‘Right,’ Tan growled. ‘But only very outside chance.’
‘We won’t risk it, though,’ I decided. ‘I’ll have a private jet on the ground ready to move. When?’
‘It long flight, Singapore to eastern seaboard.’ He was silent, calculating. ‘Sunday morning here now, maybe can’t get on a plane tonight. Make it six, Monday evening, USA time.’
‘Right; we’ll be ready.’ I frowned, as if he could see me. ‘When you get these photographs, Jimmy, you will shut these people down, won’t you?’
‘Oz,’ he chuckled, ‘they not know what hit them.’
45
The waiting, again. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were singing in my brain all that night and all through Sunday. Maddy never left her room, and she was never left alone either. The security bolt was on all night and during the day either Mike or I was always with her.
I left all the arrangements until the Monday morning as a tiny piece of extra security. They didn’t take long to make. I booked a twelve-seater Gulfstream jet, to be on the ground and fuelled up by five thirty, ready to take off on command, destination Newark, ready to connect with a British Airways flight to Heathrow for Mrs Primavera Blackstone, Ms Madeleine January and me, and with the train to Penn Station for Mr Benedict Luker.
The terminal building at Trenton Mercer Airport is very small, they told me, but they did have a VIP room which they’d be happy to prepare for the private use of my party and me prior to our flight.
The charter company wanted passenger names in advance: a TSA requirement, they said. I gave them mine, Prim’s and Benny’s, and they didn’t quibble over the fourth member of the group, Doe, Jane, Ms.
When all that was done, I left Mike guarding our charge and took my ex-wife for a walk, a tour of the State Capitol building, an impressive pile, which is, they say, the second oldest in the US. Neither of us was really interested, though: there were things, I sensed, that we wanted, no, needed, to say to each other, but they’d take more time than we had available.
That’s the trouble with the really important things, and time. Too often, there isn’t enough of it; too often, it’s the wrong moment. That, of course, just ain’t true. For matters important enough, there’s always enough time; there’s never a wrong moment.
But, as it was, we whiled away a couple of hours, looking at old stones in silence, until it was time to gather the team and get the show on the road.
I drove us the short distance to the airport in the rental car. I’d arranged for Hertz to collect it. It was five forty when we arrived, were greeted by the airport manager and shown into our private room. As he left us, Madeleine stepped up to me. She kissed my cheek, and slipped a small square envelope into the breast pocket of my shirt. ‘Just a little card,’ she whispered, ‘to say sorry and thanks for everything.’
We sat on our hands for the next twenty minutes. I’d set the alarm on my watch for six exactly. Everybody jumped when it went off.
Two more minutes went by, before we heard a soft knock on the door. I went across, opened it, and almost cried out in my surprise. Standing there in a silk dress with a slit up the side, a bag over her shoulder and her letter of introduction clutched in her hand was Marie Lin. ‘What the hell?’ I gasped.
‘My father sent me,’ she said. ‘He trusts nobody in the world more than me.’
46
When I stood aside to allow her into the room, I could see the flash of astonishment in Mike’s eyes, but he controlled it well, and didn’t let it transfer to his mouth.
She insisted that I read her letter of introduction, and I went along with it. The notepaper bore the embossed crest of the Government of Singapore.
Dear Oz [it began],
Allow me to introduce formally my daughter, Tan May Wee, who is my emissary in this matter. I apologise if this has come as a surprise to you, but I ask you to accept that when one’s father is head of the security police it is wise to pursue one’s profession under an assumed name.
Marie is indeed an aspiring actress, and she was very honoured to make your acquaintance in Singapore, although she was unaware, until I told her of the incident in the Next Page, that you had made mine.
She is a good, brave woman, and you may trust her to complete our mission properly and to return the material safely to me, so that use may be made of it. Yours truly Jimmy
When I’d finished, I passed it to Mike; he read it in turn, unsmiling, then put it back into its envelope and handed it back to me.
‘Okay,’ I said to Maddy. ‘This is Marie, the agent of the Singapore security service, and she’s here to take charge of your pictures. So, hand them over and let’s get the hell out of here.’
She looked at me, almost gratefully, then reached into her bag, removed an HP personal organiser, a state-of-the-art model, and handed it over. ‘Go to “Home” then “Pictures” if you want to see them,’ she offered.
‘My father said I must not look at them,’ Marie told her, ‘for my own safety.’ She switched off the palmtop and removed the memory card from its slot. ‘They are stored here?’ Maddy nodded. ‘Then that will be sufficient.’ She handed back the wee silver computer.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now, come on. Let’s board the jet.’
A second door in the VIP room led directly on to the tarmac. I opened it, and found the co-pilot waiting outside. ‘If you’ll come with me,’ he said. He was a big, beefy lad with a blond crew-cut. His ID said he was called Scott, and he looked as if, at some point in his college career, he could have been a pretty effective nose tackle.
Mike took each of the girls by the elbow and steered them after the officer towards the Gulfstream, which was parked only thirty yards away. They wheeled their luggage and his was slung over his shoulder. I waited in the doorway with Marie. ‘I want to thank you for this,’ I told her, ‘and your father. You’ve saved a woman’s life here.’
She looked at me as she had as she disappeared down the escalator at the Clarke Quay MRT station, the last time I’d seen her. ‘Then thank me,’ she whispered. ‘Stay behind with me for a while. I know you well enough now.’
I felt a tiny shudder run through me. I almost turned and walked away, as I bloody well should have done. Instead I looked at her, or maybe the devil in me looked at her. Again, I almost turned away, and then I heard inside my head a voice, crystal clear, a voice I’d known all my life: Jan’s voice, my sister’s voice, my soul-mate’s voice.
‘You can trust this girl,’ it said. ‘You can trust her with your life.’
I turned and looked towards the plane. The other three were on board, and Scott was standing at the top of the steps. ‘Go on without me,’ I shouted to him. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’ll drive the hire car back to New York.’
‘Very good, sir,’ he called back, then stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
A few seconds later the plane began its taxi. As it pulled away, the last thing I saw was Prim’s face, framed in a small round window. I could see mischief in her eyes; I could almost hear her chuckle.
47
I drove us back to the hotel and checked in again. If the desk clerk was surprised, he didn’t say so, even when I checked in under a different false name than the one I’d used before. I suppose that in Trenton, New Jersey, they see many things.
Marie began to undress as soon as I closed the door. I watched her as she slipped her shoulders out of the silk dress and let it fall to the floor. I watched her as she slipped off her thong with her thumbs.
And then it was my turn.
I made love to her slowly, very gently, taking my time, as I sensed she wanted. She winced a little when I entered her, and I realised she was a virgin, only the second I’d ever been with. I held nothing back; I gave her the best I could. Maybe here I should lie to you, and say that it was magical: yes, maybe I should, but it wasn’t. It was just all right, for me at least, although she wouldn’t have known if it had been cannon-fire, she’d nothing to set me against.
I told her it had been wonderful, though; well, you do, don’t you, if there’s anything of the gentleman about you? After a while, we did it again, and this time, Marie contributed more, although I could tell that she was making it up as she went along, trying to please me as best she could.
About ten minutes before ten, she got up. ‘I have to go downstairs,’ she said, as she headed for the bathroom. ‘I need things for morning. There’s a pharmacy across the street.’
‘I’ll go,’ I volunteered. ‘You stay here.’
She smiled at me. ‘Don’t be silly. You can’t shop for what woman needs.’
I watched her again, as she dressed this time. It didn’t take long. When she was ready she picked up her bag and stepped through the door, closing it behind her.
I lay there for a while, still naked, wondering what the hell I’d done, and where it was going, if anywhere. I think I began to feel ashamed, but as it turned out I didn’t have time to dwell on it.
To divert my thoughts, I picked up the television remote and switched it on. The hotel menu popped up on screen; I pushed a number at random and found myself watching more bloody baseball. I moved on to the next channel.
‘Blackstone.’ My name came out at me; I was watching the local CBS station and they were talking about me. ‘I repeat,’ said the announcer, ‘our breaking news story. English movie star Oz Blackstone is believed to have died tonight when a private jet crashed in a New Jersey swamp, en route for Newark Airport.
‘He was one of four passengers on the chartered Gulfstream when it came down. Emergency services report that so far five bodies have been recovered, those of the two pilots, the flight attendant, a woman as yet unnamed, and the promising New York mystery writer, Mr Benedict Luker. Police and fire-fighters are still searching for the remains of Mr Blackstone and of his former wife, Mrs Primavera Blackstone, the sister of Oscar-nominated Dawn Phillips, wife of Miles Grayson. More news and pictures on this story as it develops.’
48
I suppose I knew then that Marie wasn’t coming back. In fact, I guess I knew everything, although it was quite a while before I was able to lie down, quietly and with something approaching rationality, and put all of the pieces together.
At that moment, though, I was struck down, numb with grief. Primavera was dead. I could have stayed behind for another night in Trenton with her, rather than with Marie. I had been thinking about that in the State Capitol building, and so had she. If either of us had come out with it, said what we were thinking, given voice to our unquenchable lust for each other, then Marie would have been catching the plane back to her father, and Prim would be alive today.
And Maddy was dead: I’d gone to all that trouble to save her life, I’d thought I’d triumphed, but after all my efforts to save her from the gangsters she was still stone dead, crisped in a swamp in New Jersey that had been a Mafia dumping ground for decades. That’s a fine irony for you, Blackstone, is it not?
Dylan? Yes, he was dead too, but he’d been fucking dead for years.
The television was still droning on: they had moved on to the day’s death toll in Iraq, but I had my own casualty list to grieve over. I forced myself into action. I got up, showered and dressed. Then a horrible thought struck me. I snatched up my cell-phone and called Susie.
It was Conrad Kent who answered. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before I’d had a chance to speak, ‘Mrs Blackstone is not taking calls.’
The media jackals were gnawing at my corpse already. ‘Shut up,’ I shouted at my assistant. ‘This is Oz. I wasn’t on that fucking plane. Now put me on to my wife.’
It took me a while to calm Susie down. It took me a minute or so to believe truly that it was me speaking to her. Christ, I was so fucked up in my head that I wasn’t even a hundred per cent sure myself.
‘What happened?’ she asked, when she could speak properly.
‘The plane must have been sabotaged, somehow. It was flying Maddy to safety but the Triads got to it.’
‘So they killed her, after all.’
‘Yes, but she wasn’t the target,’ I told her, even as the first significant part of the truth hit me, clear and ringing as a bell. ‘Mike was.’
49
The rest of it didn’t even begin to come together until I made it back to New York, driving, dangerously, through the fog that seemed to have spread inside my head. Everything was instinctive. I don’t remember anything about the journey. The navigation system was switched off, but I made it on my personal auto-pilot, just heading north and taking signs as they came up.
I must have been burning rubber for it was just after midnight when I drove out of the Lincoln Tunnel and on to Manhattan. I dumped the car in a Hertz drop-off location somewhere in the Forties, shoved the keys and papers at the receiving clerk without a word, took my bags and almost stumbled into the night. I was headed anywhere but towards the Algonquin: I wanted never to go back there, ever again. Still I don’t, and I won’t.
I walked across to Broadway, then headed south. It was early Monday morning and the city was as quiet as it ever gets, so quiet that some idiot tried to mug me. He was standing in a doorway just past Thirty-eighth; as I passed he pointed a gun at me and told me to give him my wallet. I looked at him, and considered his options. He didn’t look drug-crazy enough or scared enough to shoot me, so I snatched the pistol from him, pushed him back deeper into the doorway and beat him bloody, then shoved the barrel up his arse. I’m speaking literally here, folks. I told him, although I doubt if he was hearing anything, that if I turned and saw him crawling out on to the street I’d come back and pull the trigger, then I carried on in my aimless way.
Finally it dawned on me that I’d better get off the street before I killed somebody, so I checked myself into a hotel on West Thirty-second, just past the Empire. It wasn’t much better than a flophouse, and they gave me a room next to the lift-shaft. I don’t even remember now what it was called, but it had four walls and a roof, and that was all I wanted. As I lay there in the dark, the shock began to wear off. I began to come to terms (whatever the hell that actually means) with my grief, and I revisited it with a vengeance.
I cried for a while, for quite a while, for Primavera and for the times we had shared together, the good, the bad, the thrilling, the exciting, the downright scary. I cried for the love we had made, and for Tom. Soon I was going to have to tell him that he’d never see his mother again, other than in dreams. I’d try to find the positive side for him, though, when he was old enough, that he’d always see her young and beautiful, and that he wouldn’t have to watch her dynamism fade, and her body weaken and wither with age. I never saw that in my mother. I’d never see it with Jan, and I’d never see it with Prim.
It’s a terrible curse, being married to me: it’s as if you seal your fate when you sign the contract. I have been married three times and two of my wives have died prematurely, at the cold emotionless hand of Fate. Now I live my life in a constant state of fear for Susie, and with the dread that she might carry it too. I’ve found myself wondering whether I should leave her, for her own good, to try to protect her. But that didn’t do Primavera any good, did it?
I thought of all these things as I cried myself out, and then I began to think of what had brought them about, and I began to see more of the truth, beyond that first flash that I’d revealed to Susie.
First and foremost, I knew for sure that Sammy Goss hadn’t met us by accident: he’d been sent. Someone had noted my arrival in Sing, someone who knew all about Maddy January, and made the connection with me. Once Goss had latched on to me he hadn’t let go.
Only it had been more complicated than that. Something unexpected had happened. Someone entirely unlooked-for had turned up, and changed some people’s priorities.
I knew all these things: they followed a logical and inescapable pattern, yet it was all theory, all fucking Sherlock stuff, with no hard evidence, no reinforced concrete proof.
And yet there was, and I n
early threw it away.
I forced myself upright at eight fifteen next morning. The water pressure in the shower above my bath, its enamel worn almost through by countless thousands of feet, was so poor that it took me ten minutes to do the job according to my standards. I didn’t bother to shave: I wasn’t ready to look at myself in the mirror.
Back in the bedroom, I took a fresh shirt from my bag. When I had removed it from its wrapping, I picked up the one I had worn the day before, meaning to stuff it into the polythene and toss it all in the waste. But as I crumpled it in my hand, my fingers closed on the forgotten envelope in the pocket, Maddy January’s parting thank-you card.
I took it out and opened it. It was inscribed as she had said, but with it there was something else: another tiny square SD disk. ‘As a token of good faith,’ she had added, ‘and maybe a little insurance.’
50
As I stared at it, I felt as if someone had switched me back on. I had purpose again; I had things to do.
The first of those involved breakfast. Somehow I’d managed to skip lunch the day before, and I was starving. I checked out of the dosshouse and took a cab to Seventh and Fifty-fifth. They were between rush-hours in the Carnegie Deli, so I was afforded the luxury of a table on my own. I demolished a Woody Allen (lotsa corned beef, plus lotsa pastrami) and a side order of cinnamon toast, and I was on my second coffee refill when I was aware of a guy peering at me. He wore a white apron; it was too pristine for him to have been a cook, so I guessed that he had to be the owner. ‘Hey,’ he asked hoarsely, ‘ain’t you Oz Blackstone?’
I ran my hand over my heavy stubble. ‘So the beard didn’t fool you.’
‘Buddy, you’re supposed to be dead. It says so in the Daily News.’
For The Death Of Me Page 25