Two Women Page 21

  It took Alice less than fifteen minutes to buy the computer system she wanted, a duplicate of the laptop and printer she’d abandoned in New York, and she stored both in the Volkswagen boot before re-entering the mall for the already isolated telephones. Once more she leaned so that her calibrated watch was in front of her, counting off the seconds.

  Alice recognized the receptionist’s voice from her first approach. She said: ‘This is A …’ and just stopped herself in time. ‘… Martha. I want to speak …’ but before she could finish the line went dead and then she heard the other recognizable voice.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Martha,’ said Hanlan. ‘How come you haven’t got back before now?’

  ‘John didn’t call, to tell me where they were meeting. That was our arrangement. That’s what I was going to tell you, where the handover was going to be.’

  ‘Where is it, the stuff that was going to be handed over?’

  A minute, Alice saw. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about Citibank?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Martha! I think you know it’s John’s bank and that he was in the securities division earlier that day. And that you changed your mind about telling us.’

  The photograph in the New York Times! That’s what she’d failed to recognize, Citibank in the background! ‘No, that’s not how it was! He didn’t tell me. That’s what I was waiting for, for him to tell me.’

  ‘Why’d he go back, with the others?’

  A minute and a half. ‘I don’t know anything about any others.’

  ‘I asked you this before and I’m going to ask you it again. What is it you do know? I don’t want to go on screwing around like this. It’s made me look stupid and I don’t like being made to look stupid. I want you – with a proper name – and I want all this evidence that John had. That clear?’

  ‘I’m going to get some of it. But I need to come into the protection programme. They know what I’ve done.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘I don’t know names, not yet.’ It sounded bad, ridiculous, Alice recognized.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Things.’ On her way in from the cabin she’d thought she had everything worked out but it was all swirling in the wind again. They’d been talking just over two minutes. She shouldn’t hang on much longer.

  ‘You want to deal, we’ll deal. But you’ve got to give me a lot before we even start. At the moment we’re going around in circles and for most of it you’re not making sense.’

  ‘You’ve got John’s murder as proof, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘What I’ve got are five witnesses each of whom say John ran in front of a truck and died in a complete accident.’

  Alice slammed the phone down, chest tight, feeling sick again. But she was sufficiently in control to see the newsstand.

  Stanley Burcher tried to analyse the significance of the meeting being with the consiglieri of the five Families, not their Dons, but couldn’t, not instantly. Perhaps, he thought, he’d get a guide during the discussion. They were in the park-view penthouse suite of an hotel on Central Park South in which the Genovese clan had a concealed investment, the six of them grouped around a table. There was an array of liquor and mixes on a smaller side table but no one was drinking. It would have been presumptuous for Burcher to have helped himself. Perhaps, he thought, it was presumptuous of him to have expected to meet the Dons.

  Charlie Petrie said: ‘It’s a hell of a mess to clean up.’

  ‘But it’s got to be cleaned up,’ insisted Vito Craxi, the Bonanno counsel. ‘There isn’t a Family who haven’t used the system and paid well for the facility. It’s got to be kept intact.’

  ‘Who’s going to run it?’ asked Burcher. There was still the opportunity of enormous power, being the liaison between these five and whichever accountancy firm was suborned into co-operating.

  ‘It’s being taken care of,’ said Petrie.

  ‘You asked for the meeting,’ reminded Bobby Gallo, representing the Gambino clan. ‘What have you got in mind?’ He spoke as he got up to go to the drinks table. He did so without gesturing an invitation to Burcher.

  ‘The only way in to Citibank security is through the wife,’ said Burcher, discomfited at stating the obvious. ‘She’s the only one with the legal right. I might be able to use the severance with the firm’s lawyer. And there could be an advantage in the girlfriend. Sure, Carver gave every indication of having everything at the bank but he could have split it up. Some guys do stupid things, pussy prowling …’ He hesitated, unsure of the Delioci strength. ‘I’ve called the apartment in Princes Street: left messages about an assignment. She hasn’t been there. I guess she’s run. We need to go into Princes Street. But not like Litchfield. If she is still around, I don’t want her to know we’ve been there. If she has gone we need to know where she’s gone to.’

  The Luchese Family’s Gino LaRocca, a thin, bespectacled man, picked up on the reference to Litchfield, needing the way in: the Queens-based clan had operated under the control of the Luchese organization. ‘The Deliocis are out of this. Out of business. They fucked up big time, all the way. I’ve been asked to apologize.’

  There were nods of acceptance, at the apology.

  Petrie said: ‘They’ll be sore.’

  ‘They try to do anything smart they’ll be dead, starting with the old man himself and the son next,’ said LaRocca. ‘That’s been made clear.’

  ‘We don’t want to draw attention at this time, taking out known small-timers,’ warned Carlo Brookier, the Colombo Family consigliere.

  ‘We all know that,’ said LaRocca, irritably.

  ‘I’m going to need people to do things, starting with getting into Princes Street. How can I do that, if Delioci isn’t involved any more?’

  ‘Through me,’ announced Petrie. ‘I want us to stay close on this.’

  They didn’t trust him any more, Burcher decided. They were excluding him from whatever new arrangements were being made and they were going to monitor everything he did. Channelling everything through Petrie put the Genovese family in total control of the money laundering.

  Nineteen

  Alice squatted cross-legged on the cabin floor, her mind back in synch, surrounded by the accounts of John’s death, with the rest of the newspapers discarded unread. She’d been lucky, picking up Newsday at the Paterson mall. Its coverage was much fuller than that in the previous day’s New York Times or anything else she’d snatched up. The photographs were reproduced bigger, too, so that it was easier to identify the Citibank building. The amalgamated stories fitted what she’d been told by Hanlan – certainly about it unquestionably being an accident, with witnesses talking of a mystery car that drove away – with the addition of John appearing to run towards a police patrol car.

  It was pitifully easy for Alice to work out the sequence. John had met them somehow – she’d never know whether he’d intended to call or been prevented from doing so – and handed over what they wanted. And then tried to confront them with the threat of producing his copies. What threat would they have made in return? Jeered at him, so arrogantly sure of themselves, of their power? The most likely would have been to hurt Jane. Kill her even. Maybe, accepted Alice, for her to be hurt as well. They knew about her existence, although maybe not yet that she was the hacker they were hunting. Perhaps they hadn’t even bothered with threats, mocking him, laughing at him. They wouldn’t have been able to torture him – it was a relief, to realize that – because they’d obviously been taking him back to the bank. But there must have been some threat, she thought, changing her mind. Otherwise how could they have known Citibank was his bank? And that he had a safe-deposit facility there? Which was obviously where he’d thought what he’d kept would be untouchable by anyone except himself. How frightened he must have been, poor, optimistically brave John: knotted inside, believing in miracles when he’d seen the police car. Yards away from safety and protection, prepared at last �
�� if he’d thought about it, which he probably hadn’t in those few terrified moments – finally to sacrifice his precious inherited firm in exchange for his life. Which he hadn’t saved and which was the bitterest irony of all. It hadn’t even been necessary for the murdering motherfuckers to stage John’s killing as an accident, as they had the other two.

  For some reason she couldn’t identify – didn’t need to identify – it made Alice even more determined to exact her revenge. Which brought her back in more detail – attempted total recall – to the conversation with Hanlan. He was playing hardball, with every good reason. She’d realized as they’d talked how bad – how unconvincing – she’d sounded. How many times had she said ‘I don’t know’? Without intending any pun, Alice thought, I don’t know, and didn’t think it funny. It was difficult to recall the last time she’d found anything funny: ever would again. What did she know, Alice asked herself, unknowingly echoing Gene Hanlan’s interrogation that morning. She knew how to get into IRS files with that unopened laptop over there on the desk. And how to download a paper trail of money-laundering tax returns for five Mafia-controlled companies, although she had no proof-nor way of obtaining proof – that they were Mafia-controlled. Incomplete though it was, would that be sufficient for the demanding Gene Hanlan, irrespective of it being obtained illegally? She wouldn’t know until she retrieved them and tried to negotiate.

  And she had time now, hidden away up here in the mountains where no-one could find her. It was good, to feel safe.

  The feeling lasted until she began gathering up the discarded newspapers and on impulse turned to the public notice sections and found Carver’s official death notice. The funeral was scheduled the day after tomorrow. She’d have to go, Alice decided. Whatever the danger, she had to go.

  The return call from the telephone company came as they finished listening, for the fourth consecutive time, to the taped conversation between Alice and Hanlan. McKinnon took it, didn’t say anything apart from thanks and turned back into the room. ‘Paterson. She’s taken to the hills.’

  ‘The Catskills aren’t our territory,’ said Ginette at once and just as quickly wished she hadn’t.

  ‘I know what our – my – territory is,’ threw back Hanlan.

  ‘We could do a re-shoot of the Sound of Music,’ said McKinnon, trying to lessen the tension. ‘The hills are alive, to the sound of Martha, where are you, Martha?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ said Hanlan.

  ‘Gene!’ soothed McKinnon, jerking a nail-bitten finger towards the latest tape, still in the player. ‘You really want to hear it for the fifth time, hear nothing for the fifth time? I don’t know what this gal thinks she’s got …’ He shrugged. ‘Circumstantially, maybe a lot. Evidentially, we don’t have diddly squat. Until she arrives outside here with a U-Haul packed with evidence – or points us the way – we’re wasting our time.’

  Now Hanlan indicated the tape. ‘We almost had her real name there at the beginning.’

  The other two regarded him solemnly, neither speaking, as if a mist distanced them from Hanlan.

  Hanlan said: ‘I’m not becoming paranoid about this.’

  ‘Good,’ said McKinnon. He thought that was exactly what Hanlan was becoming and didn’t want any foul-ups, even by association, between now and his retirement.

  ‘But there’s something here! I’ve got a gut feeling.’

  ‘You keep telling us that,’ reminded Ginette, as concerned as McKinnon.

  The smoothly efficient burglary of Alice Belling’s apartment in Princes Street did not produce as much as John Burcher had hoped, although the inscription on the back of the two photographs of Carver outside the cabin – ‘Bearsfort. July’ – gave them a possible although too wide-ranging direction in which to look. He was disappointed at Alice Belling’s apparent modesty. Nowhere among any of the other photographs – all copied to hide any evidence of the entry – was there the sort of proud-parent studio portrait from which Carver’s mistress could be positively identified. The best, ironically, was a thumbnail image that had accompanied her profile of George Northcote in her cuttings book, every clip of which had also been copied.

  He picked his way painstakingly through the trawl, aware as he did so that the total, seemingly snatched-up disorder in which Petrie had personally handed over the package an hour earlier in the downstairs lounge wasn’t snatched-up disorder at all. It would have been gone through – still be under examination, right now – by several people, each more than once, to ensure nothing was missed. But the responsibility for anything missed was his.

  There was a substantial amount of business correspondence, none of it relevant, two letters confirming assignments that were still on her telephone answering machine, Burcher’s attempts to make contact having now been erased. There were bank statements up to the previous month showing a comfortable balance and all the woman’s utility bills were receipted as being paid in full before their due date. He was surprised at the total absence of any personal correspondence, not even a note that could have been construed to be a love message from Carver. Imagining themselves to be discreet, he supposed.

  It was crumpled when he found it, crushed in such a way between two of the bank statements he was re-examining that Burcher didn’t think it had been extracted for copying. It was a paid-in-cash receipt for access time upon a computer at a cybercafe named Space for Space.

  Despite the well-remembered rehearsal of her first hacking expedition it still took Alice most of that day and well into the night to duplicate her IRS evidence, herding her Trojan Horses through the computer system of a Hertz car-hire outlet in Des Moines, Iowa. By the time the physical tiredness of unremitting concentration forced her to stop, just before nine, Alice was still short of her original trove and unsure if she might need any more.

  Not a decision that needed to be made tonight, Alice thought, carrying her drink, more gin than tonic, to their once-shared chair. Time enough tomorrow. The following day. No hurry, now that she was safe. The refusal came at once. She wasn’t safe, she was hiding: curling up like a baby, trying to make herself too small to be seen. To be found. There was more than enough in what she’d already downloaded to illustrate how accounts had been padded from subsidiary to subsidiary and from state to state and country to country. All she’d achieve by obtaining more – apart from postponing her committing, physical approach to the FBI – would be unnecessary repetition.

  What if it wasn’t enough, evidentially? Sufficient, maybe, for an IRS investigation but not for one by the FBI? It was an income-tax prosecution that nailed Al Capone, she reminded herself. But that had been in the 1930s, not now. Now she needed a Witness Protection Programme and only the FBI provided that. If only she’d had … Alice didn’t complete the thought, her mind racing beyond it.

  She hadn’t been thinking properly, completely. Just selfishly, knowing that she was being pursued for her computer intrusion and desperate only to save herself. What about Jane? Jane was the one – the only one – who could get to whatever John had in the safe deposit at Citibank. And therefore the one at risk, as Northcote and John and Janice Snow had been at risk. All of whom were now dead.

  Twenty

  ‘I’m all right,’ insisted Jane, relieved her voice hadn’t wavered, because she wasn’t, not as all right as she would have liked to be. But she didn’t want anyone around her to realize it. There were still too many moments when her mind blanked, mid-sentence, and others when she suffered the audible and visual receding sensation that was the most disconcerting of all.

  But she was sufficiently in control of herself and her surroundings to comprehend what she had been told the previous day and to prepare herself for what was going to happen today. John was dead. Today there was to be his funeral, in the same cathedral in which the ceremony for her father had been conducted, and after that the wake at the same hotel in which her father’s had been held. And John’s burial, later, when she’d decided upon where the interment was to be.
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br />   But most important of all she believed herself sufficiently free of the drug, now down to its one dose a day minimum, to understand – although perhaps not properly, fully, to comprehend – that she didn’t have John any more. Didn’t have anyone any more. That she was all alone. She’d never imagined being entirely by herself. Not having anyone to turn to, rely upon. She’d sat on charity committees – chaired some of them – and raised money to help people bereaved by tragedy or catastrophe and believed she’d had some conception of their loss. But now, despite the response-dulling effects of the medication, Jane accepted that she had no conception whatsoever. At this precise moment – probably for some time to come – it was too overwhelming for her to conceive, to rationalize in any way. Which was the easiest explanation for why she hadn’t collapsed and wept the previous day or wept today, although she had awakened early, before it was fully light, with total recall of the conversation with Paul Newton and Peter Mortimer, and lain there for more than an hour, trying to envisage a future. And failed, remaining there mummified, thoughts, images, feelings, tears, refusing to come. It went blank again at that moment, so that she was not immediately aware of Geoffrey Davis talking to her.

  ‘I said we could do away with the formal receiving line,’ repeated the firm’s lawyer.

  ‘I don’t want that,’ said Jane, freshly insisting. ‘Everything will be done properly, as it should be done.’ John would have wanted that, for everything to be done properly. It was important to remember what John would have wanted. Expected. He would have come round soon enough to wanting a baby as much as she did. Had wanted, she corrected herself. Robbed of John and robbed of having his baby. Or was she robbed? Had he provided the specimen Rosemary Pritchard had asked for? She couldn’t remember – there was still too much she couldn’t remember – but if he had there was surely a possibility of it being used, to impregnate her, once the gynaecologist had corrected her problem. Something she had to call Rosemary about as soon as possible: today even, when she got back from the wake.