Two Women

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘I’m protecting the firm.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘You don’t need to know that, either.’

  ‘They know what you’re going to do?’

  ‘That’s why I stayed on, for the extra year. To tidy things up and to bring it all to an end. You think I …’ There was another familiar hesitation. ‘It’s all going to be resolved.’

  ‘Going to be,’ seized Carver, at once. ‘Hasn’t it been, yet?’

  ‘It’s my problem. I’m sorting it out.’

  Carver gazed around Northcote’s mahogany-panelled, leather-Chesterfielded office with its corner-window glimpse of Battery Park City and the intervening pillared monuments to wealth and power and corporate cunning, for once – for the first time – not feeling the comfort, and the pride, of being part of it. He said: ‘I’m aware of a possible criminal activity. There are regulations governing that. Quite a lot, in fact.’

  Northcote looked blankly at him. Then indignantly – close to being big-voiced again – he said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘I’m being professional. In everything you’ve said – every inference you’ve made – you’ve assumed I’ll go along with what you’ve got in mind: everything you’ve got in mind but won’t tell me.’

  Northcote held up a hand. ‘A long time ago, when I was first starting out and needed every break I could get …’ The block came but he made jerky gestures with the still raised hand against Carver intruding. ‘I got caught up in a situation which developed as it did … innocently caught up, with no idea what was happening until I was involved. Couldn’t get out. I’ve lived with it, all these years. Now it’s over: I’m promising you that it’s over. I’m leaving you with one of the foremost accountancy firms in the financial world. You’re already a rich man and you’re going to become richer. You’ve got it all and not just because I’m handing it over to you: because you’re good – the successor I hoped you would be – and because you deserve it … I … you …’ he stumbled once more to a halt. ‘You earned it. You trying to tell me you’re now going to tear it all down – pull all the houses down, to use your words – by going to the SEC or whoever to put the gun into your own mouth and pull the trigger?’

  At that moment Carver wasn’t sure what he was telling anyone and certainly not what he was being told. ‘We’re involved with organized crime! The Mafia!’

  Northcote took a long time to reply. Finally he said: ‘I’m handling it.’

  ‘You going to be able to give me an unbreakable assurance that by Friday it’ll all be over?’ What was he saying? Why was he accepting it?

  ‘Dead and buried,’ insisted Northcote, at once. ‘Who I’m seeing tonight is their representative …’ He looked at his watch. ‘And I’m already late.’ There was another brief smile. ‘I telephoned, to warn him. He’ll be waiting.’

  ‘I want to come with you,’ announced Carver.

  Northcote snorted yet another dismissive laugh. ‘It began and it ends with me. Only me. The protection for this firm – and for you – is your knowing nothing, your meeting no one.’

  ‘I do know!’

  ‘You’re staying away. Out of it.’

  ‘You said you were staying over tonight?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We have to talk tomorrow. I need a lot more guarantees.’

  ‘You’ve got them.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ insisted Carver. ‘Tomorrow we talk specifics.’

  ‘Lunch,’ agreed Northcote. ‘It’ll be our own farewell celebration.’

  Nothing had emerged the way it should have done. The way he’d wanted. What he’d wanted – fervently hoped for – was booming-voiced offence and a provable, point-by-point, figure-by-figure denunciation of his every suspicion. What he’d got instead amounted to a confirmation – a near-immediate admission – of fraud and false accounting and involvement in organized crime – which meant Mafia – and criminal conspiracy and criminal complicity and probably a lot more indictments he couldn’t, and most certainly didn’t want, to think of. It was all too much, too overwhelming, to contemplate. What did he want to think of? The best answer. Or was it the right answer? And was the best and right answer the easiest way out? Or the most difficult? He’d examined George Northcote’s argument from every which way and from every which way what the older man had said about bringing the house down around him – throwing his own words back at him – made the only logical sense. Of course he would prove his professional integrity and rectitude by disclosing the indications of crime to the SEC – to every governing authority – but in so doing he’d bring about the collapse of one of Wall Street’s most prestigious and internationally trusted financial names. Every sort of criminal and governing-body investigation would take months, during which they would most likely be suspended and during which any proper work would in any case be impossible. And there would also be the personal fallout. No matter how right and correct his actions, he would publicly be seen – and despised – as a man totally destroying his own father-in-law by exposing the man at the age of sixty-seven to inevitable imprisonment and an inevitable multimillion-dollar fine. And even if George Northcote accepted every responsibility, in Wall Street – in the global financial village – the mud would stick and those clients who didn’t despise him personally would rush to wash their hands of all and every association. George W. Northcote International would be relegated as another greed-driven, illegally operating financial pariah.

  ‘Hello. My name’s Jane and I’m your wife.’

  So engrossed was he that Carver physically started at his wife’s voice, smiling apologetically across the dinner table. ‘Sorry. I was thinking.’

  ‘Darling, you were so deep in thought you were out of sight! You haven’t said a word for at least the last thirty minutes. Or eaten a thing!’

  Carver sipped his wine, setting his knife and fork aside. ‘I ate a big lunch,’ he lied. How would their marriage withstand his blowing the whistle on her father? Her mother had died when Jane was fourteen and practically from the time she was sixteen until their marriage – and even after – Jane had been at her father’s side at all the charity events he’d sponsored and hosted, which were literally beyond count. The feeling – the bond – between father and daughter was umbilical. Jane, whom Carver sometimes thought to be even stronger than her father, would be the person to despise him the most.

  ‘I don’t ever remember you like this!’

  ‘Trying to sort out one or two things in my mind. Making choices.’

  ‘Involving me?’ she asked, with coquettish confidence.

  ‘You know the answer to that.’ He smiled back, trying to match her lightness. There was no feeling of hypocrisy or guilt, both of which he’d long ago rationalized, as he had all the uncertainties about morality.

  John Carver was not a promiscuous man: indeed, he’d sometimes considered himself undersexed. His affair with Alice was his first and he was sure it would be his last. And hopefully lasting. He’d never consciously set out to seduce Alice Belling, nor she him. George Northcote had introduced them when Alice had come for the first interview session and he’d asked Carver to handle any subsequent questions, which he did on three occasions, twice over lunch. The fourth occasion, at her apartment on the West Side, had been to read the finished article, which was immaculately factual and in his opinion brilliantly written, which he told her, and her intended joking kiss of gratitude had become something more when he’d inadvertently turned towards her. She’d said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and he’d said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and they’d kissed again, intentionally this time, and after they’d made love they’d solemnly agreed it was one of those unexpected, accidental things that had been wonderful and should be immediately forgotten. He’d telephoned the following day and they’d lunched together and gone to bed together and the excitement – the flattery – of his first sexual dalliance had become a deeply loving affair.

  Which was what it was. Quite simply he loved
two women, neither of whom were endangered by the other. Carver would never leave Jane. Nor did he want – nor intend – ever to leave Alice. If their relationship ended it would be Alice’s decision – which she insisted she’d never make – and if she did he knew he would consider it an unsought and very much unwanted divorce. The word – divorce – lodged in his mind, refocusing it. Carver was sure Jane loved him as much as she was able: as she ever would. Maybe, even, that there would be love – bruised, wounded, but still some love – if Jane ever learned about him and Alice. But he was equally sure – surer even – she wouldn’t be able to love him, stay married to him, if he were responsible for publicly ruining and humiliating a father she adored. At once the conviction that Jane would reject him overwhelmed his fear of what effect any disclosure would have upon the firm and even more upon him, personally.

  ‘It must be important, for you to be like this?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘You want to tell me about it?’

  ‘I’ve gotten things out of proportion,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s what I meant about making choices, which wasn’t it at all. I’m trying to balance things.’ He never compared Jane with Alice or Alice with Jane, because they were incomparable, but physically they were remarkably similar, except for the most obvious difference of Jane being naturally deep brunette against Alice’s blondness, again natural. There was nothing to choose – a wrong word because he would never choose – between them in height nor in their small-busted slimness.

  The difference was in their personalities: their imbued motivations. Jane had always been cared for: cosseted, accustomed from childhood to the best, although she had by no judgement or criticism – certainly not by him – grown from a spoiled child into a spoiled woman. Jane was someone grateful of her privileged upbringing, recognizing her advantages and working always to give back. Which she did sometimes with an almost relentless determination better fitted to a business environment than a charity organizer: indeed, Carver had occasionally wondered why Northcote had not groomed Jane to take over the firm upon his retirement. Carver’s reflection stopped at the thought. Knowing what little he did now about George Northcote’s criminal involvement was the most likely answer to that uncertainty.

  Alice’s character had come from a similar but cracked mould. As far as Carver understood, although it was not a biography he’d deeply explored, her parents had at one time – briefly – been even richer and she more indulgently cared for than Jane. But her father had been a bull-and-bear-market gambler whose fortunes appropriately rose and fell upon his prediction of which way the market would go. His disastrously misplaced switch, between bull and bear when the markets were going in the opposite direction – and not reversing, when he’d further invested in the expectation that they would – financially ruined Alice’s family. Alice was left with a suicide note of apology, a final year at Harvard Business School, a roller coaster personal awareness that money was a buy-or-sell marketable commodity, not the green stuff in her purse, and a street savvy to invest her way extremely comfortably to her graduation ceremony. Unrecorded upon that graduation certificate – although an indication, perhaps, of how successfully she would later pursue her chosen heads-or-tails career – was that Alice Belling was not just a woman totally emancipated in mind, body and attitude but more inherently streetwise than her finally unable-to-cope father.

  ‘Hello, again!’

  Shit, thought Carver. ‘It’s not my best night, is it?’

  ‘Is it a big problem, whatever it is?’

  ‘I don’t bring work home, remember?’ That wasn’t even true.

  ‘You just did.’

  ‘Let’s forget it, Jane.’

  She looked surprised at the tone in his voice. ‘It’s nothing to do with us, is it?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’ He should have handled everything better than this!

  ‘Did you see Dad today?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘He’s going back up to Litchfield tomorrow.’

  ‘I know.’ It had been Jane’s urging that they buy a weekend house less than five miles from her father in Litchfield County, both close to Woodridge Lake.

  ‘I thought I might drive up with him, for company.’

  ‘Why don’t you do that?’

  Manuel came enquiringly into the dining room and Jane said to Carver: ‘Do you want anything else? Dessert?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m full.’

  ‘That’s a lie, but OK.’ To the butler she said: ‘After you’ve cleared away we shan’t need you any more tonight. Thank you. Tell Luisa it was a wonderful meal, as usual. But we weren’t hungry.’ Neither Manuel nor his wife, who cooked, lived in.

  ‘Den or where?’ she asked Carver.

  ‘Den,’ he decided, following her along the linking corridor. The eight-room duplex on East 62nd Street had been her father’s wedding present.

  ‘You want a brandy?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I’m worried about Dad,’ she announced.

  ‘Worried how?’

  ‘So often losing the thread of what he’s saying. That’s why I want to go up with him tomorrow: persuade him to see Dr Jamieson.’

  ‘It’ll take some persuading.’

  ‘I want you to help me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I want him to stop work. Completely. That’ll be twice as difficult as getting him to see a doctor. But I’m asking you to try.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Carver. ‘I really will.’

  Stanley Burcher was unique and knew it and was not concerned that no one else ever would, because fame – or rather notoriety – held no interest for him. The total opposite, in fact. Stanley Burcher prided himself upon being the person no one ever saw or noticed. He was a totally asexual bachelor whose only sensuality came from his association with the people for whom he practised and the knowledge of their criminality. Total evilness – and the people he acted for in such an unusual way were totally evil – fascinated him, as anthropologists are fascinated by unknown species. Which Burcher recognized himself to be too, because he was not revulsed by anything they did. Burcher maintained a small house on the unfashionable north side of Grand Cayman, in the Caribbean, and a box-numbered office in the capital, Georgetown, because Grand Cayman was the tax-avoidance haven in which the people he represented hid their vast fortunes. However, he lived for the majority of the time in distinguished but discreet hotels throughout the world, ensuring that the affairs of his exclusive clients never attracted public attention, most particularly from any law-enforcement authority.

  The Harvard Club, in which he waited that night, just off New York’s Fifth Avenue, represented an unaccustomed luxury, as did most of his regular meeting places with George Northcote. Burcher liked the meetings and he liked Northcote. Northcote was a man who, like himself, had been presented long ago with an opportunity, taken it and prospered. He was surprised at Northcote’s lateness: Northcote had never before delayed an appointment and was now running later than the rescheduled time. But at that moment he appeared at the maître d’s station.

  ‘Sorry I’m so damned late,’ apologized Northcote, approaching with his hand outstretched in greeting.

  ‘Not a problem,’ insisted the quietly spoken Burcher, who represented – through their combined consigliori – the five Mafia Families of New York.

  Three

  George Northcote was a meticulous dawn starter (‘I originated the early-worm philosophy’) but when Carver made his first attempt at nine thirty he was told Northcote hadn’t arrived: there’d been no warning of a delay, either. Carver was told the same when he called fifteen minutes later and again at ten. Carver telephoned Northcote’s apartment on West 66th Street to be told by Jack Jennings, the butler, that he’d missed Northcote by minutes but that he was on his way.

  Northcote came on to Carver’s
inter-office phone at ten thirty. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  ‘George! You know damned well there is a problem, a big one! Why are you signing off double-accounted figures if the companies aren’t going public?’

  ‘It’s totally the opposite to what you think: what you imagine you’ve worked out. Which isn’t important. I’ve said I’m resolving it.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to hearing how it went.’

  There was a pause in the still subdued, no-longer hectoring voice. ‘I think it would be a good idea to postpone lunch.’

  ‘I don’t. Nothing’s being postponed, George. I’ve made the reservation and we’re going to keep it. And you’re going to tell me what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘You think you can talk to me like this!’

  ‘In these circumstances, yes.’

  ‘You feel good?’

  The rumble-voiced belligerence, too long in coming, momentarily silenced Carver before giving him his platform. ‘No, George. I don’t feel good about any of this. You know how I feel? I feel so sick so deep in my stomach that any moment I might physically throw up.’

  ‘You watch – and listen – to too much television.’

  ‘Stop it, George! We’re not talking television. We’re talking one great heap of shit you’ve gotten this firm, yourself – us all – into …’ Carver stopped as the thought came to him. ‘And gotten Jane into, as well. The booking’s for one o’clock, at the club.’

  ‘I’ve things to do. I’ll see you there.’

  Carver gave way to his anger. ‘Don’t be late, George. I don’t want anything to be too late.’

  Northcote wasn’t late. The meticulous timekeeper was actually early but Carver was intentionally ahead of him by more than thirty minutes, ensuring their table was beyond overhearing, nursing his mineral water until his father-in-law arrived, trying to rehearse himself for a scene for which there was no script. Too late acknowledging the emptiness of the gesture to be just that, empty, he matched Northcote’s previous day’s refusal to stand. Northcote compounded Carver’s belated embarrassment by pointedly standing beside their table, refusing the chair withheld as an invitation to sit from the frowning maître d’.