter would accept or reject Lagundi’s final offer, but I was damn sure he wouldn’t like it. Ten percent of twelve million dollars. One-point-two million. After that steep a discount, Haplon’s profit would be wafer thin, under normal circumstances, unacceptable. But Rossiter needed cash badly, and ten-point-eight million dollars wasn’t an amount he’d reject out of hand, not without proper consideration, no matter how aggrieved he might feel after I’d delivered Lagundi’s scribbled note. My fervent hope, of course, was that he’d take the money and let the materiel sail. But he could only do that if he had the chance to consider Lagundi’s offer.

“Milton!” I banged on the door with my fist, then waited. Nothing live came back from inside, only the disembodied jingle of an advertisement. It was somewhere around then that I stopped thinking about Lagundi’s offer and started wondering why Rossiter wasn’t where he’d told Barbara he’d be. And why, if he’d gone out, he’d left the TV going, and turned up loud. I rapped on the door again and called his name. There was no response. Pretty soon, I figured, his neighbors along the hall would be poking their heads out to find out who the jerk was making the noise. I took out my key ring. If Rossiter was inside, and the door wasn’t chained, I could just say I’d pushed it and the door had opened. If he wasn’t inside, he might have left some clue as to where he’d gone.

I turned the key and pushed the door. It wasn’t chained.

“Milton?”

The only sound came from the TV. I let myself in and closed the door behind me. After listening a moment, I crossed the living room to the rear hall and went down there calling his name again. I pushed open his bedroom door. He wasn’t there. The door to the adjoining bathroom was open, but he wasn’t in there either, so I retreated up the hall, glancing in the other bedrooms. There was no sign of him anywhere, nor any sign of anything unusual. It was the same when I looked in the kitchen. Everything in place. Out in the living room again, I stopped, hands on hips, and considered what the hell to do next. While I was considering, my eyes fell on a copy of the latest
Jane’s Defence
lying on the coffee table. Rossiter’s reading glasses were sitting beside the magazine. Next to the glasses, a half-finished mug of coffee.

Stepping around the table, I reached down and touched the mug. It was cold. When I dipped my finger inside, the coffee was tepid. On the TV, a CNBC reporter was running through the latest news from Wall Street. I looked at the sofa, indented where he’d been sitting, and at his glasses, and the copy of
Jane’s
. My gaze wandered up to the end of the sofa, and stopped. The blue porcelain dog, Chinese-style, was missing. I looked around at the other low tables near the sofa. The porcelain dog wasn’t on any of them. I stepped up to the table where I was sure it had been. Then, on the floor, I noticed shiny fragments of something glinting. Crouching, I examined the fragments. Blue porcelain. I shouldered the sofa back a few inches, and lying there were the larger shards and broken pieces of the shattered porcelain dog. My throat dried.

I stood straight up and crossed to Rossiter’s study, I went directly to the drawer where I’d locked the bill of lading. When I pulled on the drawer, it wasn’t locked, it slid open easily. The drawer was empty. The bill of lading was gone.