‘He’s a religious terrorist – the leader of an extreme evangelical movement calling itself the Global Message. He daren’t stay too long on American soil because he’s wanted by the FBI in connection with a number of bombings. So Victor Labrea does all his dirty work for him. Or did. He’s hospitalized now.’
‘But why should this Dennis Evelyn Branch want so much money? We must be talking about hundreds of millions!’
‘He’s talking about a worldwide crusade, and for that he needs funds. A war chest, I guess you’d call it. After all, he says he’s committed to nothing less than the wholesale conversion of every man, woman and child on this planet to his own particular brand of fundamentalism.’
‘How could he do that? You mean everybody – Catholics and Muslims and Hindu people, too? It’s impossible!’
‘Dennis Evelyn Branch doesn’t seem to think so. I don’t know what he’s planning to do, but if he succeeds, he’s going to start the biggest religious war in history.’
‘He sounds like a mad person.’
‘I don’t know. He wasn’t so mad that he couldn’t organize one of the most original extortion operations this city has ever seen, and get away with it.’
‘You said on the phone that you could get my money back.’
‘I’m going to try, sure. I have to try. My whole reputation depends on it. My life depends on it.’
‘Then how much do you need to go to Oslo?’
‘I don’t know. Oslo’s pretty pricey, and I don’t know how long this is going to take me.’
‘If I give you twenty-five thousand dollars?’
‘I guess that should cover it. Well, to begin with, anyhow.’
Davina Gambit turned to Eleanor. ‘I’ve heard of you, haven’t I? You’re a very famous woman. Very respected.’
‘I was,’ Eleanor corrected her.
‘To me, you still are. Do you think I can trust this man?’
‘Conor? Yes. I trust him, and I’m a pretty good judge of character. It’s my job, after all, characters.’
‘Then do something for me. You go to Norway with him. Look after him. Make sure that he doesn’t do anything too ridiculous. I know men like him. They’re always their own worst enemy.’
‘You want Eleanor to be my nursemaid?’ Conor protested.
‘Absolutely. All men need a nursemaid. Somebody to remind them that they’re only men. That was why I was good for Jack. And look at him now. All those bimbos on his arm, making a fool of himself.’
Conor said, ‘This could be very, very dangerous. We’re dealing with fanatics here. We’re dealing with people who are beyond fanatics.’
‘All the more reason you need somebody like Eleanor with you.’
‘What do you think, Eleanor? Wouldn’t you rather stay here with Sidney?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘There’s nothing much I can do for him, not just yet. It’s going to be months before he’s fully recovered. What happens after that … well, that depends on all sorts of different things, like how much nursing he’s going to need, and whether he wants us to get back together and whether I want us to.
‘I’m not getting any younger, Conor. I wasted four years of my life loving Sidney before. I’m not so sure that I can allow that to happen again.’
Conor reached across the table and took hold of her hand. Davina Gambit laid her hand on top of both of them, so that they looked like the Three Musketeers. ‘You’ll have your money in the morning. Give me your number and I’ll call you tomorrow morning at nine.’
Chapter 24
Conor was pouring himself a second cup of coffee when the phone rang. He picked it up and said, ‘Good morning, Ms Gambit. You’re right on time.’
‘Right on time for what?’ replied a woman’s voice. It certainly wasn’t Davina Gambit.
‘Who is this?’ Conor demanded.
‘Conor – what’s the matter?’ asked Eleanor, through a wreath of cigarette smoke.
The woman said, ‘Your little friend at the Kaufman Pharmacy gave me your number. Don’t blame him. He didn’t do it voluntarily. I induced him.’
‘Hetti,’ said Conor.
‘I’d prefer it if you called me Magda. Especially now that Ramon is gone. No more Hypnos: no more Hetti.’
‘I’m sorry about Ramon, no matter what he did.’
‘Don’t be too sorry. Ramon was a fool. Bombastic. Thought so much of himself. I was always a better hypnotist than him. I don’t know why I worked with him. I don’t know why I loved him. It’s crazy, isn’t it, the things you do in spite of your better judgment?’ She pronounced it ‘yoodjment’.
‘I guess we all make mistakes like that,’ said Conor. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to meet with you, talk with you. I can tell you everything I know about the Spurr’s Fifth Avenue robbery – about all of the robberies.’
‘And why would you want to do that?’
‘They want to kill me, that’s why. I need your protection.’
‘Who wants to kill you?’
‘You know who they are. Dennis Evelyn Branch and all of his people. Those men with their black suits and their crucifixes. They’re looking for me, to make sure that I don’t say anything.’
Conor said, ‘All right, then, let’s meet.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘No, today. As soon as possible.’ He didn’t tell her why: that he was leaving for Norway in less than nine hours.
‘Where are you?’ asked Magda. ‘Wherever you are, I can come to see you as soon as you like.’
‘I don’t think so. You want to meet me, I’ll tell you where to meet me. John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker at Seventh Avenue.’ He checked his watch. ‘Ten o’clock, precisely.’
‘Very well. Anyplace at all. This is a bad thing that has happened, Mr O’Neil. But I think that there is something worse to come.’
‘I don’t doubt it, Ms Slanic’
‘Magda, please.’
‘OK – Magda.’
Eleanor gave him a long, old-fashioned look. ‘Are you sure this is wise?’
‘Maybe not. But we don’t have anything to lose, do we?’
At 10:05 a dour bald man in sunglasses and a bright pink polo shirt arrived, and handed Conor a large brown paper postal bag. ‘Open it,’ he said; and when Conor looked inside he saw that it contained bundles of $100 and $50 bills, all of them used.
‘Twenty-five grand,’ the man told him. ‘You don’t need to count it.’
‘You want me to sign for it?’ asked Conor.
The bald man said, ‘I wouldn’t bother. You lose this, your life’s worth shit anyway.’
Magda Slanic was already waiting for him at a corner table in John’s Pizzeria when he arrived. The atmosphere was sweaty, noisy, with music bumping and lines of lunchtime office workers waiting for takeout, so many that they had to form a crocodile into the street. The temperature was edging its way over ninety degrees, and the street was already distorted with heat.
Magda looked as striking as usual, with her white deadpan face and her startling eyes and her mouth that was almost invisible. Her jet-black hair was pinned up with a variety of silver stars, and her hands were clustered with silver rings. She wore a long black skirt and black high-heeled ankle-boots that were fastened by elaborate spiderwebs of thin leather laces.
‘You hungry?’ asked Conor, as a waiter approached them with his pad at the ready.
Magda whispered, ‘No. But coffee maybe. Black. Strong.’
‘Two large espresso,’ said Conor. The waiter kept his pen raised as if he expected them to order a pizza, but Conor said, ‘That’s it. Two large espresso.’
Magda looked around her nervously. ‘You’re sure we’re safe here?’
‘It depends on your definition of safe.’
‘I never thought that they were going to kill us,’ said Magda. ‘Victor Labrea was always so friendly, you know? Right from the very beginning he was always giving us money and treating us to meals.’ She gave him a
thin, quirky smile. ‘He called me the Romanian Raven because I always dress in black.’
‘How did you get to meet a scumbag like him?’
‘It was April. The first of April, stupid fools’ day, I should have realized! But it was a very bad time. Ramon and I hadn’t had any serious work in over two years and we had no money. Ramon was wanted for crack dealing and for stealing food from grocery stores. But how else could we live? We were living in a horrible apartment near the Bowery. In the winter it was enough to freeze your bones and there was damp running down the walls.
‘Being so broke, it hit Ramon very hard, even more hard than me. He came from a very poor family in Tijuana. To think that after all that fame and all that money he would have to go back to such a life…
‘Then Victor appeared on our doorstep. I never knew how he managed to locate us. He told us that he needed our help and that he was prepared to pay us very well for it. Thousands of dollars, if we did good.’
‘Did he tell you what you were supposed to do?’
‘He said it was charity work.’
‘So he didn’t ask you outright if you were prepared to steal safety deposit boxes and confidential legal records, and extort money from their owners to get them back?’
Magda shook her head. ‘He didn’t say it was anything like that. He said that he belonged to a religious movement that wanted to launch a worldwide crusade. The Global Message Movement. He said they had no money left because they had been persecuted by the government and the Southern Baptist Conference. All of their assets had been taken by the FBI, and none of the TV stations would carry their fund-raising broadcasts. But he said they weren’t criminals, they were people who believed in God and believed in the Bible, that’s all.’
‘Maybe. But it’s a little difficult to see how he reconciled that with stealing other people’s private property.’
‘He said that God had given him a sign.’
‘A sign, huh? What kind of a sign?’
‘It was like, what do you call it, a vision. He said he drove past a field and saw ears of wheat all waving the same way, and he suddenly realized that God wanted the world to be the same as that field of wheat. He wanted everybody on the planet to pray the same prayers together, and cherish the same beliefs, and only then would there be universal peace and goodness, for ever. He said that God gave him the authority to take money from sinners so that he could spread His word. God said that it was only right to make sinners pay for their sins, especially when they had hidden their sins away and had never been punished for them. “Be sure your sin will find you out,” that’s what he said.’
Conor sat back. Magda’s eyes were so black that they looked like pools of oil, and they were quite unreadable. What does she want? he asked himself. Why the hell has she come to me?
‘So you and Ramon thought that Dennis Evelyn Branch’s sign from God – like, what did you think? Don’t tell me you believed it? A sign from God? Ears of wheat, all blowing the same way? That was sufficient justification for robbery and blackmail and murder?’
‘Mr O’Neil – you forget that I didn’t have enough money in my purse for a single hot dog, and when you are like that, you are ready to accept almost any justification that anybody offers you.’
Their espressos arrived. ‘You’re one hundred per cent sure you’re not eating?’ asked the waiter, snippily. Conor gave him a look that – given two or three centuries – could have worn down granite. ‘Well,’ said the waiter, unnerved. ‘If you change your mind.’
Magda tinkled her spoon in her cup. ‘Victor Labrea saved us. That’s what we thought, anyhow. And it wasn’t only the money. It was the chance to practice hypnotism again, to control other people. It was the power.’
‘You’re telling me that hypnotism is all about power?’
‘Of course. The power to heal. The power to hurt. The power to make people look ridiculous. A hypnotist can turn your whole life upside down.’
‘So what about ethics? What about morality?’
‘Nobody has ethics any more, Mr O’Neil. Nobody has morality. Who knows … perhaps that’s what Dennis Evelyn Branch is trying to bring back, with his crusade.’
‘So how did you plan the Spurr’s robbery?’
‘The same way we planned all of the other robberies. We called up, we made enquiries about safety deposit box facilities and then we made an appointment to meet your deputy Salvatore Morales.’
‘And? What are you trying to say to me? He offered to help you steal all those safety deposit boxes?’
‘At first, no. We put him into a trance to find out what kind of material we might expect to find in the boxes and what your security measures were. Easy.’
‘Easy?’
‘Oh, yes. In some of the law offices we visited, it was very difficult to find out about their confidential files. The staff were defensive, loyal and resistant to hypnosis. But with Salvatore, it was easy. He had a passion to get his revenge on Spurr’s; and once he was out of the trance he helped us of his own free will. He hated you, by the way. He thought that you had ruined his whole career. He said you were imperioso.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t mean to be.’
‘I don’t know. It’s sad that he died. Did you hear me say “sad”? I don’t say “sad” very often because I’m not a person who believes in sadness. But he gave us all the information we needed and he even helped us to empty those boxes.’
‘Would you be prepared to testify to this in court?’
Magda looked horrified. ‘In court? No, no. What are you asking me? You’re mad! If I testify against the Global Message Movement, they’ll kill me for sure.’
‘The fact remains, Magda, that apart from Darrell Bussman, who’s still in a coma, you’re the only person in New York who can prove my innocence.’
‘I understand that. I’m sorry. I know. But I don’t want to die.’
Conor finished his coffee. ‘You’ve come to me asking for my protection. What are you going to give me in return?’
‘I can help you. I can use my gift. Also … I think I know what Dennis Evelyn Branch is planning to do.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘I don’t know very much. Victor used to talk on the phone to him almost every morning. Always in the morning. Sometimes he left his bedroom door a little way open so that I could hear bits and pieces of what he was saying. It was strange, though. It didn’t sound as if they were talking about religion at all. More like – I don’t know – science.’
‘Science? What kind of science?’
‘Victor kept saying something about “keeping it isolated, at any price”. I don’t really remember much more. Oh – he used the word “biohazard” a lot.’
‘Is there anything else you remember?’
‘There was one thing … in every conversation he kept mentioning “she”, like they were discussing somebody else who was involved in what they were talking about. Like, “I don’t know what she’s going to think if we don’t get this work finished up by the end of October.” Or – I remember once – “How is she today? Not too much fire and brimstone, I hope”.’
‘Anything else?’
Magda dabbed her mouth with her napkin, leaving a pale coffee-colored kiss on it. ‘Victor said once, “I want to know that Mrs Labrea and me are going to be safe. I want your assurance”. Then there was a pause, you see, like somebody is talking on the other end of the phone. After that, Victor said, “You’re telling me that millions of people are going to die. I’m just making one hundred per cent certain that one of those millions isn’t me”.’
‘You’re sure he said that?’
‘I’m sure. You want to hypnotize me? You want to hear those conversations right out of my brain? I don’t mind. I won’t resist you, Mr O’Neil. I’ll let you in.
She took hold of his hand. ‘You trust me, don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure yet. What else do you know about Dennis Evelyn Branch?’
‘I know
where he is. I have his address in Norway.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Of course not. He called Victor one morning and Mrs Labrea answered the phone. She didn’t realize that I was using her bathroom, so that I could overhear everything that she was saying. She asked him what the weather was like, and how he liked his new apartment. She asked for his address and she wrote it down. She went off to find Victor – I sneaked out of the bathroom – and I memorized Dennis Evelyn Branch’s address as I went past the phone.’
‘Are you going to give it to me?’
‘Are you going to protect me?’
‘I’m not so sure that I can. You have to remember that I’m being hunted as well, no thanks to you.’
Magda passed a Post-It note across the table. Hammerfestgata 17, Rodelokka, Oslo.
‘I think he’s very serious. I think he’s going to kill a lot of people. I think that what he’s trying to do will make Jonestown or Waco seem like nothing at all.’
Magda looked away. There were tears brimming in her eyes. ‘I wish that I had never helped them now. It would have been better to stay in that horrible apartment. It would have been better to starve. I am so shocked. How can I tell you how shocked I am? Ramon – I can’t forgive myself for what happened to Ramon. Such a fool. Strut, strut, strut. And yet I loved him so much.’
Conor watched her for a while. The tears sliding down her cheek. He didn’t feel sorry for her. If it hadn’t been for her, he wouldn’t be a fugitive, and he wouldn’t have lost Lacey, and Sidney wouldn’t be fighting for his life. All the same, he understood how she felt. He knew what it was like to open Pandora’s box. He knew how impossible it was to close it.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’ve already arranged to fly to Oslo tonight.’
Magda stared at him. ‘You’re crazy. You’re going to go after these people?’
‘Why not? I spent my whole life tracking down criminals, mafiosi especially. And let me tell you: the safest thing to do is to find them first, before they find you.’
‘They’ll kill you. I never saw such heartless men, even in Romania.’
‘Magda – for my own sake, it’s something I have to do. If you want my protection, you’re going to have to come with me. If you want to help me, you have to come with me. I can’t force you to come, but what’s your choice? Either you face these people down, or else you spend the rest of your life running from them.’
Holy Terror Page 27