Bannerman's Law

by John R. Maxim

  “You've said some lovely things. Come to bed.”

  Bannerman sighed. Mostly in exasperation. The subject, somehow, had shifted. Just once, he thought, he would like her to stick with an argument to its conclusion. Just once, he would like to hear her acknowledge that he was right.

  “He probably won't even call,” Bannerman said.

  She didn't answer.

  “And I need Carla there if he does. He'd hang up as soon as he hears your voice.”

  “He might.”

  “Then what are we arguing about?”

  “He might not.”

  Bannerman chewed his lip. “You'd talk to him. That's all. You'd give him no information about yourself.”

  “Paul . . . ” she said wearily. “This is not like I'm parachuting into Somalia. It's just not that big a deal.”

  “I'll sleep on it.”

  “Not yet, you won't. Bring the powder.”

  30

  Young Carleton was drained.

  He was exhausted.

  Three hours ago he had watched his father dance under the impact of a dozen bullets. It had been so odd. Surreal. He didn't fall at first. He staggered about drunkenly, taking little mincing steps. The shots didn't even sound like shots. More like a chain saw. Finally, he just sat. He sort of folded in half, legs straight, and crashed, seat first, to the earth. His upper body, arms trailing, slowly tilted forward as if taking a final bow. Toward Barbara. It was like ballet. Even to the final nod of his head. Then Barbara, tears on her cheeks, simply turned and walked away.

  His own thoughts surprised him. He found, watching her disappear into the night, that he didn't blame her at all. It was as much a suicide as murder. His father's own words had killed him.

  He had dragged the body into the chaparral, once he could move, once he stopped trembling. He had walked four miles by moonlight, back to the main road, and a mile after that before he found a bar sufficiently crowded that he would not be noticed or remembered. He had called Darby. Told him to bring the truck and something in which to wrap the body.

  So, at last, he was an orphan. And an only child. Not counting, that is, the odd half-brother or sister still out there somewhere but he was certainly the last to carry the Dunville name. The use of it, for the first time in his life, required no adjective. No more young Carleton. No more Dunville the younger.

  It felt strange. As if a weight had been lifted. He felt so free, in fact, that he now wondered anew whether that riddled mess in the basement had actually sired him. There had never been much of a resemblance. Even less to Henry.

  He had asked his father about that once. His father brushed- the question aside. He insisted that none of the special guests at the time would have dared go near the Dunville private stock of brood mares. Arrogance again. Young Carleton, now the only Carleton, had long rather hoped that one of them had.

  There were two possible candidates. He'd spent hours, over the years, with their files. Both had the right coloring, the right bone structure and both had interests that were similar to his. One was still alive, quite successful, more or less behaving himself. Dunville had decided, or rather fantasized, that he was the one. He imagined himself calling on this man someday and asking, straight out, whether he remembers creeping into the Members' Wing sometime around March eighth of 1965.

  But he knew he wouldn't ask. This man, now the father of a congressman, could hardly be expected to take him in his arms. Still, it would have been nice.

  He would have been able to believe, once and for all, that he was untainted by the Dunville genes that also seemed to carry the curse of eventual madness. His father had shown interesting signs of imbalance in recent years. Henry was simply a bad seed. And his supposed grandfather, the Count, had died strapped to a bed, raving, in the very room where Henry now lay.

  Count Vittorio D'Arconte. Bastard son of the duke of Parma. Italian war hero. Shot down six Turkish planes. Or eight. Or twelve, depending on the telling. These heroics, in any case, led the duke to recognize him, hence the title. Steered him into the Italian film industry, which was then controlled by the aristocracy. A new art form. Best not left to the Jews or Germans. Made his mark but was forced to defend the family honor when insulted by a Fascist rabble-rouser. His pistol against a shotgun. Dropped him in one shot, at thirty feet, although he was wounded himself. Thought it best to spend a year or two making American films. Stayed on.

  Dunville did not believe a word of it. Except that he flew. The Count, according to his ... father, had kept a little Ryan Seaplane at the Santa Barbara Marina with which he made regular 250-mile drug runs to Ensenada.

  Among his customers was one Avery Johnson, then executive director of Sur La Mer. When relatives of some of his other customers began shooting at him on the streets of Los Angeles, he decided to blackmail Johnson into letting him lie low for a while at the asylum.

  Once there, and safe, he was in no great hurry to leave. He had, at his disposal, at least four of the world's most beautiful women—although evidently they were all something of a wreck at the time. He insisted that they be kept bathed and beautified and costumed. And drugged, where necessary. He enjoyed them all, and shared them all. Except Nellie Dameon. He kept Nellie for himself. Although she probably never knew it.

  Later that year, one of his Mexican suppliers got into trouble. He was sitting in a shore restaurant one night when his mistress and another man entered, nuzzling each other. The supplier crushed the other man's skull with a champagne bottle and slashed his mistress with the broken stem. Nothing might have come of it had there not been an American diplomat in the same restaurant that night. The authorities felt compelled to make a gesture.

  The Count spirited his supplier out of Mexico in the tandem seat of the Ryan Seaplane and put him up at Sur La Mer. But the man was trouble from the start. Bad tempered, more so when drunk, would not obey the rules and he wanted the use of Nellie. Enough was enough. The Count put him to sleep with a dose of his own wares.

  Months later, another Mexican associate, named Galinas, asked what became of him. The Count, unwilling to admit that his late guest was now nourishing the bougainvillea, ad-libbed that he was now living in another state, under a new identity, for which the Count had trained him during his stay. This new identity must, of course, remain a secret. He was honor bound.

  Galinas, far from doubting this, decided that it was quite a good idea. He asked D'Arconte to begin creating a new identity for him as well. An entire life history such as, he suspected, the Count had already created for himself. This Mexican, in fact, would become an Italian. He was already more or less European in appearance and the Count could help him with his accent. Perhaps he, too, could have been an aviator. Or a race car driver. Disfigured in a crash. Undergoing a long series of reconstructive operations. That would explain a year or two of bandages and his eventual new face.

  The Count was entirely willing to do this, for a price, but had no wish to be killed when the Mexican was ready to cut off the last link with his past. He would keep records. The Mexican would know it.

  By 1933, Señor Galinas had not only moved into his new identity but into a new family. He was a widower with two handsome infant sons, both of whom resembled him because they were in fact his own, courtesy of another deranged but fertile inmate of Sur La Mer. He had also begun converting drug profits into California real estate, specifically vineyards. In less than a decade, with imported wines cut off by the war in Europe, his new name would be on the labels of half the cheap domestic wines sold in America.

  Vittorio D'Arconte, meanwhile, knew a good thing when he saw it. His next move was to recreate himself. He became Victor Dunville and got himself named to the Board of Trustees—the only other trustee being Avery Johnson—and eventually became executive director when Johnson, who had argued against him once too often, electrocuted himself in a bathtub.

  The vintner, by the middle 1930s, had become a life benefactor of Sur La Mer. A plaque in the main hall so honore
d him. He was the first but the list grew. Slowly, at first. In the beginning they were mostly drug traffickers who thought it prudent to plan for their retirement. Then, by word of mouth, other types of criminals appeared. The Count, now Victor Dunville, specialized in embezzlers for a while but avoided mafia types. The latter were far too family-oriented for his taste. Never willing to end all ties to their past.

  Staff was not much of a problem. Quite a few had been stealing from the members for years or otherwise amusing themselves with them. For most, it was simply a matter of putting further temptation in their path, catching them in the act, and blackmailing them into continued loyalty. Money usually did the trick for surgical and psychiatric staff, most of whom had established practices on the outside, and saw a chance to earn handsome fees that need not be shared with their partners, their spouses, or the tax collector. All such transactions, of course, were recorded against the day when they might try to withdraw their services.

  Several of these associations yielded unanticipated long-term benefits. One staff psychiatrist, whose duties included convincing female members that they'd only imagined having had children, himself had a son by one of them. The psychiatrist, Marcus Feldman, brought the son home to his barren wife, told her that he was the illegitimate issue of two famous movie stars—the mother was his patient—and suggested that they raise him as their own. They did, and the son grew up to be an internist. Quite a good one. Third in his class at Johns Hopkins. And, unaccountably, a rather decent young man. Named Michael.

  When the Motion Picture Relief Fund decided that it really ought to assign one of its affiliated doctors as a liaison with Sur La Mer—a sort of inspector general— Carleton the elder rushed to nominate young Michael. Young Michael was flattered and pleased to accept. All went smoothly enough until the young doctor began hearing stories from the members, and noticing the occasional special guest. He questioned Carleton the elder who, after making an unsuccessful attempt to bribe him into minding his business, sat him down and laid his father's dossier before him.

  His proposition was straightforward. Make your inspection visits, verify that the members are receiving good care, report back to that effect and keep your mouth shut on all matters that do not concern you. Say or do anything that might bring unwelcome scrutiny to Sur La Mer and the reputation of your late father will become the first casualty. Your dear mother's life will be the second. You, after a brief period of mourning, will be the third.

  That arrangement, the surviving Dunville reflected, seemed to be working in spite of the fact that they had no real hold on the young doctor other than his sense of duty to a parent who had lied to him all his life. Still, young Dr. Feldman did more or less as he was told. Although not meekly. He visited his charges, saw to their needs, but insisted that they have no contact whatsoever with any of the special guests. He also saw to it that no new patient of child-bearing age was ever again institutionalized at Sur La Mer.

  Not that it mattered much. No child had been born there for more than two decades. Stolen and brought there, yes, but not born there. What young women they did get these days were often so ravaged by drugs and disease that the act of impregnating them was repellent and the resulting child, if it survived, was often stunted.

  Carleton Dunville the younger had never been at peace with the practice of breeding babies for use as props and he loathed the stealing of them. That was another thing. He had grown up in an environment where such activities were a perfectly routine part of the family business and yet they had always bothered him. He took it as one more reason to hope that he was unsullied by the genes of Vittorio D'Arconte and Carleton Dunville the elder. In any case, one of his first acts as chief executive of Sur La Mer was to put an end to the trafficking in children.

  There were many things he'd intended to do differently. Being more selective for one. Attracting a better class of special guests. The Hong Kong Chinese, for example. Hong Kong was certain to be a gold mine as 1997 drew near. Dunville had already begun outlining special programs for all those Chinese who, having been denied legitimate British or American passports, will be dripping in dollars with no place to go.

  Placing Orientals had its problems, of course, but it would at least be more morally satisfying than, for example, that crew that came through during the late 1940s.

  They were the real boom years to hear Count Victor tell it. Sur La Mer's golden age, when its capacity was strained with fleeing war criminals, Nazis in particular, and several French and Dutch collaborators, all of whom had made their way to California with sizable fortunes in gold, gems, and stolen art.

  But the greatest of the art thieves was in fact a Pole. One Tadeusz Ordynsky turned up in the early 1950s with a two-inch stack of canvasses by Rembrandt, Renoir, and Corot plus a Botticelli on wood. Most of the Corots turned out to be fakes but the others were genuine.

  Tadeusz Ordynsky, after a ten-month stay, emerged as Theodore Marek and, that same year, created the art auctioning firm of Richardson-Marek, which then grew to become California's answer to Sotheby's. The real impetus behind the growth of Richardson-Marek was not so much art auctioning as art theft, which Marek brokered. That, and the sale of counterfeit art, including the Corots.

  Marek had once remarked to Carleton the elder that although Camille Corot painted only eight hundred canvases in his lifetime, four thousand ended up in American collections.

  During the 1980s, as art soared in value, Theodore Marek was among the first of the art auctioneers to appreciate the money-laundering potential of his chosen profession. He could sell a painting to a drug dealer for a suitcase full of cash. The federal authorities paid little attention to the cash flow within auction houses and none at all to the intrinsic value of the objects being sold because, in the art world, there was no such thing. A bit later, Marek would auction the drug dealer's painting for him, always at a profit, always for an unconscionable commission, and the drug dealer would then have clean money.

  His association with drug dealers had other benefits. Foremost among them was the fact that he had, at his disposal and, therefore, at the disposal of the Dunvilles a small army of thugs who would resolve any unpleasantness that might arise in the course of their business dealings.

  One such thug was Harry Bunce, who had been asked to resolve Mr. Hickey. Another, to whom hurting people was more of a hobby, was Theodore Marek's own son, Peter.

  Well, not actually his son, thought Dunville. Peter was provided by Sur La Mer. His real father was Carleton the elder or, more accurately, the semen of Carleton the elder. No surprise, therefore, that the young man was psychotic. He had been born a handsome enough child, according to Dunville’s father, but one had only to look into his eyes to see that something was awry.

  Not that his subsequent environment was likely to improve matters. Theodore Marek, for all his acquired polish and studied charm, was the single most execrable human being Dunvile had ever met. Small wonder that the drug dealers sniffed him out so readily. He must give off a scent.

  There was a certain irony to the fact that Carleton the elder and Peter Marek now lay, equaly dead, in adjoining rooms in the basement of Sur La Mer. To say nothing of Henry. It was Carleton the ... Carleton the dead . . . who had offered Peter as a replacement for Luisa Ruiz, whom Theodore Marek had virtually destroyed before trading her in for a newer model.

  Marek was down there with his son. Dunville tried to imagine the scene. Was Theodore Marek capable of shedding a tear? Or was he looking at him in the way one looks at the ten-year-old clunker in his driveway when it will no longer start: Well, I got my money's worth. Time to check the ads.

  Thoughts of cars led Dunville to recall that Harry Bunce had arrived driving a white Lexus. That, it seemed to him, was Peter Marek's car. He realized, with a shock, that Peter had used his own car. God knows how many bystanders had seen him being dragged back to it after the shots were fired.

  Dunville sighed deeply.

  Speaking of cars, he thought, i
t was getting to be just about time to borrow a car from one of the guards, drive down the hill, wait for the bank to open, and then begin a leisurely cross-country trip with nothing but the clothes on his back and the contents of a safe deposit box. Two new life histories, two sets of documents. His choice of a town house in New Orleans or a shore villa on Hilton Head. No Sur La Mer alumnus within a hundred miles of either. He would shave his head and grow a mustache. The Gordon Liddy look. He could even . . .

  “Yuri Rykov.”

  The voice at Dunville’s door yanked him back to the present.

  “Rank of captain, KGB, almost certainly a trained assassin and, by the way, still very much alive.”

  Theodore Marek's face pink and unlined despite his age. Four facelifts . . . one day his ears will meet, thought Dunville. He stood reading from a sheet of notepaper. His tone was accusatory.

  “Carla Benedict, contract agent, assassin, knife work a specialty. Molly Farrell, contract agent, assassin, electronics a specialty. And someone named Paul Bannerman, apparently their control.” Marek looked up at him. “Quite a cast of characters.”

  Dunville chose not to reveal, just yet, that two of the names were familiar to him. He stared blankly at the mention of the third. Clearly, Marek had been on the telephone before arriving at Sur La Mer.

  “Rykov, Benedict, Farrell,” Marek ticked them off on his fingers. “All three have been positively identified by the FBI. All three were at Joseph Hickey's apartment this evening. First Benedict, apparently, with her knife. Then Rykov. Then Benedict and Farrell again. It was Benedict who killed Hickey.” He jabbed one bony finger toward the basement. “It was the Russian who did that to my son.”

  Dunville was astonished. He tried not to show it. That young girl's sister again. And now a KGB agent? Hilton Head was emerging as his choice. It was farther away.

  31

  “Nothing 's real here,'' David Katz muttered.

  Lesko rolled his eyes. It was the fifth time Katz had said it.