‘Bureaucrats,’ I said, and got no reaction.
‘What caught the eye of my clever assistant – she is much more techno than I – is that the two replies came from different origins. Both emails appear to be official emails, but only the first comes from an internet address associated with the Home Office.’
I said, ‘Well, you’re asking the wrong guy if you’re looking for information on internet-related issues.’ More calculated thickness on my part.
‘So, I followed up with an acquaintance of mine at Scotland Yard, a fellow I met at a conference in Geneva. I sent him the dead woman’s fingerprints. And just before I left to come here for Dame Stella’s sparkling and delightful party, I heard back.’ The words ‘sparkling and delightful’ came with a nod toward our hostess across the terrace where she was chatting up a distinguished-looking gent.
I favored Kiriakou with a look of benign, even conspiratorial amusement. ‘Are you building suspense, Mr Kiriakou?’
He liked that a lot. ‘Ah! Of course, the writer in you looks for literary tropes. Hah hah!’
I was a bit surprised that he knew the word ‘trope,’ let alone how to use it properly. It’s not the sort of word an assistant police chief typically comes across, and it came to me that a few years earlier Publishers Weekly had used that word in a review of one of my books. Had Kiriakou researched me? That wasn’t good. But my puzzlement was almost immediately replaced by a much starker emotion, because Kiriakou spoke the ‘F’ word.
‘It appears the victim was a fugitive. There are both British and Belgian arrest warrants for Rachel Faber.’
I don’t think my squeak was audible. ‘A fugitive? Ah, the plot thickens.’
I don’t always spout lines of Conan Doyle when I’m startled, but it was the best I could manage.
‘Ah, but that much plot is all we have, it has not thickened any further,’ Kiriakou said. Then, hesitant – well, hesitant unless he was playing me – he said, ‘I don’t wish to impose on you in any way, and please you are free to say no, and I will understand. But …’
I waited with an expectant but resolutely not guilty look on my face.
‘I wonder if you would have an hour free to have lunch with me and perhaps offer me your insights?’
‘Of course, I would be happy to,’ I lied. ‘But I hope you understand that I’m only a writer, I am not a trained investigator. I’m certainly not a murder cop!’
To which he replied with a Cypriot shrug, ‘To be quite perfectly honest, neither am I. Normally such cases are handled by the chief inspector of criminal investigation in Nicosia, but poor fellow, he is in hospital for an operation. Hernia. Very painful.’
At that point Dame Stella swept by, gathering me up to glad-hand her other semi-celebrity, the movie’s assistant director, as well as various local pooh-bahs and some geezer named Jeremy Berthold, who Dame Stella whispered was ‘a very important man in the British expat community.’ I stood nodding thoughtfully as Berthold and Stella’s loopy hubby and a man who looked far too much like Rowan Atkinson discussed the eternal reunification negotiations.
Suddenly Berthold turned to me. ‘So, you write paperback mystery novels, do you?’
And just like that I hated him. ‘Actually I write manuscripts which the publisher turns into hardcovers, and a year later releases as paperbacks.’
He was a big man, maybe fifty-five, wide and beefy in the shoulders. He had the look of a man who’d been professionally fit at some point in his life, maybe ex-military, and had let himself go a bit to seed. He was trying the Oxbridge snob act on me.
‘But popular novels, yes?’
‘Not as popular as I’d like. I mean, sure, I outsell most of your Booker Prize-winning … I have that right, don’t I? It is the Booker Prize, right? I sometimes confuse Booker and Bake-Off. Anyway, I would love to be still more popular.’
I finished that up with a grin I save for snobs. It’s a sneering gangsterish grin, openly challenging; the toothy version of Bring it on, pal, bring it on.
I love a snob. They always think they have something. They don’t understand that the thing they think they have is only as real as I’m willing to make it. Berthold’s eyes took on a distant chill and something distinctly not Oxbridge was looking across at me. Credit where it’s due, for a posh old snot he quickly parsed the situation, read my cockiness correctly and said, ‘Then I must wish you success.’
‘Thanks,’ I said cheekily. ‘And I’m terribly sorry, but your name was …’
I left him to mutter about rude, uncultured Americans. It was stupid of me to poke an important guy in the expat community, I was trying to fit in and go unnoticed. I should have ducked my head sheepishly and made some self-deprecating remark. But my blood was up, as the old saying goes: I had an actual cop to worry about and some puffed-up old fart who wanted to score points off me was irrelevant.
Out of the corner of my eye I tracked Kiriakou, who wandered genially around the room shaking hands and working his expressive eyebrows. The threat of panic was past, leaving a sour paranoia in its wake. There’s a definite tendency among my people – fugitives, not writers – to sound the alarms. Ten false alarms for every justified one. But a conversation with a cop the day after a murder right where I happened to be drinking beer was, by definition, a justified alarm.
As soon as I could do it without attracting attention I made my farewells, found the door and threaded my way through parked Mercedes and BMWs – and a rather nice old Triumph – to the privacy, if not safety, of my villa and the comfort of the Isle of Skye’s best.
FOUR
I committed my first crime at age four.
We were living in southern California in those days. My birth father, sensible fellow, had seen where things were headed and had disappeared. My very young mother and I were living with my maternal grandparents.
And I wanted money. No doubt my need was great, I don’t recall the specifics, but I can only assume a desire for candy was involved.
But first, before crossing over to the dark side, I tried entrepreneurship. I had a black plastic toy medical kit from which I dumped the stethoscope and syringe, and that thing you use for looking in ears, and into which (the kit, not the ears) I poured a boxful of vanilla wafers. I set off around the neighborhood as the world’s first (and probably last) door-to-door vanilla wafer salesman. Amazingly I was able to sell some to a bemused woman who answered her door. I think she gave me a dollar. But even in those days a dollar didn’t go far, so when I got home I noticed some crumpled bills and loose change on my grandfather’s mahogany chest of drawers. I took the money and claimed it had come from robust Nilla sales.
Four years old. My first misdemeanor. If only I’d thought to take a commemorative photo.
My second crime came later when, at age twelve, I tapped my mother and stepfather’s telephone landline. It was easy enough: a matter of a headphone, a wire stripper, and some black electrical tape. The crime: successful but pointless. Neither parent had anything interesting to say, by which I mean that none of their calls were about me.
By age nineteen, I was a high school dropout working for a major law firm in Washington DC, in the law library as a messenger and obtainer of hard-to-get documents. My boss called me into his office one day, and said, ‘I need you to run something over to a fellow at the Government Printing Office.’
‘Okay.’
Then he pulled out a sheet of paper. He laid a small stack of greenbacks on the paper, folded it neatly, stuffed it into an envelope, sealed it and held it out to me. ‘It’s an invitation to my daughter’s bat mitzvah. Discreet, right?’
‘Discreet,’ I agreed and took the envelope.
Not much of a crime, though I imagine bribing a government employee is a criminal offense of sorts, unless you’re a campaign donor. The interesting thing to me looking back – as a guy whose current job is creating characters with backstories and motivations and notions of good and evil – is my complete lack of qualms. Steal from
grandparents: nothing. Wiretap parents: nothing. Deliver payola: nothing. I had seen Bugs Bunny cartoons, I knew there was supposed to be a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, but I was morally one-shouldered.
A year later, despite having dropped out of high school, I had beaten the various tests and been accepted to San Francisco State University. It was my last attempt to reintegrate into normal society, I suppose. God knows what I had in mind. Bong construction wasn’t my declared major, that would have been philosophy, but getting high and seducing arts majors was much more fun than reading Kant and Husserl. I dropped out and, in one of the inexplicable sudden turns that define my life, ended up working for the Denny’s restaurant chain as a graveyard shift manager, eleven p.m. to seven a.m.
Skimming off the register at Denny’s was pitifully easy, so long as you didn’t go overboard. We all skimmed – management to pay the help off the books and improve their labor cost numbers, and we humbler employees because, well, because fuck it: there it was, all green and foldable. But skimming is too much risk for too little reward. You don’t want to end up in general population at Chuckawalla, or God forbid Folsom, having to admit you got popped for a forty-dollar-a-day skim; that’s just embarrassing. So, on the theory that I had not yet made a complete hash of my life and needed to get on with it, I pulled my first major felony.
I knew the physical layout of Denny’s restaurants, and I knew how lazy managers were about using the awkward safes in their offices. I drove a few towns away to a unit with the identical layout, cut my way through the roof access, then down through the office ceiling where I found what I expected: an open safe stuffed with seven thousand dollars. It was all very Mission: Impossible The Movie if the movie had had a props budget of ten dollars. Sure, it would have been great to have a laser to cut through the wallboard, but a box-cutter worked well enough.
Needs must, as the Brits say.
For a while after that I drove around the US in an ancient but lovable green Karmann Ghia convertible with a paper bag of cash in the trunk. Good times. Especially that commune in … somewhere hot. Peyote plays hell with memory. Arizona? New Mexico? One of those. I remember fleas, cacti and lots of sand.
Two more Denny’s burglaries, one for a solid ten grand, and I’d basically found a way to live as a parasite.
Then I was arrested. Not a good moment. I had walked into an acquaintance’s antique shop in Carson City (where no fencing of questionably obtained goods took place, nope,) and I had seen the two detectives sitting there, questioning him about my whereabouts. I had played it cool for fifteen seconds, pretending to shop, then made for the exit. Twenty yards down the street they called my name: Martin DeKuyper, my actual birth name. If I remember correctly.
You might bluff it out and keep walking if a cop calls John Smith, or Joe Anderson, but Martin DeKuyper was too specific to pull off the ‘I thought they meant some other …’
Handcuffs. Mug shots. Bend over.
That was not a good day. However clever or suave or tough you think you are, it’s hard to carry it off in what the cons call a four-by-four: handcuffs, shackled ankles and a chain around the waist of your freshly deloused orange onesie.
Oooh, I’m prisoner number 6732 and 32 is my lucky number!
I spent eleven days inside before I could make bail. The food was lousy, and a constant fear of a beating, a rape or a knifing tends to cast a pall over things. I was a young smartass, a two-bit burglar, chump-change embezzler and failed vanilla-wafer salesman. I wasn’t the kind of hard case who hurt people. I didn’t go around frightening folks. No one was locking up wives and daughters for fear of Martin DeKuyper. I wasn’t one of those guys, but there were definitely some of those guys in that cage with me. I was admittedly a bad boy, but some of the men in there were evil.
People who dismiss the idea that you can sense evil have never been to jail. Look for guys with tears tattooed on their faces, or guys who are small and weak yet everyone steers well clear of – even guys with big swastika chest tattoos stretching from nipple to nipple.
That’s another sign, the swastika tattoo.
I finally made bail, promptly jumped said bail, and began my life as a fugitive from justice.
Not quite twenty years had passed since then, with half of that time spent expanding my criminal repertoire beyond burglary into the exciting and lucrative world of scams and cons and the occasional high-value theft. I started in the domestic market: the posher reaches of New York, Washington, LA, Houston and points between, before realizing that my work would be so much easier and safer if I took the act overseas. And I enjoy foreign travel: it broadens the mind.
It was crime that made me a writer. No grifter can avoid being a decent storyteller, and you meet very interesting people out there in the world outside the law. I was good at lying, good at inventing legends about myself, good at building narratives that would appeal to widows and divorcees with more money than sense.
In this I had been helped by my appearance, which runs to the Clive Owen, dark hair, blue eyes, impishly flirtatious sort of thing. I can pull off the open-necked white shirt and blue blazer look, and was in fact pulling it off at the moment. Or I can do the worn designer jeans and Tommy Bahama camp shirt. I can even manage not to look ridiculous in a tuxedo. I look like I might be the ne’er-do-well third son of wealthy parents – trouble, but of the fun kind, like that ginger prince, what’s-his-name? Harry. The kind of man women like for a few days or a week while hubby is away on business.
In a well-run, successful scam, I could clear a quarter million. A burglary could net from twenty-five large to a hundred grand. I made about as much on my first book, all-in, as I did on a decent burglary, and I suppose I could have gone on doing both, but I was getting older, the universe of lonely women in the one percent demographic is not endless, and I had by then reached the essential insight that all criminals come to if they’re bright enough: the game is not fox and hounds with clever fox evading pursuing hounds, tally-ho; the game is tightrope walker and floor.
The police are the floor. I was the guy on the rope. One wrong step, and the floor would be waiting. It would wait forever.
So, about ten years back I sized everything up, and went straight. Well, straight aside from fake ID and the occasional bit of creative accounting. And being a fugitive.
Straight-ish.
But the thief and the con were still part of me, probably always would be. I still saw the weakness in security systems and the vulnerabilities in people. I sometimes amused myself figuring out just how one would go about stealing, say, the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. (I have a plan.) Or creating a fake charity, signing a celebrity to attend, throwing a gala and walking away with the contributions while I had teams go through the empty homes of attendees. (I have a plan for that, too.) Or using an office-cleaning service to access computers at a brokerage house and selling the passwords to the Armenian mob.
Okay, that one I actually did. It was quite lucrative, but with several terrifying moments involving guns and threats of castration. Credible threats.
I have a natural repugnance for violence, so I never hurt anyone except in their wallets and pride, and only then if they could afford it – there’s no point stealing from anyone who isn’t rich. Middle-class people will call the cops over a hundred bucks, but my victims could shrug off a hundred large just because they didn’t want to waste an hour talking to dull working-class folks like detectives.
Anyway, the point is that while I was a crook, I was not a bad person. Mostly. And in the early years I held firmly to that belief. I was a gentleman thief, like Cary Grant, more amusing than threatening.
But then Arthur Wilson Janes disagreed with that generous self-assessment, and did so in convincing style by putting a nine millimeter in his mouth and blowing his brains all over the gorgeous interior of his two million dollar Bugatti.
Not my fault. I told myself.
An unfaithful wife and fifty grand from a man who drove a car th
at cost almost fifty times that? Kill yourself over that? Over a bit of cuckolding? Over chump change? Anyone who would do that was already suicidal, I told myself. Not my fault the guy couldn’t take a joke, I told myself.
Not my fault at all, I still told myself on lonely nights as I waited for Ambien and whisky to send me off to dreamland.
And yet, there were the consequences, even the mundane sequelae, the fact that my victims had to fill out insurance forms, and upgrade their security and perhaps be embarrassed or humiliated. Or endure a divorce. Or blow off half their head while destroying a gorgeous leather interior and shattering the moon roof.
I’ve read that a man’s brain does not reach full maturity until he’s in his twenties and that this explains a tendency in many males to reckless behavior, to sociopathy. I was a late bloomer. I was in my early thirties when it began to occur to me that I was just possibly a bit of an asshole.
But by that point I’d already long known in that way you can suppress but never quite shake off that I had taken a wrong turn in life. Well, several wrong turns, a couple dozen, but it was one particular point in time that stuck with me, one particular wrong turn, one indelible image that haunted me: the image of a girl in a window.
In a few days, it would be exactly nineteen years since I’d done the stupid thing and rejected that escape. I don’t remember the exact date when I learned that Janes had painted his impromptu Rothko in blood and viscera. But I remember the exact goddamned date when I started firmly down the road to making that happen.
FIVE
The morning after Dame Stella’s party I went shopping. I’d been putting it off, getting lazy in my old age, getting cocky, but my brush with Kiriakou had lit a fire under me. On my shopping list were useful folks I could bribe efficiently. And then lunch with the cop.
A Sudden Death in Cyprus Page 3