by Chris Knopf
So I thought about sailing. About how I’d motor out into the Little Peconic, well past the shallower water, where I could raise the mainsail and unfurl the jib. I thought about how the breeze would fill the sails as I turned off the wind, and as the boat began to heel, kill the motor, introducing a near perfect silence into the world. I thought about checking the anemometer and setting the ideal bearing in relation to wind direction and velocity. Snapping on the auto helm and dropping back on the padded seat behind the helm, releasing control of the wheel and whatever tension had accumulated around my heart and soul.
Free from operating the boat, I could look around the Little Peconic, at the familiar coastlines and scattering of speed boats and sails. The sky and slate grey water, whose power lay latent and unconcerned by the affairs of those like me, moving over the surface in blissful denial of the true nature of things.
I switched to Spanish to scour that feeling from emotional memory. I realized it made me feel wealthy beyond words. Rico. And its opposite, pobre.
I called Randall and asked him to access Carolyn’s e-mail account. When he got there, I said, “Try pobrecitos.”
“Okay. Why the hell not.”
After a few seconds he said, “I’m in. How did you do that?”
“Ask the Buddha.”
“Righteous hacker, for sure.”
“The most.”
I asked him to download everything he could and e-mail it to me. I could hear him tapping away, fingers moving over the keyboard like Arthur Rubinstein on speed.
“You know, dude, this is barely illegal,” said Randall. “Not on the same scale as some of the shit you’ve had me do.”
“I said I’d protect you.”
“I’ll never argue with you again.”
“Yes, you will,” I said.
“Okay, but I’ll be nicer when I do it.”
“Fair enough.”
Soon after, an e-mail showed up from an unknown address with an attachment titled “Carolyn’s Last Words.” As her personal e-mail, it was predictably domestic in nature, over half being responses to Eulah’s handwritten letters. I deleted all of that without looking. I searched for any e-mails to names connected to the Loventeers, with no success, until a bunch popped up as correspondence with a person named Ruth.
These I read. Starting six months before her death, Carolyn was becoming increasingly apprehensive about how some adolescent girls and young boys were being directed away from the Caring Center into a program run out of the hacienda. Ruth’s replies were conciliatory, promising to dig into the situation and report back anything she found that may be of concern. Carolyn grew steadily frustrated with these assurances, which seemed to yield few tangible results.
Like a Hitchcock movie rendered in digital language, one could see the ever more frantic Carolyn Harris heading for a collision with the dissembling and evasive Ruth Bellingham, until Carolyn’s final e-mail, written the day before her death, carried the words, “I’ve run out of patience. I intend on reporting this entire state of affairs to federal and Puerto Rican authorities.”
Film goes to black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jackie was happy to confirm to me that she was, in fact, a digital genius, proven by having tracked down Ruth Bellingham’s address.
“I knew you could do it,” I said.
“No mean feat, you should know.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “So where is she?”
“London.”
“Get the hell out of here.”
“Specifically a London neighborhood called Islington. She’s the daughter of the founders of Worldwide Loventeers. Married a rich bloke named Pendleton Bellingham, if you can believe that. Do you think people called him Penny? Or Ha’penny, if he was a little on the small side? He dropped dead about twenty years ago, nicely timed with her parents’ deaths. Ruth inherited the charity, the house in Islington, and other houses around the world, including Patagonia and the Seychelles.”
“The Loventeers executive director in Puerto Rico said she wasn’t the big boss,” I said.
“He’s been deceived. She’s the biggest boss they have, since she owns the joint. One hundred percent.”
“You can own a nonprofit?”
“Sure. Like your age, your tax ID is just a number.”
“Does Burton’s expense account cover a trip to London?” I asked.
“It would cover a trip to Proxima Centauri if it helped one of our cases. But how do we know she’s there?”
“Just a hunch. If I’m wrong, I’ll reimburse the firm.”
“Piffle.”
I once spent more than 50 percent of the year in parts of the world other than my home in Stamford, Connecticut. Every part of the world you could possibly imagine, wherever there was a handy source of crude oil and investment capital. At first, Abby found that a cause to gripe, but after a while, she almost seemed cheered by the prospect of my absence. It came to be that she had a completely separate life from me, enjoyed with one of our neighbors. They liked to spend time in a cozy ski lodge in Vermont. I destroyed it, right around the time I gutted our Stamford house that had passed into Abby’s ownership after the divorce. This turned into a legal encumbrance, though it felt therapeutic at the time. I’ve built a lot of houses since then, and I think figuring out how to tear them down was good preparation. It’s a lot harder than you might think.
International travel had changed since I’d done a lot of it, but the basics stayed the same. Drive to JFK, park in a long-term lot about one hundred miles away, ride a tram with nervous, unhappy people, get stripped nearly naked by the TSA, find a bar near your gate, drink too much, but still get on the flight with more nervous, unhappy people, endure efforts to encroach on your armrests (I gave no quarter), fail to sleep, continue to drink too much, read the illiterate thriller novel nearly losing your eyesight because of the small type and lousy paper, pee frequently and suffer the terrifying sound of the toilet flushing, try to assure the British flight attendants that you really weren’t flirting, just trying to be friendly and pleasant, stagger through the Heathrow gauntlet, and tell the person at the hotel desk that your room must be ready because if you don’t lie down for a moment your brain will bleed out through your eye sockets, creating an awful, shall we say bloody, mess.
All of that awaited me, but first I had to go back to Burton’s and check in on Amanda and tell her what I was up to. I stopped at the cottage on the way and threw essentials in a suitcase, like my laptop and clever Internet connector. While I was so engaged, Jackie had booked my flight and a hotel in London close to Islington, but not too close. Experience told me to always keep your home base a little distant from your quarry.
That evening, I sat with Amanda, Jackie, Harry, Burton, Eddie, and Sullivan out on one of Burton’s big sun porches, open on three sides with a giant paddle fan on the ceiling double teaming with the sea breeze. His house wasn’t right on the ocean, but we were close enough to hear the surf, which sounded a little worked up over something.
No one was feeling particularly festive, the stress of recent events weighing heavily. Burton had a device he’d brought back from Australia that he used to fling a hard rubber ball out onto the lawn, so Eddie was gleefully occupied.
I asked Burton if he’d ever met Ruth Bellingham.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t even know she existed. Not sure if the Edelsteins do either, and I’m not about to call and ask. I’m afraid of what I might say.”
“I’ll do it,” said Jackie. “Tomorrow. Would be good to know.”
Burton thanked her but said it really wouldn’t make much difference one way or the other.
“I appreciate everything you all are doing,” he said, “but I don’t see how it improves my prospects with the case. It’s going to come down to my testimony against the surviving witnesses that evening, two of whom are of unimpeachable standing legally and socially. Thoroughly damning.”
I wanted to tell him that for some reaso
n all the things we were discovering about the Worldwide Loventeers had an important bearing on the events of that night, but I couldn’t tell him why. That it was a conviction based on pure gut, which wouldn’t have assuaged me if our situations had been reversed.
But then Jackie did it for me.
“I think we’re making progress,” she said to him. “It just doesn’t look like it.”
“Very well,” said Burton.
My cell phone rang, which I think relieved everyone. I took the call out on the lawn.
“Sam, it’s Bill Fenton.” My buddy from the NYPD. “Sorry to call so late, but I just got some news from Interpol. Damn Europeans always forget they’re in a different time zone.”
“No problem here. What’s up?”
“Your boy Mikolaj Galecki, aka, Zayna Dabrowski, Addey Mazur, Krzysztof Zalewski, take your pick, is major bad news. Picked a fight with a Polish Olympic heavyweight when he was only eighteen. Beat the shit out of him. From there had a career in hurting people for the Polish version of Cosa Nostra, then went international, moved into drugs, arms dealing, and human smuggling, currently most wanted for white slavery. Big business out of Eastern Europe. I guess easier to transport than Russian grenade launchers. And would you believe it, has an advanced degree from the University of London. Speaks like a dozen languages. If he’s over here, and the smart money says he’s lurking around Brooklyn, the FBI would very much like to show him a little hospitality.”
I told him about the attack by a pair of Polish guys out on Oak Point. That they hadn’t hesitated to shoot one of our cops.
“That’s the way it is with these foreign nationals,” said Fenton. “They get sent out on a job, they either get their man, or die trying, since failure is apparently not an option. Almost makes you nostalgic for the old gumbas.”
I thanked him and said I’d definitely call it in if I caught wind of Galecki.
“Listen, Sam. I’m not trying to insult you, but he’s out of your league. Even if you weren’t on the wrong end of middle age, there’s some evil shit out there that’s bigger than anything you can imagine. Bigger money, bigger power, bigger motherfuckers. Nothing you can handle on your own. I’m just saying.”
I said I heard him, but had one more question.
“What’s Galecki’s degree in?”
“Philosophy. Isn’t that some shit?”
I FILLED everyone in on my call with Bill Fenton and asked Sullivan if he could pass along the information about Mikolaj Galecki to Ross Semple, and he said sure.
“I’ll call Bill myself just to get all the details. I know the stuff Ross will want to hear.”
“For what it’s worth, London is full of Polish import-export people,” said Harry, a guy in the import-export business. “It’s the perfect hub for any EU citizen. Though I suppose Brexit will screw that up and they’ll have to move somewhere else.”
“So these Polish shippers and handlers, legal or illegal?” I asked.
“Both. Ever since the war, the Brits and Poles have been woven into the same illicit networks. Keeping the naughty goods flowing from East to West and back again. Dollars to dimes it’s where Galecki hooked up with Bellingham, who hooked him into New York.”
In no hurry to leave the soothing fellowship, however dimmed by current misfortune, I forced myself to get up and kiss Amanda farewell.
“I think you can forgo packing shorts and T-shirts for this trip,” she said. “Though an umbrella might be in order.”
Burton rose with me and asked if we could have a private word before I left. Only Jackie raised an eyebrow.
He brought me into a small library near the front door that I’d forgotten was there, shutting the door behind us.
“This is horrible, but I have to tell you something,” he said. “I hope it can stay between us.”
The only way to describe the expression on his face was agonized.
“Of course, Burt.”
He forced it out, with great difficulty.
“Elton Darby was attempting to gain my financial support through a variety of incentives. Of relevance here was the prospect of certain liaisons, anonymous, discreet, in foreign locales. I’m a fool who should have shut these offers down immediately, but I was a little intrigued. It’s hard for me, you must know. I’m not the flamboyant, public type. I know that’s all passé, but I can’t depart from habit. But I get lonely. That damned Darby really knew how to work on me.”
“Listen, Burt, that’s no big deal. Everybody deserves a little romance.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head hard as if to cast away the horrid thing he was about to say.
“That night, at the Edelsteins, I was still resisting Darby’s entreaties, so he must have been desperate enough to raise the stakes.” He paused before saying, “He said I could have any age I wanted. Just order it up. I was horrified, and told him so. What kind of monster did he think I was? I told him I was going to report him to Loventeers management. That’s when he grabbed my arm and pulled me in to say he’d claim it was me who asked for this. It would be my word against his. And the media would surely get his story first.”
He gripped my arm, as if re-creating the moment, and shuddered.
“I ripped my arm away and he ended up with my watch,” he said. “There were threatening words. Shouting. He said he was keeping the watch as a donation. He taunted me. I just walked away. Looked for Joshua and Rosie, but couldn’t find them, so I left the house. And you know the rest. I trust you with this, Sam, but no one else. Jackie doesn’t need to know. It doesn’t change anything about the facts of the case.”
I told him it connected a few dots for me, but I would keep his confidence.
“One thing in return,” I said.
“What?”
“Stop being so hard on yourself. You’re still the best person I know.”
“Then you might question your other associations,” he said, but smiled a tired smile, genuine for all of that.
JACKIE HAD me in business class, so I was comfortable, though wide awake for the whole flight. I brought along an architect’s scale, mechanical pencil, and an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven pad of drawing paper that I used to design a giant built-in wall unit Frank had assigned to me. The very finest kind of project: big, open budget, and very long time frame. And no other designers involved to muddy the waters.
The English flight attendant asked me if I was an architect.
“Cabinetmaker,” I said. “Architects take themselves too seriously. Though I like some of them. The good ones.”
“That looks appallingly complicated,” she said.
“It’s only scale, proportion, symmetry, and common sense in three dimensions.”
“Still sounds rather complicated.”
“Do you know how to knit a sweater?” I asked.
“I do, actually.”
“That’s complicated. This is child’s play. You just need to bring me another belt of vodka to help with my concentration.”
“That I can accomplish right away. You’ll have to wait a bit for the sweater.”
I’d made the run to Heathrow a hundred times during my tenure with the company, since in those days London was the hub through which you had to pass to get almost anywhere. It had been a few years, but it was neither better nor worse to negotiate the massive infrastructure and find my way into the city.
The sun was bright and the sky blue on the ride in, which didn’t seem natural or particularly fair, given the bleary, sand-filled condition of my eyes. The cabbie, a Hungarian who claimed to have lived in every country in Europe, and was planning his next move to Sri Lanka, said the traffic in London had achieved astonishing levels of congestion in the two years he’d been there, but driving people around was still his favorite occupation.
“I need to keep moving all the time. My girlfriend thinks it’s a sickness, but she keeps moving with me, so how bad really?”
“I like sitting on my ass in one place,” I said. “You should giv
e it a try.”
“Maybe in Sri Lanka.”
Jackie had put me in a hotel on the South Bank with a nice view of the Thames and Saint Paul’s Cathedral. I would have appreciated the scenery more if I hadn’t passed out and slept all the way around to the next morning, with only a few interruptions to pee and watch Saint Paul’s experience various phases—grey daylight, somber dusk, stellar artificial lights of night, rosy dawn. I was reminded of Monet’s obsessive paintings of Notre Dame, every moment a new vision.
At breakfast in the hotel, everyone was from somewhere other than the UK, the servers and guests alike. Just like New York. I felt right at home.
I was on my second run to the buffet table, brimming with eggs, sausage, mushrooms, and bacon, when Jackie called me, even though it was only about three in the morning her time.
“I went through the Carolyn Harris e-mails you sent me. I see what you mean. Makes the threat, then the next day, she’s dead. Coincidence?”
“Only if lesbian leprechauns are in charge of the Pentagon.”
I caught a ride over to Islington, which took about an hour of circuitous travail through construction sites and frequent long waits at intersections. The driver was a skinny guy from Nepal who smelled of grilled cuisine, though the car was cleaned to standards I hadn’t experienced outside Japan. He held up his smartphone, jacked into the car’s stereo system, and asked my taste in music, suggesting punk rock. I went for late Ellington, a choice he found surprising, but as we listened, also inspired.
Islington was as I remembered, only with a lot more fresh paint and nicer cars. I walked past Bellingham’s townhouse, and was disappointed to find no reasonable place to establish a stakeout. So I went down the block to a pub and hung out working on my built-ins over coffee until noon, when I had a Guinness and pondered next moves.
I called Jackie, waking her up, as usual.
“So Bellingham doesn’t have a separate office. Does that mean she’s usually there at her house?” I asked.
“I guess. She could be in some Loventeers’ outpost for the next few months. No way to know.”