‘Who is this?’ she said.
The man leaned yet closer to the phone, so that his lips were almost touching it. He frowned, and his nostrils twitched.
‘Is there someone there with you, Ms Phipps?’
‘I asked you a question,’ said Phipps, and her voice became even less steady, belying her attempt at bravado. ‘Who are you?’
‘A collector,’ came the reply. ‘The Collector.’
‘A collector of what?’
‘Debts. Regrets. Souls. You’re stalling for time, Ms Phipps. You know who I am, and what I am.’
There was a pause, and Tate knew that the Collector was right: there was someone else with Becky. He could picture her looking to the other for guidance.
‘That was you in the bar, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘Davis was right to be worried. I thought he was just jittery, but it seems that he was more sensitive than I gave him credit for.’
Tate didn’t like his producer’s use of the past tense in association with his name.
‘He is remarkably sensitive in more ways than one,’ said the Collector. ‘He screamed very loudly when I sliced through his earlobe. Thankfully, these old brownstones have thick walls. Will you scream when I come for you, Ms Phipps? It won’t matter either way, so don’t be too concerned. I always bring earplugs. And I really do believe that there is someone with you. That’s my particular sensitivity. Who is it? One of your ‘‘Backers’’, perhaps? Put him on. Let him speak. It is a “he”, isn’t it? I can almost see the price tag on his suit. Be sure, whoever you are, that I’ll find you too, and your associates. I’ve learned a great deal about you already.’
There was an intake of breath before Phipps started shouting.
‘What did you tell him, Davis? What did you tell him about us? You keep your mouth shut. You keep it shut or I swear, I swear we’ll put you—’
The Collector killed the connection.
‘That was all very amusing,’ he said.
‘You warned her,’ said Tate. ‘She knows you’re coming now. Why would you do that?’
‘Because in her fear she’ll draw out the others, and then I can take them too. And if they choose to remain hidden, well, she’ll give me their names when I find her.’
‘But how will you do that? Won’t she hide from you? Won’t she be protected?’
‘I find your concern for her very touching,’ said the Collector. ‘One would almost think that you liked her, rather than merely being obligated to her. You really should have examined that contract more closely, you know. It made clear your obligations to them, while leaving them with none to you. It is in the nature of their bargains to do so.’
‘I don’t read Latin,’ said Tate glumly.
‘Very remiss of you. It’s the lingua franca of the law. What kind of fool signs a contract written in a language that he can’t read?’
‘They were very persuasive. They said it was a one-off deal. They told me that if I turned it down, there were others who would accept.’
‘There are always others who will accept.’
‘They told me I’d have my own TV show, that I’d get to publish books. I wouldn’t even have to write them, just put my name to them.’
‘And how did that work out?’ the Collector asked, and he seemed almost sympathetic.
‘Not so good,’ admitted Tate. ‘They said I had a face made for radio. You know, like Rush Limbaugh.’
The Collector patted him on the shoulder. The small gesture of humanity increased Tate’s hope that the word ‘perhaps’ had become less a piece of driftwood to which he might cling than a life boat to keep him safe from the cold waters that currently lapped at his chin.
‘Your friend Becky has a bolt-hole in New Jersey. That’s where she’ll run to, and that’s where I’ll find her.’
‘She’s not my friend. She’s my producer.’
‘It’s an interesting distinction. Do you have any friends?’
Tate thought about the question. ‘Not many,’ he admitted.
‘I suppose that it’s difficult to keep them in your line of work.’
‘Why, because I’m so busy?’
‘No, because you’re so unpleasant.’
Tate conceded the point.
‘So,’ said the Collector. ‘What should I do with you now?’
‘You could let me go,’ said Tate. ‘I’ve told you all that I know.’
‘You’ll call the police.’
‘No’, said Tate, ‘I won’t.’
‘How can I be sure?’
‘Because I know that you’ll come back for me if I do.’
The Collector appeared impressed with his reasoning. ‘You may be smarter than I thought,’ he said.
‘I get that a lot,’ said Tate. ‘There’s something more that I can give you, to convince you to let me go.’
‘What would that be?’
‘They’re going to abduct a girl,’ said Tate. ‘Her name is Penny Moss. They’ll blame whatever happens to her on some raghead.’
‘I know. I heard you discussing it.’
‘You were right at the other end of the bar.’
‘I have very keen hearing. Oh, and I placed a cheap transmitting device on top of your booth as I passed.’
Tate sighed. ‘Will they hurt the girl?’
‘There is no girl.’
‘What?’
‘It was a test to see how you’d respond. After what happened with Barbara Kelly, they’re worried. Repentance is contagious. They’ll administer many such tests in the days and weeks to come. I think they probably figured that they were safe with you, though. After all, you never displayed any signs of being principled before. You were hardly likely to start now.
‘The pressing question remains, Mr Tate, what is to be your fate? You’ve been a bad man: you’re a corruptor, a proselytizer for ignorance and intolerance. You thrive on fear, and finding easy enemies for the weak and bitter to hate. You fan the flames, but plead innocence when the ugliness of the consequences becomes apparent. The world is a poorer, more benighted place for your presence in it.’
The Collector stood. From beneath his coat he removed a gun, an old .38 Special, its grips worn, its metal dulled, yet still handsomely lethal. Tate opened his mouth to shout, to scream, but no sound emerged. He tried to worm his way into the corner, covering his face with his arm as though it might shield him from what was to come.
‘You’re panicking, Mr Tate,’ said the Collector. ‘You haven’t let me finish. Hear me out.’
Tate tried to calm himself, but his heart was beating and his ear throbbed with renewed vigor, and he welcomed the pain of it because he could still feel it, because he was still alive. He peered over his forearm at the man who held his life in his grasp.
‘Despite all of your manifest failings,’ the Collector continued, ‘I feel reluctant to pass final judgment upon you. You are almost damned, but there is room for doubt: only a little, a scintilla. You do believe in God, don’t you, Mr Tate? What you talk about to your listeners, hypocritical and untruthful though it may be, has some roots in a blasted version of faith?’
Tate nodded sharply, and consciously or unconsciously, joined his hands as if in prayer.
‘Yes. Yes, I do. I believe in the risen Lord Jesus. I was born again in Christ when I was twenty-six.’
‘Hmmmm.’ The Collector made no effort to disguise his doubt. ‘I’ve listened to your show, and I don’t think your Christ would recognize you for one of His own if He spent an hour in your company. But let’s leave it up to Him, as you’re such a believer.’
The Collector ejected all six bullets from the gun into the palm of his right hand before carefully reloading three of the chambers.
‘Ah Jesus, you got to be kidding,’ said Tate.
‘Taking the Lord’s name in vain?’ said the Collector. ‘Are you sure that’s how you want to start off your greatest test before God?’
‘No,’ said Tate. ‘I’m sorry.’
�
�I’m sure the deity will put it down to the stressful nature of the situation.’
‘Please,’ said Tate. ‘Not like this. It’s wrong.’
‘Are the odds too generous?’ suggested the Collector. ‘Too ungenerous?’ He looked perturbed. ‘You drive a hard bargain, but if you insist.’
He removed one of the bullets, leaving two rounds in their chambers, and spun the cylinder before pointing the gun at Tate.
‘If your God wills it,’ he said. ‘I say “your” God, because He’s nobody that I recognize.’
The Collector pulled the trigger.
The clicking of the hammer on the empty chamber was so loud that Tate was convinced for a moment he had heard the bullet that was to kill him. His eyes were screwed so tightly closed that he had to concentrate just to force them open again. When he did so, the Collector was looking with a puzzled expression at the gun in his hand.
‘Strange,’ he said.
Tate closed his eyes again, this time as a prelude to a prayer of gratitude.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Jesus Lord, thank you.’
When he finished, the gun was again pointing at his forehead.
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘You said. You promised.’
‘It always pays to be certain,’ said the Collector, as his finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Sometimes, I find that God’s attention wanders.’
This time, Davis Tate heard no sound, not even God’s breath in the exhalation of the bullet.
30
Instead of traveling straight to Portland after arriving in Boston, I stayed at a cheap motel on Route 1 near Saugus and ate a good steak dinner at Frank Giuffrida’s Hilltop Steakhouse. When I was a boy, my father would treat my mother and me to an early dinner at the Hilltop when we were heading up to Maine to see my grandfather each summer, and I always associated it with the beginning of our vacations. We would sit at the same table every time, or as near as we could get to it. There would be a view over Route 1, and my father would order a rib steak as big as his head, with all the trimmings, while my mother tut-tutted good naturedly and fretted about his heart.
Frank had died back in 2004, and an investment firm now owned the Hilltop, but it was still a place where regular folk could go for a decent steak dinner without breaking the bank. I hadn’t been back there in about thirty years, not since my father took his own life. There was too much of him associated with it, but in recent times I had learned more about my father and the reasons for what he had done, and I had reached an accommodation with the past. It meant that places like the Hilltop were no longer tinged with the same sadness, and I was glad that it remained pretty much as I remembered it, with its illuminated sixty-foot Saguaro cactus outside, and its herd of fiberglass cows. I slipped the hostess ten bucks to give me my family’s old table to myself, and ordered the ribeye in memory of my father. The dinner salad was just a little smaller than before, but since the original salad would have fed a small family it meant that there was less to throw away. I drank a glass of wine, and watched the cars go by, and thought about Epstein, and Liat, and an airplane hidden by the woods.
And I thought about the Collector, because one matter had remained untouched upon between Epstein and me, although Louis had raised it before I left with Walter to catch my plane. What Louis suggested was that, if the Collector were in possession of a full or partial list of names, he would almost certainly begin targeting those on it. This begged the question: if my name was on it, would he then also choose to target me? For that reason alone it was necessary to arrange a meeting in Lynn with the lawyer Eldritch, to whom the Collector was linked in ways that I did not fully understand.
I finished dinner, skipped dessert for fear of busting my insides, and headed back to my motel room. I had just turned on the light when my cell phone rang. It was Walter Cole. Davis Tate, the toxic figure on talk radio whose name appeared on the lists, was dead. According to Walter, Tate had been shot in the head, but some knife wounds had been inflicted on him before he died. His wallet, containing his credit cards and 150 dollars in cash, was still in his jacket pocket, but his cell phone was missing and a tan line on his left wrist suggested that his killer might have taken his wristwatch. The theft of the wristwatch, which would later be revealed as a modestly expensive Tudor, puzzled the detectives investigating the killing. Why leave the money but take the watch? I could have told them why, and so could Walter, but we did not.
The man who killed Tate had magpie eyes.
The Collector had just added another trophy to his cabinet of curiosities.
Early the next morning, I drove to Lynn.
If the firm of Eldritch & Associates had been raking in big bucks in recent years, it hadn’t seen fit to pump them back into its offices. It continued to occupy the top two floors of a bleak edifice too dull to qualify as an eyesore but still sufficiently ugly to make the neighboring businesses look as though they would have upped foundations and moved if they could, and it wasn’t as if they were housed in architectural gems either. The unprepossessing exterior of Tulley’s bar, a prime example of fortress design, stood to the right of Eldritch’s building. On its left, a telecom store previously run by, and for, Cambodians had been replaced by a telecom store run by, and for, Pakistanis. Short of putting up a sign inviting the American wing of Al Qaeda in for coffee and cookies, it couldn’t have advertised itself more as a target for federal surveillance in the current mood of distrust between the US and Pakistan. Otherwise, this stretch of Lynn was still the same accumulation of gray-green condos, nail salons, and ethnic restaurants that I remembered from previous visits.
The gold lettering on Eldritch’s upper windows announcing the presence of a lawyer inside was more flaked and faded than before, a graphic representation of Eldritch’s own slow physical decline. The first floor of the building remained unoccupied, but its windows were now barred and the filthy old glass had been replaced with dark, semi-reflecting panes. I tapped on one with a finger as I passed. It was strong and thick.
The street-level door no longer opened to the touch. Beside it, a simple intercom panel was set into the wall. There was no visible camera, but I was willing to bet good money that one or more sat behind the dark glass of that first-floor window. As if to confirm my suspicions, the door buzzed before I even had a chance to press the intercom button. Inside, the building remained reassuringly musty, every intake of breath bringing with it the smell of old carpets, impacted dust, cigarette smoke, and slowly peeling wallpaper. The paintwork was a sickly yellow, and marked on the right of the narrow stairway by decades of traffic. On the first landing was a door marked Bathroom, and looking down on it, from the second floor, was a frosted glass door with the firm’s name written in the same style of gold lettering that adorned the street-facing windows.
It was almost a relief to open the door and discover that the wooden counter remained in place, and behind it the big wooden desk, and behind that the heavily kohled and otherwise cosmeticized presence of Eldritch’s secretary, a woman who, if she had a last name, preferred not to share it with strangers, and, if she had a first name, probably never allowed it to be used, even with intimates, assuming anyone was foolhardy or lonely enough to attempt some form of intimacy with her to begin with. Her hair was currently dyed a gothic black, and rose from her head like a pile of coal slack. She had a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside her, smoking away in a pond of butts, and all around her rose teetering piles of paper. She added to the nearest ones as I entered, yanking two sheets from her old green electric typewriter and carefully separating the carbon copy from the original before placing each on the top of its respective tower. She then picked up the cigarette, took a long drag on it, and squinted at me through the smoke. If the memo about the illegality of smoking in the workplace had reached her, I guess she’d burned it.
‘Good to see you again,’ I said.
‘Is it?’
‘Well, you know, it’s always nice to see a friendly face.’
; ‘Is it?’ she repeated.
‘Maybe not,’ I conceded.
‘Yeah.’
There was an uncomfortable silence, but it was still less uncomfortable than actually trying to conduct a conversation. She continued to puff on her cigarette and view me through the fug of the smoke. She produced a lot of smoke, so there was a limit to how much of me she could see through it. I suspected that she liked it better that way.
‘I’m here to see Mr Eldritch,’ I said, just before I threatened to lose sight of her entirely.
‘You have an appointment?’
‘No.’
‘He doesn’t see people without an appointment. You ought to have called ahead.’
‘I would have, but nobody ever answers the phone.’
‘We’re real busy. You could have left a message.’
‘You don’t have an answering service.’
‘You could have written. You can write, can’t you?’
‘I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, and it’s urgent.’
‘It always is.’ She sighed. ‘Name?’
‘Charlie Parker,’ I said. She knew my name. After all, she’d let me in without the aid of the intercom to identify me.
‘You got some ID?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘I look like a kidder to you?’
‘Not really.’ I handed over my license.
‘It’s the same picture as last time,’ she said.
‘That’s because I’m the same guy.’
‘Yeah.’ She made it sound as though that represented a regrettable lack of developmental ambition on my part. My license was handed back to me. She picked up the receiver on her beige phone and dialed a number.
‘That man is here again,’ she said, even though it had been years since my presence had dampened her day. She listened to the voice on the other end of the line, and put the phone down.
‘Mr Eldritch says you can go up.’
‘Thank you.’
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