by Thomas Perry
Bala gasped for air, his face contorted into an open-mouthed mask. “Wait,” he said. “I’m Carlo Balacontano.”
“You’ve been trying to kill me.”
Bala’s eyes focused on Schaeffer as though he had just realized who he was. He rasped, “I can fix this. All of it. I have the money.”
“You were safe in prison. You should have stayed.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. That’s why I made sure you got out.”
Bala’s hand slithered toward the inner pocket of his jacket. Schaeffer waited until he could tell the hand had reached the weapon, then fired his .45 pistol through the old man’s forehead.
Schaeffer picked up the brass casing his pistol had ejected, walked back across the pasture to the house, and went inside. He disassembled the AR-15 rifle and picked up the six brass casings that had been ejected onto the living room floor.
There was still quite a bit of work to do. He went to the barn where his car was parked, uncovered it, and threw the tarp over a lawn mower. He climbed to the loft, retrieved his remaining belongings, swept away his footprints, and climbed back down to put his weapons and belongings into the car.
Next, he looked closely at the backhoe that was parked with the other machinery. It was not so different from the one that Don Sarkassian had taught him to operate to sift the dirt and sand on the firing range when he was a kid. He saw the key hanging in the cab, sat in the seat and tried it, but the battery was dead. He looked at all the other machinery and found that the battery in one of the two tractors was strong, so he traded it for the battery of the backhoe.
He had to siphon some gasoline from the tractor’s tank and pour it into the backhoe, then drain the tank of the second tractor to fill the backhoe’s tank. In a few minutes he managed to get the machine started. He let it idle to warm up while he opened the big barn door and drove his car out. Then he drove the backhoe out and down the farm road as far as the pasture behind the stable. He began to dig.
He calculated that he would need a hole about ten feet wide, forty feet long, and seven feet deep, to do a proper job. He worked at the project for hours without stopping. He found that the backhoe Sarkassian had taught him to use about fifty years earlier had been much harder to operate than this one, which had a more powerful engine, more responsive controls, and a much better seat. He worked quickly once he got used to the backhoe, and his scoop dug deeper into soft, yielding levels of earth.
This part of the country had been forests since the last ice age, so the ground was a mixture of plant matter and ground-up minerals, and the bedrock was far below. He dumped each big shovelful of dirt he lifted out onto the ground, and when the glow of the sun looked as though it might soon be too weak to let him work any longer, he decided it meant that he was done.
He drove the backhoe out of the big trench, climbed down from the seat, walked to the front of the house where the two black SUVs were parked, and got into the first one. The key was still in it and so was the dead driver. He pushed the man into the passenger seat and drove the SUV into the field where Carlo Balacontano lay dead. He dragged and lifted the body into the back seat, drove to the big trench he had dug, lined the SUV up carefully, and drove it down the incline to the end. He found he had made the trench just about as narrow as it could be to still allow him to open the driver’s side door far enough to get out.
He walked to the second vehicle but didn’t see a key. He found it in the pants pocket of one of the two dead advance men. He drove their SUV close to the front porch, loaded the two bodies into the rear hatch, loaded in the remaining body, and then drove the SUV into the trench.
Because of the incline, he couldn’t drive the second SUV down far enough to get the roof completely below ground level, but that was all right. He wanted the bodies to be found within a day or so, to be sure all the men who thought that killing Schaeffer would make them rich learned that it wouldn’t anymore. The man who would have paid them was dead.
He got into the backhoe and then scraped and shoveled the mounds of dirt back into the trench on top of the cars. The volume of the two SUVs was great enough so that the dirt he’d dug out more than covered both vehicles when he was finished. The top of the second SUV rose a couple of feet above ground level in a small mound. When he was satisfied, he drove the backhoe back into its place in the barn.
Next he went to work on the final touches in the house. It took him about two hours to be sure he’d removed any sign that could have proved who the intruder had been. Then he drove from the farm toward the south, and in the dark he took all his own ammunition and disassembled weapons and disposed of them in bodies of water along the way.
He stopped at a hotel on Long Island and made reservations for his flight from JFK to Paris, then showered and put on new clothes. He left the car he’d bought in a parking lot with the keys in it before he walked to the well-lit spot where the Lyft driver was to pick him up to take him to the airport.
35
Elizabeth Waring was in her friend David’s apartment in Boca Raton, watching him bring the two plates to the table. He said, “I think you’re going to like this. I was planning it for the next time you came to Florida, and here you are.”
She looked down at her plate. “It smells wonderful. What is it?”
“It’s chicken paprikash, a humble dish, but deservedly revered among bachelor chefs of Hungary and elsewhere.”
“I thought that might be what it was. I can hardly wait.”
David said, “Years ago when I was at the UN, a Hungarian diplomat told me that when he was young, his love life depended on this recipe, and that the women he served it to had made all the terrible things in his life bearable.”
Elizabeth dipped the tip of her fork in and tasted the sauce. “I can see how you might impress a woman, particularly during a period when food was scarce and she was close to starving.”
“Not the best compliment I’ve had. But I have many more recipes. I was in the State Department for years.”
“No you weren’t, you liar,” she said. “You were in—and that means still are in—the CIA. State was just your cover.”
“Believe that if you want,” he said.
“Well, it helped you meet some great cooks.”
“And now I dine with great women.”
“Not too many, I hope.”
“I meant you,” he said. “When are you going to retire and travel with me?”
“Interesting coincidence,” she said. “Just before I left for the airport this afternoon, I filed my notice of intention to retire in three months.”
David grinned, knelt, and said, “Will you marry me?”
“What?”
“I’m unprepared right now, but I’ll get you a ring with a diamond the size of a brussels sprout tomorrow.”
“No, of course not,” she laughed. “Get up and stop it.”
He sat back at the table.
“I’m not marrying anybody,” she said. “I’m a grandmother.”
“And I’m a grandfather.”
“So you should know better. I’m perfectly pleased with my sinful ways and plan to keep them up. Now that I know you cook things besides fried eggs, I may visit more often, but I’ll never marry again.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “I guess all I can give you is dessert.”
“Perfect,” she said.
He got up and disappeared into the kitchen. Elizabeth reached into the purse at her feet and looked at her cell phone. The message began, “Carlo Balacontano has been murdered.” She sighed. “Of course he has.” She turned the phone off, slipped it into the purse, and pushed the purse away with her foot.
36
The man with the British passport that said “Charles Ackerman” spent five days in Paris walking and scanning the faces around him to be sure he had not brought anything unwanted back acro
ss the Atlantic behind him. It was a self-imposed quarantine.
At the end of the five days in Paris, he took a train from Gare du Nord to St. Pancras station in London. It arrived on schedule in two hours and twenty minutes, and he took the underground to Victoria Station and then another train to Bath.
He carried his well-traveled leather suitcase along the streets, walking past the familiar sights and enjoying the pleasant feel of the place in spite of the unusual number of college students and tourists.
He kept going to Holroyd House, Meg’s family’s favorite home, and the place where he and Meg had lived since their marriage. He went past the Royal Crescent and uphill for half a block on one of the next streets, climbed the stone steps, and unlocked the big creamy-white front door. He walked toward the rear of the house along the hallway, then turned and stepped into Meg’s office.
He stood by her desk, facing the window, where she could look out at the bright flowers of the eighteenth-century garden, but she was not there. He walked the rest of the house, but there was no sign of her. The place looked as though everything had been dusted, polished, and cleaned, but he’d noticed the calendar on her desk still had the date 5 May on its top page.
He took a set of keys from a drawer of her desk, walked out the door and a few streets away to the house he had bought right after he had arrived in Bath over thirty years ago. At the time he had been suffering from the knowledge that he had implacable enemies, and his imagination had not yet been restrained by educated taste. He had remodeled the house to install an indoor pool, brick-and-steel reinforcements to the outer walls, and thick glass bricks where windows had been. He had turned it into a small fortress. Since his marriage, he hadn’t lived in the place for more than a few days at a time, usually when Meg was away on a trip or they were waiting out crews of painters or carpenters working at Holroyd House.
He unlocked the door of his house and walked through the living room to the den that he had designed years ago to find Meg sitting at his desk, looking at her laptop computer. She sensed she wasn’t alone and looked up.
The tears welled in her green eyes and streaked down to her chin, and she smiled the smile that had caught him over thirty years ago. She called out, “Oh, there you are, Michael. It’s been weeks and weeks. I’ve been planning your funeral. I guess all that work is wasted now.”
He smiled. “Where were you going to bury me?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure if I would get your body back. If I did, you would be in the family crypt with me, where our bones would intertwine. If I couldn’t get your body, you’d still get a tastefully engraved plaque, like the ancestors who died at sea.”
“Since I couldn’t have a noble birth, a noble burial is nice.”
“You wouldn’t be the worst man in the family crypt by any means.”
They stood face to face and then kissed in a long, gentle embrace while he felt her tears streaming on his cheek. After a while, she pushed him back a little. “I’ll bet you would like a strong drink. Let me make you one.”
“A little later, I think,” he said. “I’ve been traveling most of the day. Right now I’d like to get these clothes off and take a bath. No, a swim, since we’re here.”
“An excellent idea,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll join you. I don’t think either of us has a bathing suit here though. They’re all in York.”
He put his arm around her waist, and they walked across the foyer toward the steps that led to the dressing rooms and the pool below. He said, “I suggest we do without them.”
“I was sure you would. Did things go well in Australia?”
“Not so bad. Practically a false alarm. Is all well here?”
“Now it is.”
THE END