Two Women Page 3

  As he finally sat Northcote said to the man: ‘I’ll have Macallan. Large. With a water back.’

  Carver said: ‘Gin Martini. Large. Straight up with a twist.’

  Father-in-law and son-in-law remained looking at each other, unspeaking, for several minutes before Carver said: ‘So tell me.’

  ‘There’s a few things that still need sorting out. Not a problem.’

  ‘I’m getting a little tired of being told there isn’t a problem.’

  ‘And I’m getting tired of telling you there isn’t one.’

  ‘What are the few things still needing to be sorted out?’

  ‘Understandings.’

  They pulled back for their drinks to be served.

  Carver said: ‘What’s understandings mean?’

  ‘Agreements.’

  ‘With whom? About what?’

  ‘The dissolution.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, George: talk in words that make sense! Are you – the firm – out?’

  ‘There are still some things that need to be agreed.’

  There was another long silence.

  Carver said: ‘They don’t let you go, these people, do they?’

  ‘They’re going to.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You don’t believe yourself!’

  Without knowing what it was, they both disinterestedly ordered that day’s special when the head waiter returned and at the same time nodded to the house claret.

  ‘They don’t have a choice.’

  ‘George! I’ve got to know!’

  Northcote shook his head, gesturing for another whisky. There was a tremble in his hand of which Carver hadn’t been aware before. Don’t over-interpret, Carver told himself. ‘George?’

  ‘They know it’s all over,’ insisted Northcote. ‘They want all the files and records …’ The block came. ‘The … the …’

  ‘Evidence,’ finished Carver. He nodded again in acceptance of the wine, without tasting it.

  ‘It solves the problem. That’s how it was always going to be. Separating the firm. No evidence, either way.’

  For a moment Carver could not respond, silenced by the other man’s seemingly easy acceptance of what he considered a disaster threatening – even impending.

  ‘So you give them all our records dating back …’ Carver paused, stopped by an abrupt question. ‘Dating back how long, George? When did it all start …?’

  ‘A long time ago,’ said Northcote. ‘And it took a lot more years to build up to what it became. There aren’t many records with us any longer. But enough.’

  ‘Where?’ demanded Carver, remembering his fruitless computer search.

  ‘Safe.’

  What was missing from the older man’s voice, Carver asked himself. Guilt? Remorse? Embarrassment? Acknowledgement of wrongdoing? All of them, Carver decided. If there was an intonation, it was of pride, in whatever it was he had created. He’d always accepted that his father-in-law was self-confident to the point of overwhelming arrogance, which Alice had more than once accused him of being as well, but this went beyond that. But then, Carver further asked himself, how could Northcote be otherwise, after the unstoppable international success he’d achieved, now with offices in every one of the world’s financial capitals? But this … Carver was stopped again by another numbing, unthinkable uncertainty. ‘You told me you were trapped into it … that you didn’t realize it was criminal?’

  ‘That’s what it was … how it happened.’

  ‘When – remember we’re talking precisely, exactly – did you realize what you were into?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘George! For fuck’s …’ Carver abruptly stopped with the arrival of their food, which they discovered to be rack of lamb. As soon as the waiter was out of earshot Carver said: ‘George. Tell me true. Don’t tell me things weren’t like I imagine them to be or that I’m misunderstanding or that I shouldn’t be as pig-sick worried as I’m worried at this moment. How long ago?’

  ‘Maybe twenty years.’

  ‘How long ago?’ persisted Carver. ‘Precisely. Exactly.’

  ‘Twenty-two. But it was a longer evolving process, to get everything set up.’ The attitude reflected in the voice now was truculence.

  Carver recognized it was a different story from that Northcote had first offered, of a struggling accountant, just starting out. ‘How’d they keep you in line? They blackmail you: tell you how you’d be debarred if you didn’t go along with everything?’

  Northcote moved his meat around his plate, eating none of it. Saying nothing.

  Carver completed his own non-eating carousel, despising himself for matching the earlier verbal mockery. Then he said: ‘They’ve had you, George, haven’t they? For most of your career they’ve had you, just like this …?’ Carver closed his hand, as if crushing something.

  ‘I could handle it then: can still handle it now,’ insisted the other man, pushing his plate aside.

  Carver said: ‘How’s about this? How’s about a stomach-against-his-spine hungry guy who got initially caught, but who then went with the flow? Paddled the boat, even? You had the choice, all those years ago, of blowing the whistle. But you stayed with the system: their system, your system. Same system. Everyone gets rich. And you, additionally, got protected. Wasn’t that how it ran, George: you their willing guy, all the way along the line?’

  Northcote’s face flushed redder than the previous night. ‘I didn’t have a choice!’ The voice – the anger – was cracked.

  Carver waved for their untouched meal to be taken away, waiting until it was. ‘You did a Faust on everyone, George. You sold out to the Devil …’ He sniggered a laugh. ‘How about that! You sold out to the underworld! Isn’t that how it was … how it is … you got the joys of this life, leaving those who inherit to pay your dues …?’

  Northcote shook his head against the new approach from the waiter. To Carver he said: ‘What the fuck would you have done, dirt poor, knowing you could climb the mountain, but not knowing how: which way to go? Not knowing, then, even which way you were going? You want to tell me that?’

  ‘No, I can’t tell you that,’ admitted Carver, totally honest. ‘I’d have certainly been frightened. Tempted, too … maybe even have been eager. But mostly tempted, I guess. I don’t know.’

  ‘So that’s how it is,’ said Northcote.

  ‘No,’ refused Carver. ‘That’s how it was. Now is how it is. Tell me about last night.’

  ‘I told you about last night.’

  ‘George!’

  ‘I won’t let them win … beat me …’

  They’d won. Made this man their own mob-backed Wall Street colossus, Carver accepted, his numbness growing into a tingling feeling of total unreality. ‘They’ve owned you, George. Owned the firm – owned all of us – from the word go!’ How could he be talking like this, in an ordinary manner – conversationally – like everyone else around him in this safe, protected, uninvadible bastion of total, privileged security!

  ‘There’s a way,’ declared Northcote.

  ‘What way? Which way?’

  ‘I kept some records … the records you – no one – was ever supposed to find … I … they …’

  Carver seized the stumble. ‘Janice! What does Janice know?’ Janice Snow was Northcote’s black, permanently weight-watching but constantly failing personal assistant who averaged 190lbs when she followed the regime and ballooned way above when she didn’t, which was most of the time. She’d been with Northcote before Carver had entered the firm. It had been Janice who’d earlier insisted Northcote hadn’t arrived in the office, when he clearly had.

  ‘Absolutely nothing: only that they’re my personal accounts.’

  ‘How many are “they”?’ demanded Carver, determined to discover as much as he could from a man who was clearly as determined not to volunteer anything. ‘How many more companies are there than Mulder, Encomp and Innsflow?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘I hav
e your word on that?’ What the fuck use was the word of a man who’d been a Mafia puppet … Yet again, Carver’s mind stopped at a conclusion he didn’t want to reach but had to, because it was the only one possible. They were talking – conversationally, quiet-voiced, how-was-the-weekend? where’s-this-year’s-vacation? – about the Mafia!

  ‘You have my word,’ recited Northcote, in immediate reply.

  He despised this man, Carver abruptly decided. It was as much a shock as all the other revelations of the last thirty-six hours. Maybe even greater. Until now he had been in awe – in trepidation – of this lion of a man with a lion’s mane (but a bull’s shoulders) who had dominated his life and Jane’s life and so many other lives but whom he was now coming to regard as nothing more than a clay effigy – a hollow clay effigy at that – of the supposed Colossus who could not have stood guard, legs astride, over any empire. Most certainly – and provably – not over his own, which wasn’t his at all but which had been allowed and granted him, in return for his usefulness.

  ‘You’re going to give them all the records?’ Itself a criminal – certainly a professional – offence but that no longer seemed a consideration.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re making copies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Over so long you’re talking in tons!’

  ‘Things went back, after the statutory limitation. It’s just what’s in my personal section of the vault.’

  ‘Where are the copies?’ Carver repeated.

  ‘Safe,’ insisted Northcote.

  ‘Where are the copies?’ persisted Carver.

  ‘Not all together yet. You’ll know, when they are. And where they are.’

  ‘Don’t you think they’ll expect – suspect at least – you’ll do this?’

  ‘There’s no reason why they should. Everything’s amicable.’

  Both men shook their heads to the offered humidor but both ordered brandy, Carver deciding he genuinely needed it. He said: ‘Only for as long as they choose to let it be amicable.’

  ‘I told you, you watch too much television.’

  Carver had to push the calmness into his voice. ‘George. Don’t you have any idea how serious … dangerously serious … all this is!’

  ‘This is not Chicago in the twenties, Al Capone and machine guns. I know these people. Have done, over a lot of years.’

  He was wasting his time, Carver realized, incredulously. ‘I’ll need more than the location.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Names.’

  ‘It’ll involve you.’

  ‘I am involved, for Christ’s sake!’ said Carver, in continued exasperation.

  ‘Let me think on it.’ Northcote smiled abruptly over his brandy snifter. ‘I’m driving up with Jane this afternoon.’

  ‘I know. What about Friday?’

  ‘It’ll all be settled by then. You got everything in hand?’

  Carver didn’t answer, looking across the table at his father-in-law, who stared back. Finally Northcote said: ‘I’ll make the formal retirement announcement in the keynote speech. Everything will be confirmed by Friday.’

  Carver acknowledged that he’d condoned a crime: crime after crime after crime, more crimes than could be counted. Which had – astonishingly – been easy. All so logical. All so acceptable. All – all and every aspect of it – so illegal. Was he prepared to go with that? Was he ready, prepared, to be Superman in the red shorts? Or Eliot Ness? Or John Carver, trying to preserve an empire from crumbling? He said: ‘You were my icon. You were Jane’s icon. Everyone’s icon. God.’

  ‘Grow up, John.’

  ‘I just have,’ said Carver. ‘I didn’t enjoy it.’

  Alice was already at their table, at their place – the place in the Village he couldn’t remember choosing for those early lunches but which had become their place since. Everyone called everyone by their first names, the moment they were regulars. A very different club from the Harvard: a preferred club even. In which he felt comfortable. Easy. Here – despite the suit in which he definitely felt uncomfortable – he was John: anonymous John, no one John. In the Harvard Club he was Mr Carver. Or more often, sir. Rich son-in-law of richer father-in-law, both of whom could order, as they had carelessly ordered, $250 lunches and not eat anything, nor drink more than a token sip of their matchingly expensive wine. Alice was drinking beer.

  He said: ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  She shrugged. ‘Not a problem.’

  How many more times was that phrase going to jar through his mind. ‘Beer?’

  ‘I was thirsty, OK?’

  ‘OK. You look fantastic.’ She did, wearing blue jeans, a white shirt and with a blue sweater as a wrap around her shoulders.

  ‘You don’t. You look like shit on a stick. What’s up …?’

  The waiter, who’d had a walk-on part in a movie that no one could remember but who called himself an actor said: ‘Hi John. You wanna cocktail?’

  ‘Straight up gin Martini. A twist.’

  ‘Please,’ added Alice, before the man left. To Carver she said: ‘There’s bad days and there’s bad days. This was a very bad day, right?’

  ‘The baddest day in the history of bad days.’ That sounded flip, like a joke, and the last thing in which he imagined himself was a flip, one-liner joke scenario.

  ‘So, yet again, do you want to talk about it?’

  He did, decided Carver. He couldn’t, to Jane, because he would be talking about her father. And he shouldn’t, to Alice, who was a financial – even an investigative – journalist. But he needed – had – to talk to someone. And he trusted Alice as much as he trusted Jane: just as he trusted Jane as much as he trusted Alice. It would not occur to Alice to use anything he told her professionally: doing so would risk exposing their relationship. His Martini arrived and he said: ‘Thanks. And sorry, about before,’ and the waiter smiled and shook his head. To Alice, Carver said: ‘I’m going to tell you something you won’t believe. That I don’t want to believe. But which has happened … I …’ He shook his head, a lost man not knowing his direction. ‘Just listen.’

  Which Alice Belling did, through two nodded-for replacement drinks and head-shaking against menu offers and when Carver finished, Alice, who’d held back her impatience, said: ‘This is absolutely fucking unbelievable!’

  ‘I thought I’d said that already. More than once.’

  ‘It needed saying again.’

  Carver said: ‘You’re the guy on the white horse, wielding the sword of truth. What would you have done?’

  ‘I’m not going to become your conscience, darling. Or your reassurance. You’re old enough to go to the bathroom by yourself. You decide which way to piss.’

  ‘I’ve decided.’ It hadn’t ever seemed like a decision. Nothing more than a natural progression. He raised and dropped his arms, the stupidity of the gesture heightening his embarrassment. ‘It was like … like … the obvious thing to do.’

  ‘You know you’ve compromised me!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bastard!’

  Their passing waiter said: ‘Nothing’s terminal, guys.’

  Picking up the remark, Alice said: ‘This could be.’

  ‘It was the only way I could go. Is the only way I can go.’

  Briefly they enclosed themselves in their own silence.

  Alice said: ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Trusting me, so completely.’

  ‘Didn’t you think I did?’

  ‘Not this much.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’m sorry, about that compromise shit. I’m not compromised.’

  ‘You are. But thank you.’

  ‘You told me everything?’

  ‘Everything that I so far know. I still don’t understand what the scam is: just that there is one, very, very big-time indeed. Or why are the figures being massaged like they are if the companies aren’t being floated!’

  ‘I want to know whether Georg
e W. Northcote was an entrapped innocent, like he says. Or is long-established Mafia big-time.’

  ‘I can’t decide that, either,’ said Carver. He would though. He’d understand it all and resolve it all and keep the firm he was destined to inherit safe from whatever Northcote had involved it in.

  In New York the Mafia, despite some investigative setbacks, remains a pyramid structure, the five predominant Families of Bonanno, Luchese, Gambino, Genovese and Colombo at the pinnacle with minor although named Families permitted to exist and operate beneath them, sometimes paying tributes and sometimes providing services. The Delioci clan were the most entrepreneurial and successful of those minor groups, largely because it was Emilio Delioci who had all those years ago enmeshed George Northcote and originally sold his money-laundering services to all of the five. Although, because of the accountant’s importance to the five, Northcote’s individual control had passed to Burcher, Mafia protocol decreed that any working difficulty had first to be raised with the Delioci Family before any reference to New York’s ruling Mafia Commission and that was why Burcher that day drove over the East River to Queens to meet the elderly, white-haired Emilio Delioci.

  Burcher didn’t like operating with minor groups. They were unpredictable, nearly always imagining they were more important than they were, and there had been no attempt to hide the Delioci resentment when, at the superior Families’ insistence, he became liaison between them and Northcote. Nor was there now when he was ushered into the inevitable back room of the Delioci headquarters in the inevitable restaurant on Thomson Avenue.

  ‘To what do we owe this rare honour,’ wheezed the asthmatic don.

  ‘A problem that at first has to be discussed with you,’ said Burcher. He was glad he had advised the consiglieri of all five New York Families of the visit and was able to indicate at once that the resolve could easily be taken away from the Deliocis.

  Four

  John Carver had cleared his diary to give himself a final review before the scheduled arrival of their overseas chief executives. The head of the Tokyo office was arriving that night, all the others some time during the following day. Carver strictly, determinedly, maintained his already planned agenda, obviously unable to forget his one overpowering concern but managing – mostly – to relegate it sufficiently to concentrate upon the annual international conference.