When the Air Canada pilot announced they were about to land, Anna Navarro removed her files from the tray table, lifted it closed, and tried to focus her mind on the case ahead of her. Flying terrified her, and the only thing worse than landing was taking off. Her stomach flip-flopped. As usual she fought an irrational conviction that the plane would crash and she would end her life in a fiery inferno.
Her favorite uncle, Manuel, had been killed when the clattering old cropduster he worked in dropped an engine and plummeted. But that was so long ago, she’d been ten or eleven, and a deathtrap cropduster had no resemblance to the sleek 747 she was in now.
She’d never told any of her OSI colleagues about her anxiety, on the general principle that you should never let them see your vulnerabilities. But she was convinced that somehow Arliss Dupree knew, the way a dog smells fear. In the last six months he’d forced her to practically live on planes, flying from one lousy assignment to another.
The only thing that allowed her to keep her composure was to spend the flight immersed in her case files. They always absorbed her, fascinated her. The dry-as-dust autopsy and pathology reports beckoned to her to solve their mysteries.
As a child she’d loved doing the intricate five-hundred-piece puzzles her mother brought home, the gifts from a woman whose house her mother cleaned and whose kids had no patience for puzzles. Far more than seeing the glossy image emerge, she loved the sound and feel of the puzzle pieces snapping into place. Often the old puzzles were missing pieces, lost by their careless original owners, and that had always irritated her. Even as a kid she’d been a perfectionist.
On some level, this case was a thousand-piece puzzle spilled on the carpet before her.
During this Washington-Halifax flight she had pored over a folder of documents faxed from the RCMP in Ottawa. The Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, Canada’s equivalent of the FBI, was, despite its archaic name, a top-notch investigative agency. The working relationship between DOJ and RCMP was good.
Who are you? she wondered, staring at a photograph of the old man. Robert Mailhot of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the kindly retiree, devout member of the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. Not the sort of person you’d expect to have a CIA clearance file, deep-storage or no.
What could have connected him to the vaporous machinations of long-dead spymasters and businessmen that Bartlett had stumbled on? She was certain that Bartlett had a file on him, but had chosen not to give her access to it. She was certain, too, that he wanted her to find out the relevant details for herself.
A provincial judge in Nova Scotia agreed to issue a search warrant. The documents she wanted—telephone and credit-card records—had been faxed to her in D.C. in a matter of hours. She was OSI; nobody thought to question her vague cover story about an ongoing investigation into fraudulent international transfer of funds.
Still, the file told her nothing. The cause of death, recorded on the certificate in the crabbed and almost illegible handwriting of a physician, presumably the old man’s doctor, was “natural causes,” with “coronary thrombosis” added in brackets. And maybe it was only that.
The deceased had made no unusual purchases; his only long-distance calls were to Newfoundland and Toronto. So far, no traction. Maybe she’d find the answer in Halifax.
Or maybe not.
She was intoxicated by the same strange brew of hope and despair she always felt at the beginning of a case. One minute she knew for sure she’d crack it, the next it seemed impossible. This much she knew for sure: the first homicide in a series she investigated was always the most important. It was the benchmark. Only if you were thorough, if you turned over every rock, did you have any hope of making connections. You’d never connect the dots unless you saw where all the dots were.
Anna was wearing her travel suit, a navy-blue Donna Karan (though the cheaper line), and a white Ralph Lauren blouse (not couture, of course). She was known around the office for dressing impeccably. On her salary she could scarcely afford designer labels, but she bought them anyway, living in a dark one-bedroom apartment in a lousy part of Washington, taking no vacations, because all her money went to clothes.
Everyone assumed she dressed so nicely to make herself attractive to men, because that was what young single women did. They were wrong. Her clothes were body armor. The finer the outfits, the safer and more secure she felt. She used designer cosmetics and wore designer clothes because then she was no longer the daughter of the dirt-poor Mexican immigrants who cleaned the houses and tended the yards of rich people. Then she could be anyone. She was self-aware enough to know how ridiculous this was in rational terms. But she did it anyway.
She wondered what it was about her that rankled Arliss Dupree more—that she was an attractive woman who’d turned him down, or that she was a Mexican. Maybe both. Maybe in the world according to Dupree, a Mexican-American was inferior and therefore had no right to reject him.
She had grown up in a small town in Southern California. Both her parents were Mexicans who’d escaped the desolation, the disease, the hopelessness south of the border. Her mother, soft-spoken and gentle, cleaned houses; her father, quiet and introverted, did yardwork.
When she was in grade school she wore dresses sewn by her mother, who also braided her brown hair and put it up. She was aware that she dressed differently, that she didn’t quite fit in, but it didn’t bother her until she was ten or eleven, when the girls started forming iron cliques that excluded her. They’d never associate with the daughter of the woman who cleaned their houses.
She was uncool, an outsider, an embarrassment. She was invisible.
Not that she was in a minority—the high school was half-Latino, halfwhite, the lines rarely crossed. She got used to being called “wetback” and “spic” by some of the white girls and guys. But among the Latinos there were castes, too, and she was at the bottom. The Latino girls always dressed well, and they mocked her clothes even more viciously than the white girls did.
The solution, she decided, was to dress like all the other girls. She began to complain to her mother, who didn’t take her seriously at first, then explained that they couldn’t afford to buy the kind of clothes the other girls had, and anyway, what was the difference, really? Didn’t she like her mother’s homemade clothes? Anna would snap, “No! I hate them!” knowing full well how much the words hurt. Even today, twenty years later, Anna could barely think about those days without feeling guilt.
Her mother was beloved by all her employers. One of them, a genuinely rich woman, began donating all of her children’s castoffs. Anna wore them happily—she couldn’t imagine why anyone would throw away such fine clothes!—until she gradually came to realize that her clothes were all last year’s fashions, and then her ardor cooled. One day she was walking down the hall at school and one of the girls in a clique she very much wanted to join called her over. “Hey,” the girl said, “that’s my skirt!” Blushing, Anna denied it. The girl stuck a probing finger under the hem and turned it over to reveal her initials inked on the tag.
The RCMP officer who picked her up at the airport, Anna knew, had spent a year at the FBI Academy learning homicide investigation techniques. He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, she’d heard, but a good sort.
He stood outside the security gate, a tall, handsome thirtyish man in a blue blazer and red tie. He flashed a pearly smile, seemingly genuinely happy to see her. “Welcome to Nova Scotia,” he said. “I’m Ron Arsenault.” Dark-haired, brown-eyed, lantern jaw, high forehead. Dudley Do-Right, she thought to herself.
“Anna Navarro,” she said, shaking his hand firmly. Men always expect women to shake like a dead fish, so she always gave them her firmest handshake; it set the tone, let them know she was one of the guys. “Nice to meet you.”
He reached out for her carry-on garment bag, but she shook her head, smiled. “I’m O.K., thanks.”
“This your first time in Halifax?” He was obviously checking her out.
“Yeah. It looks beautiful from above.”
He chuckled politely as he guided her through the terminal. “I’ll be liaising with the Halifax locals for you. You got the records O.K.?”
“Thanks. Everything but the bank records.”
“Those should be in by now. If I find them I’ll drop them by your hotel.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing.” He squinted at something: contact lenses, Anna knew. “Tell you the truth, Miss Navarro—Anna?—some folks back in Ottawa can’t quite figure why you’re taking such an interest in the old geezer.
Eighty-seven-year-old man dies in his home, natural causes, you gotta expect that, you know?”
They had reached the parking lot.
“The body’s in the police morgue?” she asked.
“Actually, in the morgue of the local hospital. Waiting in the fridge for you. You got to us before the old guy was planted, that’s the good news.”
“And the bad news?”
“Body had already been embalmed for burial.”
She winced. “That might screw up the tox screen.”
They got to a dark blue, late-model Chevrolet sedan that screamed “unmarked police vehicle.” He opened the trunk and put her bag in.
They drove for a while in silence.
“Who’s the widow?” she asked. It wasn’t in the file. “French-Canadian, too?”
“A local. Haligonian. Former schoolteacher. Tough old biddy, too. I mean, I feel bad for the lady, she’s just lost her husband, and the funeral was supposed to be tomorrow. We had to ask her to put it off. She had relatives coming in from Newfoundland, too. When we mentioned autopsy she wigged out.” He glanced over at her, then back to the road. “Given how it’s evening, I thought you could settle in, and we can get started bright and early tomorrow morning. ME’s going to meet us at seven.
She felt a pang of disappointment. She wanted to go right to work. “Sounds good,” she said.
More silence. It was good to have a liaison officer who didn’t seem to resent an emissary from the U.S. government. Arsenault was as friendly as could be. Maybe too much so.
“Here’s your inn. Your government doesn’t exactly spend the big bucks, hey?”
It was an unlovely Victorian house on Barrington Street, a large wooden building painted white with green shutters. The white paint had been soiled to a dirty gray.
“Hey, so let me take you out to dinner, unless you’ve got other plans. Maybe Clipper Cay, if you like seafood. Maybe catch some jazz at the Middle Deck …?” He parked the car.
“Thanks, but I’ve had a long day,” she said.
He shrugged, his disappointment obvious.
The inn had a faintly musty smell, as from a baseboard dampness that never quite went away. An old-fashioned carbon was made of her credit card and a brass key provided; she was prepared to tell the beefy guy at the front desk that she didn’t need help with her bags, but none was volunteered. The same slight mustiness pervaded her room, on the second floor, which was decorated in floral patterns. Everything in it looked worn, but not objectionably so. She hung her clothes in the closet, drew the curtains, and changed into gray sweats. A nice run would do her good, she decided.
She jogged along the Grand Parade, the square on the west side of Barrington Street, then up George Street to the star-shaped fortress called The Citadel. She stopped, panting, at a newsstand and picked up a map of the city. She found the address; it wasn’t far at all from where she was staying. She could reach it in her run.
Robert Mailhot’s house was unremarkable but comfortable-looking, a two-story gray clapboard with a gabled roof, practically hidden in a wooded patch of land behind a chain-link fence.
The blue light of a television flickered behind lace curtains in a front room. The widow, presumably, was watching TV. Anna stopped for a moment across the street, watching intently.
She decided to cross the narrow street to take a closer look. She wanted to see if it was indeed the widow, and if so, how she was behaving. Did she appear to be in mourning or not? Such things couldn’t always be intuited simply by observing at a distance, but you never knew what you might pick up. And if Anna positioned herself in the shadows outside the house, she might not be seen by suspicious neighbors.
The street was deserted, though music played from one house, a TV from another, and a foghorn sounded in the distance. She crossed toward the house—
Suddenly, a pair of high-intensity headlights appeared out of nowhere. They blinded her, growing larger and brighter as a vehicle roared toward her. With a scream, Anna lunged toward the curb, unseeing, desperately trying to jump out of the way of the insane, out-of-control car. It must have been gliding down the street, lights off, its quiet engine noise masked by the ambient street noise, until it was but a few feet away, then suddenly switched on its lights.
And now it was barreling toward her! There was no mistaking it, the car wasn’t slowing, wasn’t moving straight down the road like an automobile simply going far too fast. It veered toward the shoulder of the road, toward the curb, heading right at her. Anna recognized the vertical chrome grill of a Lincoln Town Car, its flattened rectangular headlights somehow giving it a predatory, sharklike appearance.
Move!
The car’s wheels squealed, the engine at full throttle, as the maniacal car bore down on her.
She turned around to see it hurtling at her just ten or twenty feet away, the headlights dazzling. Terrified, screaming, a split-second away from death, she leaped into the boxwood hedge that surrounded the house next to the widow’s, the stiff, prickly branches scraping at her sweatpants-covered legs, and rolled over and over on the small lawn.
She heard the crunch of the car hitting the boxwood, then the loud squeal of tires as she looked up to see the car veer away from her, spraying mud everywhere, the powerful engine racing down the narrow dark road, and then the headlights vanished just as abruptly as they had appeared.
The car was gone.
What had just happened?
She jumped to her feet, her heart thudding, adrenaline flooding throughout her body, the terror weakening her knees so that she could barely stand up.
What the hell was that all about?
The car had headed right for her, quite deliberately targeting her, as if trying to run her down.
And then … it had unaccountably disappeared!
She noticed several faces looking through windows on either side of the street, some of them closing drapes as soon as she noticed them.
If the car had for some reason been aiming for her, trying to kill her, why hadn’t it finished the job?
It was entirely illogical, maddeningly so.
She walked, panting deeply, coughing painfully, drenched with sweat. She tried to clear her head, but the fear would not leave her, and she remained unable to make sense of the bizarre incident.
Had someone just tried to kill her, or not?
And if so—why?
Could it have been a drunk, a joyrider? The car’s motions had seemed far too deliberate, too elaborately choreographed for that.
The only logical answers required a paranoid mind-set, and she adamantly refused to allow her thoughts to go in that direction. That way madness lies. She thought of Bartlett’s ominous words about decades-old plans hatched in utmost secrecy, old men with secrets to hide, powerful people desperate to protect reputations. But Bartlett was a man who, by his own admission, sat in an office surrounded by yellowed paper, far removed from reality, a setting all too conducive to the weaving of conspiracy theories.
Still, was it not possible that the incident with the car had been an attempt to frighten her off the case?
If so, they had picked the wrong person to try such a technique on. For it served only to stiffen her determination to find out what the real story was.
The pub, called the Albion, was located on Garrick Street, at the edge of Covent Garden. It had low ceilings, rough-hewn wooden tables, and sawdust floors, the sort of place that had twenty real ales on tap and served bangers and mash, kidney pudding, and spotted dick, and was jammed at lunchtime with a stylish crowd of bankers and advertising executives.
Jean-Luc Passard, a junior security officer for the Corporation, entered the pub and saw at once why the Englishman had chosen this place to meet. It was so dense with people that the two of them would certainly go unnoticed.
The Englishman was sitting alone in a booth. He was as described: a nondescript man of about forty, with bristly, prematurely gray hair. On closer inspection, his face was smooth, almost tight, as if from surgery. He wore a blue blazer and white turtleneck. His shoulders were broad, his waist narrow; he looked, even at a distance, physically imposing. Yet you would not pick him out in a lineup.
Passard sat down at the booth, put out his hand. “I’m Jean-Luc.”
“Trevor Griffiths,” the Englishman said. He shook hands with barely any pressure at all, the greeting of a man who did not care what you thought of him. His hand was large, smooth, and dry.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” Passard said. “Your services to the Corporation over the years are the stuff of legend.”
Trevor’s dead gray eyes showed nothing.
“We wouldn’t have brought you out of your … retirement if it weren’t absolutely necessary.”
“You screwed up.”
“We had bad luck.”
“You want a backup.”
“An insurance policy, so to say. An added safeguard. We really can’t afford to fail.”
“I work alone. You know this.”
“Of course. Your record puts your methods beyond second-guessing. You will handle the matter as you see best.”
“Good. Now, do we know the target’s whereabouts?”
“He was last spotted in Zurich. We’re not certain where he’s headed next.”
Trevor cocked an eyebrow.
Passard flushed. “He is an amateur. He surfaces periodically. We will pick up his trail again soon.”
“I will require a good set of photographs of the target from as many angles as you have.”
Passard slid a large manila envelope across the table. “Done. Also, here are the encoded instructions. As you’ll understand, we want the job to be done quickly and untraceably.”
Trevor Griffiths’s stare reminded Passard of a boa constrictor. “You have already brought in several second-raters. Not only have you thereby lost both money and time, but you have alerted the target. He is now fearful, cautious, and no doubt has been frightened into depositing documents with attorneys to be mailed in the event of his demise, that sort of thing. He will therefore be considerably more difficult to take out. Neither you nor your superiors need to advise me on how to do my job.”
“But you’re confident you can do it, yes?”
“I assume that was why you came to me?”
“Yes.”
“Then please don’t ask foolish questions. Are we done here? Because I have a busy afternoon ahead of me.”
Anna returned to her room at the inn, poured a tiny screw-top bottle of white wine from the minibar into a plastic cup, downed it, and then ran a bath, making the water as hot as she could stand. For fifteen minutes, she soaked herself, trying to think calming thoughts, but the image of the Town Car’s vertical chrome grill kept intruding on her consciousness. And she remembered the Ghost’s soft-spoken remark: “I don’t believe in coincidences, do you, Ms. Navarro?”
Slowly, her sense of self-possession returned to her. These things happened, didn’t they? Part of her job was to know where significance might lie, but it was an occupational hazard to impute significance where there was none.
Presently, she slipped into a terry-cloth robe, feeling much calmer and now ravenously hungry. Slipped beneath the door of her room was a manila envelope. She picked it up and sank into a floral-upholstered armchair. Copies of Mailhot’s bank statements going back four years.
The phone rang.
It was Sergeant Arsenault.
“So is half past ten going to be all right for our visit with the widow?” Around him she could hear the bustle of a police station in the evening.
“I’ll meet you there at ten-thirty,” Anna replied crisply. “Thanks for the confirmation.” She debated whether to tell him about the Town Car, her brush with death, but held back. Somehow she was afraid that it would diminish her authority—that she would sound vulnerable, fearful, easily spooked.
“Right, then,” Arsenault said, and there was a hesitation in his voice. “Well, I guess I’ll be heading home. I don’t suppose—I’ll be driving by your way, so if you have any second thoughts about grabbing a bite …” He spoke haltingly. “Or having a nightcap.” He was obviously trying to keep it light. “Or whatever.”
Anna didn’t reply immediately. In truth, she wouldn’t have minded company just then. “That’s nice of you to offer,” she said finally. “But I’m really tired.”
“Me, too,” he said quickly. “Long day. All right, then. See you in the morning.” His voice had subtly shifted: no longer a man talking to a woman, but one professional talking to another.
She hung up with a slight sense of emptiness. Then she closed the curtains to the room and started sorting through her documents. There was still plenty of stuff to work through.
She was convinced that the real reason she hadn’t yet gotten married, had veered away from any relationship that seemed to be getting too serious, was that she wanted to control her own surroundings. You get married, you’re accountable to someone else. You want to buy something, you have to justify it. You can no longer work late without feeling guilty, having to apologize, to negotiate. Your time is under new management.
At the office people who didn’t know her well called her the “Ice Maiden” and probably a lot worse, mostly because she dated infrequently. It wasn’t just Dupree. People didn’t like to see attractive women unattached. It offended their sense of the natural order of things. What they failed to realize was that she was a genuine workaholic and seldom socialized, hardly had time to meet men anyway. The only pool of men she could draw from were in the OSI, and dating a colleague could only mean trouble.
Or so she told herself. She preferred not to dwell on the incident in high school that still shadowed her, but she thought of Brad Reedy almost daily, and with ferocious hatred. On the Metro she’d catch a whiff of the citrus cologne Brad used to wear and her heart would spasm with fear, then reflexive anger. Or she’d see on the street a tall blond teenage boy in a red-and-white-striped rugby shirt, and she’d see Brad.
She had been sixteen, physically a woman and, she was told, a beauty, though she didn’t yet know it or believe it. She still had few friends, but she no longer felt like an outcast. She quarreled with her parents almost daily because she could no longer stand to live in their tiny house; she felt claustrophobic, she couldn’t breathe.
Brad Reedy was a senior and a hockey player, and therefore a member of the school’s aristocracy. She was a junior and couldn’t believe it when Brad Reedy, the Brad Reedy, had stopped by her locker and asked if she wanted to go out sometime. She thought it was a joke, that he’d been put up to it or something, and she scoffed, turning away. Already she’d begun to develop a protective layer of sarcasm.
But he persisted. She flushed, went numb, said I guess, maybe, sometime.
Brad offered to pick her up at her house, but she couldn’t bear the thought of his seeing how humble it was, so she pretended she had errands to do downtown anyway and insisted on meeting at the movie theater. For days before, she pored over Mademoiselle and Glamour. In a Seventeen magazine feature on “How to Catch His Eye” she found the
perfect outfit, the sort of thing a rich, classy girl might wear, the kind of girl Brad’s parents would approve of.
She wore a Laura Ashley tiny floral-print dress with a high ruffled collar she’d bought at Goodwill, which she realized only after she bought it didn’t fit quite right. In her matching lime-green espadrilles and lime-green Pappagallo Bermuda bag and lime-green headband, she suddenly felt ridiculous, a little girl dressing up for Halloween. When she met Brad, who was wearing a ripped pair of jeans and a striped rugby shirt, she realized how overdressed she was. She looked like she was trying too hard.
She felt as if the entire theater were watching her enter, this overdressed fake preppy with this golden boy.
He wanted to go out to the Ship’s Pub for pizza and a beer afterward. She had a Tab and tried to play mysterious and hard to get, but she already had a wild crush on this teenage Adonis and still couldn’t believe she was on a date with him.
After three, four beers, he began to get coarse. He drew close to her in the booth and put his hands on her. She pleaded a headache—it was the only thing she could think of on the spur of the moment—and asked him to drive her home. He took her out to the Porsche, drove crazily, and then made a “wrong turn” into the park.
He was a two-hundred-pound man, incredibly strong, fueled by just enough alcohol to make him dangerous, and he forcibly removed her clothes, put his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams, and kept chanting, “Aw, you want it, you wetback bitch.”
This was her first time.
For a year afterward she went to church regularly. The guilt burned inside her. If her mother ever found out, she was sure, it would destroy her.
It haunted her for years.
And her mother continued to clean the Reedys’ house.
Now she remembered the bank records, tented on the armchair. Couldn’t ask for more compelling reading material during a room-service dinner.
After a few minutes, she noticed a line of figures, then looked at it again. How could this be right? Four months ago, one million dollars had been wired into Robert Mailhot’s savings account.
She sat down in the chair, looked more closely at the page. She felt a
rush of adrenaline. She studied the column of numbers for a long time, her excitement growing. An image of Mailhot’s modest clapboard house popped into her head.
A million dollars.
This was becoming interesting.
The streetlights flashed by, illuminating the backseat of the taxi like the jittery flashes of a strobe light. Ben stared straight ahead, looking at nothing, thinking.
The homicide detective had seemed disappointed when the lab results showed that Ben hadn’t fired the weapon, and processed his release papers with a show of reluctance. Obviously, Howie had managed to pull some strings to get his passport returned.
“I’m releasing you on one condition, Mr. Hartman—that you get out of my canton,” Schmid had told him. “Leave Zurich at once. If I ever find out you’ve returned here, it will not go well for you. The inquiry concerning the Bahnhofplatz shootings remains open, and there are enough unanswered questions that I would have reason to swear out a warrant for your arrest at any moment. And if our immigrations office, the Einwanderungsbehörde, gets involved, you should remember that you can be held in administrative detention for one year before your case reaches a magistrate. You have friends and connections, very impressive ones, but they will not be able to help you next time.”
But more than the threats, it was the question the detective had put so casually that haunted Ben. Did the Bahnhofplatz nightmare have anything to do with Peter’s death?
Ask it another way: What were the odds it didn’t have anything to do with Peter’s death? Ben always remembered what his college mentor, the Princeton historian John Barnes Godwin, used to say: Calculate the odds, and recalculate, and recalculate again. And then just go with your gut instinct.
His gut told him this was no coincidence.
Then there was the mystery surrounding Jimmy Cavanaugh. It wasn’t just the body that had disappeared. It was his identity, his entire existence.
How could such a thing happen? And how had the shooter known where Ben was staying? It made no sense, none of it did.
The disappearance of the body, the planting of the handgun—that confirmed that the man he knew as Cavanaugh had been working with others. But with whom? Working on what? What possible interest, what possible threat, could Ben Hartman be to anyone?
Of course it had to do with Peter. That had to be it.
You see enough movies, you learn that bodies are “burned beyond recognition” only when something’s being covered up. One of Ben’s first, desperate thoughts upon hearing the unbearable news had been that maybe there’d been a mix-up, that it wasn’t really Peter Hartman who’d died in that plane. The authorities had made a mistake. Peter was still alive, and he’d call, and they’d laugh over the bungle in a grim sort of way. Ben had never dared suggest this to his father, not wanting to raise false hopes. And then the medical evidence arrived, and it was irrefutable.
Now, however, Ben began to focus on the real question: Not was it Peter, but how had he died? A plane crash could be an efficient way to conceal evidence of murder.
And then again, maybe it had been a genuine accident.
After all, who could have wanted Peter dead? Murdering someone and then crashing a plane—wasn’t that a ludicrously elaborate cover-up?
But this afternoon had redefined what was within the realm of plausibility. Because if Cavanaugh, whoever he was, had tried to kill him, for whatever unfathomable reason, wasn’t it likely he—or others connected with Cavanaugh—had also killed Peter four years ago?
Howie had mentioned databases accessed by a colleague of his who did corporate espionage work. It struck Ben that Frederic McCallan, the aged client he was supposed to meet at St. Moritz, might be helpful in this regard. McCallan, in addition to being a serious Wall Street player, had served in more than one administration in Washington; he’d have no shortage of contacts and connections. Ben took out his multistandard Nokia phone and called the Hotel Carlton in St. Moritz. The Carlton was a quietly elegant place, opulent without being ostentatious, with a remarkable glassed-in pool overlooking the lake.
His call was put right through to Frederic McCallan’s room.
“You’re not standing us up, I hope,” old Frederic said jovially. “Louise will be devastated.” Louise was his allegedly beautiful granddaughter.
“Not at all. Things got a little hectic here, and I missed the last flight to Chur.” Strictly speaking this was true.
“Well, we had them set a place for you at dinner, figuring you’d show up eventually. When can we expect you?”
“I’m going to rent a car and drive up tonight.”
“Drive? But that’ll take you hours!”
“It’s a pleasant drive,” he said. And a long drive was precisely what he needed to clear his head right now.
“Surely you can charter a flight if you have to.”
“Can’t,” he said without elaborating. The fact was, he wanted to avoid the airport, where others—if there were others—might be expecting him. “I’ll see you at breakfast, Freddie.”
The taxicab took Ben to an Avis on Gartenhofstrasse, where he rented an Opel Omega, got directions, and set off without incident on the A3 highway, heading southeast out of Zurich. It took a while to get the feel of the road, the great speed at which Swiss drivers raced along their main highways, the aggressive way they signaled that they wanted to pass by pulling up right behind you and flashing their high beams.
Once or twice he had a flash of paranoia—a green Audi seemed to be following him but then disappeared. After a while he began to feel as if he’d left all that madness behind in Zurich. Soon he’d be at the Carlton in St. Moritz, and that was inviolable.
He thought about Peter, as he’d done so often in the last four years, and he felt the old guilt, felt his stomach tighten, then flip over. Guilt that he’d let his brother die alone, because in the last few years of Peter’s life he’d barely even talked to him.
But he knew Peter wasn’t alone at the end. He’d been living with a Swiss woman, a medical student he’d fallen in love with. Peter had told him about it on the phone a couple of months before he was killed.
Ben had seen Peter exactly twice since college. Twice.
As kids, before Max had sent them off to different prep schools, they’d been inseparable. They fought constantly, they wrestled each other until one could claim, You’re good, but I’m better. They hated each other and loved each other, and they were never apart.
But after college Peter had joined the Peace Corps and gone to Kenya. He had no interest in Hartman Capital Management either. Nor would
he take anything out of his trust fund. What the hell do I need it for in Africa? he’d said.
The fact was that Peter wasn’t just doing something meaningful with his life. He was escaping Dad. Max and he had never gotten along. “Christ!” Ben had exploded at him once. “You want to avoid Dad, you can live in Manhattan and simply not call him. Have lunch with Mom once a week or something. You don’t need to live in some goddamned mud hut, for God’s sake!”
But no. Peter had returned to the States twice: once when their mother had her mastectomy, and once after Ben had called to tell him that Mom’s cancer had spread and she didn’t have long to live.
By that time Peter had moved to Switzerland. He’d met a Swiss woman in Kenya. “She’s beautiful, she’s brilliant, and she still hasn’t seen through me,” Peter had told him over the phone. “File that one under ‘strange but true.’” That was a favorite boyhood expression of Peter’s.
The girl was returning to medical school and he was going with her to Zurich. Which was what had first got the two of them talking. You’re tagging along with some chick you met? Ben had said scornfully. He was jealous—jealous that Peter had fallen in love, and jealous, on some crazy brotherly level, that he’d been replaced at the center of Peter’s life.
No, Peter had said, it wasn’t just that. He’d read an article in an international edition of Time magazine about an old woman, a Holocaust survivor, living in France, desperately poor, who’d tried without success to get one of the big Swiss banks to give back the modest sum her father had left for her before he’d perished in the camps.
The bank had demanded her father’s death certificate.
She’d told them that the Nazis hadn’t issued death certificates for the six million Jews they’d murdered.
Peter was going to get the old woman what was due her. Dammit, he said, if a Hartman can’t wrest this lady’s money from the greedy paws of some Swiss banker, who can?
No one was as stubborn as Peter. No one except Old Max, maybe.
Ben had little doubt Peter had won the battle.
He began to feel weary. The highway had become monotonous, lulling. His driving had fallen naturally into the rhythm of the road, and other
cars no longer seemed to be trying to pass him quite so often. His eyelids began to droop.
There came a blaring car horn, and he was dazzled by headlights. With a jolt he realized that he’d momentarily fallen asleep behind the wheel. He reacted quickly, spinning the car to the right, swerving out of the oncoming lane of traffic, just barely missing a collision.
He pulled over to the side of the road, his heart pounding. He let out a long, relieved sigh. It was the jet lag, his body still on New York time, the length of the day, the madness at the Bahnhofplatz finally catching up with him.
It was time to get off the highway. St. Moritz was maybe a couple of hours away, but he didn’t dare risk driving any longer. He had to find a place to spend the night.
Two cars passed by, though Ben did not see them.
One was a green Audi, battered and rusty, almost ten years old. Its driver and sole occupant, a tall man of around fifty with long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, turned to inspect Ben’s car, parked on the side of the road.
When the Audi had traveled about a hundred meters beyond Ben’s car, it, too, pulled over to the shoulder.
Then a second car passed Ben’s Opel: a gray sedan with two men inside. “Glaubst Du, er hat uns entdeckt?” the driver asked the passenger in Swiss-German. You think he’s spotted us?
“It’s possible,” the passenger replied. “Why else would he have stopped?”
“He could be lost. He is looking at a map.”
“That could be a ruse. I’m going to pull over.”
The driver noticed the green Audi at the side of the road. “Are we expecting company?” he asked.