Sixteen

“YOU HEARD HIM BREAK?”

She turned toward me and I felt her warm breath on my chest. She took my hand and held it against her breast, squeezed my fingertips around her nipple, then brought the palm to her mouth, kissed.

“You poor darling,” she said, “you poor, poor darling. And Fleury—our Morris Fleury, the phantom of the Minnesota night—repaired your head?” She kissed my hand again. “You can’t be allowed out on your own again, my darling. Now we’ve got to get you relaxed … You’re so stiff—”

“That’s not tension, Heidi.”

“I’ve heard it said that violent death excites some people.” She giggled.

“This is serious.”

“I know.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

It was so much easier dealing with her now that I knew she wasn’t one of Fleury’s people. Easier, but something still bothered me. I was beginning to think Fleury might have been right about her feelings for me. That hadn’t been part of the deal.

She’d been waiting for me when I’d arrived back at the hotel, after Fleury had drifted away into the night. Past two o’clock, the middle of one of life’s darker nights, the mist having turned to rain, my head splitting. Really. Splitting. Morris Fleury’s bank investigations twisting my brain. The sound and feeling of the man’s back breaking over the railing, the memory of the wire flicking against my face. The emptiness of Clive Taillor’s house, the sound of “MacArthur Park” from next door … Heidi Dillinger waiting for me in the lobby, curled up on a couch reading a copy of the International Herald Tribune, looking up sleepily, telling me she’d been wondering if I was dead or something. Then she asked me if I’d been with Clive Taillor all this time. Had I gotten her message about meeting him at his place? She’d called him from Madrid, where she’d been attending to a Spanish-rights matter for Bechtol, and then she’d called the hotel to leave word for me …

We made love until one of us fainted. I think it was me, which is probably the standard post-killing performance level. The little death, Hemingway—or somebody like him—called it. It helped to erase the memory of the big death a little earlier in the evening.

It also made me stop thinking about Annie DeWinter, which was probably a good thing. I didn’t start thinking about Annie DeWinter again until Heidi herself brought her up later and opened the door to the final stage of our little saga. But I’ll get to that shortly.

Come morning, I staggered to the shower while Heidi was already on the telephone with Bechtol or Whitney or parties unknown. She wasn’t telling anyone about my previous evening’s activities. She’d become very protective about me.

I stood for a long time under the hot water, feeling the steam rising around me, while I tried to put my finger on the exact nature of what was going on between Heidi and me. There was an uneasiness I couldn’t shake. We weren’t, of course, in love. But was she? I couldn’t imagine what there was in me to love, and I hadn’t loved anyone in so long I’d forgotten how one managed it. We were, I suppose, drawn to one another, but it was the kind of thing co-workers, a couple of smartasses, sometimes find themselves embroiled in almost before they know it. We climbed one another because we were there, as the mountaineers say. Still, there was more to it than that. But for me it was shallow; I’d thought it was for her, too. Maybe seeing what a mess I was, how vulnerable I could be, had touched a nerve in her. Maybe she never trusted anyone and then found herself trusting me. … Maybe.

I’d made no move on her. She’d been the one who got it going that night at Whitney’s. Thinking about it, I was getting angry with both of us. What did she think she was doing, anyway? What was in it for her?

Heidi was a thinker. When Heidi looked at me, what was Heidi thinking?

I had no idea, not anymore.

And what was I thinking of when I looked at her?

It was time to admit it to myself.

Annie DeWinter. Like a song, a melody of the past, she kept coming back to me.

When I came out of the bathroom she was off the phone, sitting at the little desk waiting for me, tapping her front teeth with a Waterman pen, smiling crookedly. I’d seen the expression a thousand times before on the faces of countless women, and I knew it meant trouble. It was impossible to know just what kind of trouble, but I was going to be finding out right away. With emotional women, it could signal a firestorm up ahead. But Heidi wasn’t emotional; she was a thinker. Something had set her thinking about me. Some women have a sense of what’s going on inside your head and there’s no damn point in arguing about it. When I saw her I felt guilty about my thoughts in the shower, not because I’d had them but because she knew. I was going to pay, now or later; the crooked smile, the sidelong appraising glance told me that.

“Well, Lee, there seems to be an increasingly popular view that you, my dear, know where JC is … that you may, in fact, be in cahoots with him.” She was all mischief. It made me nervous. “Cahoots,” she said. It sounded like a sneeze.

“Whitney and Bechtol,” I said. “A pair of mental giants. Nobel winners for character judgment.”

She shrugged. “I’ve known dumber in my time.”

“So what do you think?” I was getting dressed, avoiding eye contact.

“Oh, I think you’re an elusive, secretive devil. A complicated man who has spent a lifetime concealing himself. Nobody knows you. You won’t allow it.”

“God, how I hate cheap pop psychology.” I was buttoning my shirt, making hard work of it. “Soap-opera crap.”

“Apparently I hit a nerve.”

“Look, I’m just a guy who had a famous brother and I can’t seem to get past it. JC may not be alive but he’s the un-dead, so far as I’m concerned.” I was pulling my pants on, hopping about on one leg.

“You are such a liar!” She laughed. “But I like that in a man.”

“Bullshit.” Up with the zipper.

“But, my darling, you are. A liar and a scoundrel. You can’t fool me. He is alive and you know it, don’t you? And you’ve always been part of the cover-up, haven’t you?”

“Socks,” I said. “I must have clean socks somewhere.”

“You are in love with Annie DeWinter, too, aren’t you?”

Ah, the curveball at last. Set me up with the fast balls, then the slow curve from nowhere. “What a question. I have not seen the woman in twenty years. She was twenty-five. Now she’s forty-five. I don’t even know her, let alone love her.”

“Now, don’t get all petulant. But if you’re not, that makes it all the more peculiar.”

I found my socks and sat down on the edge of the bed to put them on. “What,” I sighed, “could you possibly be babbling about?”

“You kept saying her name, ‘Annie, Annie,’ in your sleep. Oh, it was terrible.” She was smiling very slowly. “It made me feel like a wife checking up on her husband. Or do you know some other Annie?”

Clearly, she was a witch.

There was no answer when I called Clive Taillor’s house. An hour later I called again, with the same result. Heidi said she at least wanted to see the place, get some kind of feel for the man. She had rented a car at the airport, so we got directions and drove, first stopping in the old quarter to have a look at the Moon Club by daylight. It didn’t look like much, but then it never had, but once it had been a kind of temple, back in the days when everybody who came to Zurich went to the Moon Club, and some came to Zurich for no other reason. Now it was tough to imagine just who wouldn’t dread being there. It was locked and quiet and we headed for Clive’s house. This mist clung to the city, and fog continued to shroud the mountaintops. Uetliberg was completely obscured. The forested hillsides gleamed darkly, as if they’d been polished.

We left the car at the corner of the entry to the cul-de-sac and retraced my footsteps from the previous night. It seemed like a long time ago, probably because I’d killed a man in the meantime and gotten Morris Fleury’s version of the low-down and spent a long night with Heidi. But nothing on the street seemed to have changed. It was Sunday, impressively quiet, any lingering sounds muffled by the patter of the rain in the trees and the fog.

Clearly the party next door was over, but through the foliage I glimpsed a man in a striped bathrobe kneeling with a dustpan and whisk broom disposing of the evidence. Taillor’s house was quiet, streaked with damp. The pots of flowers hanging on the chalet balcony dripped steadily. I led Heidi along the route I’d followed, the door, the fox’s head, the trip around the house trying to get a look through a window, and my results reproduced themselves once again.

“Did you try this entrance?” We were standing at a heavy, scarred wooden door at the rear of the house. Two plastic trash cans were full, and empty flowerpots were stacked near a box of gardening tools, a rake, a hedge trimmer.

“No. The thought never occurred to me. The place was empty. I wasn’t going in.”

“Let’s see if maybe Mr. Taillor is just a very sound sleeper.” She depressed the catch on the handle and shoved. The door gave grudgingly, as if the insistent precipitation had swollen it against the frame. She gave it another push and it swung open into a back hallway. She reached in and turned on a light.

“Breaking and entering,” I said.

“Just entering,” she whispered. “Trespass.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Use your head—you know damn well if we go in there we’re going to find a corpse. My old friend Clive Taillor will be dead. It stands to reason.”

“You’ve seen too many movies.”

“Read books, too. Don’t forget books. I don’t like this one damn bit.”

“Be reasonable. Our coming in isn’t going to affect the situation one way or another. If we find a corpse, maybe it’ll be a big shock—maybe it’ll be somebody else. Maybe Hugo Ledbetter will be swinging from a light fixture.”

“No way. He’d pull the ceiling down.” I wanted to laugh at myself and the situation, but it was a slow go. My mind flipped through the back issues, I saw myself entering Sally Feinman’s loft, smelling things …

The house was spotless, which was pure Clive, organized and spectacularly precise in the absurdity of our rock existence. His compulsive neatness had made him indispensable to JC and me, both of us being something of a shambles. The pictures were straight, the dishes were in the cupboard, the throw rugs neat and squared with one another. The smell of lemon furniture polish hung in the stillness like a reproach to the less fastidious. The bookcases were full and arranged alphabetically, the dust jackets pristine, the ashtrays empty.

We climbed the polished wooden stairway to the second floor. It was dark because the windows were shuttered and the air was stale. Stale cigarette smoke.

Clive Taillor was tied to a high-backed wooden rocking chair in his bedroom. There was a small bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up on the forearms, black slacks, and his feet were bare. There were burns on his feet and a couple more on his forearms, which were roped to the arms of the chair. The wounds were charred, raw, blackened smudges where blood had dried. I looked down at his feet, then saw Sally Feinman’s foot sticking up out of the bathtub, smelled burned flesh.

Heidi stood beside me. Her face had gone white and she kept swallowing, lips clamped tight, unable for a few moments to speak or look away or swallow. I took her arm and pulled her back out into the hallway. Her eyes were wide when she looked up at me. “Clive?” Her mouth was dry, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth.

I nodded. “Older, grayer, and deader. But Clive.”

She was leaning against the wall. “I’ve got to think.”

I went back into the bedroom, trying not to look at the body. Cigarettes had been stubbed out in a glass ashtray. But I wasn’t looking for cigarettes. I was looking for a crust of charred tobacco knocked out of the bowl of a pipe.

I found it.

It didn’t smell of cherries. It just smelled stale and burned. But it was enough for me.

Back at the hotel, with the rain beginning to drum in the streets and blow in sheets across the balcony, I started in on Morris Fleury. I told Heidi what he’d told me about how he’d gotten into this, how he’d met her in Tangier, everything he’d told me less than twenty-four hours before. I told her about the tobacco ash and I said he seemed to me to be a lethal shadow, leaving the dead in his wake. She thought I was reading way too much into things, but she was still pale.

“Come on, don’t get bent out of shape about Fleury. He’s just not a now kind of person. I’d say he’s just somebody Rosen and Stryker foisted off on Whitney because he was good at not seeing some of the stuff that was going on. He’s on the downhill side, just cruising on home. He’s a flunky, Lee, but he goes way back, he goes all the way back to JC’s days at Magna—I’m surprised you guys didn’t know him, actually.”

“Maybe JC met him, but Fleury hasn’t said anything about it.”

“Look, Fleury’s a broken-down old bum—did you catch the suit he wears? I mean, have a heart … Whitney barely knows he’s alive, but he puts up with him out of habit. He’s a fixture, like an old desk somewhere they’ve forgotten to throw away. He’s been there forever—”

“How do you know so much about him?”

“Whitney told me, he called me in Tangier to tell me this old coot was coming to make contact with me. He told me I could trust Fleury to get messages to him, Whitney, if I couldn’t reach him or Allan. But really, it seems to me that you’re missing the point, Lee—”

“Wouldn’t surprise me, frankly. You’re the researcher.”

“And you’re always setting me up,” she said.

“The hell I am. Which point am I missing today?” I was thinking about Clive Taillor. I hated all of it. For all his decency and loyalty to JC he’d been killed. Tortured and killed. Had he told them what they wanted to know? Who were they? And I wondered when the police would find Taillor’s corpse. When we were long gone from Zurich, I hoped. And I wondered if Fleury was in the process of having Whitney put the pressure on the bankers to find out who’d been paying Taillor all these years.

“The point is that Taillor must have known all about what happened to JC. Including where he is now if he’s alive. I mean, why else torture and kill him?”

“Maybe Taillor was the one blackmailing Magna,” I said. “He could have sent the goddamn song. He could be in it with Thumper Gordon.” I was just talking, filling the air with words while I tried to cope with her suggestion about Taillor. What might happen if Taillor had told what he knew about my brother and, of course, about me? What ultimately had he known?

Heidi was shaking her head. “No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel that way to me. They—Magna, Whitney, Fleury—would give in to a blackmailer—and a blackmailer would have protected himself, the old in-case-of-my-death-an-envelope-will-be-opened gambit. No, I think Taillor was killed to find out something. Or”—she frowned at me—“to keep him from telling something—”

“Here we go again,” I muttered, but my heart wasn’t in it. It wasn’t a game anymore. “Why torture him if you just want to shut him up? Anyway, I like Morris Fleury for the killer, I don’t care what you think.”

She kept frowning at me. Her color was coming back. She was doing something I couldn’t do. She was forgetting Clive Taillor. I wanted to kill the man who’d murdered Clive. Perhaps I already had. “If Fleury killed Taillor, why?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “All the theories everybody is always insisting on depend on JC’s being alive. And I know JC is dead.”

She gave me one of those looks that said her patience was being tried. “I never know when to believe you.”

“Always believe me and you’ll be okay.”

“If Fleury killed Taillor, two motives present themselves.” She was tapping her teeth with the Waterman again. She had a faintly distracted look, as if she were programming a computer in her mind. “First, he was trying to find out where JC is … he tortured him to get the answer. Then, whatever he learned, he killed Taillor to shut him up, to keep him from warning JC or anyone else. Second, and I begin to like this one the more I think about it—he killed Taillor because Taillor knew where JC was … Taillor knows JC’s whereabouts, let’s say, and, maybe he’s one of only two people who know, so he’s a terrible danger to JC’s privacy—we don’t even know who JC is! Time, a little nip and tuck, hair gain or loss, ditto weight—in twenty years you can become someone else. For that matter, you can do it in six months. Don’t look at me like that—that’s a perfectly reasonable idea!”

“One of two,” I said, trying to get my feet back on firmer footing. What an imagination. “Who else knows where JC is?”

“You, of course.”

I groaned. “Well, JC will always be JC.”

“You mean he is alive,” she crowed triumphantly.

“For God’s sake,” I said. “Nips and tucks, wigs and false beards and, presto, Ledbetter is actually JC! Get serious, for God’s sake!”

“Oh, I am serious.”

“Where do the guys—or guy, I’ll never know, I guess—where do the guys who tried to kill me fit in? That was real, too. I killed a man. Last night!”

“I know, darling—”

“Don’t soothe me!”

“It must have been terrible for you—”

“Nothing a goddamn bit funny about it!”

“I know, I’m sorry. Who were they? As above … they wanted to find JC or—”

“Nobody was asking me questions, may I remind you. I was getting killed, not interrogated.”

“Well, what does that tell you? I don’t like to be the one to tell you your brother is trying to kill you—”

“The hell you don’t.”

“Well, you’re right, there’s nothing funny about it.”

“Whoever killed Clive—why torture him if all they wanted was to make sure he didn’t tell anyone where JC is?”

Heidi thought about that for a moment, then said, “Maybe the killer wanted to know if Taillor told anybody else where JC is. It’s possible. But more likely it’s the other way—trying to find out where JC is.”

Later, without quite realizing what I was saying, I remarked aloud, “I wonder if Clive told him …”

She looked back at me from the open door to the balcony where the rain fell steadily.

“What do you mean, Lee?” She wasn’t bantering. “I thought JC was dead.”

“I’m losing my mind,” I said, damn near meaning it.

“A nip here, a tuck there.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t just making conversation before, what I was saying about a nip and a tuck, a little weight, less hair or more. JC could have become someone else.”

“Sure, something only Walt Disney could love. A cartoon.”

“It would explain why he’s so hard to find, so determined to remain a secret.”

“So would death.”

She was in her slip, which was very short, her long thighs crossed, the naked flesh warm and damp. We’d made love again. Now she was painting her nails, deep in concentration, her hand utterly steady. I leaned back against the sweat-dampened pillows.

“Your Annie DeWinter is what we have left. Are you ready for that?”

“She’s not my Annie DeWinter, and what in the world do you expect from her?”

“Look, there’s no one else to go to. We don’t know where Thumper Gordon is; Taillor is dead; you’re here and maybe you’re even telling the truth, maybe you don’t know where JC is—in any case, you four were the last ones together in Tangier—”

“But Annie was gone when he died.”

“You didn’t see her when you were writing your book about the search for JC Tripper. I thought that was strange.”

“Why open old wounds? She knew nothing about his death, she was gone. She had found the quiet life, that was what she’d always wanted … why make her go through it all again?”

“That was about the time her boyfriend had arrived on the scene, wasn’t it?”

“I have no idea. I knew nothing about a boyfriend.”

“Well, I can’t imagine lovers like Annie and JC could easily get over one another.”

“People die. Life does go on, Heidi.”

“If he’s alive, he must have gotten in touch with her. No sane man could ignore the woman he loved—not ignore her for twenty years—”

“JC could have. He always used to say that when the time came he could slam his big steel door on people and that was the end to it. When he made up his mind, the door would come down with a helluva clang. And once it came down, it could never be raised. He said it was JC’s law.”

“Lovely.”

“Whoever was on the other side was exiled forever.”

“I believe I grasp the point—”

“Maybe Annie was part of the problem, maybe he had to get free of her, she was so much a part of his old life … she was the old life …”

“Darling … you’re crying.” She was standing beside me. I could smell her, feel the warmth.

“Memories. I don’t know … Christ, twenty-four hours ago I killed a man. Let’s call it shock.” I wiped my eyes on the corner of the sheet.

“You’ve begun to talk about him as if he’s alive, Lee. Is he alive, Lee?”

“Dead as a fucking skunk,” I said vehemently. “You suggested a hypothetical question. Now just leave it alone!”

Later she said, “We have to go to London.”

“All right.” There was no point in arguing. I knew what had to be done.

“It’s Annie, Lee. We’ve got to exhaust the possibilities.”

“Annie.”

“She could be in danger.”

“Not from JC,” I said. “Never from JC. Fleury, maybe, if he really thinks JC’s alive and she might know where—but I’m telling you, you don’t need me.”

“Yes, we do. You know her, she’ll talk to you. And … I think you’ll want to be there, Lee.”

“She has no idea where JC is because he’s—”

“I think she does, actually.”

“Oh, for God’s sake—”

“I think he’s with her, Lee. That’s the point.”

She took an eleven-by-fourteen manila envelope from her bag and held it on her lap, slowly tapping it with one large, red, newly painted fingernail.

“You tried to see her, didn’t you?”

I shrugged. “Not very hard.”

“But you did try, right?”

“I wrote her a note, that’s all, the old address. Berkeley Square.”

“And?”

“I got a one-sentence reply. Please leave me out of it. So I did.”

“That was shortly after she took up with the new boyfriend. You know about him?”

“Heidi, I don’t spend much time keeping up on Annie’s private life—”

“How disingenuous. Well, of course, she’s nothing to you—”

“Now you’re talkin’. Twenty years, Heidi, twenty big ones.”

“So naturally you talk about her in your sleep.”

“Heidi, you are being very tiresome.”

“And you’re denying the simple fact of her friend or lover, obviously, whatever he is. That is oddly amusing, Lee, but also tiresome. We have to go see her and ask some questions—I’d like you to get with the program.”

I stared at her. “I didn’t make you the boss, Heidi. So I’ll ignore the tone of your voice; I’ll forgive you. But one more word of imperious bullshit from you, this boy is taking his bat and ball and going home and you can spend the rest of your fucking life looking for my poor lost brother and good luck to you.”

“Aha, you add truculence to your many sins.” She smiled. “I like that in a man. And now that I am properly chastened, let’s give a thought or two to the man in Annie DeWinter’s life. Just grit your teeth, Lee. It’s no worse than a root canal—his name is Alec Truman, a financier who is very, very big and almost entirely unknown.”

“So how do you know so much about him—as I assume you do?”

“Research and computers are my two specialities. Magna has an exceptionally large data base of information—there’s a wholly owned subsidiary, an information-gathering firm, JQP, that never appears anywhere on any balance sheet related to Magna. But I—through Whitney—have access. Because of our search for JC—”

“He must trust the hell out of you.”

“He has good reason.”

“And Alec Truman is in the computer.”

“Everybody is in the computer.”

“JQP?”

“John Q. Public.”

“Cute.”

“Coy, I’d have said. But I didn’t name it.”

“So what’s the story on Alec Truman?”

“Let me strip it down to its essentials. No family, an orphan, born and raised in Johannesburg, only the sketchiest history of his youth, adolescence, and young manhood. A very anonymous man. Until he appeared in London something over a decade ago, still shadowy but partnering with Arabs, Japanese, Germans, Greeks … that’s when it became apparent that he has enormous wealth, leverage, and therefore power at his fingertips. Then he meets Annie DeWinter, but this, too, barely makes its way into the public forum. He pays people to keep his private life unnervingly private. He is, in short, a man with an easily faked past and an extremely anonymous present; he pays his taxes and minds his manners. Annie DeWinter is the only public event in the course of an exceedingly private life. There are almost no extant photographs of the man … but I have my sources; this arrived today by courier from London. I think you’d better take a look at it.”

She handed me the envelope. The rain was still bouncing hard on the balcony. Night had fallen and Zurich was a glowing blur of light behind the fog and rain. I was fumbling with the clasp. I was thinking about Morris Fleury, where he might be now … was he always going to be just ahead of us? I thought of Clive Taillor and wondered when he’d been killed, if he’d been dead upstairs the first time I went to the house, before I’d run into Fleury in the dark street—

The envelope contained a single eight-by-ten blowup, grainy, taken from a newspaper and enlarged. It had been shot at what appeared to be a racetrack. The man wore a hacking jacket, a windowpane-plaid shirt, a dark knitted tie. He was turning toward the camera, standing at a railing, presumably overlooking the racecourse. Binoculars hung on a leather strap around his neck.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

My throat had tightened, the muscles constricting and cutting off speech, though I can’t quite imagine what I’d have said.

There was less hair, more of a dome, some gray wings over the years, a tightening under the chin, heavy glasses, but the slight grin, the flat gaze with the crinkle at the corners of the eyes, countless features, details, I knew so well.

I stared at the picture, feeling as if the ground had been cut from beneath me, feeling my feet swinging out into space.

JC Tripper twenty years later was staring back at me.