City Of Lies

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘Which is good enough for me,’ Marcus said.

  ‘Then that is settled,’ Freiberg interjected. ‘For relinquishment of all concerns and interests, for the acquisition of all territory previously owned and controlled by Edward Bernstein, you agree to pay the sum of seven and a half million dollars, to be delivered in cash tomorrow evening at a location to be agreed now.’

  Marcus was silent for a moment, surveying the faces of the people before him. ‘Agreed,’ he said.

  Freiberg turned and looked at Harper. ‘Sonny, you agree?’

  Harper nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I agree.’ His heart trip-hammered in his chest. He wanted to move, wanted to do anything but stay facing Ben Marcus. There was something terrifying about the man. The man was a consolidation of endless nightmares personified in human form. Such a man as Marcus would kill without reserve, without compunction, without consideration of consequence. Perhaps, Harper believed, that was what he had intended to do all along.

  Marcus rose from his chair, Harper also. They met in the center of the room, for a moment each of them hesitant, and then they shook hands, held their grasp for some considerable time, each of them looking directly at the other.

  Marcus stepped back. He seemed in his element. ‘It is unfortunate, is it not, that you will not be accompanying us on our little adventure tomorrow. Perhaps we could have used some of your Florida crew, eh Sonny? I think West Twelfth—’

  ‘No details,’ Freiberg suddenly said. He rose from his chair. ‘Sonny will not be with us on this thing, Ben. There is no need for him to be aware of anything that may compromise his objective position. He is here merely as a representative of his father, here to make sure that the agreement you made with Edward stands. Once this is done he will return to Florida and attend to his own business down there.’

  Marcus smiled. ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘So now our business is concluded we should drink our coffee, speak of inconsequential pleasantries for a little while, and then away to prepare for Christmas, eh?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Harper said, believing that at no time in his life had he ever so desperately wished to be somewhere other than where he was.

  Within minutes the gathering was disbanded. Marcus once again shook hands with both Freiberg and John Harper, and then walked them from the door of the room to the elevator. Marcus and his people waited while the lift was called, stood and watched as Harper and Freiberg stepped inside, Marcus never looking anywhere but directly at Harper, watching him even as the elevator door closed and started down. Harper and Freiberg remained motionless, each of them completely silent, until they reached the street below.

  ‘You did good,’ Freiberg said quietly, almost a whisper. ‘Real fucking good. Edward . . . hell, John, Edward would’ve been proud of you.’

  Harper, experiencing the greatest sense of turmoil, the greatest conflict and division of loyalties he had ever known, believed he would not make it to the car.

  He did, for Walt Freiberg was beside him, holding him up all the way.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Marcus said, his voice edgy, irritated.

  Sol Neumann stood at the window, looking down into the street as Walt Freiberg and Sonny Bernstein came into view. He watched them as they made their way towards the car parked against the facing sidewalk.

  ‘Let it go, Sol,’ Marcus continued.

  Neumann turned, stepped forward and took a seat.

  ‘When this thing is finished . . . when Christmas Eve is done, then I’ll find Walt Freiberg and kill him.’

  ‘And Sonny Bernstein?’ Neumann asked. ‘Whoever the fuck this guy is . . . what are we going to do about him?’

  Marcus smiled, waved his hand. ‘Who the hell cares? He goes back wherever he came from. We get what we want out of this.’

  ‘And Lenny?’

  ‘Lenny is going to die. He isn’t dead come Christmas Day then we’re going to send someone in there and finish this thing for good.’

  Neumann nodded, didn’t speak.

  ‘Whichever way it goes we wind up with New York,’ Marcus said. ‘Long time overdue . . . the way it always should have been.’

  FIFTY-NINE

  Later, close to eight, having left the hotel and walked four blocks west, Harper stopped at a callbox and dialled Duchaunak’s cellphone number.

  ‘I went to their meeting,’ Harper said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘The meeting with Freiberg and Marcus . . . last minute change. I had to go too.’

  ‘Jesus Christ . . . what the fuck. . .’

  ‘It’s over now. Another story for another day. I gotta get back to the hotel.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Duchaunak asked.

  ‘West Twelfth,’ Harper said. ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘West Twelfth what?’

  ‘How the fuck do I know? That’s all that I could get. Marcus said that it was unfortunate I wouldn’t be accompanying them on their little adventure tomorrow, and then he mentioned West Twelfth. Walt Freiberg stopped him saying anything further.’

  ‘You think that’s one of the places they’re going to hit?’ Duchaunak asked.

  ‘Jesus Christ, you’re the fucking detective. What do I think . . . oh fuck, I don’t know, maybe they’re all going to meet there and choose Christmas presents for the help.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Duchaunak said. ‘I’m just thinking aloud, okay?’

  ‘Go think aloud somewhere else. I really have to get back to the hotel.’

  ‘Mr Harper?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I appreciate your help.’

  ‘It’s as good as I’ve got . . . there isn’t anything more after this.’ He paused for a moment. ‘One other thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I agreed to do it for three hundred grand. That was the deal I made with Walter Freiberg. I would do what he asked and I’d walk away with three hundred grand.’ Harper didn’t wait for Duchaunak to respond; he hung up the phone and elbowed his way out of the callbox.

  The snow came down thick and fast.

  Tomorrow it would be Christmas Eve.

  SIXTY

  Eight-forty-two a.m.

  ‘How many times has he called?’ McLuhan asked.

  ‘Counting this time . . . er, seven I think. Four calls last night and three this morning.’

  ‘And what is he saying?’

  ‘That he has to speak with you, something about Lenny Bernstein’s son.’

  McLuhan sat without moving. It was Christmas Eve. Last thing he needed was Duchaunak somewhere in New York City, out of control, beyond whatever dividing line existed between his sense and his obsessions.

  ‘Call Faulkner . . . Faulkner will more than likely know what’s going on.’

  Oates nodded. ‘I called him, landline and cell . . . left messages on both. He has family upstate, may have gone there for Christmas.’

  ‘As we all should’ve done,’ McLuhan said. ‘How did he sound?’

  ‘Duchaunak? God knows, Captain, how does he always sound? Manic?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, this I do not need. He calls again put him through. Don’t let him talk to anyone else, just put him straight through to me.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Sergeant Oates said, and turned to leave the office.

  ‘Oh, and one more thing.’

  Oates turned.

  ‘Don’t say a word to anyone about Duchaunak. Not a fucking word, okay?’

  ‘What . . . that he called, or that he’s crazy?’

  McLuhan scowled. ‘That he called for God’s sake. Don’t mention to anyone that he called.’

  ‘As you wish Captain,’ Oates said, and disappeared down the corridor towards the elevator.

  It took three attempts before the car started. Old car, an ancient Chrysler Plymouth station wagon, but Dr Kennet Wiltsey was determined to drive her until she died on the road. Wiltsey was a creature of habit, ignorant of fashion or trend, and regarded any attempt to revise his ways as both offensive and invidious
. He was fifty-three years old, head of the Department of Anthropology and Religion at NYSU; graduated from Oxford University, England, with an honors degree in Religious Studies.

  When it came to God, Kennet Wiltsey knew a thing or two. Cars, however, were a different thing, hence the Chrysler Plymouth station wagon and three attempts to start her after a night of heavy snow in New York. Christmas Eve the university was officially closed, but that afternoon – commemorating the season, acknowledging the acquisition of additional funding from a private benefactor that would permit the construction of an annexe to the university library – there was a luncheon scheduled. Dr Kennet Wiltsey had been asked not only to preside over the lunch, but to give the keynote speech. He had no family as such, and thus there would be no rowdy gathering of antecedents and progeny the following day. Others spoke of such gatherings and Wiltsey experienced nothing but relief. For Christmas dinner itself he had been invited – and had indeed accepted – by the university’s deputy principal, Robert Bryan, and en route to this day’s luncheon, Kennet Wiltsey had scheduled a stop at a small bookstore called The Reader’s Rest. There, in the possession of a most pleasant young woman called Annie Parrish, waited a copy of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1828 Notions of the Americans. Bryan was a Fenimore Cooper aficionado, and a first edition of Notions would not only surprise the man, it would damn near give him a coronary seizure. Such was Wiltsey’s humor, such was his generosity, such his intention for that afternoon and the subsequent day.

  He would indeed make his appointment at the bookstore, and there he would purchase the Fenimore Cooper. The luncheon he did not make, despite having prepared a most sardonic and excellent speech, peppered with tasteful quips and wryly obscure references, for – as he entered the New York Providence Bank on West Ninth and Washington – he was shot in the face by a hooded man. It was nine-forty-two a.m. The bullet, a .45 caliber Glaser Safety slug, penetrated Wiltsey’s head alongside the nose, perhaps three-quarters of an inch below the left eye; the proximity of the weapon, no more than eight or nine feet from the target, the simple fact that it was a handgun of significant power, and the nature of a Glaser Safety – designed to spread on impact and thereby reduce the possibility of passing through the intended target and hitting an innocent bystander – meant that Kennet Wiltsey, half the alphabet chasing his name, fifty-three years of age and of rare and inordinate intelligence, was dead before he hit the polished parquet floor.

  Christmas Eve had started the way it intended to go on.

  A black stripped-out Ford Econoline E-250 cargo van.

  Sound of the engine was like something feral, hunched and waiting on the corner of Bethune and Greenwich. Driver was Henry Kossoff, thirty-nine years old, part of the Marcus crew for eleven years, three and a half of which he’d spent visiting friends at Altona and Sing Sing. Did his terms effortlessly, didn’t remember much of it, never really gave it a second thought: it was part of the life.

  Back of him, crouched, hooded, each back on his haunches, each clutching M-16s, were Walt Freiberg, Ray Dietz and Cathy Hollander. Van stank like a cheap bordello in summertime, and Kossoff had inched open the forward left window to get some air in there.

  It was nine-o-seven a.m. American Investment & Loan was scheduled to open at nine-thirty. Time like that – cramped and armed and frightened, but at the same time experiencing the inimitable rush of anticipation that came with such a thing; looking to the right, ahead, back behind them, eyes the only thing visible in their faces, hearts running ahead of themselves, tension like a live thing in the base of the gut. Time like that, twenty-three minutes last as many hours as a week.

  There was nothing they could do but wait.

  So wait they did.

  *

  He had no number but Duchaunak’s.

  John Harper stood at the window, American Regent Hotel tenth floor, New York buried beneath him in a distant whitewash of snow. Glanced at his watch: nine-thirteen a.m. Had eaten no breakfast; no appetite; had slept little, restless and agitated all night.

  All these people – Marcus and Freiberg, Cathy Hollander, the others that were part of this thing; they were all out there and he felt he had to tell someone.

  Three times he’d started dialling Duchaunak’s number, three times he’d hung up before the last digits registered. He was caught; he knew that; caught between darkness and its shadow.

  Loyalty to his father? Is that what it was? In some way he felt such a thing could never have been possible, and yet he believed that that was what he was experiencing. Perhaps it was loyalty to Walt Freiberg, even to Cathy Hollander, a woman he’d hoped would mean a great deal more to him than an acquaintance, if only because he’d believed she understood something of what he was feeling. Hell no, it had been more than that. He knew it had meant more than that. She had let him walk a certain route, and when that route had taken him too close she had rejected him. It had made him mad but, perhaps more than that, it had served to highlight and intensify his sense of utter aloneness.

  The hotel room was claustrophobic, his feeling of nervous anxiety pervasive and all-encompassing. He tried to smoke, but the cigarette made him nauseous. He paced, agitated and irritable, frustrated with himself for becoming involved in this nightmare, but at the same time aware of the slow-burn nature of what had happened. He had been drawn in, perhaps allowed himself to be drawn in, for hadn’t there been something seductive and alluring about the lifestyle that was represented here? Walt Freiberg and Cathy Hollander had promised him something, something that had been so obviously missing from his own life. He had walked towards it, a moth to a flame, and now, only now – as he stood alone in the hotel room, aware that New York was at some point going to be subjected to whatever Freiberg and Marcus had orchestrated – was he really facing the truth of his father.

  Edward Bernstein was a thief and a murderer. That was the truth. That was Harper’s heritage, his ancestry, and that would be his legacy once the old man died. Yet there was something John Harper could not escape: a sense of allegiance. That was the only way he could describe it – a feeling that the old man was somehow due something from him, if only because he was his father; nothing, in truth, any more complex than genetics, but nevertheless something. Something where previously there had been nothing.

  With no-one behind or ahead of you, no parents before, no children to follow, the world was some awful lonely place.

  And if he called Duchaunak? What else could he tell him? He had told him everything he knew: the deal, the trade-off, West Twelfth, the three hundred grand he’d been promised for standing proxy for his father at the Marcus meeting. What else was there?

  There was nothing.

  And Freiberg, Cathy Hollander, the others involved? What of them? Was it right to have played one side against the other, to have made them believe they could trust him, only then to turn and speak to the police? As of this moment, what had they done? They had trusted John Harper, and he had betrayed them. Had they done anything directly and intentionally injurious to him? Truth? No, they hadn’t.

  Harper paced. He cursed, he sat down, stood up again. He closed his eyes and imagined that it had all been some insane, fractured nightmare, a throwback from his own imagination, what he’d remembered of Evelyn and Garrett and Walt and his mother . . .

  ‘Aah, Jesus Christ!’ he shouted, and with force sufficient to break it he hurled a heavy glass ashtray against the wall.

  His mother had killed herself – and he didn’t know why. To escape? Or to demonstrate that her loyalty to Edward Bernstein was greater than the value of her own life?

  Harper did not know. Believed that if his father died he would never know.

  And if his father died, then who? Evelyn? Harper believed that she knew only some of the truth, and what was to prevent her from continuing to lie? If not Evelyn, then . . . then Walt Freiberg?

  Harper paused. He closed his eyes. Walt had answered every question he’d been asked. Until this point he had not lied to Harper, at
least not that Harper had been aware of. Not like Evelyn, who seemed to have lied about everything, and then once faced with the truth of her own lies had lied yet again to evade confrontation.

  Perhaps Walter Freiberg was the only man alive who could really, really answer all of Harper’s questions.

  And where was Freiberg? Freiberg was on his way to wherever – possibly even West Twelfth – right into the line of fire that would be so ably and expediently provided by Duchaunak and the police.

  Harper, hesitating for just a heartbeat, asked himself if warning Freiberg about Duchaunak was the right thing to do. The right thing?

  John Harper believed that the right thing did not exist, and if it did then he was possibly the last person on earth who would recognize it.

  He grabbed his jacket from the edge of the bed and hurried out of the room.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Nine-sixteen a.m.

  Associated Union Finance on West Broadway.

  Man called Richard Amundson leaves his car in the parking lot and walks around the corner of the building to the ATMs. There are queues. He glances at his watch, peers through into the bank and notices the lines for the internal machines are significantly smaller. He hurries along the sidewalk and enters the bank through the front door.

  By this time it is nine-seventeen. Due at work at nine-thirty, Amundson is employed by the New York City Educational Board as an inspector for school catering facilities. This morning he is en route to St Mary Magdalene School on Lispenard Street.

  He waits patiently in line. Ahead of him a large Hispanic woman is listening to something on a Walkman. Every once in a while she utters a single word in Spanish, and then nudges her hips to the right and left as if dancing with someone.