Alarm Call

by Jardine, Quintin

It must have been closing in on midnight in the accountant’s world, but he didn’t protest. He simply asked what he could do for me, as if it was the middle of his working day. ‘What . . . if anything . . . do you know about a bank called Fairmile and Company, in Vancouver?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s funny you should mention that name,’ he replied. ‘The presentation that my team is doing for you and Mrs Blackstone lists them as one of the options. They’re a subsidiary of a mega-bank, rock solid, absolutely squeaky clean, and they provide exactly the sort of international services that we believe you and your wife need. What prompted your question?’

  ‘I’ve just had a meeting with their president, on a matter not related to my own interests.’

  ‘In that case, have I done my firm a favour, against the opposition?’

  I came clean with him. ‘As of yet you have no opposition. We haven’t got round to briefing anyone else, and we won’t. You’ve got a clear field. Mind you, you won’t get to play on it for another couple of weeks. I’ll be in the States until then. When you’re ready, you can contact my office in Scotland and make an appointment.’

  I let him go back to sleep and kept on walking until I found the jetty from which the ferry operated. It was a pod-like wee boat, and didn’t look all that stable, but it got me across the inlet in five minutes, with a good view of the waterfront thrown in for good measure.

  I wandered around the island for a while, looking in the craft shops and galleries, before making my way back to the hotel. I went straight up to my room, switched on my laptop, plugged in the modem and went online. I checked my private e-mailbox first, the one I keep on my own website, with an address that only my family and closest friends know. There was a single message, from Everett, saying that my suite in the Bellagio was available any time I wanted to arrive, but that he expected to see me for lunch on Sunday.

  I sent him a quick ‘OK’ response, then switched to AOL. There were a dozen and more tag-lines displayed there, but there was only one that interested me in the slightest. It was from ‘pwallinger@’ and the heading was ‘Catch me if you can.’ I slammed a finger on the enter key to open it, then read,

  Well, well, I am honoured. The great Oz Blackstone is out to get me, personally; from what Prim told me about you, that should scare me, but it doesn’t. You can’t hit what you can’t see. You may be coming for me, Oz, but where are you going to start? Right now, I’d guess you’re in or near Vancouver, and that Prim’s traced her money. That’s part of my plan, since I found out I need her to release it. She’s tighter than I thought, when it comes to money at any rate. Oh, yes, you can tell her that Tom misses his mom. Ask her, too, what took her so long. That’s what Tom keeps asking me.

  So, buddy, how are you going to find us in this big country? Maybe I should give you a clue. Look for us around Manila Bay, at three tomorrow afternoon . . . oh, yes, and be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

  ‘Fucking nutter,’ I snarled. I let a black thought cross my mind. If I called Mark Kravitz and told him that I was rescinding my previous direct instruction, the consequences might well be terminal for Mr Wallinger. The trouble was, there would be a chain, and like all chains it would be as strong as its weakest link. So the phone stayed in its cradle.

  I read his message again, and considered not so much what it said, but what it didn’t say. So he had a plan, indeed: my guess was that it didn’t involve him coming back to Vancouver. The money was gone from Britain and so was he. The bastard had wanted her to follow it because he had no other way of getting his hands on it. He might have been expecting her sooner, but it had all worked out.

  I looked at the last paragraph. Manila Bay? How the hell were we going to get to Manila Bay in less than twenty-four hours, far less pin down his location there? And what was this nonsense about bloody flowers in our hair?

  I stared at the screen, for one, two, three minutes. I wasn’t aware of the tune at first; it started way back in my head, pure background music, the kind that cuts in on your thoughts when you really don’t want it to. It got louder; I tried to banish it, but it wouldn’t go away, so I gave in and focused on it, trying to recall what it was. Finally it came to me, an old song, from the year after I was born, all about hippies and psychedelia and the summer of love . . . and wearing bloody flowers in your hair. It was one of my mum’s favourites; when Ellie and I were kids she was always humming it about the house. San Francisco: the bastard wanted us to go to San Francisco.

  ‘Right, so far so good. Now, what the hell’s Manila Bay got to do with it?’

  I found a search engine, entered ‘San Francisco Manila Bay’ and started looking. That got me nowhere, so I focused on the city, and was given a different range of options. I looked at several, before I found myself looking at the city’s own website. There was a search window, so I typed in Manila Bay and waited. It gave me a single choice, a two-year-old minute of the San Francisco Arts Organisation, which discussed the refurbishment of a column dedicated to Admiral George Dewey, victor of the battle of Manila Bay, in 1898. It took pride of place in Union Square; I even knew where it was.

  When Prim and I were in California in the death throes of our marriage we’d spent a weekend there. I think we’d agreed we were trying to resurrect things; that might not have been really true for either of us, but we gave it a shot, including some fairly passable sex, probably, in truth, the last time we had really got it on. We’d gone walking on the Sunday and had taken a cable car up to the square. I could even picture the statue, a tall white column about one third the height of Nelson’s, with an Eros-like figure on top. She was more interested in Saks Fifth Avenue, of course . . . yes, there was a branch there too: she has a thing about that store . . . but I liked the feel of the whole place.

  I made another executive decision: I called Reception and asked them to book us two seats on the first available flight to San Francisco next morning, and two of the best rooms that the Campton Place Hotel had available, with a car at the airport as usual. I wasn’t sure whether we’d actually be staying overnight, but we needed somewhere to dump the luggage.

  By the time Prim came back from Fairmile and Company, everything was done. The bad news was that the flight time was just after seven thirty.

  She knocked on my door just before seven. ‘I’m back,’ she said, as I let her in.

  ‘Self-evident. How did it go?’

  ‘Very well. I’ve told Bill to get me invested. Do you think I’ve done the right thing?’

  ‘The guy I checked them out with says you have.’ I told her about Henry Potter.

  ‘You really watch out for me, don’t you?’

  ‘I do for now; once you get Tom back, you’re on your own again.’

  ‘Do you think we’re on the right track?’

  I nodded. ‘I told you before. The money’s the key.’

  ‘You seem sure of that.’

  ‘Dead certain.’

  ‘Come on down to the bar, then, and I’ll buy you a drink for your certainty.’ I couldn’t see anything wrong with that idea.

  The micro-brewery had several products, including something that was pink in colour, probably in honour of the elephants you’d see if you drank too much of it. I wanted no part of any hangovers, so I settled for a sleeve . . . that’s Vancouver for pint ... of their ordinary lager.

  ‘What do you think I should do?’ Prim asked. ‘Wait here for Paul to show?’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Confront him, I suppose; do what Harvey said and take the interdict to the court here.’

  ‘The guy’s not the best thief in the world, but he’s not stupid either. He’s not going to show up here, not yet anyway. When you hear from him, he’ll be giving you a bank account number for you to transfer the money into. What you’ll have to do then is make bloody sure you’ve got Tom back before it goes anywhere.’

  ‘But how can I do that?’

  ‘You insist that he hands Tom over to Bill Hoover, or h
is representative, after Hoover gives him a binding assurance that once he has the boy he’ll process the transfer.’

  She frowned. ‘That would mean treating Tom like a commodity.’

  ‘How’s Wallinger treating him, then?’

  I finished my beer. It was making me morose, but maybe the time shifting and the aggravation with Susie had something to do with that as well. I decided on another, but not there.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to the Sandbar.’

  We walked along Johnston Street to the restaurant. Somewhere along the way Prim linked her arm through mine; I didn’t mind, for at the time my mind was on San Francisco.

  We reserved a table, then had a drink at the bar, another sleeve for me, and a glass of British Columbia red wine for her. My mind was still going to funny places. ‘Do you ever look back?’ I asked her.

  ‘Do I ever not?’ she answered quietly.

  ‘Do you think there was a time, even at the end, when we might have made it?’

  ‘What makes you ask that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can tell myself, and I do, that what happened to us was your fault as much as mine. But that’s not really true. I can tell myself too that Susie didn’t really have anything to do with it, but that’s not really true either. She did. Maybe I should always have been with Susie, and maybe you should always have been with Mike. I don’t know; I don’t fucking know.’

  Prim squeezed my arm. ‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ she said.

  ‘Another one? Who else did you shag? My dad?’

  She grinned. ‘Your father is a very attractive man . . . but I didn’t. And the truth is, I never shagged Mike either. There was never anything between us.’

  ‘What about that letter Susie found among his things?’

  ‘It was a joke on my part, a lousy joke as it turned out. Mike did make a pass at me once, at a party we were all at. He was monkeyed at the time, and to pay him back, I sent him a Valentine with a very steamy and suggestive letter in it. But I never signed it. If Susie knew it was from me, she must have recognised the handwriting.’ She sighed. ‘Poor Mike. He was always just a bit hapless, wasn’t he? How awful it was that he should go bad like he did, and die like that.’

  ‘What if he isn’t dead?’ I asked her. ‘What if he was in deep cover and the whole shooting thing was a put-up?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Then your marriage would have a big cloud hanging over it. Susie really loved that guy, you know.’

  ‘Just like you always loved me?’ was on the tip of my tongue, but I let it stay there.

  ‘You are kidding about that, though, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Mike not being dead and such?’

  I made myself laugh. ‘Did I get you going there? That’s what happens when you’re an actor. Everything in life has to have a convoluted plot.’

  ‘Then keep it under control; that one was a bit scary.’ She paused. ‘Go back to your last real question. Was there a time when I thought we might make it work?’

  ‘Yes. Was there?’

  ‘Yes, once or twice. For example, that weekend we had when we were living in LA and you were back from filming in Canada for a long weekend, the time we went up to San Francisco. That was good. We took a cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf for dinner and we had an extra bottle of wine and we went back to the hotel, and it was really terrific. Afterwards I remember lying there, thinking, “We’re going to make a go of this after all.” And then you went back to Toronto, and the next time you came back, you were as cold as ever you’d been. It just pulled the rug from under me. A few days later I was at a party and I met Nicky Johnson again. When he asked me to go to Mexico with him, I thought, “Why the hell not?” and I did.’

  She looked me in the eye. ‘So why did you ask me that?’

  ‘Because I’ve been thinking of that weekend too.’

  ‘Since when?’

  The time had come; I couldn’t keep it from her any longer. ‘Since this afternoon, when I had an e-mail from Paul Wallinger.’

  I thought that the shock was going to knock her off her bar stool. She was white-faced as I told her the whole story, about the message in Susie’s box, sent after we had met Martha, and around the time that I was speaking to John, and about my challenge to Wallinger and the response it had provoked.

  ‘We’ve got to go!’ she exclaimed, when I had finished.

  ‘Too right we have. Don’t worry, the tickets are booked; it’s an early start, so don’t have too much more to drink.’

  She couldn’t if she’d wanted to. She spent the rest of the evening fidgeting in her seat, picking at her food and toying with her glass rather than emptying it. I had some more Sandbar fish; I’d have had a dessert too, but Prim was so distracted that she put me off the idea.

  The daylight was still lingering on when we got back to the hotel, but we went straight up in the lift, regardless, having booked another six o’clock wake-up. When I walked her to her door, she looked so anxious that I took pity on her. ‘Do you want a coffee?’ I asked her. She nodded, and I led her across to my room, where I plugged in the machine.

  She asked me if she could see Paul’s message, so I set up the laptop again, logged on to AOL and displayed it for her. When she reached the part about Tom asking why she was taking so long, she began to cry. She read it over and over again, her hands twisting and kneading together, unconsciously. ‘Why’s he doing this?’ she kept asking. ‘Why? Why?’

  ‘We won’t know till we get there.’

  ‘Will he have Tom with him, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t want to predict anything this guy might do.’

  I made her coffee and watched her as she sat in one of the room’s two chairs cupping it in her hands, as if she was freezing. ‘You should sleep,’ I told her. ‘Or at least try.’

  The big brown eyes looked into mine. ‘Oz,’ she whispered.

  I thought about it: we were occupying two rooms so even if he did mail Susie again to stir her up, there would be no problems. Anyway, when it came to it, I didn’t have the heart to send her back to her room. Hell, I’d been married to Prim, and with every step on our journey I was realising more and more how badly I’d used her. Plus, I was still just a wee bit pissed off with my wife for her rush to judgement the night before.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Just go and get your half of the pyjamas, will you?’

  Chapter 21

  Fortunately, it was a bloody enormous bed; suppose I had fancied any, I’d have had trouble finding her. I don’t know whether Prim slept at all, but I know that I did. I sat bolt upright when the alarm rang, picked the phone up and slammed it down again to cancel it.

  The light on Prim’s side of the bed was on, and she was up; she was showered and sitting in front of the mirror in her bra and pants, blow-drying her hair as I’d watched her do a thousand and more times before. I wondered why she hadn’t gone back to her own room to do that, until I remembered that she’d brought all of her stuff across the night before, not just the pyjama jacket.

  I got out of bed and made for the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and saw the tension still on her face, so I stopped and stood behind her, putting my hands on her shoulders and kneading the muscles at the base of her neck with my thumbs. They were tight and bunched at first, but soon they relaxed under the gentle pressure. ‘How’re you doing?’ I asked her.

  ‘All the better for that.’ She looked up at me in the mirror. ‘Will we find him in San Francisco, Oz?’

  ‘We won’t know until we get there. The first thing we’ve got to do is catch this plane.’

  We’d cut it f ine . . . I hadn’t allowed for US Immigration when I’d booked the car . . . but we made the flight. The coach section was busy, but we were in first so we had plenty of room. We had just reached our cruising height when a guy leaned across and tapped my shoulder. ‘Hey, aren’t you Keanu Reeves?’

  I’m good with people, usually, but this one was rude. I looked him in the eye, put on the acce
nt and that deep, sincere voice Keanu’s got and said, ‘Oh, fuck, I must need a haircut.’

  It was not my day for being recognised. When we rolled our luggage through the arrivals gate in San Francisco, we had to search for our chauffeur. Eventually we found a Hispanic woman in uniform, holding a sign that read ‘Mr Blackstein’. I had to do some talking to convince her that I was from the Gentile side of the family, but eventually we got under way and headed for the city.

  We sat silent on the drive in, and let the driver . . . her name was Carmen . . . do the talking. ‘This yo’ first time in San Francisco, Mr Blackstein?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll love it.’ Clearly she was a woman who worked from a script, regardless of her passengers’ answers. ‘You got to take the cable car, now, and don’ forget go to Fisherman’s Wharf. Alcatraz ees good too: don’ worry, no prisoners there no more.’

  We let her prattle on. She did it to such good effect that she missed a turn and we found ourselves heading across the Bay Bridge on an unscheduled trip into Oakland. ‘Sorry, Mr Blackstein,’ she said. ‘This ees bad. You no wanna go into Oakland.’ From what I’ve heard of the place, I was inclined to agree.

  Eventually, she found a turn-off and headed back in the right direction. By this time Prim was agitated. ‘What if he’s there and we’re not?’ she muttered.

  ‘The message said afternoon, love, remember.’ That quietened her for a while. Eventually Carmen got her bearings and we turned into Stockton Street.

  The big brown eyes widened as we stopped in front of the Campton Place Hotel. ‘This is where we stayed on that weekend we were talking about last night,’ she exclaimed, her earlier panic forgotten. ‘What made you choose it?’

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ I told her. ‘I knew it, so rather than ask the guy on Granville Island to find us something I just told him to book here.’

  ‘Are you sure you weren’t remembering that weekend too?’

  Maybe I was . . . but I wasn’t going to admit it.