May not be carried forward after the death of whoever issued the order.
The last, Darrow understood, was not only a matter of tidiness but also to avoid having one man inherit the judgment of another. Twelve years ago, when he had taken over at Number 19, there had been two of Gridley’s orders outstanding. They were automatically dropped and he, Darrow, had begun with a clean slate.
Now, as much as he did not want to, he would put on business clothes and be driven into town to see Hunsicker. It had become to his advantage that he put the Gainer order on hold.
He had to give Hine credit this once.
It was a splendid idea to have Gainer make a carry. As Hine had pointed out, quite possibly Gainer would take the opportunity to visit the three million he undoubtedly had gotten from Norma’s last carry. And, as Hine had not considered but was even more promising, it gave Darrow time alone to impress Mrs. Pickering.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THAT afternoon, while Darrow in New York was four hundred feet above street level putting Gainer’s temporary reprieve in Hunsicker’s ear, Gainer was at sixty thousand feet in Air France Concorde Flight 002. The plane was approaching the so-called point-of-no-return, a designation Gainer thought appropriate for him personally as well.
So much had happened, changed in just three-quarters of a day. He was not where he should be. He felt displaced. On his way to Zurich via Paris faster than sound.
He might have felt better about it had he been able to reach Leslie. He’d tried, rung her apartment and his from the airport terminal and got no answer. He didn’t have the telephone number of Number 19. It was unlisted. Besides, by then he had barely enough time before departure to go into the men’s room to change. The matching all-leather bag that wasn’t his, but it contained needed things of his. It had been waiting for him when he arrived at the terminal. The skycap had greeted him by his name with a sir after it and informed him that part of his luggage, that smaller bag, had already arrived. The thirty-incher containing the three million got checked right through. What amazed Gainer was not that Darrow’s people could pull strings but that they held so many.
Sweet had driven him to Kennedy.
Sweet had tucked a ten-fold of hundreds into Gainer’s shirt pocket for expenses.
Sweet had gone all the way to the boarding gate with him and stood at the window until the ramp was disconnected and the Concorde sealed and moving away.
It was obvious to Gainer that Darrow wanted him out of the way, far away, soonest possible. A direct Swiss Air flight leaving at seven would have avoided the hurry, been almost half the fare and put him in Zurich only an hour later tomorrow morning. Darrow’s motive appeared to be Leslie. If it was only her, Gainer could feel relieved. The old bastard would need a diamond-edged chisel for a prick to get through to her.
But maybe Leslie wasn’t it.
Maybe they had decided to deal with him a different way. The three in the bag could be really dirty, dirty millions, marked, identifiable, and he was flying to take the fall. How, in the first place, had they been able to come up with three million all banded and packed and ready to travel in mere minutes? No one had run out to the bank.
Watched over.
Darrow had said he would be.
Gainer had spotted two other passengers who might be doing exactly that, but not necessarily for his protection. One was the thirtyish, apparently well-off woman across the way and one row down. A blond wearing beige and navy. Gainer had caught her eyes on him three times, the third time with a trace of a smile. Probably a styled-up ex-Vegas showgirl, Gainer thought. Then there was the man a couple of rows back with the haggard if polished look of a lawyer. He was reading the Harvard Law School Journal but had been on the same page for an hour.
Ignore them.
Gainer plumped his pillow, requested another and filled in the space between the seat and the window for his head. He gazed out at the night, couldn’t see the moon or a star or a cloud, just black. Even one star would have helped counter his sense of unreality. To pass the time he tried making a mental list of things he didn’t love about Leslie. Got nowhere with that. Switched to the things he loved about her and they were like sweet sheep leaping one after another over a fence.
He napped without dreams until the moment of touchdown at Charles De Gaulle Aéroport, stretched his face and neck awake and filed off the Concorde. He saw the blond fellow passenger being met by a casually dressed, distinguished-looking man who kissed her as though he owned her. The other lawyer-type passenger was met by a sort of young version of himself who gave him a son’s hug.
It was midnight Paris time, but six hours earlier Gainer time. Again, he tried phoning Leslie and again, got no answer. He remembered a knockaround street guy in New York who had claimed a couple of times he had the connections to get any unlisted number in the world in five minutes. Gainer reached him, told him what he wanted—Darrow’s number. When, as agreed, Gainer called back in a half hour, the guy’s wife or woman or whatever said she didn’t know where he was, that she thought he had gone over to Meadowlands to the trotters.
So much for that.
The connecting Air France flight to Zurich would not leave until seven-forty. Gainer had all night. He thought of the container of Norma’s ashes only a few miles off in that crypt in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise but was not able to feel any closer to her for that. He bought an Italian edition of Playboy and a paperback in English of John Cheever stories. He looked and read at the counter of a bistro while he had a Croque Monsieur and then a glass of vin ordinaire for a change of pace. Every so often he would casually glance around for whoever was supposed to be watching over him. No one likely, as far as he could see. Certainly not the slight, brittle-looking old man across the way who had either a bad summer cold or sinus problems.
Killing the night, Gainer wandered the terminal, observed hellos and good-byes from casual to passionate. Also saw a lot of different kinds of waiting. Found a seat and read slowly to make the Cheever last.
Finally he was buckled in and being thrust upward with the rest of Flight 680. The plane climbed for a half hour and descended for a half hour and touched down at Flughafen Floten in Zurich five minutes ahead of schedule.
At customs Gainer had his passport looked at but that was all. He went out to the upper level ramp, disregarded the taxis there, hired a limousine. He kept his smaller bag and the three million thirty-incher with him in the rear seat.
The destination given to him by Hine was a street off the upper section of Bahnhofstrasse. A five story private bank that could not be identified as a bank from the street. Its cut-stone facade needed only a cross or two to make it seem a church.
Gainer told the driver to wait.
He took the carry inside.
Entered a spacious reception area, a hard, traditional atmosphere of varnished walnut, panels and floor. The fringes of an Isfahan carpet seemed combed into place. Not a speck of dust on the crystals of a huge, lighted chandelier. Precisely beneath the chandelier was a receptionist. Her desk and chair were the only furnishings. Evidently they did not care to have anyone else sit. The only thing on the desk was a brown telephone. The receptionist could have been either twenty-five or forty. The most rememberable thing about her was she had very accurately penciled eyebrows in place of her natural ones that were entirely plucked. Otherwise the attempt was to be nondescript, as though if she had a name it was a secret.
Gainer told her who he was. In keeping with Hine’s instructions he asked to see a Fraulein Foehr.
The receptionist used the telephone, and then without touching anything with her hands, caused a section of the paneling behind her to slide noiselessly aside. Gainer thought she probably did it with her knee beneath the desk—an interesting touch, ominous and slick. The opening in the paneling revealed an elevator for four, or a close-packed six. With a minimal gesture of her hand the receptionist gave Gainer permission to enter it. He asked what floor he should go to but she did not reply.
&nb
sp; The elevator enclosed him. There were no buttons to push, no way for a passenger to control it. Gainer set himself for an upward ride, but only his stomach went up a little when he was taken abruptly down. He waited for the side he was facing to slide away; instead the one behind him opened.
Standing there, anticipating him, was a short, older woman, no more than five feet tall in her solidly heeled shoes. Her white hair was parted in the middle and done up into two buns in back. Her eyes glistened as though she had just been laughing. She said hello with Gainer’s full name, seemed please to say it.
Gainer had thought he would be carrying to someone severe and compulsively efficient, not this gnome of a person whose open smile displayed false teeth that were believable except around the gum line. Fraulein Foehr could have been a salesperson in a candy store or a vendor of balloons in some happy park.
She walked just slightly ahead of Gainer down a corridor that had floor-to-ceiling photographic murals along both sides; summer Alps on the left, winter Alps on the right. She inquired about Gainer’s flight, his crossing, as she called it, had it been effortless? She also asked if he’d had breakfast, her tone implying she could provide it.
Gainer looked down at her, saw the whiter flesh of her scalp where her hair was parted as he went along with her into a room dominated by an Empire table de bureau inset with dark green tooled leather, waxed and buffed hard. On the desk was a white porcelain Yougzheng bowl containing an abundant bouquet of edelweiss.
This was like no bank he’d ever experienced, Gainer thought. Far cry from the sort with waffle iron, AM-FM clock radio, color television set inducements. Not a teller in sight nor an inch of formica and certainly no waiting lines for deposits or withdrawals.
Gainer wondered if Norma had ever been here, perhaps in this very room. He wouldn’t have asked if it hadn’t been for Fraulein Foehr’s seemingly friendly attitude. “Did you happen to know my sister, Norma Gainer?”
“Yes, quite well,” Fraulein Foehr said, but nothing more. She indicated that Gainer should place the carry on the desk and as soon as he did she stepped between him and it. She unbuckled and unzipped the suitcase as though she knew it, flipped the top back, exposing the money. The neatly nestled sheaves, tightly wide-banded. Each sheaf containing twenty-five thousand. It was more money than Gainer had ever come face to face with. Benjamin Franklins, he thought, caught more by the gray etched portrait in the repetitive ovals than the numbers in the corners.
Fraulein Foehr went to the paneled wall to her left, folded part of it open. There on a shelf was a scale. She proceeded to weigh the packets of money, was all business now. Her eyes seemed to have gone somewhat dry and her mouth did not appear even capable of a smile.
The scale was an electronic one. Its digital indicator showed to five figures beyond the decimal. Each packet weighed within a few hundred thousandths of 8.125 ounces, Gainer noted. He also noted that instead of one hundred and twenty packets, which would have amounted to the three million he’d been told was the total of the carry, there were one hundred and twenty-four. An extra one hundred thousand. Not an oversight, Gainer thought. Darrow had put it in as a teaser, a tester. Gainer was glad now that he hadn’t even considered opening the carry.
Fraulein Foehr transferred the packets into money bags, the sturdy natural canvas type usually used by banks. Thirty packets to a bag. She tossed the bags to the floor as she processed them, forming a disorderly pile. Left them there.
What, Gainer wondered, would happen now to his carry … in fact, to all the dirty millions brought over by the people who traveled for Number 19? He had no idea how much it amounted to, but was sure this nice clean bank and others like it in nice clean Switzerland would see that it was washed—loaded a certain way into the big rotating sidewinding money machine that converted it into legitimately earned riches. He had no way of knowing, of course, how systematically it was done. Some of the carried money remained in Europe, where it was soaked up by the financial ends of certain multinational corporations, included in their annual reports as good clean taxable profit. Other huge amounts of the carried money found their way back to the United States in the form of loans. Loans from a High Board controlled Swiss bank to a High Board controlled bank in the United States. Loans that were often written off or only figuratively repaid. It was easy juggling.
“Did you bring along a raincoat and some extra clothes?” Fraulein Foehr asked, becoming once again the amiable stranger.
“No, why?”
“For this bag,” she said, zipping and buckling it. “Buy a few things and not all of them new.”
Gainer thanked her for the suggestion, took up the empty bag, sixty-some pounds lighter now. She showed him to the elevator, said goodbye.
A minute later Gainer was out on the street. He motioned to the limousine driver that he should stay behind the wheel, he’d get his own door. He tossed the empty bag in ahead of him and was about to duck in when over the roof of the Daimler and the passing traffic he caught a glimpse of something he’d seen before.
It was the white of a tissue that attracted him as it was brought to the nose of the man in the car across the way.
That old man.
Same slight build, brittle-looking old man with sniffles that Gainer had noticed at the bistro counter at De Gaulle Aéroport. Gainer was sure of it.
Gainer stood there, deliberately stared at him.
The old fellow made the most of it. He did not try to slouch down, realizing he had already been spotted. Instead he got out of the car, looked up at the building there as though his destination was above, adjusted his hat and went in.
Gainer, under way in the Daimler, realized now when Darrow had said “watched over” he really, of course, meant watched. They were making damn sure he went where he was supposed to with the three million. And now, would they be through with him? He doubted it. Well, he wasn’t through with them either. Not yet, Norma.
The carry had been easy. How much had Norma made per carry? Forty-some thousand? It was now easier for him to see why, how she had gotten hooked.
Alma.
He should see Alma while he was in Zurich. He had things to say to her. There was time. Hine had told him to stay at least a week.
At the Dolder Grand.
The room they had for him was an upper floor front room.
Room Number 450.
Norma’s regular room, the same that she was killed in.
It could not possibly have been a coincidence, Gainer knew. A sadistic touch. A warning? It did shake him some at first, but he did not say anything, just followed the bellboy up and took it.
There was the bed.
There was the shower.
If they expected room 450 to rattle him, it had the opposite effect. He drew new resolve from showering in that shower, from lying on that bed.
He looked at his watch that was still set New York time—five-forty-five A.M. He should try calling Leslie again. He was tired, hadn’t slept more than an hour of the last fifty-two. He’d just close his eyes for a few minutes.
When he woke up he thought it was getting dark. But when he looked out the window, he realized it was getting light. He had slept through from day to day. He felt torpid, heavy-lidded, not refreshed as he should have. He ordered from room service, and after splashing handfuls of cold water onto his face, drying roughly and drinking two cups of hot, black coffee, he started to come around.
Phoned Leslie. Her place, his place. No answer, which at that hour U.S. time meant she was probably at Number 19. Stupid of her. She had no idea what an animal hole it was. Or perhaps she did, which would be worse. She and her penchant for being on the fine line between here and the other side, as she called it. She seemed to want to stretch fortune to just this side of snapping point, as though in that there was some sort of proof for her, a verification of some special karmic prearrangement that she believed in and that nothing harmful could possibly contradict. At the moment, Gainer hoped there was indeed a Lady Ca
roline looking out for her.
He knew he couldn’t take being out of touch for a week, so why should he endure another day? He’d tell Hine he misunderstood, lie to Darrow. He repacked the smaller suitcase and solved the larger empty one by putting the smaller one into it.
Called Swiss Air.
First available space to New York was on the two o’clock. He reserved it. Took one last look at the shower stall and the bed and went down to the lobby. While settling his bill, he asked at the desk for Alma Schebler and was told she was on vacation.
All the better, Gainer thought. He remembered Alma’s home address from having seen it so many times on her letters. Rather than lug his bag along he would leave it there at the hotel with the porter, who maintained a special room for such purposes off the far end of the lobby. The room was kept locked but the porter knew which was the key for it among all those on his large ring. It wasn’t an ordinary check room. A number of people who were frequent guests at the hotel were above being bothered with bringing or taking away luggage, so they merely left a full set of their belongings permanently packed in the care of the porter who kept them in that room. Gainer tried to imagine what it would be like to have appropriate wardrobes and essentials always ready and waiting at the Ritz, the Berkley, the Carlton and so on.
A very Rodger arrangement, Gainer thought.
The porter scribbled a receipt. Gainer overtipped him.
Alma’s home address was in Zollikerberg, a section southeast of the city proper and not far from the hotel. Zollikerberg was like a small town unto itself, and where Alma lived was a modest private house set comfortably between a Lutheran church and a bicycle shop. Two of the upper windows were partly open, suggesting that Alma or someone was there. Gainer knocked and waited, knocked and waited, and then went to the bicycle shop to inquire. A man there told him that Alma and her son were away, staying somewhere down the lake, not expected back for a week at least.
Gainer was disappointed. Realized how much he’d wanted, needed to share time with someone who apparently had also loved Norma. He left a brief note in Alma’s mailbox.
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