Kate saw that at once. “You must have had to tie her down.”
“Not me,” said his father. “I knew nothing about it. The portrait was a birthday surprise.”
“You haven’t told me her name.”
“It was Andrea.”
“She’s lovely.”
“Yes, she was. Even now, I’m still amazed that she married me. One would think that she could have done better.”
“One would think,” said Kate Geller.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Just agreeing.”
“Well, feel free to contradict me any time.”
Claudia had also admired the portrait, but she seemed to have something else on her mind. Whistler asked, was something wrong? She took him aside.
“You and I are going to have separate rooms on separate floors?”
“We…didn’t sleep together in your mother’s house either.”
“Are you stalling?”
“Not at all. But what’s the rush? You’re still healing.”
He was certainly stalling and a little afraid. That first time…the time that they’d made love while going camping was awkward for its own set of reasons. They quickly became less self-conscious with each other, but Claudia had been right. There was still something missing. The only thing that made it fall short of being great was his awareness that he was still lying to her and that she would eventually find him out.
Now there were no more lies. She knew who he was. Well, sort of. She had yet to see that side of him. It was now more a question of who Claudia was and how different she thought sex would be. Would she expect celestial trumpets? An orgasmic super-nova? There was only one way to find out, he supposed. He hoped that she would not be disappointed.
Kate Geller had overheard the exchange. While Claudia was being shown
to her room, she nudged him again and said, “Adam, relax. There’s such a thing as thinking too much.”
He asked, “How would you know what I’m thinking?”
“Daughters talk to their mothers. She knows that you have all kinds of misgivings. She said you told her that you love her. Did you mean it?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then be patient, Adam. You’ll work it out.”
“Working it out takes two rational people.”
“You think love is rational? Who told you that? All you can do is follow your heart and dance to the music while it lasts.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“On the subject of irrational behavior, Adam, something seems to be developing between me and your father. Would that bother you, by the way?”
“Not at all.”
“Unlike yours, ours might not be a match made in heaven. Here I am, this hick who grows plants in Colorado. There he is, this, well…whatever he is…who’s been known to do a different kind of planting.”
“Mrs. Geller…”
“My point is, If I’m willing to dance with the devil, why should you get uptight about an angel?”
“He’s not a devil.”
“I know that, Adam. He’s only a man. And Claudia is still just a woman.”
“Yeah, but…”
“You’re looking that horse in the mouth again, Adam. There doesn’t have to be any ‘but.’ You ought to try counting your blessings.”
He supposed that he’d never thought of his father in terms of having a woman in his life. There must have been some since his mother died. But perhaps there were none who had gotten to know him before they had any idea who he was. Like Claudia and himself. Two very different worlds. As with Claudia and himself, maybe that was the attraction. Whatever. Here they were. And Kate Geller was right. They should dance to the music while it lasts.
Within a week he and Claudia were going on day trips, returning for her therapy sessions and treatments. They went out on his father’s boat a few times. He taught her the basics of sailing. On land, he took her touring, a few trips by car, but mostly they traveled by train. He thought that travel by train would be less exhausting, so he bought Eurail passes for the two of them. Half of Europe was within a few hours by rail. He showed her some of Switzerland, some of France, some of Germany.
Claudia was thrilled, like a kid on Christmas morning. To begin with, she’d never been on a train. Most Americans hadn’t if one doesn’t count subways. In Europe, it’s the best way to travel.
At first, he’d booked them a first class compartment, but Claudia preferred to wander through the cars meeting and mixing with the passengers. She was very outgoing, much more so than he, and no one seemed able to resist her warm smile. Most of them spoke some English and, if they did not, Whistler would act as translator. She was very impressed to learn that he was fluent in most of the languages they would encounter. It had not occurred to her that he’d be multi-lingual, having grown up in the middle of Europe.
Europeans are often taken aback by the easy affability of Americans. This was not the case with Claudia at all. People seemed instantly comfortable with her. They would ask with concern what had happened to her neck. She would shrug it off as nothing and ask about them. She would want to know where they were going, where they came from, and she’d ask their advice on places to visit. If they’d brought a lunch with them, they would ask her to share it. If they traveled with children, she would play with the children. If they traveled with pets, she would ask to hold the pets.
Oh, yes. The pets. She would hold small dogs and cats in her arms and walk with them up and down the aisle. She would speak softly to them and they would respond with a lick or the touch of a paw. Whistler didn’t realize what was happening at the time, but this was where the talking to animals began. He wasn’t sure when they began talking back. Or at least when she started to hear them.
Even without her thing with the animals, Whistler had serious concerns. If the plan was for them to lay low for a year, that meant not attracting attention to themselves. But Claudia seemed a magnet. One could not fail to notice her. And once noticed, everybody seemed to want to approach her. This was new. Well, sort of. She had always been approachable. But he supposed that when a woman in convinced that she’s an angel, she’s bound to radiate an extra measure of warmth. He half expected to see cripples hobbling after her to touch her. But it was nothing like that. They just liked her.
And there was a flip side that might not be so bad. No one seemed to be paying much attention to him beyond what was minimally polite. The attraction was Claudia. He was just, well…some guy. Compared to her he was almost invisible. That might not be a bad thing after all.
What mattered for the moment was that she was happy, especially when they would detrain and explore. To her, every vista was new and exotic. Not the cities so much. They’d become too modern-looking. Downtown Frankfurt, for example, could well have been Houston, having been almost totally rebuilt since the war. But dozens of quaint little villages and towns had survived the war undisturbed. A few looked like something out of Hansel and Gretel. She’d want to hop off the train and tour them on foot until she was thoroughly exhausted.
Whistler let that happen. He let her get tired. That way, getting home, she’d fall asleep right after dinner and the question of sex could be postponed a while longer.
It wasn’t exactly that he dreaded the prospect. He knew that she claimed to have been pulling his leg on the subject of transcendent sex with an angel. But if she, in fact, had some unearthly expectations, how could he possibly live up to them?
“Adam...” He could hear her mother’s voice in his head. “Stop fretting. Just follow the breadcrumbs.”
Kate Geller and his father had stayed closer to home. Kate had been right. Something seemed to be developing. Not that the going was entirely smooth. They had obviously already had the discussion about their two kids going off for a year. Whistler knew this because he had happened to hear a part of a subsequent discussion.
Well, he hadn’t just happened to hear it; he’d eavesdropped. He was sitting in the study where Cla
udia was napping. He’d left the door ajar, although not for that purpose. Kate and his father had gone for a walk. They’d been out in the square feeding birds. As they came back in, he heard his father’s voice asking, “How can I help you feel better about this?”
She said, “I’d take her and run if I had any sense.”
“Except Claudia won’t. She’s quite comfortable with it.”
“Harry…we both know she’s out of her gourd. That aside for the moment, let’s talk about you.”
“We’re just people, Kate. We’re a family just like yours.”
“No, yours is a family like the Mafia’s a family. Mine is a family like the ones that go to church and then stop to pick up some Egg McMuffins.”
He grunted. “In the first place, we are nothing like the Mafia. In the second place, Adam’s always gone his own way. My hope is that this will redirect him.”
“So it’s true. This is part of a grand scheme you’ve hatched.”
“Kate…I did not deal these cards.”
“Oh, and who are those strange little men I keep seeing? There are two of them, right? Or have you cloned a whole bunch?”
“They’re the Beasley twins. Donald and Dennis.”
“They’re part of the family?”
“You could say they’re adopted.”
“What exactly do they do besides lurk?”
“They do what members of a family should do. We take care of each other. We look out for our friends.”
“I bet they also take care of your enemies, correct?”
Whistler heard another grunt. His father didn’t answer.
Kate said, “Come on, Harry. Time to level with me. I promise I won’t call the cops.”
He said, “Only when there’s no other way.”
This led to a discussion of “those bozos and their bosses” and why his father had let them off the hook. She said, “It isn’t that I wanted you to stop all their clocks. It’s more that you don’t seem the kind of man who’d leave a thing like this unfinished.”
Whistler wanted to hear this himself.
His father’s answer was, basically, that they weren’t worth the trouble.
Bottom-feeders, he called them. Dime a dozen, he called them. He said that every government has them.
She said, “So you’re saying that, you, Harry Whistler, have no time for minor league villains. The woods are filled with crooks who only steal millions and who kill on a scale that falls short of genocidal. Is that about the size of it?”
“No, nothing like it.”
“Harry…then what the hell are you?”
As soon as she’d said that, Claudia coughed. His father walked over and pulled the door closed. Whistler couldn’t hear very much after that. Too bad. Kate had seemed to have his father on the ropes.
He could only imagine what she must have been thinking. She must have concluded that Harry Whistler only dealt with James Bond-ian villains. Maybe the kind who sat and stroked a white cat as they planned to unleash some doomsday device that would vaporize a dozen world capitals. It struck Whistler that his father might be letting her think so in order that, when he finally explained, his real business would sound almost boring. He won’t lie to her. He almost never lied. But he certainly would be selective.
Back at Aspen, he’d said that he counseled investors and that was essentially true. More or less. Or at least since the cold war had ended. He still did the odd job for this or that government, but mostly his clients were businessmen. These were entrepreneurs who wanted to invest in countries where shakedowns and bribes were the rule and where the law, far from offering protection, often needed protecting against. He would negotiate their agreements for them. He knew how to reach the right people to talk to. What made him special, and much in demand, was that he also had the means to enforce those agreements. “Keep your word, we stay friendly, we all make a fair profit; there will be other deals after this. Break your word, get too greedy, and you’re going to get hammered. This is all the warning you’ll get.”
That warning would apply to all the parties involved. Every deal that he brokered had to work both ways. But the need for such enforcement was actually rare. Anyone on either side who was tempted to cheat knew that his father’s response would be swift. There would either be a visit by one of the twins or by any of some fifty out-of-work former operatives of at least eight or ten different governments. They were KGB, CIA, Stasi…the works. Only a few were on his payroll full time. The rest were used on an as-needed basis according to their individual skills. That pool gave him people who not only spoke the language but who knew how things worked within any given culture. As a group, they seemed to know where all the bodies were buried and who could be bought at what price.
His father valued these ex-agents, but he felt sorry for them. All that training and experience and they’re scratching for jobs. He’d once said, “See these people? That’s you. That’s your future. You’re an Airborne Ranger, Special Ops, highly trained, but how long do you think you can do it? There are thousands of you, Adam, and that’s all you know. One day you’re going to find yourself, forty years old, selling plumbing supplies at Home Depot.”
Actually, he said things like that all the time. It was part of his ongoing
come-back-home pitch. He didn’t care much for government service. He didn’t care much for governments either. Too slow, too much meddling, too little accomplished, and most of them don’t really matter very much in the daily lives of their citizens. It’s better to make your own world.
His father was by no means alone in that view. In fact, he had competitors in the same line of work, but there didn’t seem to be much rivalry between them. As often as not, they helped each other. They all drew on the same pool of freelance ex-agents and often employed each other’s specialists. In Moscow there was an ex-KGB general who did pretty much the same thing. His name was Leo Belkin, an old friend of Whistler’s father. He’d stayed at the house next door many times.
The friendship between Leo Belkin and his father dated back way before
the cold war had ended. Belkin was still KGB at the time. One would think that they would have been enemies, but they weren’t. Not that Whistler would have given that a thought growing up. One would also think that he would have wondered, growing up, why there were always guns and bodyguards around. But he hadn’t. It must have seemed normal.
He didn’t know why Belkin had popped into his head. Except that Belkin, and Russia were perhaps the best example of why what his father did was needed. In Russia, say, you want to set up a company. You draw up a contract, you make your agreements, but say that the mafia – the Russian variety – gets wind of it and tries to muscle in.
No, wait. That’s too obvious an example.
Say instead that some supplier, some partner, some investor, decides not to hold up his end of the deal. In most of Western Europe, you’d take him to court. To the East, however, there is no civil law that protects people trying to do business. The business environment in Russia today is much as it was nineteenth century America when the robber barons were a law unto themselves and when many of them either had private armies or they’d rent one from the Pinkerton Agency. So unless you have a Belkin or a Harry Whistler, you have no real recourse; you will lose your investment. You might also end up being gunned down on the street. That happened in Moscow every night.
The other reason why Belkin popped into his head had to do with his mother’s funeral. Belkin was there and tried to say a few words. But he’d always been a little bit in love with Whistler’s mother. He choked up and someone had to finish his talk for him. Who was that? Roger Clew? No, he’d already spoken. No, the man who got up and put his arm around Belkin was another old friend named Paul Bannerman.
Bannerman, by then, was an almost mythic figure who had more or less invented this kind of consultancy. Whistler’s father had worked either with him or for him until Bannerman, still young, still in his late thirties, decided
that he wanted to call it a day and try to live a normal, quiet life. He went back to the States – this was well after the funeral – and maybe a dozen of his people went with him. Whistler had met most of them over time. He liked some more than others. Some were pretty scary people. At least two had struck him as borderline psychopaths, but Bannerman seemed to have them under control.
One was a woman. He’d forgotten her name. In fact several of Bannerman’s people were women. They had chosen to follow him and were loyal to the death. It was much like the twins and Whistler’s father.
The story is they moved to some town in Connecticut. Westbury… Westport…something like that. They bought homes and businesses, settled down, some got married. Settling down, living normally, was all that they wanted. Well…normal might not be the right word for how they lived, but they did do their best to mix in. The government, however, had trouble believing that settling down was all that Bannerman had in mind. Or maybe they saw all that talent he’d brought with him and decided to try to put his people back to work. Whistler didn’t remember what the story was, exactly. But a lot of people had died who would have lived if they’d only just let him alone.
Bannerman….Wait…The American friends.
That had to have been Bannerman who supplied the extra help within hours of Claudia being shot. Whistler didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of that before. It had to have been someone well known to Roger Clew. So it must have been one of Bannerman’s women who called on Aubrey and Poole with the ledger. Molly Farrell, maybe. She was Bannerman’s right hand. Nice woman. Deadly. But still very nice. He remembered that she’d hugged him after the funeral. She handed him a small book of poems that she said his mother had given to her. She and his mother had been very close. She said, “Adam, call me if you ever need to talk. And if you ever need me, I’m there.”
He’d lost touch with Molly, but he’d bet that it was her. She would have been the one with “more restraint.” And the woman, therefore, who carved up Briggs and Aubrey was probably one of Bannerman’s scariest people and one of the two who Whistler thought to be psychos. It would have been a tiny little redheaded woman who was known for her work with a knife. Her name was Carla Benedict. There were all kinds of stories. Come to think of it, Carla had a sister of her own who was murdered years ago in California. A serial killer was blamed for the murder, but it turned out that he didn’t do it. That serial killer, more to the point, resented being accused of the murder. So he ended up allying himself with Carla and helped her track down the real killer. Whistler’s father said it’s true. It really happened that way.
Whistler's Angel (The Bannerman Series) Page 9