“The black man? The one called Moon?”
A shrug. “No one's seen him since he walked out of Mount Sinai.”
“But the same questions apply. How would he know? And why would he have waited this long?”
“Mr. Hobbs . . . think about it.”
“Enlighten me.”
Smug son of a bitch. His theories change with the wind.
“All it is,” insisted Parker, “somewhere, somehow, they got a few names. But other than that, they don't have shit.”
Hobbs had thought about it. He'd been trying to believe just that. But the call from Bellows, if nothing else, had put an end to any such self-delusion.
Michael hadn't run, exactly. And he certainly did not go off to sulk. He had merely gone underground.
Witness the fact that he laid a false trail to Cape Cod. An elaborate trail. Even down to his gas receipts. Witness the probability that he had two or more men positioned to cover his departure. Parker's people had seen them. They said they had hard faces and they wore their clothing loosely.
So Michael clearly had allies. Probably those “investigators” of Doyle's. He went underground when it dawned on him that nearly everyone he saw seemed to want to kill him. And he spent those three months digging. Digging and planning.
What is it he wants? Revenge, certainly, but with a new wrinkle. He now wants ten million dollars' worth.
But then why all the arson? Why the campaign of terror?
“To spook you,” says Parker, as if the answer were obvious. “To me, that means they still can't prove a thing.”
Perhaps.
But at least Parker, swine that he is, is doing something. He has people out looking. For Michael, for Jake Fallon`s shadow whom the Baron wants dead just as much, and now for Victor Turkel. And for the missing Pakistani whom Parker seems to think he'll find hiding from the INS in some Muslim sanctuary such as Jersey City or the Bronx.
Hobbs left the dining room.
He made his way through the lobby, toward Fifth Avenue, then thought better of it. He opted for the side entrance opening onto 61st Street. This is what it's come to, he thought bitterly. Bartholomew Harriman Hobbs III, chewing Maalox by the handful, sneaking out through side doors while that vindictive old bastard hides away in his tower.
Unraveling. It's all unraveling.
Parker was right about one thing. The* mistake, if there was one, was firing Michael. Better the devil you can see.
But it had been just too nerve-wracking, waiting to see whether he would come back to work as if nothing had happened. Wondering whether he really did know or whether—as Bronwyn seemed to think—he knew nothing at all. There's an irony for you. Bronwyn arguing that there was no need to kill him. But Rast would have none of it and Bronwyn, as always, was a good and willing soldier.
Of what the uncle knew, at least, she had little doubt. Bronwyn saw in Jake Fallon's eyes that he had recognized Franz Rast in that copy of the annual report. From twenty-five years earlier. Before he was a baron. Before he was a corporate giant.
Before he was even Franz Rast.
Chapter 25
They sat in the cockpit of Megan's ketch, watching the sunset. The dinner dishes had been washed and stowed. He would have to head back soon. Tomorrow would be a long and busy day because his first guests would be arriving on Friday. But there was always tomorrow night. Michael squeezed her hand.
“What was that thing you were going to show me?”
“What thing was that?”
“You know. How to leave all the bad stuff in New York.”
“Oh.” She smiled as if at a private joke. ”I don't think you need that now.”
Never mind, again.
“Yeah, but now I'm curious. Is it something that we, ah, do together?”
The smile spread into a grin. “It doesn't require undressing, Michael.”
”I wasn't thinking that.”
“The heck you weren't.”
“Megan . . .”
“Okay. Okay, give me a minute.”
What it turned out to be was a mental exercise that she said she learned from an old Hindu fakir. They've used it for centuries, she told him, to clear their minds of excess baggage. It's how they make ropes climb up by themselves and it's how they stick big steel pins through their tongues without apparent pain or injury. He told her he'd settle for a couple of beers but she sat him down and made him try it. It turned out to be pretty interesting. More than that, it really seemed to work.
All you do is sit quietly, close your eyes, and focus on any bad memory, any old hurt, any recent personal stupidity. You take that one thing, whatever it is, and you isolate it right in the middle of your brain and let it float there like a single rain cloud. You try to go blank on everything else. If other thoughts intrude, you pluck them away like you'd pluck Kleenex out of a box. That done, you start to ease the hurtful part forward. What you want to do is push it, using steady pressure, through the center of your forehead.
Now comes the fun part.
It's floating a foot in front of your forehead now. You bring up both hands, cup them, and gradually compress it into a ball. Tennis-ball size is about right. As you're shaping it, you get so you can actually feel it. It gives off heat, just a little, and it has weight. You can heft it in one hand. You can toss it back and forth and feel it when you catch it.
This, according to Megan, is because thought waves are matter. An idea is matter. A memory is matter. This is because all brain activity is electrical and electrons themselves are matter. They give off heat and they have weight.
You now have this bad memory, this ball, right where you want it. You rear back your head and send that sucker flying straight over the horizon. In this case, straight toward New York. As it disappears from sight, you start counting down from ten. The instant you hit zero, there's this distant flash of light where it made impact. Follow that, if you wish, with a mushroom cloud.
Megan appeared at the hatch. She handed him a beer.
“Feel better?”
“I'll be darned. Yes.”
“Told you so.”
”I even nuked New York.”
“Whatever works for you.”
“Is this what you do?”
“Um . . . not exactly.”
“Well, where do you send your bad memories?”
An odd little smile. Suddenly, it broke wide open. “Come on, Megan. Where?” “Nowhere. I've never tried that exercise.”
“How come?”
She backed away from the hatch. “I'm not as gullible as you are.” Megan ran for her life. She locked herself in the head and called, “Gotcha, Michael Fallon.” Damn.
“Dr. Greenberg?”
‘‘Yes?”
“‘She just said her ‘gotcha' out loud. Did I say mine out loud?”
“You're on your own, Michael.”
Later, they sat quietly, listening to frogs and crickets.
Okay, thought Fallon. That round went to Megan. She said she wouldn't know a Hindu fakir from an L.A. Laker. She just thought she'd try some power of suggestion on him but then he was so enthusiastic about his magic cure that she couldn't keep a straight face.
He refused to believe, however, that she made all that up on the spot. That business about electrons having weight did not have the sound of coming off the top of her head. Anyway, they do have weight. An electron is an atomic particle. Smaller than a proton but bigger than nothing. He remembered that much from sophomore physics.
She said she might have heard it somewhere. She couldn't recall. And then when he pressed her, the grin went away and she started to get quiet. So he dropped it. Anyway, it was time to start back to Edgartown.
But hey, it worked.
The memory of Bronwyn, and especially the guilt, were already so far gone that it seemed almost indecent. And he could think of Uncle Jake as he was in life instead of always seeing him inside a medical examiner's chalk outline. But he still missed him desperately. And he wished he'd hear someth
ing from Moon. He was getting to the point, however, where he was almost beginning to agree with Mr. Doyle. Forget the Bart Hobbs thing. You just vaporized him anyway. Lehman-Stone along with him. Go on with your life. He didn't even hate New York anymore.
Life was getting sweeter by the day. He loved owning the Taylor House, he loved Martha's Vineyard and, most of all, he loved being with Megan. Her own demons, whatever their source, seemed to be keeping their distance as well.
There was a wonderful old movie called Bell, Book & Candle. Kim Novak played a witch who lost all her powers by falling in love with Jimmy Stewart. Maybe that, he thought, is what's happening to Megan. Maybe psychics have to be miserable or at least psychologically damaged for their powers to work. Nothing would please Megan more, he felt sure, than to wake up in the morning and find them gone.
Off to the west, Fallon could still see the mushroom cloud. What he was looking at, actually, was just a strata-cumulus back-lit by the retreating sun but he was beginning to feel sorry he did that anyway. He had realized for some time, of course, that blaming a whole city for what a handful of crummy people did was dumb. It had just been so hard to accept that a man like Big Jake Fallon and a girl like Bronwyn could be dead because some miserable piece of shit needed money for a fix.
New Yorkers, most of them, were as decent as any. Most are just people trying to get by, trying not to become victims of the predators you'll find in any large city. And they're stuck there. They can't just pick up and leave the way he did.
He thought about Mrs. Mayfield, the woman who had saved his life and whom he never thanked properly. He wondered how she'd feel about a week, all expenses, at an inn on Martha's Vineyard.
Good idea. Should have thought of it before.
Brendan Doyle must have her address.
He'll call him tonight from the Taylor House.
Chapter 26
Hobbs stood, watching for a taxi, inside the 61st Street entrance to the Pierre Hotel. Out of long habit, he patted the pocket where he once carried cigarettes. He reached instead for his pill box, hoping to find a Xanax.
There were none. Only antibiotics for his ulcer and two Dexedrine tablets. Damn. He needed to go down, not up. And it was not a good idea to take speed on top of vodka. But he swallowed one of each, then chewed two more Maalox.
Five minutes passed. He had still not seen an unoccupied cab. His apartment building was on Fifth at 77th. Too far to walk. Fifth Avenue ran one-way south but Madison ran north. He would have more luck finding a cab at the corner of Madison. He stepped through the doors and turned, head down, in that direction.
He hated being frightened. He hated it all the more because it had been so unnecessary. Yes, Big Jake Fallon had reacted to that photograph of Rast. He saw past twenty-five years of aging and the loss of some eighty pounds of weight. He saw past jowls that had been tucked and one protruding ear that had been reduced. And yes, he saw that so-called dueling scar that was made by no Leipzig saber. It had been made by a ring on Jake Fallon's right fist.
But the very fact that he reacted argues that Rast's portrait looking back at him must have come as a total surprise. And he still could not have been certain. The moment he got home, however, he went straight to that dictionary. A large one, they say. One of those monsters that have foreign language sections in the back. French-English dictionaries. Spanish-English. German-English. What will we bet that he was looking up “Adler” to see if it meant what he thought it meant.
The Baron certainly hoped so. He prayed so. It would be all the more poetic if just as his eye found “Adler,” just as it moved a fraction to the right and he saw that the word meant “Eagle,” the first blow of that bat came down across his shoulders.
But Parker's man—this Walter—could not be sure of that. All he could swear to, and the autopsy seemed to bear him out, was that Big Jake Fallon knew why he was going to die and had ample time to think about it. He knew on whose orders. He knew why the means was to be a baseball bat. Rast's orders, through Parker, were very specific. The arms first, then the legs. Smash every joint. Stay away from the head. He is to be conscious throughout. Revive him if necessary. Make him beg you to end it. When he does, however, first go to work on his face.
The taxi driver followed his instructions. Or claimed that he had.
“Do you believe him?” Hobbs had asked Parker.
Parker shrugged. “As long as the old man's happy.”
“What did Fallon really say, if anything?”
“When my guy asked him to beg?”
“Yes.”
“What I would have said. Go fuck yourself.”
Parker's man had been waiting, behind the wheel of a stolen cab, a few doors down from Michael's building. Bronwyn was to flag him. She was to give him one signal if the elder Fallon had seemed to recognize Franz Rast from that photo. Another if he had not.
If the former, or even if he showed an undue interest in the AdChem annual report, Parker's man was to finish him that night. He was to take him home, say how glad he was to have a fare to Brooklyn because his wife was due to give birth at Brooklyn General, then gain entrance by claiming that his dispatcher would not relay personal messages and ask if he might call the hospital on Fallon's phone. Should Fallon refuse, but only then, and only after Fallon unlocked his door, he was permitted to gain entrance at gunpoint.
Just inside, if Parker's information was correct, he would see an umbrella stand that usually had at least one baseball bat in it. This would do. Much preferred, however, would be one of Fallon's more treasured bats which the taxi driver would find, first door on the right, in Jake Fallon's library.
If, vis-a-vis Bronwyn's signal, he had shown neither recognition nor interest, Jake Fallon was to be spared but only for the time being. Long enough for Bronwyn to satisfy herself that young Michael's coming to Lehman-Stone was simply a coincidence. If it was not, he would confide in her soon enough. He was, after all, infatuated with her. He would want to protect her against being involved in an organization that he knew to be criminal. At the very least, he would give himself away by the sort of questions he asked her.
Ridiculous. Every bit of it.
This, thought Bart Hobbs, is the sort of micro-management that is typical of Franz Rast. Everything done just so. His way. No room for individual initiative.
Granted, the stakes were enormous. And Rast was the ultimate wellspring of the millions they'd all made. What Jake Fallon knew would have ruined him. AdChem's stock might have lost tens of millions and would have dragged an entire industry down with it. Trading would have been suspended. The Baron Franz Gerhard Rast von Scharnhorst would have lost every friend his money ever bought him and would likely end up in a federal prison. Minus his testicles. The Countess would have sliced them off.
And this was just Rast. The tip of the iceberg. Once the SEC got its hooks into this, and the Justice Department, and about ten other jurisdictions both here and abroad, that prison would need to build a new wing.
Hobbs reached Madison Avenue. There were cabs. But the thought of climbing into one suddenly gave him pause. Silly, of course. A brisk walk, however, might do him good after all. Madison Avenue was lined with shops, plenty of pedestrians, perfectly safe.
This was all so unnecessary. It should not have happened.
Michael had never penetrated Lehman-Stone. He had not spent his life training for the moment when he could unmask the chairman of AdChem and bring his whole empire down around his ears. Why go to all that trouble when a single phone call to the Wall Street Journal might have done the trick.
The answer? Bronwyn had been right. He knew nothing. His uncle had never told him.
“Naive,” Rast had thundered. “This is childishly naive. This is whistling past the graveyard.”
Rast's point, which had modest merit, was that even if one believes in coincidence, even if Michael knows nothing, would Jake Fallon not have wondered why the young man would end up in Pharmaceuticals of all things? Would it not hav
e struck him as odd?
Perhaps. But it's quite a leap to think that Jake would zero in on AdChem, which was, after all, just one of many clients with whom Michael was involved. Why would he? Simply because it's German? Nonsense. Until Bronwyn stuck that report in Jake Fallon's face, he had no reason to think that Armin Rasmussen was still in that business. Or that he was even still alive.
Totally stupid.
It grew out of one routine meeting, one of several that both Michael and Rast had attended. Rast had known him, worked with him, for two years. The name had certainly rung a troubling bell but even Rast admits that he dismissed the possibility as too far-fetched. It was only then, during this one meeting, that he began to notice the family resemblance and told Parker to look, quickly but quietly, into Michael's past. What he learned gave him nightmares. The nightmares made him crazy.
Lost in these thoughts, Hobbs turned west onto 77th Street.
His poor chalet.
Jocelyn, his wife, will be devastated. She was so fond of the place. She could name every variety of tree, every wildflower. Every summer weekend she would have a houseful of guests, friends from school or from her charities, and she would take them on her famous nature walks. In winter, she'd take them cross-country skiing the length of the valley or for a few downhill runs from the top of Black Mountain.
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