Fortunately the mansion was unattended when Teschmaker called and he had no problem forcing an entry and avoiding the rudimentary alarm system. As he had seen in the photograph, the missing painting, supposedly stolen in New York, was hanging above the bed in which so much of Manolescu’s lust had been taken out on young boys. Teschmaker quickly removed the painting from its frame and let himself out by the front door. No alarms sounded. No caretakers. No problem.
Within forty-eight hours Teschmaker had located a local craftsman who, for a generous fee, glued the canvas to a hardwood backing and designed and cut it into a two thousand piece jigsaw. Teschmaker toyed with the idea of attempting to reassemble it, but in the end proceeded with his original plan. It gave him immense satisfaction to imagine Manolescu’s reaction to opening that first package containing twenty pieces of his beloved painting.
It was a satisfaction Teschmaker had stretched out over the next two decades as he continued to post Manolescu pieces of the jigsaw. Revenge, Teschmaker knew, was sweetest when slow.
CHAPTER NINE
There were two of them. Muscle. No splitting the roles between nice guy and bad guy — both the men were heavy-duty trouble. Even though Teschmaker hadn’t noticed the cars outside, the splintered woodwork around the front door was indication enough that he had a problem. A sensible response would have been to do a smart about-turn and beat a hasty retreat. But Teschmaker, drawn by some fatalistic urge, simply walked in. The light was on in his study and so he climbed the stairs and found them there: one in his office chair, the other perched on the edge of the desk. The room had been given a thorough going-over — the single bed was on its side, the bedding tossed in a corner. It was no longer tidy.
‘I’d rather you didn’t smoke.’ It wasn’t the most convincing of deliveries.
The man in the chair swivelled it around and made a nonchalant show of flicking the ash from his cigarette onto the floor. He was a big man. Ex-cop? Teschmaker had seen plenty of specimens like him outside clip joints and strip clubs in cities from Rio to Copenhagen. His hair was shaved within a millimetre of its life and his T-shirt sleeves were rolled up to reveal the obligatory tattoos. The men were a matching set. Both had necks that would not have looked out of place on a Brahman bull. The second man pushed himself off the desk, dropped his cigarette at his feet and ground it into the carpet with the heel of his steel-toed boots.
‘What happened to your house?’ the man in the chair asked. ‘Kinda empty, isn’t it. Your wife take off with all your furniture?’ He laughed and spun the chair back to the desk. ‘And this crap? Really, what is a man like you doing with all this junk?’ He swept everything within the arc of his arm onto the floor. ‘I’m afraid you didn’t even have enough for us to trash.’ He looked up at his companion. ‘Disappointing, wasn’t it, Norman?’
‘Absolutely, Mr Edwards. Not enough, nothing.’ Norman grinned. He seemed quite content to play the apprentice.
‘You should have mentioned you were coming. I could have ordered some stuff in —’
Teschmaker would have said more but Norman, lacking anything else to trash, started in with a well-aimed blow to the solar plexus quickly followed by a blow to his face that spun him against the wall. For a moment he held himself up but Norman lashed out with his boot and Teschmaker’s feet were whipped from under him. Not content that the message was getting through, Edwards contributed a kick to the side of his face. From that moment Teschmaker realised there was little point in attempting to win them over with his sharp line in spirited and incisive repartee. He was aware that Edwards was talking to him but for a while things were a little hazy.
‘Norman, be a decent bloke and help me get Mr Teschmaker off the floor.’ Between them they pulled Teschmaker to his feet and pushed him into the chair.
‘Now,’ Edwards continued, ‘all of that was just by way of introduction.’ He shook Teschmaker roughly to make certain he was paying attention. ‘You’re probably wondering what Norman and I are doing here? Natural enough question. I have always subscribed to the belief that ira furor brevis est and I’m not normally an angry man. But I could get riled if you don’t understand the message that following Jane Sinclair is not a healthy occupation. In fact, we understand that it could prove terminal.’
‘Absolutely.’ Norman grinned. ‘Terminal.’
There was plenty more, but really only variations on a theme. Even in his bruised and groggy state Teschmaker was able to convince Norman and Mr Edwards that he understood the point they were making. ‘Terminal,’ he assured them. Teschmaker wasn’t sure why they needed to drag him down the stairs and prop him up by the front door. Maybe they wanted him to wave them goodbye. Maybe they wanted to make sure he locked up after they had gone. Though how he was supposed to do that given the splintered door frame he wasn’t certain. But he leaned there and watched them depart.
‘And get some fucking furniture,’ Edwards called back from the front gate. ‘All those empty rooms will end up giving you the creeps.’
For a long time he stood at the door. Not because he was worried that they might return, but he had the distinct feeling that if he let go of it he would crash to the floor. After a while he knew he had to test his mobility; to his relief he found he could make it up the stairs. He paused in the toilet to vomit and then groped his way to the bathroom cabinet. The sight that confronted him in the mirror was not a pretty one. The split lip looked as though it would swell up somewhat more before it was done and though it had been years since he had sported a black eye, he was reasonably certain that he would possess two of them by morning.
He opened the cabinet and immediately regretted he had done such a thorough job of cleaning everything out of the house. There was nothing on the shelves but a bottle of Eno’s lemon-flavoured fruit salts. Teschmaker picked it up and headed for the kitchen. He knew that Eno’s were good for an upset stomach but how efficacious they would be for one that had been severely kicked was uncertain. He popped the lid off and found that the remains of the fruit salts had become encrusted on the bottom of the jar. He prodded at them with a teaspoon but they were as hard as rock. But the fruit salts were the nearest thing to medicine in the entire house so Teschmaker persisted. Determined not to be beaten, he filled the jar with water and was depressed to see that the effervescence normally associated with the product had long since given up the ghost. He drank the cloudy liquid anyway and limped off in the direction of the bedroom to put the bed back in some semblance of order. Attempting to lie down was going to be painful, but it beat the hell out of trying to stand up all night.
He didn’t sleep well and in the morning woke in even more discomfort than the night before. There is, Teschmaker thought, at least one advantage from looking so beaten up. Nobody was going to ignore him. While it might be a wiser move to take his face and ribs to a medical centre for a little attention, he had a different candidate in mind.
He eased himself as gently as he could into a suit and tie, grimacing at himself in the mirror but acknowledging that the damage looked far more dramatic on a well-dressed individual. Had he been a tramp or a red-neck swampy he would probably not have been afforded more than a second glance. Driving into the city he turned off the motorway and detoured into the Russian Quarter, heading to Shlyapnikov’s.
A tidal wave of Russian émigrés had flooded into the city after the Revolution, followed by a ripple or two and then a trickle during the Stalinist years. Though many of the successful Russian businesses now had offices downtown, it was here, around the Petrovsky Markets and in the triangle formed by Guzenko, Vlasov and Fyodorov Avenues, that the heart of the community still lay. Here you could still hear Russian spoken, could drink decent vodka and play chess or, as was Teschmaker’s intention, have a bowl of the best borshch in the country followed by a slice of Sharlolka Malakova. The dessert, first created by the French chef Carême for Czar Alexander I, was the speciality of Teschmaker’s long-time friend Aleksandr Yefremovich Shlyapnikov. ‘Old friend’ would
have been a better description for Shlyapnikov was as old as the hills. His weatherbeaten face looked as though it could have been around in the days of the Tzar and Rasputin. He was probably only eighty or so, but instead of playing down his age he had developed the habit of exaggerating it. ‘I remember before the Revolution . . .’ he would say, keeping a straight face, betrayed only by his twinkling eyes and historical impossibility.
There was no sign of his friend in his usual spot, propped up behind the bar, chessboard in front of him. Neither could he see Shlyapnikov’s wife, Zoya Nikolayevna, so Teschmaker took his time over the food and followed it with a cup of coffee. Shlyapnikov’s contacts and his ability to worm information out of people were legendary. If something was to be known Shlyapnikov knew about it. If he didn’t know he could find out. It made him an invaluable ally. Teschmaker wanted to seek Shlyapnikov’s advice about who was who in the Romanian Embassy, but it could wait.
Feeling only slightly more prepared to face the world, he walked back to his car and drove into the business district. It took another frustrating twenty minutes to find a car park and when he did it was a good ten minutes from his destination. He hoped that the enforced walk would loosen up his aching muscles but it didn’t. However, it did give him the chance to observe people’s reactions to his battered face. Is this how a leper feels, he wondered. The pedestrians flowed around him. A beaten-up Moses parting the waters.
He entered the foyer of Sinclair Towers and, keeping his head down, merged with a group of people waiting for the elevator. He had no idea where to find Oliver Sinclair but it was a pretty fair bet that it would be on the top floor. He was wrong. Workers in cramped office cubicles cast curious glances at him, but nobody asked what he was doing there. Sheep in pens; it reminded Teschmaker of his deep-seated aversion to corporate culture. The first thing he had done when he became involved in the insurance industry was to find a job that took him on the road. Selling was the obvious one, but his dislike of hustling was as strong as his distaste for claustrophobic offices, so he had worked towards a job in investigations only to find that most of the fraud division spent their time chasing paper trails.
The company maintained a small team of investigators who kept themselves aloof from the others. Their offices were often locked and deserted; they would appear from time to time to drop some tiresome paperwork on someone’s desk, like teachers distributing exams. The stories about them were the stuff of legends and they thought of themselves as an elite — the industry superstars. And indeed some deserved the superstar tag. People like Marcia Brumpton — everybody’s idea of a benign granny — famous for having tracked down a renegade insurance agent through his parrot, a bird with a taste for a particular bird seed that had to be ordered in. Both man and parrot were now behind bars, the parrot in the care of Marcia Brumpton. People like old Harry Stainsworth, who had followed a hunch about a woman whose husband had died in the Soviet Union after being arrested for drunkenness. The wife collected a massive life insurance payout and went about her business, soon marrying again. Harry also went about his business and in Moscow, by bribing the right people, found that the man had not died in custody but had been released with a hangover. Harry took a copy of the man’s fingerprints and returned home where, three weeks later, he procured a set of the new husband’s fingerprints. They were identical.
Harry’s other claim to fame was that he had worked with William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the man who, along with California-born insurance magnate Cornelius V Starr, had set up the remarkably secret Insurance Intelligence Unit as a part of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA. Starting in early 1943, they had gathered half-a-dozen top insurance agents, Harry Stainsworth among them, and produced intelligence on the Nazi insurance industry. Most importantly, the unit searched standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets. It was only after the war that it became clear the Germans had also used insurance records as a source of intelligence, but by that time Harry Stainsworth was a legend.
Teschmaker had walked the entire length of the twenty-fifth floor without being challenged. He couldn’t believe that Sinclair would allow such lax security. There had to be another lift. Or . . .
He found the door to the fire stairs and managed to slip through and close it behind him without setting off any alarm that he could hear. There was, of course, no way of knowing if he had triggered a warning in the building’s central security station, but glancing around he could see no cameras. Above him the stairs continued to a door that was supposedly only able to be opened from the inside — that was unless you forced a credit card into its unprotected edge. Teschmaker grinned at the thought of giving Sinclair a ticking off about his poor security. Slipping through, he found himself in an extremely ornate corporate bathroom with gold fittings and half a hillside of cipolin marble. I suppose the money had to be spent on something, he thought. He paused to relieve himself in a urinal cut out of a single block of marble.
There was always risk attached to a straight confrontation. Once the element of surprise had been expended there was little else to recommend it, but as he opened the door out of the bathroom he realised that he had no alternative. Teschmaker found himself standing at the back of Oliver Sinclair’s private office. Sinclair was sitting at his desk, apparently studying a document. For a moment Teschmaker had a rush of panic and considered simply backing out. The man sighed and sat back in his chair.
‘You could have gone to reception, Martin.’ He didn’t turn around. ‘I had told them to expect you.’
‘I’ve always been the backdoor type.’ So, there had been a security alarm or a camera he hadn’t spotted. ‘And I needed the exercise.’
‘Come around here so I can take a look at what Mr Edwards described as a low-level remedial massage.’
‘He has a way with words.’
Teschmaker walked around the desk and eased his still complaining body into several thousand dollars worth of Italian calf leather. It was the first time he had been close enough to get a good look at Sinclair. He was dressed in an open-neck shirt that would have been more at home on a tropical beach and the exposed bit of chest looked as though it had spent a little too long in the sun. He was even smaller than the PR-sanctioned photos portrayed him but then, Teschmaker thought, most people would be diminished sitting behind such a vast slab of mahogany. He also looked older than Teschmaker had imagined: sixty? sixty-five? It was hard to tell. The previously dark brown hair was now salted with a considerable amount of silver but there was no sign of a receding hairline. The eyebrows, prominent because of the jutting brow, were neatly trimmed. The famous walrus moustache was a shade or two darker than the hair, probably cosmetically enhanced. To Teschmaker’s surprise Oliver Sinclair picked up a pair of spectacles. That was something the public never saw. He wondered if he used contact lenses in public.
‘Look at it this way, Martin, it could have been a lot worse.’ Sinclair turned on the rather impish smile that was something of a trademark. Most female columnists considered him to be a jovial little dumpling and, despite his age, his boyish behaviour always guaranteed him reasonably kind treatment from the media. Many of the women journalists thought him attractive. ‘I originally decided to have you killed.’
‘I’m flattered you thought of me at all.’ Teschmaker couldn’t understand why but he didn’t feel the slightest bit intimidated by the man or his wealth. The bravery of the fool? Probably. ‘People usually ignore me.’
‘Oh, I thought about you a lot. I have always been pretty broad-minded but there is a certain kind of slime ball that really gets my goat, and you happen to be one of them.’
‘I’m afraid you are confusing me with someone else.’ Teschmaker shrugged. ‘I’m just your regular clean-living guy.’
He decided that the best way to play this was not to be drawn into a fight. Mind you, he was unsure how long he could maintain the facade because, not far
beneath the pain and stiffness of his battered body, he was suppressing a great deal of anger.
‘No, Teschmaker. Don’t play the fool with me. You know my reputation. I like a bit of fun as much as the next man. Probably a little bit more, seeing I can afford it. But I draw the line at this kind of shit.’ He slid a 10 x 4 photograph across the mahogany. ‘You’re a sick man, Teschmaker.’
Teschmaker picked it up and stared at it, trying to understand what he was looking at and why Sinclair thought he would be involved with what looked like a bunch of pretty bent individuals. The photo, taken with a wide-angle lens, was grainy but despite the lack of crisp focus showed more than enough to get the general idea. Several men and women in various states of undress seemed deeply involved in inflicting a great deal of pain on each other. In the foreground a rather weedy-looking individual was curled in a foetal position. Teschmaker couldn’t ascertain the person’s gender but suspected he was male. The person was naked except for the rope that bound him around his neck and snaked down his back to where his wrists were tightly tied. From there the rope continued on to his ankles, which were tied up against his back. It looked anything but pleasurable.
‘Nice rope work,’ Teschmaker murmured, and it was — the kind of thing to turn a scoutmaster green with envy.
Delicate Indecencies Page 14