The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

by Louise Penny

  “Mason Alimonti?”

  “Mason Kenneth Alimonti?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, well, wonderful. We’ll need verification of your identity before we can proceed, of course, but for the moment, since we’re just beginning to get acquainted, I am satisfied. Now, what do you think of our proposal?”

  He was in the living room, sitting in the armchair under the reading lamp, using the old landline phone his daughter told him he ought to give up since the cell was all anybody needed these days and she really didn’t know anyone, not a single soul, who still paid for a landline. But for something like this—an overseas call—he somehow felt better relying on the instrument he’d been using for thirty years and more. “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds too good to be true—”

  The man on the other end of the line let out a booming laugh, a laugh that scraped bottom and then sailed all the way up into the high register, a good-natured laugh, delighted, a laugh of assurance and joy that proclaimed all was right with the world. “Well, of course, it is,” the man boomed, and here came the laugh again. “But sometimes we just have to accept the fact that luck has come our way—and be grateful, Mr. Alimonti, kick up our heels and embrace what life brings us, don’t you think?”

  For a moment he was confused. He felt as if he’d gone out of his body, everything before him—the loveseat, the houseplants, the blank TV screen—shifting on him so that it all seemed to be floating in air. The phone was in his hand. He was having a conversation. Somebody—the man on the other end of the line—wanted something from him.

  “Mr. Alimonti—you there?”

  “Yes,” he heard himself say. There was something odd about the man’s accent—it was British, proper British, Masterpiece Theatre British, but the syntax was off somehow. Or the rhythm, maybe it was the rhythm. “Why me?” he asked suddenly.

  Another laugh, not quite so deep or pleased with itself as the last. “Because you’ve lived an unimpeachable life, because you pay your debts and you’re as solid an American citizen as anyone could ever hope to find. Oh, rest assured we’ve vetted you thoroughly—as we have each of the nine other final candidates.”

  Nine other candidates? The receiver went heavy in his hand—molded plastic, but it might as well have been cast of iron.

  “Am I hearing surprise on your end of the line, Mr. Alimonti? Of course, you understand, we must protect ourselves, in the event that our first choice doesn’t wish to accept our offer for any reason—and I can’t really imagine that happening, can you?—but as you are the first on our list, the single most qualified individual we’ve examined to date, we have to say—I have to say—that we are delighted you’ve contacted us ahead of any of the others.”

  He felt a wave of relief sweep over him. The phone was just a phone again. He said, “What next?”

  “Next?” the voice echoed. “Well, obviously we have to make certain that you’re the man for us—and that we’re the men for you too. Do you have any question about the figures I presented in my letter to you? You agree that a sixty/thirty-eight percent split is equable? You’re content with that?”

  He said nothing. He was back in himself, back in the moment, but he didn’t know what to say—did the man want him to negotiate, to quibble over the way the money would be split?

  “Again, let me anticipate you, Mr. Alimonti. You are wondering, no doubt, what’s in it for us.” The laugh again, but truncated now, all business. “Self-interest, pure and simple. If this account has not been claimed within a five-year period, the whole of it goes to the government and we receive nothing, though we’ve been the guardians of the late Mr. Kim’s fortune for a quarter century now. We need you, Mr. Alimonti, and that is the bottom line. We need an American citizen in good standing, with an unblemished record and absolute probity, to be the designee for your fellow American, Mr. Kim.” A pause. “Otherwise, none of us receives a shilling.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Oh, nothing really, not for the moment. We’ll need banking information, of course, in order to transfer the funds, and our solicitors will have to draw up a contract so as to be sure there are no misunderstandings, but all that can come in time—the only question now is, are you with us? Can we count on you? Can I hang up this phone and check the other nine names off my list?”

  His heart was pounding in his chest, the way it did when he overexerted himself. His mouth was dry. The world seemed to be tipping under his feet, sliding away from him. Thirty million dollars. “Can I have some time to think it over?”

  “Sadly, we have but two weeks before the government accounting office swoops in to confiscate this account—and you know how they are, the government, no different, I suppose than in your country, eh? A belly that’s never full. Of course you can think it over, but for your sake—and mine—think quickly, Mr. Alimonti, think quickly.”

  A Night to Think It Over

  The rest of the day he really couldn’t do much more than sit—first in the armchair and then out on the deck in one of the twin recliners there—his mind working at double speed. He couldn’t stop thinking about England, a country he’d visited only once, when he was in his twenties, along with Jan, in the year between grad school and the start of his first job, his daughter not yet even a speck on the horizon. They’d gone to Scotland too, to Edinburgh and where was it? Glasgow. He remembered he took to calling Jan “lassie,” just for the fun of it, and how one day, leaving a fish and chips shop, she’d got ahead of him on the street and he cried out, “Wait up, lassie,” and every woman’s head turned. That was England. Or Scotland, anyway. Same difference. And they had banks there, of course they did, London the banking capital of Europe, though he couldn’t remember actually having gone into one. He closed his eyes. Saw some sort of proud antique building, old, very old, with pillars and marble floors, brass fixtures, an elaborate worked-iron grate between customers and tellers, but here again, he realized, he was bringing up an image from one BBC drama or another, and what was that one called where they showed the lives not only of the lords and ladies but of the servants too? That had been Jan’s favorite. She’d watch the episodes over and over, and sometimes, at breakfast, she’d address him as “my lord” and put on a fake accent. For the fun of it.

  Yes, sure. And where was the fun in life now?

  At some point, when the shadows began to thicken in the trees, he went into the house and clicked on the TV—sports, a blur of action, a ball sailing high against a sky crippled with the onset of night—but he couldn’t concentrate on it, and really, what did it matter who won? Somebody had won before and somebody had lost and it would happen again. And again. Unless there was a tie—were there ties in baseball? He couldn’t remember. He thought so. In fact, he distinctly remembered a tie once, but maybe that was only an exhibition game . . . or an all-star game, wasn’t that it?

  It was past eight by the time he remembered he ought to eat something, and he went to the refrigerator, extracted the stained pot there, and ladled out half a bowl of the vegetable-beef stew he’d made last week—or maybe it was the week before. No matter: he’d been rigorous about keeping it refrigerated, and in any case the microwave would kill anything, bacterial or otherwise, that might have tried to gain a foothold in the depths of the pot. The important thing was not to waste anything in a world of waste. He poured himself a glass of milk, scraped two suspicious spots from a slice of sourdough bread and put it in the toaster, then sat down to eat.

  The walls just stood there. But the silence gave way to a sound from the other room, where the TV was, a long drawn-out cheer and the voice of an announcer unleashing his enthusiasm on the drama of the moment, and that was something at least. What was the time difference between here and England? Eight hours? Nine? Whatever it was, it was too early there to call yet. He was thinking he might like to endow a fellowship in Jan’s name at the college—maybe in the art department; she’d always liked art—and if he gave enough they’d install a plaque, maybe
even name a building after her. Or a wing. A wing at least. Maybe that was more practical, really. He saw her face then, not as it was in those last months, but her real face, her true face, fleshed out and beautiful even into her seventies, and he pushed himself up from the table, scraped his bowl over the trash can, and set it on the rack in the dishwasher, decided now, his mind clear, really clear, for the first time all day.

  In the morning, after breakfast (no rush—he wouldn’t want to come across as overeager), he would settle himself in the armchair, pick up the phone, and make the call.

  The Second Phone Call

  Of all days, this was the one he wound up oversleeping, so that it was past eight by the time he sat down with his morning coffee and punched in the bank’s number with a forefinger that didn’t seem to want to steady itself, as if this wasn’t his finger at all but some stranger’s that had been grafted on in the middle of the night. This time there was no music and the phone picked up on the first ring. He was all set to tell Mr. Shovelin—Graham, can I call you Graham?—that he’d found his man, that they’d grow rich together, though of course, as a bank employee, he didn’t imagine that Mr. Shovelin would actually get any of the money, but a bonus maybe, there had to be that possibility, didn’t there? Imagine his surprise then when it wasn’t Shovelin, with his rich booming basso, who answered the phone, but a woman. “Yorkshire Bank, PLC, Chevette Afunu-Jones speaking,” she said in a thin weary voice. “How may I help you?”

  Again he drew a blank. This whole business made him nervous. The phone made him nervous. London made him nervous. “I was,” he began, “I mean, I wanted to—is Mr. Shovelin there?”

  A pause, the sound of a keyboard softly clicking. “Oh, Mr. Alimonti, forgive me,” she said, her voice warming till you could have spread it on toast. “Mr. Shovelin, whom I am sorry to say is away from his desk at the moment, instructed me to anticipate your call. And let me say, from all the good things he’s had to say about you, it is a real pleasure to hear your voice.”

  He didn’t quite know how to respond to this, so he simply murmured, “Thank you,” and left it at that. There was another pause, as if she were waiting for him to go on. “When do you expect him back?” he asked. “Because—well, it’s urgent, you know? I have some news for him?”

  “Well, I can only hope it’s the good news all of us on Mr. Shovelin’s staff have been waiting to hear,” she said, her voice deepening, opening out to him in invitation. “Rest assured that Mr. Shovelin has given me full details and, in my capacity as his executive secretary, the authority to act on his behalf, though he’s—well, he’s indisposed today, poor man, and you can’t begin to imagine what he’s had to go through.” Here she dropped her voice to a whisper: “Cancer.”

  This hit him like a blow out of nowhere. Jan’s face was right there, hovering over him. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

  “Believe me, the man is a lion, and he will fight this thing the way he has fought all his life—and when he returns from his treatment this afternoon, I know he will be lifted up by your good news, buoyed, that is . . .” Her voice had grown tearful. “I can’t tell you how much he respects you,” she whispered.

  What he heard, though he wasn’t really listening on an intuitive level, was an odd similarity to the accent or emphasis or whatever it was he’d detected in Shovelin’s speech, and he wondered if somehow the two were related, not that it mattered, really, so long as they stayed the course and checked those other nine names off the list. He said, “Please tell him from me that I hope he’s feeling better and, well, that I’ve decided to take him up on his offer—”

  She clapped her hands together, one quick celebratory clap that reverberated through the phone like the cymbal that strikes up the band, before her voice was in his ear again: “Oh, I can’t tell you how much this will mean to him, how much it means to us all here at the Yorkshire Bank PLC . . . Mr. Alimonti, you are a savior, you really are.”

  He was trying to picture her, this British woman all the way across the country and the sea too, a young woman by the sound of her voice, youngish anyway, and he saw her in business dress, with stockings and heels and legs as finely shaped as an athlete’s. She was a runner, not simply a jogger but a runner, and he saw her pumping her arms and dashing through what, Hyde Park?, in the dewy mornings before coming to work with her high heels tucked in her purse. He felt warm. He felt good. He felt as if things were changing for the better.

  “Now, Mr. Alimonti,” she said, her voice low, almost a purr, “what we need you to do is this, just to get the ball rolling—officially, you understand?”

  “Yes?”

  “We will need your banking information so that we can begin transferring the funds—or at least cutting you a preliminary check—before the Royal Fiduciary Bureau for Unclaimed Accounts moves on this.”

  “But, but,” he stammered, “what about the contract we were supposed to—?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry, darling—may I call you darling? Because you are, you really are darling—”

  He gave a kind of shrug of assent, but nothing came out of his mouth.

  “Don’t you worry,” she repeated. “Mr. Shovelin will take care of that.”

  The First Disbursement

  Once the banking details were in place (within three working days, and he had to hand it to Shovelin for pulling strings and expediting things), he received his first disbursement check from the dormant account. It was in the amount of $20,000, and it came special delivery with a note from Shovelin, who called it “earnest money” and asked him to hold off for two weeks before depositing it in the new account, “because of red tape on this end, which is regrettable, but a simple fact of doing business in a banking arena as complex as this.” The check was drawn on the Yorkshire Bank PLC, it bore the signature of Graham Shovelin, Operations Director, and it was printed on the sort of fine, high-grade paper you associated with stock certificates. When it came, when the doorbell rang and the mailman handed him the envelope, Mason accepted it with trembling hands, and for the longest time he just sat there in his armchair, admiring it. He was sitting down, yes, but inside he was doing cartwheels. This was the real deal. He was rich. The first thing he was going to do—and the idea came to him right then and there—was help out his daughter. Angelica, divorced two years now, with a son in high school and barely scraping by, was the pastry chef at a tony restaurant in Rye, New York; her dream was to open her own place on her own terms, with her own cuisine, and now he was going to be able to make it happen for her. Maybe she’d even name it after him. Mason’s. That had a certain ring to it, didn’t it?

  That evening, just as he was ladling out his nightly bowl of stew, the phone rang. It was Shovelin, sounding none the worse for wear. “Mason?” he boomed. “May I call you Mason, that is, considering that we are now business partners?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” He found that he was smiling. Alone there in his deserted house where the silence reigned supreme, he was smiling.

  “Good, good, and please call me Graham . . . Now, the reason I’m calling is I want to know if you’ve received the disbursement.”

  “I have, yes, and thank you very much for that, but how are you? Your health, I mean? Because I know how hard it can be—I went through the same thing with Jan, with my wife . . .”

  The voice on the other end seemed to deflate. “My health?”

  “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to stick my nose in, but your secretary told me you were, well, undergoing treatment?”

  “Oh, that, yes. Very unfortunate. And I do wish she hadn’t confided in you—but I assure you it won’t affect our business relationship, not a whit, so don’t you worry.” There was a long pause. “Kidney,” Shovelin said, his voice a murmur now. “Metastatic. They’re giving me six months—”

  “Six months?”

  “Unless—well, unless I can qualify for an experimental treatment the insurance won’t even begin to cover, which my physician tells me is almost a miracl
e, with something like a ninety percent remission rate . . . but really, forgive me, Mason—I didn’t call you all the way from England to talk about my health problems. I’m a banker—and we have a transaction to discuss.”

  He didn’t respond, but he was thinking of Jan, of course he was, because how can anybody—insurers, doctors, hospitals—put a price on the life of a human being?

  “What I need you to do, Mason—Mason, are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Good. I need you to deposit twenty thousand dollars American in the account we’ve opened up at your bank, so as to cover the funds I’ve transferred to you until they clear. You see, I will need access to those funds in order to grease certain palms in the Royal Fiduciary Bureau—you have this expression, do you not? Greasing palms?”

  “I don’t—I mean, I’ll have to make a withdrawal from my retirement, which might take a few days—”

  “A few days?” Shovelin threw back at him in a tone of disbelief. “Don’t you appreciate that time is of the essence here? Everyone in this world, sadly enough, is not as upright as you and I. I’m talking about graft, Mason, graft at the highest levels of government bureaucracy. We must grease the palms—or the wheels, isn’t that how you say it?—to make certain that there are no hitches with the full disbursement of the funds.”

  There was a silence. He could hear the uncertain wash of the connection, as of the sea probing the shore. England was a long way off. “Okay,” he heard himself say into the void.

  But it wasn’t a void: Shovelin was there still. “There are too few men of honor in this world,” he said ruefully. “Do you know what they say of me in the banking industry? ‘Shovelin’s word is his honor and his honor is his word.’” He let out a sigh. “I only wish it were true for the unscrupulous bureaucrats we’re dealing with here. The palm greasers.” He let out a chuckle, deep and rolling and self-amused. “Or, to be more precise, the greasees.”