Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  “That’s round one,” I continued. “Assuming I give the safety signal by seven tonight, then the Websites stay unhooked. For a while. Then there’s another deadline. Close of business tomorrow; call it 6:00P.M.,to give a little leeway. By that time you will have completed my shopping list. Or else the e-mail goes down the wire.”

  The trio had taken up their original positions.

  “Very elegant,” McIntyre said, “but—”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “The blackmailer always comes back for more. But this isn’t about me.”

  “Zip it,” McIntyre snapped. “You’ve missed the point. You need to stop talking and start listening, because I’m about to tell you where we really are.”

  He raised one hand. “This hand is your position. A few dumbfuck e-mails and a mechanism for disseminating them independent of your being alive. My guess is Pablo Tochera is your button pusher, and I can’t be sure that you don’t have others. But that’s all you have, Border.”

  He raised his other hand. “And this is our position. We have Carol Amen. Before he lost his head, Conrad was a sight smarter than you gave him credit for. Miss Amen was in no condition to sound convincing, so Conrad took a rain check on her tempting offer of a rendezvous, and arranged to have one of our friends pay her a visit.”

  My blood turned to ice. I should have known that Carol’s voicemailmessage was screwy, that she was under threat when she made it. I felt in need of Charles’s inhaler. “What have you done to her?”

  “Nothing. Yet. As for the future, her life can take one of two courses. If the e-mails remain locked in their box, then she will find that India fulfills her basic needs: food, shelter, television, and maybe some out-of-dateNew Yorkermagazines. Her body will be respected. She will be unharmed. Unmolested. Unemployed. Not a bad life really.”

  “And if the e-mails go out?”

  “That really doesn’t bear thinking about, Fin. The traffic you speculate about between Bombay and the States can work as well the other way. She will be subjected to every indignity you can imagine, and plenty you can’t. She won’t die. She’ll want to, but we won’t let her. We’ll keep the respirator switched on. At some point she may succeed in killing herself. But not before we’ve made her worst nightmare look like a walk in the park.”

  It was the calmness with which McIntyre presented his position that was so shocking. It was as if he were goofing around with some minor boilerplate provisions in a sale and purchase agreement.

  He mimed trying to force his hands together. “So you see, on the basis of what you’ve suggested, the two hands can never join in a handshake. It’s a standoff. The most important thing to you is Carol Amen, even more than the exoneration you crave. We let her go and there is nothing to stop those e-mails from flying out of their box. But if those e-mails fly, then the Amen girl gets fucked to pieces by the lowest life forms rising from the sewer. If the e-mails don’t fly, you can keep her in comfortable spinsterhood, somewhere in India.”

  I wanted to kill him. “No,” I said. “Carol stays here, in the US. Then the e-mails will be neutralized.”

  McIntyre shook his head. “Wouldn’t work. You would always be a threat, dead or alive.” He shrugged helplessly. “You created this situation, Border. I’m just trying to be practical. I’m trying to help.”

  I was in a vice.

  “How would I know that she was safe?” I asked.

  McIntyre smiled at the desperation in my voice.

  “And the money? My name?” I added.

  McIntyre stroked his chin. “We’d have to work out how to let youknow that Miss Amen was having a swell time. As for the money, you can go fuck yourself. We won’t pay a dime. And who gives a shit about your good name, that got sunk with your father, God rot him.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  McIntyre’s secretary appeared.

  “Jim. I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but there’s a Detective Manelli waiting to see you.”

  “Ah, your friend,” he said turning back to me. “I’ll see him in my meeting room.” I couldn’t fail to be impressed by his reaction. There was none. For a moment he didn’t even move. Mendip and Askari, on the other hand, acted like two kids who had been caught smoking behind the bicycle shed.

  There was a door in the corner of McIntyre’s office and he made his way to it. “Send Manelli round,” he said. “Not through here.”

  His secretary nodded and left the room.

  As McIntyre opened the door, he turned to me. “You don’t want Manelli’s cuffs on you. Nor do I. So I reckon we’ll keep you safe for a while. Jesse will be up in a moment to help.”

  “I’ve got to make a call by seven,” I said. “Otherwise the e-mails go out.”

  McIntyre rolled his eyes. “So make your call. I’ve just told you that you’re safe.”

  “You don’t seriously expect me to take your word for it.”

  He held his hands out again. “Standoff, Fin. Think about it.”

  He then left the room.

  Askari grunted and picked his teeth.

  Mendip toyed with the e-mails and wheezed over them.

  “And what did Carlstein give to you?” I said to him. “What could possibly bind you to him?”

  Mendip didn’t look up. “These people love India. Most of them merely want to invest inside and get a proper return for their money.”

  “Who gives a fuck about NRIs?” I replied. “The other thing, Charles. The other thing.”

  Mendip came over to me. His face wore a bluish tinge, his whole body drooped. He looked like he was dying and knew it.

  He lifted Ganesh from my hands and studied the inscription. Mytesticles tightened defensively as he gently replaced the statue on my palm.

  “I didn’t have many friends at Oxford,” he said. “A provincial schoolboy from the north, you know. Unsophisticated. Respectable and poor. And here was this giant man—Carlstein—with a giant brain and funny accent who knew no boundaries, would try anything, to whom nothing was sacred. During the mid-sixties in a small north-country seaside town, everything was sacred. Carlstein was a jewel in the mud for us, wasn’t he, Sunil?”

  “You have little breath, Charles,” Askari muttered. “Why waste it?”

  Mendip kept his gaze on me. “You probably think of Gemini as dinner-suited students supping fine wine, eating the obscurer parts of animals cooked according to classic French principles, and all the while reciting Proust or Seneca in the original. There was some of that, I’ll grant you. But for the most part it was about ideas: about class, about statehood, about eroticism, about law and morality. We loved law, all of us—my God, we all got firsts. But a diet increasingly weighted to the darker side of the Greeks, to Wilde, to Huysmans, de Sade, Genet, Huxley and his mescalin—you can guess the others—well, a diet like this in such a rarified environment, is bound to have an effect.”

  He laughed. “Bill Clinton and his uninhaled joint. My God, I wish . . .”

  “But why didn’t you leave it behind at Oxford?” I asked. “Why was anything that followed remotely necessary?”

  “Ah.” There were decades of regret bundled in Mendip’s exhalation, it was the musty puff at lifting the lid on a long unopened suitcase. “The belief, at every stage, that one had gone too far. And the discovery with the next step that the previous one wasn’t so serious after all, that it could have been retraced—but that now it was too late. And always the figure of Carlstein over us. He lived in a vacuum to ideas alone—reality didn’t seem to impinge on him and bring him to heel.”

  “But a slave trade, Charles,” I said. “Why not flee, start afresh on the other side of the world? Change your name, get plastic surgery, kill yourself.Anythingbut get mixed up in that.”

  “At some indefinable point, sins of omission become ones of commission,” he said. “It wasn’t a slave trade at all in the beginning. An immigration service, there was even a quasipolitical philosophical theory that went with it, one o
f Carlstein’s. Anyway, just as money wanted to find a haven, so did people. Carlstein came into contact with more and more facilitators, middlemen, wealthy benefactors with special needs, if you will. A shift of emphasis here, an exception there. The school in Bombay was real, you know. Genuine for Sunil, me, JJ, your father. For a while we pretended to ourselves that the prostitution was an intermittent and unintended sideline from what we could rationalize in more favorable terms. We were busy building empires, after all—legal and legitimate empires—and we allowed ourselves to build the palaces before the revolution was complete.”

  “And my father?” I whispered.

  “Carlstein always looked for weaknesses in people: his brother, Ernie, me.” Mendip sighed. “He couldn’t find the weakness in your father. It infuriated Carlstein, possessed him. To him it was a fundamental breach of metaphysical laws. Your father became a project for him. And then Ernie’s file came along.”

  The half-eaten file, Bombay breakfast of scam and eggs.

  “The drink did the rest, Fin. But he would never have touched that girl. He turned the torment onto himself, tortured himself, destroyed himself.”

  “And you killed him,” I said.

  Mendip shook his head. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t a simple case of saying: Border’s a threat, kill him.” He turned to Askari. “Tell him, Sunil.”

  “I do not want to talk.”

  “And why are you prepared to talk, Charles?” I asked. “Is it because, with Carlstein dead, you’re able to restore the obligations you owe to me as godfather?”

  Mendip shrugged.

  Jesse came into the room. Ear-to-ear grin. “Sorry to keep you waiting gentlemen. Okay, Mr. Brown, sir. Mr. M wants you with me.” He crooked his arm in mine and led me out of the office and into the secretarial area.

  “Patti?” He nodded in the direction of McIntyre’s secretary. “Mr. Brown isn’t feeling so good. I’m taking him to the restroom to freshen up.”

  Patti shook her head. “All that food and you didn’t eat a thing. You should take better care of yourself.”

  “I intend to,” I said.

  In the hallway Jesse placed a thumb and forefinger on the spiral wire sprouting from behind his ear. “See this, Mr. Brown? Any fooling around and a dozen quarterbacks will flatten you.” He paused. “You’re a Brit, ain’t you? Know what a quarterback is?”

  I did. JJ had taken me to a few football games.

  We headed around the corner in the direction of the elevator banks, and nearly collided with a scurrying figure loaded down with a pile of documents.

  It was Chuck Krantz.

  “You’re in the wrong building, Chuck,” I said. A couple of documents had fallen to the floor. I could see “DRAFT PRESS RELEASE” stamped in red at the top of the front page. And underneath, the clasped hands insignia.

  Krantz eyed Jesse. “Where you taking him?”

  Jesse winked. “Just to the bathroom, Mr. Krantz. He don’t feel too well.”

  Krantz smiled. “Good.”

  “Don’t wait around on my account,” I said, as he picked up the rogue press releases. “I’ll let you finish being McIntyre’s paperboy.”

  “Fuck you,” Krantz said and continued at a trot down the corridor.

  We passed the men’s room. “It’s here, Jesse.”

  Jesse laughed. “Very good, sir. But this one’s for executives only.”

  We got to the elevator. The doors slid open as soon as Jesse pressed the call button. Once inside, he leaned down and reached for the security key.

  My hand was already in my pocket as my head told me there might not be another opportunity. Since I had been with him, his head had towered above me, now it was below, within easy reach.

  I’d expected a crack, like the sound of a spoon against the shell of a boiled egg. But as Ganesh connected with the back of Jesse’s head, all I heard was a dull thud and a surprised grunt.

  Jesse crashed to the floor and for a moment I stood transfixed. I heard Damindra Ketan’s skullcrack, crack, crackon the flagstones at the Towers of Silence, in time with my heartbeat. But if Jesse were dead, I’d have no excuses.

  But there had been no crack, and there was no blood either.

  He gave a moan as I tore the wire from his ear and ripped it out of the radio.

  I turned the security key, punched Floor 53.

  Refurbishment, Ellis Walsh had said, as we’d ploughed slowly through the client lists for the Conflict Committee. Extra space for Clay employees who’d made it to the lifeboats.

  It was less than five seconds before the door opened at Floor 53. It was a steel-floored wasteland, interrupted only by a few trestle tables laden with a workman’s kit, bordered by a horizon of windows. A tangle of wires hung like creepers from the ceiling cavity.

  The air smelled of dust and laborers. But there was no one around. This wasn’t a twenty-four-hour project; the refugees from Clay & Westminster could kick their heels in their old lodgings while a new home was built during normal business hours.

  Jesse was starting to move.

  I lifted him from under the armpits, a dead weight and havoc on my suppurating hip that now felt like an overripe melon about to explode.

  Tie him up? I looked around me. Short of ripping some wires out of the ceiling, there didn’t seem to be anything with which to improvise. The wire from his radio? Too short. Anyway, I didn’t want him stuck here all night if he had a fractured skull. Let nature takes its course, I decided.

  I got back into the elevator, turned the key, and aimed my finger at the lobby button.

  When the door opened again, I limped slowly toward the exit.

  Beyond the barrier, I saw more police uniforms. Three.

  Manelli had backup.

  I went through the turnstile. It clicked easily; it didn’t mind my passing through.

  A few feet away from the bank of revolving doors, I heard, not a“Stop that man” or “Hey you,” but the unmistakable hiatus of recognition, of impending pursuit.

  I broke into an ungainly run and crashed through a half-open segment of the nearest revolving door. It already contained a man who, somewhat imprudently, was reading a newspaper. I passed my hand over his shoulder and gave the glass a decent shove.

  “You see that? The fuck . . .” he screamed.

  Outside the building, the crowds had thinned. I needed cover, camouflage. Looking down into the ice-rink area, I could see that the restaurant was still busy, roving waiters cruising a sea of clamoring tourists.

  I galloped down the stairwell into the throng. Glancing up, I saw two cops leaning over the balustrade. It occurred to me that Detective Manelli could not have been expecting to find me with McIntyre, otherwise I would have been surrounded by flashing lights, megaphones, and darting SWAT teams. Therefore I should be using open ground while I had it, before the dragnet was mobilized and I could be cornered.

  One of the cops pointed. He’d seen me. The other held a radio close to his face before following his colleague who was now headed for the stairs.

  I was near a stupid glass bubble of an elevator that took tourists the fifteen feet from street level to the rink. Charging through a small group of people, necks craned, compact cameras focused on the GE Building, I rammed my arm into the narrow gap of the closing elevator doors and pried them open. The startled occupants continued to lick their ice creams and fiddle with Saks shopping bags while they wondered whether to scream, whether I was going to pull a gun.

  “It’s okay,” I said breathlessly. “Late for a date.”

  They didn’t look like they believed me, but the journey was too short to matter much one way or the other.

  Fifth, get to Fifth, I screamed to myself as I placed Saks in my sights and ran for it; but I wouldn’t be aiming to take sanctuary there; or even in St. Patrick’s Cathedral to its left. A yellow cab would provide a more mobile and practical haven.

  The traffic on Fifth was moving fast and even though there were

  �
��free” lights aplenty on passing cabs, I knew the operation of hailing and entering would cost more time than I could afford, particularly as I could see that I wasn’t the only one on the sidewalk with the same idea.

  “FUCKIN’ DYKE FASCIST VERMIN.”

  I wheeled round to find a scabrous bum frothing at some poor tourist who’d got in the path of his three-coach train of shopping carts filled with empty soda cans.

  Without stopping to think of the consequences, I wrenched the pushbar of the rear cart from the bum’s hand and swung his wretched convoy into the oncoming traffic.

  It was hardly an F1 McLaren onto the FDR, but my version served well enough. In the shower of cans that rained down after the impact of carts and postal van, traffic on Fifth came to an abrupt halt to a modest accompaniment of crunches and splintering glass.

  I ran into the traffic and yanked open the rear door of a cab that had slowed to a near stop in front of Saks.

  “What’s happening, man?” asked the driver, jerking his head toward the west side of the street. He didn’t sound that interested.

  “A derelict hurling soda cans at cops,” I replied as calmly as possible.

  He sniggered. “Good,” he said before accelerating hard. “Where to?” he added as an afterthought.

  I was only a few blocks from Pablo’s house, but I figured it might be better to take a roundabout route to ensure I wasn’t being pursued. Pablo and company had enough to contend with already.

  “Er, corner of 42nd and Fifth, then somewhere else,” I said.

  I looked at my watch. Two minutes to seven. Hell’s teeth.

  I called Pablo.

  “Fuck you,” he blurted. “I was—I mean Paula was—about to hit the red button.”

  “There’s two minutes left,” I said indignantly.

  “Not according to CNN, there isn’t. It was seven about five seconds ago, you crazy fuck. I nearly had heart failure. Sheesh, the world goes kawoosh because a fucked-up Brit can’t tell the time.”

  “Fin the Quartz” belonged to another era.

  Pablo allowed himself a couple more expletives before seeming to calm down. “You okay?” he finally asked.