by Bill James
‘She said his business was not her business, so she didn’t ask any questions. Emily realizes this van is here for a purpose.’
‘Well, yes, Leo, but . . .’
‘You don’t get to head a museum committee if your thinking’s dim and flimsy,’ Leo replied. ‘They’re handling a big budget, buying in ancient jewellery, paintings and sculptures, tools, old chinaware from many a country, valuable artefacts, if you know that term, meaning items from history. This is capability, Tom. This is someone who’s learned fast what life is re, and who knows how to blank off certain aspects and how to stay silent when that’s best. Plus, she looks after them two mounts more or less solo in term time when the boys are away at their prep school. We’re thinking of Charterhouse for them next, though Emily’s also keen on Winchester. She says the town of Winchester used to be the capital of old England when London hadn’t really got going at all. This is the sort of thing museum people know. Toss a coin to see which school? Or would that seem flippant for such a major matter as education?’
‘Do you all ride?’
‘Definitely. We love it – for instance, the weather in your face on a canter, and the power of the animal under you, directed, controlled by only a couple of thin strips of leather. Have you ever thought of that, Tom? It’s a picture of human power over beasts, fragile looking, yet effective. We discuss such topics, Emily and me, when we’re out together in the saddle, the horses taking a breather, walking after the canter.’
‘This is interesting,’ Tom said. It was the best he could come up with. He felt almost smothered by guff. He said it pretty matter-of-fact, no heavy, fascinated trill laid on, otherwise it would sound like sarcasm – apparently admiration, but really piss-taking words that stood in for the true meaning, which amounted, approximately, to, ‘Fuck off, Leo, you verbose, anti-grammatical cunt.’ Their whole conversation was possibly as it seemed – or its total opposite. All that shit about his instant sense of Tom’s total, organic OKness could be genuinely what Leo felt: another case of his brilliance at personnel selection. Alleged brilliance.
Alternatively, this endless, go-nowhere waffle might be a lulling exercise, a screen, a trap, a frightening, malevolent game; and Tom’s delight at being handed a couple of jobs just naivety, perhaps lunacy. But, of course, he must get into the lulling game himself. He had to react as though relations between him and Leo were developing happily and at a pace – at a canter, maybe – and as though Tom’s only aim was gloriously to justify Leo’s immediate and deep trust in him. Alleged, again. This was how undercover worked. The officer had to create trustworthiness out of falsity, and to keep an eternal watch in case the people around him gave little, accidental signs that they didn’t trust his trustworthiness and had glimpsed glints of his bogusness.
Leo always dressed formally and was in a dark grey single breasted suit, including waistcoat, white shirt with buttoned down collar, and unvivid striped tie, light blue on a dark blue background. He wore nicely polished black lace-up shoes. Tom felt certain that when Leo went riding he would also have all the right accessories, fine quality jodhpurs, no question and a possible cravat. He was short, about five foot five, his head and face too small even for that kind of frame.
It was an unscarred face which could have been genial. But his features lacked sufficient room and looked cluttered, crammed into a paltry space and competing with one another for position, like too many survivors in a lifeboat. Possibly Leo’s cheeks were economized on in the womb – his mother might have smoked when pregnant – and although, of course, they’d extended as he went into adulthood, they had not extended enough to catch up with normal cheeks for someone of forty-two, according to the dossier. It didn’t seem the sort of appearance you should have if discussing humanity’s clear superiority to animals while out riding one with Emily.
Although Leo’s face missed coherence, Tom could imagine it as frightening enough if he decided you were a bastard menacing his firm and the mortgages, alimony, fashion costs and/or Oxford and seminary fees of his people. It was a face that could probably do cold condemnation, and, when it did, the close, uneasy bunching of features might make things worse, as if they’d grouped together to give a combined insult, like a mob. Leo had fair, wavy hair worn longish and a tiny, Hitler style moustache, but also fair. Possibly, he realized that a big moustache on such a limited surface would look as if it was taking him over and had already started eating his cheeks, the way ivy could dig in and spread on a house frontage.
‘Tom, I don’t want nothing but a sighting – Scray or one of his team, most likely Rice, calling at the wholesaler’s place and coming away with stuff. Describe it. Name. Clothing. Time. Date. Method of collection. Vehicle used. Registration. That’s enough. It’s an evidential matter. Yes, evidential. I don’t know if you’ve met that term before. I need the evidence so I can move justly, fairly, unavoidably against them. The procedure has to be correct. You carry a Browning, don’t you?’
‘It’s a reliable piece. The army use it. And Jamie.’
‘No argument. Take it with you, if you like – I’m not going to come between a man and his armament. Your morale might be tied up with that gun, and morale is vital.’
‘There’s inspector Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry and his love of the Magnum.’
‘Some people don’t operate properly unless they can feel a recognized, comforting metal shape against their skin,’ Leo replied. ‘But this will not be a shooting trip, not at this junction, even though you might get angry seeing Scray, or a sub for Scray, betray the firm in such sickening fashion. What you do, Tom, is observe and report all you see to myself or Mart. Then we’ll decide on the required response, possibly a cleansing response. Oh, yes, almost for certain, that.’
They climbed out of the van, and Leo locked it. Then they walked back to the house. Leo spoke some more about riding and mentioned how upset he, also, would have been to wake up in the morning and find the chopped-off head of one of his horses in bed with him, like the film producer in The Godfather. Tom said it would come as a definite shock, though he realized this was a dud sort of comment.
FIFTEEN
BEFORE
When he got the van in place for his surveillance job he found it was the A-hole in the AND of ACME LAWN AND GARDEN SERVICES on the passenger side that gave him the best view of the entrance to the target building. He had the ACME LAWN AND GARDEN SERVICES lettering clear in his memory and could therefore work out inside that it was the AND A by counting along until he came to the fourth hole. In addition, the LAWN A – the third – was quite useful for the approach road. Tom could see why Leo felt pride in the van and its tactically punctured As. Obviously, As on the driver’s side couldn’t be applied here, but would have been if he’d arrived in the parking spot from the opposite direction. Quite a bit of thinking and skill had gone into this van. It was equipped for many possibilities. It recognized that life, vision fields and street geography were complex but could be managed given skill and plenty of As.
He had been in position for only half an hour when through the LAWN A he saw Claud Norman Rice arrive in a red Lexus and pull in. Tom spoke its number into his pocket recorder. Rice took a lightweight suitcase on castors from the boot and pulled it behind him by the telescopic handle as he entered the building. Tom had to move now from the LAWN A to the AND A. There was a decisiveness about Rice, as if he knew he’d get a happy welcome. The suitcase was almost certainly empty. Rice would pay in cash and he’d probably have it in his pockets and/or a bumbag on his waist belt, bundles of twenties mainly. The case would be for the purchases and return journey. Its covering was done in a tartan design, which Tom thought suggested unexceptional, innocent travel, to tourist spots like Crete or Florida. Clever.
As Leo had promised, identification of Rice now was simple. There’d been four pictures of him to look at when Tom and he came back to the drawing room after their stables visit at Leo’s home yesterday. No, the photos were not perfect but clear enough. The
re were also five of Scray and a couple of this apartment block where the wholesaler and his family lived. Jamie’s information and/or intuition had turned out accurate again, as Leo had forecast. The pictures showed Rice as slight with cropped dark hair. He looked about twenty-seven. He might have been a jockey or a featherweight boxer, though an unmarked one. His face was slightly gaunt, bordering on anorexic. ‘Here’s the best,’ Leo had said, holding up a more or less full length photograph of Rice, a profile shot but still closer to a head-on likeness than any of the others. He seemed to be laughing at something, his thin lips pulled well back. Good small teeth.
Viewed now through the AND A, not as a picture, Rice looked cheerful enough, but not dozey-cheerful, not on-a-trip-cheerful. He was obviously alert, and his eyes did a street inventory while he took the case from the boot. That survey included quite a stare at the van. The intensity of this inspection made Tom automatically step back, as if his eye might be spotted in the AND A aperture. Leo claimed that neither Rice nor Scray had ever seen the van. They might have heard of it, though. Leo didn’t control gossip in the firm. Possibly Rice had a suspicion of all parked vans. He might have seen The Conversation.
Tom set up one of the chairs alongside the AND A hole and waited and watched. He realized, of course, that he was a spy twice over. He apparently worked for Leo and had been ordered to get the dirt on Scray or Rice. He actually worked for his masters and mistresses in the police, his chief mission to get the dirt on Leo. This address, and the procedure here, would figure in one of Tom’s undercover reports. While showing Tom the photographs yesterday, Leo had said that Jamie gave the apartment number as sixteen, on the first floor, rented in the name of Robert H. Cochrane. In one of the photographs, a couple of windows had been circled by a highlighting yellow pen. ‘That’s it,’ Leo had said, pointing. He seemed to consider explaining more about the apartment, but just then his wife returned from duties in the museum committee. Tom had heard the rich splutter of her tyres over the excellent, formerly low-profile gravel. Leo must have picked up the sound a moment earlier and at once put the building photograph back with the others, placed them all in the bureau, and rolled down the lid. ‘I don’t ever rub her nose in it,’ he said.
‘In what?’
‘The intricacies.’
‘Of?’
‘The trade. Do you have that trouble, Tom?’
‘Which?’
‘Making our kind of profession acceptable to a wife, a partner.’
‘Well, yes it can be tricky,’ Tom had said. And how.
‘They know about it, live on it, Vogue-clothe themselves on it, smart-shoe themselves on it, status themselves on it, but there needn’t be too much definition of what it actually is. That would disturb and even upset them. The detail – they don’t want to be bothered with it. Too . . . well . . . too detailed, too itemized. No reason to show Emily that we might have to do something robust about Scray or Rice, or more likely both the bastards, on account of non-stop treachery. That word “robust” is around quite a bit lately. I don’t know if you’ve run into it at all, Tom. It’s one of them words that can sound strong and all right, but might also cover something else. Well, in fact, “robust” means fucking severe and thorough, maybe final. Ah, here’s Emily. How did it go, darling? Meet a new member of the team, Tom Parry.’
He stood up from his easy chair. They shook hands. She gave a little frown of concentration. ‘Don’t I know that name? Sir Thomas Parry. Founder-head of the National Library of Wales.’
‘Oh, you museum people and similar!’ Leo had said with a good laugh. Anyone could see he felt proud of her knowing not just about Wales but a fucking library in Wales.
‘Not me,’ Tom said. And he could have said: Not that Tom Parry, and not any Tom Parry.’ He felt himself disappearing up his own aliases. It was like one of those mirror on mirror shots, but in his case mirror shots of nobody.
‘Sort of introducing Tom to the ways of the company,’ Leo had said.
‘I hope you’ll be very happy with us, Tom.’ She was tall, smart in an above the knee blue dress, not a power-suit, dark-haired, full of go, possibly a year or two older than Leo. Yes, she probably needed Leo’s loot to keep up this classy presence. ‘You asked about the meeting, love. Tolerable, just. We managed to achieve a couple of decisions – to do with halberds and stuffed wolves for the “Europe Once Upon A Time” exhibition. I’ll make some fresh tea, shall I?’ she asked and went out to the kitchen.
‘When I say “robust”, Tom, I don’t mean I want you to do anything in that line on this excursion. I’m repeating the instruction because I must have it properly understood.’
‘Yes, I do understand.’
‘People can cut loose, become manic when presented with a situation. You’ll be in a situation there, outside number sixteen. Stay outside. No reason to enter the building. Ours is a properly run firm, Tom, with good business standards – for the kind of business it is. I hope that’s the main idea you take away from here today. It’s because it’s a properly run firm that we might have to neutralize people like Justin Scray and Norman Rice.’
‘Neutralize?’
‘It’s another interesting word around, in the sense of, take the fuckers apart. That kind of thing. Their activities are not in line with behaviour expected in a firm of this quality.’
‘Right.’
‘Reputation, Tom. It has to be cared for, cherished, protected.’
‘Right.’
‘So, sods like Scray and Rice will get what’s coming to them, and it won’t be bouquets, though it will vary in seriousness, one graver than the other. Graver, yes.’
‘Right.’
Emily had returned with more tea, and they discussed halberds and their versatility in battle, as part spear and part long-handled axe. They could jab but also splinter helmets and skulls. Tom had feared that, in her womanly way, she’d want to know about his background and home life. He had a narrative ready, though he could see some weaknesses in it. But she hadn’t asked. They might be the kind of details Leo said she’d learned not to intrude on. Scray and Rice were not mentioned, either. They would be other incidentals Leo didn’t want her disturbed and even upset by, in his attentive way.
Through the AND A now, Tom saw Rice emerge from the apartment block pulling his wheeled suitcase. It looked fatter, heavier, or was that Tom imagining matters as he thought they should be? If someone took an empty case to a rendezvous it ought to be not empty on the return, or why bother to take it empty in the first place? Rice made for the Lexus. Tom moved expertly from the AND A to the LAWN A to watch him as far as the car. Rice didn’t seem to give the van any attention this time. Perhaps he’d just handled a very satisfactory deal and felt more relaxed. He loaded the case carefully into the boot and drove off. Tom stayed for fifteen minutes in case Rice’s seeming lack of concern just now had been a bluff. He might come back to see whether the van had gone, because he and the Lexus had. Deduction? The van had been on the peep. But Rice’s car didn’t reappear.
Tom reckoned this whole episode at the apartment block had been so brief that he could possibly slip home for a swift visit on the quiet. After all, the surveillance stint might have gone on for hours more, made feasible by the commode and flasks. It was Steve’s birthday today. The detour would add an extra 100 miles or so to Tom’s journeys, but he’d learned a long time ago in a car dealer case how to adjust the mileage clock. He’d sent a card, and he would stop off and get Steve a present: an electronic item, small enough to go into Tom’s pocket: a super-modern mobile phone, or an iPod, maybe. He would explain it was a ‘holding present’ only. Months ago he had promised Steve a mountain bike. That wouldn’t be possible today. Perhaps for Christmas instead. Not now, anyway. He couldn’t accommodate a bike.
The van would take it easily, of course, but Tom didn’t intend doing the full distance in it. There’d be too many questions from the kids if he rolled up with that: the main one, naturally, being why had he joined a gard
ening firm? Neighbours might wonder the same. Iris wouldn’t ask. She’d have an idea what it was all about, and it would worry her, scare her. Steve and Laura would demand a look inside the van. The commode would give them a giggle. They might also spot the eight A windows and ask what they were for.
So, Tom would put the van into a multi-storey and do the last few miles by taxi. He’d say he was in the town with a colleague, who had things to see to nearby. This pal had used his car and done the driving, and Tom had to call another taxi and meet him near the city hall for the return hop.
He had a token pee in the commode. It seemed the considerate thing to do because Leo had displayed such evident pride in this fitment, and it would be a kind of rebuff to ignore it; might make Tom look ungrateful, uptight and possibly aloof. He thought of that famous, strange mental state known as the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ – noticed first, apparently, during a Swedish police operation – where an undercover officer or hostage came to admire the people he was spying on or imprisoned by and went over to their way of thinking and behaving.
Tom did feel that taking a leak in the van showed he had some regard for Leo and wouldn’t want to disappoint him, at least as to the commode. This piss spoke of comradeship, fellowship, camaraderie, important undercover assets. Leo looked after his subordinates. The commode figured under the noblesse oblige ticket. Tom zipped up, closed the lid, let himself out of the back of the vehicle, then went to the front cabin and drove away. The move out through the rear and around to the driver’s door on foot was very visible to anybody in the street, or looking from a window in one of the buildings: an inevitable van weakness because a solid partition divided its two parts. It ought to have been possible to get from the back to the front and vice versa without having to leave the vehicle. But any activity in the back must be blocked off from people outside looking in through the windscreen. Maybe one-way vision, darkened glass could have been installed, but why should a gardening firm or savoury pie business need that? It would have made the vehicle conspicuous.