The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  She handed me the envelope. The rain was still bouncing hard on the balcony. Night had fallen and Zurich was a glowing blur of light behind the fog and rain. I was fumbling with the clasp. I was thinking about Morris Fleury, where he might be now … was he always going to be just ahead of us? I thought of Clive Taillor and wondered when he’d been killed, if he’d been dead upstairs the first time I went to the house, before I’d run into Fleury in the dark street—

  The envelope contained a single eight-by-ten blowup, grainy, taken from a newspaper and enlarged. It had been shot at what appeared to be a racetrack. The man wore a hacking jacket, a windowpane-plaid shirt, a dark knitted tie. He was turning toward the camera, standing at a railing, presumably overlooking the racecourse. Binoculars hung on a leather strap around his neck.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  My throat had tightened, the muscles constricting and cutting off speech, though I can’t quite imagine what I’d have said.

  There was less hair, more of a dome, some gray wings over the years, a tightening under the chin, heavy glasses, but the slight grin, the flat gaze with the crinkle at the corners of the eyes, countless features, details, I knew so well.

  I stared at the picture, feeling as if the ground had been cut from beneath me, feeling my feet swinging out into space.

  JC Tripper twenty years later was staring back at me.

  Seventeen

  MAGNA OWNED SEVERAL FLATS SCATTERED across London. Heidi and I moved into a one-bedroom with kitchen in a massive red-brick Victorian building in Draycott Place, just a block off the King’s Road, a block from Draycott Avenue. Annie DeWinter lived fifteen minutes’ walk away, up from Sloane Square in the welter of expensive and elegant housing between Harrod’s back door and Sloane Street. According to Heidi’s sources Annie had left her Berkeley Square digs several years before and now lived in Hans Place with Alec Truman in a freehold townhouse worth, presumably, something in the neighborhood of two million pounds. Yet it was the sort of place where a multimillionaire financier who wanted to preserve his anonymity, to maintain an invisible profile, might feel safe, secure, and hardly noticed.

  Although none of the original houses from the eighteenth century had survived, Hans Place had an illustrious history. It was named for Sir Hans Sloane, the father-in-law of Lord Cadogan, who’d owned all the land for blocks around. It had begun its existence as a development of comparatively modest housing that had drastically declined, was well on the road to becoming a slum by the mid-nineteenth century, when Mr. Harrod opened his store. By the latter third of the century, Harrod’s had saved the neighborhood. But previous to that, in the area’s first flowering, Jane Austen had lived at Number 23 with her brother, and the Prince Regent had invited her to Carlton House and allowed her to dedicate Emma to him. Shelley had lived at Number 1, and Lady Caroline Lamb and Fanny Kemble had attended M. Saint Quentin’s school at Number 22.

  This was all in my mind because I was a nervous wreck and because I had once lived in a very trendy flat in Pont Street, a cricket ball’s toss away, but that had been in the sixties, in my youth. I’d learned the history of the area and, since I was sitting behind the wheel of a rented Rover across from Annie’s house, waiting, I had to think of something. So I thought about Sir Hans Sloane and Jane Austen and Fanny Kemble to keep from delving too deeply into my memories of Annie and the sixties and what she and JC had meant to each other. And to keep from worrying about who was living behind Alec Truman’s face …

  The rain from Zurich had followed us to London, only it had turned to hot water on the way, and it made for a nasty, sweaty business. It was too much like New York had been at the start of all this madness. I looked through the soupy rain at the house, which wore its exterior like a face of undeniable, unassailable propriety. Solemn and old and self-assured with a staff of two or three and a Daimler and a Bentley tucked away at a discreet distance. I was waiting for Annie DeWinter because I simply couldn’t call her and give her the chance to tell me once again to leave her out of it. I had to see her and I couldn’t take no for an answer. I had to take her by surprise. And I had to do it alone. So Heidi Dillinger had gone off on business of her own. And I waited, worrying about Alec Truman and trying not to remember everything about Annie, all about Annie …

  Heidi was the one doing all the thinking, and I kept turning her theories over and over in my mind, wondering how close she was coming to the truth. She was convinced that her latest brainstorm was smack on the money: namely that JC had outfoxed the world by turning into Alec Truman and returning to the love of his life, Annie DeWinter, to live more or less happily for the rest of their lives. His anonymity was the foundation of his existence and he would do anything to protect it.

  Sally Feinman, she reasoned, must have somehow discovered the truth about Alec Truman and had one way or another confronted him with it. JC, knowing Fleury from the old days at Magna, had years ago engaged the dumpy, damp detective to guard his Truman identity, whatever it involved. Consequently Fleury had killed Sally after attempting to extract whatever information he could regarding whomever else she might have told. Similarly Clive Taillor became a threat and had to be silenced: when Fleury found out who had been depositing all that money in Taillor’s bank account over the years, Heidi was sure it would turn out to be Alec Truman, probably by way of one of his companies. She was less sure why Shadow Flicker had been killed in Los Angeles—but it may have had something to do with drugs; how or why, she didn’t know. Maybe … maybe his murder was a wild track, unrelated to JC.

  In any case, Fleury is killing anyone who is a danger, her reasoning went, and with each killing the trail back to Truman was growing colder. But there was still one major threat, which was, of course, me. Her contention was that Fleury had hired the man or men to kill me in Zurich, which would explain his arrival on the scene. He hadn’t found what he’d expected and his nerve had failed when it came to killing me himself.

  It was all bullshit, I was convinced of that, but the story nevertheless had a dampening effect on my overall frame of mind. She was quick to point out that Fleury had disappeared again. What was he doing? Checking the bank records? Why? If he was working for Truman and Truman was JC, then Fleury would know perfectly well he’d been paying Taillor. And why torture someone if all you had to do was kill him? Which were only two of the flaws in Heidi’s theory, as I pointed out to her. She observed that she’d never said the theory was perfect but rather a hell of a good start on the truth. Fleury was the villain. That, she informed me impatiently, was the point. Fleury was Death in a cruddy old seersucker suit.

  I told her she was crazy. JC died twenty years ago.

  She’d lost it for a moment just then. JC was the MacGuffin, she said—or maguffin, whatever it was—how could I be too stupid to see that? Alive, dead, it made no difference. He was the reason people were getting killed. He had no importance beyond that.

  I asked her what happened to the big blackmail plot?

  She just stared at me, angry, refusing to admit that she’d forgotten that JC and the blackmail thing had somehow merged, one becoming hopelessly entangled with the other. Finally she shut up, at least for the moment.

  Twenty years ago. It could have been twenty minutes.

  She came out of the front door, stood on the step looking at the rain on the trees while she fastened one of the buttons on the pale pink duster she wore. She stood with her feet apart, the long coat swirling in a gust of wind, the stance of a gunfighter in one of the spaghetti Westerns Sergio Leone had been making twenty years ago. Then she pulled a crafty little pink rain hat from her pocket and pulled it down on the familiar jet-black hair. Her long oval face with the high cheekbones and just the suggestion of squareness in the jaw seemed from across the street quite unchanged. I didn’t know whether I was delighted or frightened, then reason told me she was of course changed, twenty years’ worth. But standing on the step in her long, blowing pink coat and girlish, adorable little pi
nk hat she might have been striking a pose for David Bailey or Skrebneski or Avedon, one of the men who had effectively immortalized her with their Hasselblads or Brownies or whatever.

  Twenty years, and now it occurred to me that I remembered Annie herself less and the photographs of her more. One stuck in my mind, a huge head shot, an enormously wide smile that crinkled her eyes, the black bangs in dagger points across the fine pale forehead, her right arm up and the long forearm laid across the top of her head, a silly, funny moment of startling, utterly fresh, blinding beauty. I’d seen her do it a thousand times, but it was the photograph I remembered; still I heard her laughter, smelled her perfume and the shampoo in her hair. Surely it all goes to show you something or other about how the time slips away, how it affects us all.

  She pushed her hands into the pockets of her duster, and in her high black wellies, like a schoolgirl, she set off in the rain, her long legs kicking through the puddles. Twenty years. My God, how the time slips away.

  I got out of the Rover and traipsed along behind her, from Hans Place out to Sloane Street, across Pont Street and along Cadogan Gardens, neither fast nor slow, as if she were out for a bit of exercise. She crossed back to the other side of Sloane Street and checked out some shop windows, nipped into the General Trading Company, where she moved among the Sloane Rangers and appeared on the street again with a parcel. How the hell was I going to pull this off? What exactly was I going to say? Hi, luv … what you been up to these past twenty years? Give us a kiss and fill me in …

  She walked down to Sloane Square, crossed to the center, then crossed to the King’s Road side and went into the W. H. Smith bookstore. I stood at the edge of Sloane Gardens, where I’d once had a girlfriend, and waited for her to come out. Fifteen minutes passed, then she reappeared with a bagful of books, newspapers, and magazines. She was coming toward me, had me in her sights, I thought, but no, I was mistaken. She walked by me, crossed past the tube station, stood for a moment looking at the poster at the Royal Court Theater, then turned the corner, where I watched her proceed toward an old, old pub. She went in just as thunder slapped and cracked over the Square.

  That left it up to me. Really I had no choice. It was too late to worry about not having come up with a good opening or, for that matter, any real plan for how I would proceed once I was inside the outer ring of defenses.

  She was sitting by herself in a booth under a leaded window depicting a large black raven perched on a tree stump. The pub, of course, was The Raven and Stump. The sound of a couple of video games boinging away on the other side of the partition clashed with the quiet, the rumble of thunder, the ancient polished wood. She was looking at the French Vogue, a pint and a plate of shepherd’s pie steaming next to the magazine. I went to the bar, got a pint of Courage and sipped it past the foam, watching her.

  Finally it was time.

  She didn’t look up when I went to stand by the table. She must have been lost in thought.

  “Well, Annie girl,” I said. My hands were shaking and I hoped the tremor didn’t reach my voice.

  She didn’t look up for a moment but her head went rigid, her hand stopped turning the page, hung suspended in midair. “Well, I know that voice,” she said. She closed the magazine. Zap, zap, buzzz, boinggg … The video game was going crazy. “Yes, I do know that voice.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She sighed. I could almost see my reflection in the shine of her hair, smooth as ebony. “Is it really you?” She hadn’t brought herself to the point of looking up yet. “What a long time …” Finally she looked at me. I watched her eyes tighten for a moment and then begin to search my face. I waited, like a man with a blind woman’s fingertips tapping out a code on his mouth, nose, and cheekbones. “You’ve changed,” she said softly.

  “You wouldn’t kid me, would you? That was the point, wasn’t it? If you stayed the same after twenty years, what was the point of having lived?”

  “Oh, it’s you, without a doubt. But I have to tell you, I haven’t really missed the corny philosophy.”

  “If it ain’t corny, my dear, it ain’t philosophy. And it wasn’t quite so corny the last time I saw you.”

  “Times have changed, haven’t they? Sit down, Trip.”

  Her eyes were huge and shiny and black, her face was as lean and sculpted as ever, and as a great writer once said, she was so beautiful you wanted to hit her with a hammer. That beautiful. But I didn’t want to spoil it. Her face was still pale, almost unlined. Pure genetics. The black hair across the wide forehead, then cut short at the sides and on the nape of her neck, flaring at the back of her head. Dark magenta mouth about as wide as the old Turnbury Road, eyebrows straight and black as charcoal. She wore a long black T-shirt and a very short pink skirt. The T-shirt ended low on her flat belly, just where the pleats of the skirt began, but I couldn’t see that at the table. That was my memory of her walking in the rain, the duster furling in the hot wind.

  “You’re here at last. It’s funny … I’ve always known you’d turn up one day.”

  “I thought I might surprise you.”

  “Oh, not you. You could never surprise me. I’ve definitely been expecting you—”

  “What are you saying? You knew I was coming?” I wasn’t getting it.

  “Telltale paranoia is showing, Trip. Maybe you’ve only changed on the outside.”

  “Maybe I’m not the man you remember so well—”

  “You are, amigo. Same old Trip. Twenty years, almost every day I’ve been on the lookout, half expecting you to come wandering into the picture not quite sure of what was going on. You’re like a time traveler. Two decades out of date. Just like your brother. You were always sort of inevitable, Trip. An inevitable bastard. An absolute charlie you always were, weren’t you?” She reached out and touched my face. “Now you’re here, what—oh, what—are we going to do with you?”

  She looked very solemn and that was the Annie I remembered, not a picture, but the real woman. A solemn expression, as if she took everything very seriously. She slowly shook her head at me. When she did, her earrings swung and I recognized them. They were twenty years old. JC had given them to her one night in New York after a recording session that broke up at four in the morning. We came out of that great old studio in what had once been a church on Thirtieth between Second and Third, we came out and piled into one of the big Caddy limos and wound up at a joint in Harlem. At about seven we were back in the street looking for a place to have breakfast, JC and the Traveling Executioner’s Band, and it was about fifteen degrees with a lashing wind and it was desolate and blasted and empty with newspapers and crap blowing in the gutters. A little newsstand was just opening up and there was a fire in a trash basket, flames blowing away in shreds and tatters. And there was, honest to God, a gum-ball machine next to a rack of newspapers.

  JC started popping nickels into the slot, bubble gum for everybody. Bubble gum and dumb little prizes, little plastic doodads, rings and cars and dice and monkeys … and these two little black plastic pistols. A perfect little Luger and a perfect little Smith & Wesson .38, each about an inch or so in length. Annie was dressed all in black and white; she used to say she wasn’t a technicolor person. She loved the little guns but JC wouldn’t give them to her. Later that day he went to a goldsmith down in the village who made 24-karat studs and turned them into earrings. JC always said he wanted to sleep with a woman carrying a gun. That night he told Annie DeWinter for the first time that he loved her.

  They’d lasted a long time, those earrings.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said, her huge eyes staring into mine, the long lashes beating slowly.

  I nodded. What was there to say?

  “Did you come back for me, Trip?”

  “Ah, Annie … never one to beat about the bush. That’s awfully sixties, I must say. We live in a new age of prevarication … lies—”

  “I don’t, Trip. You do, I guess, not me.”

  “I’m sure you’re r
ight, Annie.”

  “Be straight with me. Did you come back for me?”

  “Jesus, Annie. Are we time travelers?”

  “You are. I know that. Did you come back for me?”

  “I don’t know—you’re not alone—”

  “Does that sort of thing stand in your way these days?”

  “Go easy, cowboy. Smile when you say that … I just got here. And you’re the one with someone in your life—”

  Her lower lip jutted out, gave her a rakish, determined look. She was forty-five. I didn’t quite understand how that could be. “That didn’t stop you.” Her gaze softened and she patted my hand again. “What’s on your mind? I’ll try to do this your way. You were always into artifice. Illusions. I was never good at that. Arabesques, that was you. Complexity for its own sake.” She looked down, then took a swallow of beer. “What’s on your mind, Trip?”

  “A lot of people are looking for JC,” I said.

  “Ah.”

  “And I’m one of them.”

  She laughed at that. Then she said, “Come on, let’s get out and go for a walk.” She caught my eye. “And you’re one of them. That’s grand, Trip, really grand.”

  The pigeons flew up in force, nervously, as the afternoon thunder cracked loudly. The crowds were tourist-thick, but we moved through them and headed off down the King’s Road past the Duke of Yorks, then began angling off to the left toward the Chelsea Embankment. The rain fell steadily but it was light, more sound effects than torrents. We mooched along the way we used to when we were young. Our concerns, however, were very different now. I sketched out the situation for her but left out the scary parts. Scaring her wasn’t the point. I wanted her kept out of it. It should never have touched her at all, for either of our sakes. The least I could do now was control it, move on. But Heidi had seen the picture of Alec Truman and we had to deal with it.