Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  “Everything hurts,” I said. “Even my wig.”

  “Where are you?”

  I looked up at the driver. He had the radio on, and the Lucite window that separated us was open only a couple of inches. I reckoned he wouldn’t hear much if I kept my voice down and my mouth close to the phone.

  “Fifth Avenue, and I’m in trouble.”

  “You’ve been in trouble since I’ve known you.”

  “You are too. Get the women and kids out of the house, wipe as much as you can off the computer, and wait for me at the corner of your street and Lexington.”

  “Fin, what the fuck am I supposed to tell Julia?”

  I lowered my voice still further.

  “Tell her your boss is running schoolkids out of Bombay and into the States. Prostitutes. Slaves, Pablo.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Just get them out and be at the corner of Lexington. I won’t be long.” I snapped the phone shut. Suddenly I felt sorry for the bum and his soda cans. But he was shouting at a tourist, wasn’t he? That wasn’t neighborly. And yet it didn’t warrant having his business empire obliterated by the traffic.

  FORTY-NINE

  Pablo wasn’t standing on the corner.

  I got out of the taxi. For a moment I stood there and swore under my breath. Passersby gave me sideways glances.

  I didn’t care. Without Pablo, I was nowhere.

  “Ain’t you got eyes in your fucking head?”

  I could have hugged him.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  He pointed to a parking garage over the street. “I was waving my arms like a fucking windmill, you jerk.Sheesh.And you stand here looking like a street sign.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “On their way to Vermont. We got a lodge on Lake Champlain. They’ll take a flight from La Guardia to Burlington.”

  A hell of a way, but the farther the better.

  “Where’s the car?”

  Pablo aimed a mock slap at my face. “In the fucking garage, where’d you think? I’m going to leave a silver Jaguar out in the openfor some asshole to take apart after they’re through with my house?”

  “I’m sorry, Pablo.”

  “Don’t be, Fin.” He sighed. “I should have known better than to think I could join the big guys.”

  “You’re better than them.”

  He smiled. “I know.”

  “We need to go back into the house,” I said. “I need to fetch a couple of things.” I touched the wig. “And I want to get rid of this.”

  Pablo pulled a huge bunch of keys from his pocket. “Then where?”

  “Centre Island.”

  He whacked the keys against the palm of his hand. They must have weighed a pound. Jesus, that would hurt. “You fucked-up Brit. You’re not suggesting we go to the house that McIntyre uses up there?”

  “Just give me the keys, Pablo. I’ll let myself in. I won’t be a moment.”

  He dangled them in front of me and then jerked them aside as I tried to take them. “The guy who can get into my house when it’s locked up hasn’t been born. Let’s go.”

  It was getting dark when we pulled up at Officer Miller’s checkpoint. Two or three coats and a random selection of knitwear covered me in my hiding place on the floor at the back of the car. It was hot as hell.

  I heard Miller’s voice. Genial but curious.

  The Yacht Club, Pablo explained. They were collecting old clothes for charity. For children, added Pablo.

  I hoped Miller wouldn’t notice that the clothes piled up in the back were for rather oversized children.

  Miller and Pablo then swapped stories about the weather, goings-on at the Yacht Club, kids running wild, headless torsos in the back of Toyotas, Miller’s regret that the wreck had happened outside his jurisdiction, which, in actuality, ran to only a few feet either side of the booth. It was turning out to be one hell of a summer. He’d be glad when Labor Day arrived and things would wind down.

  Pablo talked about his boat.

  I heard the door of the booth open, then footsteps.

  Shit, no.

  “Yeah, here it is,” I heard Pablo say, obviously passing across a photograph.

  “She’s a beauty,” Miller said. “I wouldn’t want to make landfall, if I had me a boat like that.”

  More footsteps and the exchange of farewells. Then I felt the car move forward.

  “You like your boat,” I said, burrowing out of hibernation, swathed in sweat.

  “I love her,” he said, adding quickly, “nearly as much as Julia.” He tapped the photo on the wheel.Julia I. There was passion in Pablo’s eyes. “You know,” he said, “when McIntyre got to hear I had a boat, he said that I wouldn’t get a chance to use it. I’d be working too hard. He said he hated boats, anyway. Why the fuck does he have a place out here if he doesn’t like boats, for Christ’s sake?” He placed the photo back inside his wallet. “Asshole.”

  “Can I ask you something, Pablo?”

  “Shoot,” he said amiably.

  “When McIntyre made you take on my case, what exactly was going through your head?”

  To my surprise, he didn’t hesitate; no “sheesh,” no expletive. “Partnership, Fin. Pure and simple. The first person in my family to be something. Not just have money, but really besomething.”

  He took his hands off the steering wheel for a second and rubbed his face. “It clouded my judgment a little.”

  We passed the Seawanaka Yacht Club. Pablo allowed his neck to swivel with the view. “That would be neat,” he whispered.

  “Why don’t you join?” I asked.

  He stared ahead. “Not their type. And too far from home.” He slowed down. “That the house?”

  We had rounded the corner and, ahead, the land dipped into the valley of mosquito lagoon; Carlstein’s house lay beyond, a shadow in the twilight. To our left, the road hugged the hillside, dropping a little, before disintegrating into dirt track for the climb onto the ridge. The big house was silhouetted against the darkening sky.

  I half-expected to see lightning fork around its gables, for thunder to rumble among the turrets. The House of Usher, the Bates Motel.

  But everything seemed quiet.

  And inside? Wood paneling and echoes. Servants’ quarters, dumbwaiters, light switches from a different era. Big, open fireplaces. Forbidding portraits of men with facial hair and women with dresses as big as tents.

  The skitter of rats. Dust in the corners. Two-way mirrors on the wall. What else in the corners, in the dark crevices, the cellars? People. Little people. Petrified Pixies in the staging post to hell. And Carol?

  “How far do you want me to go?” Pablo asked.

  I didn’t want to get too close. “Anywhere here.”

  Pablo edged the car off the road and onto the grass shoulder. The plastic cylinders protecting a row of small saplings against gnawing wildlife were no match for the Jaguar. Pablo parked over three of them.

  He grinned at me. “A while back, I planted four trees in Central Park,” he said. “So I figure I’m still in credit.”

  “We can be seen here,” I said. “Does McIntyre know what car you drive?”

  “Apart from my boat, McIntyre knows jack shit about me. He even calls Julia ‘Connie.’ ” He rubbed his chin again. “So now we watch?”

  I’d promised that was to be the full extent our activities for the evening. Watch the house, look for movement. Make deductions. Draft a new deal.

  I reached for a pair of small rubberized binoculars, German and good quality.

  “I borrowed these,” I said. I’d borrowed a few things from Pablo’s marine kitbag in the guest room.

  Light showed in a couple of the curtained windows. I could make out the shape of a car near the inky arch that I took to be the front door.

  I rested the binoculars on my lap. “Maybe they’ve pulled out already,” I said. “Just forgotten to switch off the lights.”

  “You think they did st
uff in the house itself?” Pablo asked.

  Carlstein had, McIntyre had.

  But that wasn’t its primary function. It was a staging post. A halfway house, Ernie had said.

  “Perhaps we’re too late,” I muttered.

  Perhaps not, though. “If they had people and stuff to move,” I said, “they’d have to get past Officer Miller, wouldn’t they?”

  “He’s useless.” Pablo turned away from the house and scanned the bay with the binoculars. “He liked my boat, though. So I got to make allowances.”

  I jabbed Pablo in the arm. “Boats,” I said. “Of course. They’d move everything out by boat.”

  “And they’d have to move out at night.”

  A silent retreat from the beachhead, a cruise down Long Island Sound to another hideaway.

  “I want to look,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to see,” Pablo said, after another sweep with the binoculars.

  “Not from here,” I said. “Around the back of the house. There’ll be a slipway or jetty or something.”

  “I thought you said we’d just watch from the car.”

  “I said we’d just watch. I didn’t say it would be from the car.”

  He was silent for a moment. “You want me with you?”

  “No, stay here.” I wasn’t going to restrict myself to watching. “I’ll have the cell phone.”

  “Yeah, my cell phone,” Pablo said. “What am I supposed to use, a fucking tin can?”

  “Oh,” I said forlornly.

  “It’s okay, guy. I took Julia’s.”

  I took the bag off the backseat and got out of the car.

  “What else you got in there?” Pablo tried to catch the edge of the bag as I walked by his open window.

  “You can keep the opera glasses,” I said and set off.

  At the point where the road forked, I carried on toward Carlstein’s house, keeping half an eye on the top of the hill. The angle was bad and my view of the house started at around its second story, the rest obscured by the ridge.

  Now that I knew my way around, distances seemed less than before and it didn’t take long to find myself edging along the shrubs that ran alongside the dirt track.

  I ignored the mosquitoes, but my hip was hurting badly, slowing me up. It was difficult to ignore. Antiseptic hadn’t been enough, Julia had said; what I needed were antibiotics.

  Carlstein’s house looked empty, no car in the garage, no light. He was dead. And yet an aura hung over the place.

  Again I went around the back and onto the deck. I glanced quickly at my handiwork on the rear window. A black mass of bugs and mosquitoes had gathered on the honey-drenched newspaper.

  Out in Long Island Sound, the lights on a few late-returning sailboats rose and fell in the gentle swell.

  I looked over the edge of the deck. There was only a small strip of concrete-strewn beach between the water’s edge and a shore that rose in a tangle of brambles and loose boulders into the darkness beyond.

  I suddenly realized that this wasn’t just a dumping ground. All this shit was there for a reason. To discourage visitors.

  I climbed down the rusty ladder onto the beach.

  Picking my way along the shoreline, I stepped over the dinosaur-like remnants of long-dead saddle crabs, and felt the crunch of oyster shells where the gulls had lifted them from the mud and slammed them against the rocks.

  Then there was the human debris: empty cans, beer bottles, toilet paper, sanitary napkins. And the concrete boulders. A grudging sliver of moon bathed their hard edges with light, throwing strands of steel like rusty corkscrews into sharp relief.

  The beach widened into a sandbar that cut into the entrance of the bay.

  I could hear noises. Voices? Maybe. And scraping, banging.

  All I could see were points of light out over the water. Some moved and some stayed still. More sailboats? I couldn’t tell.

  I crouched and moved nearer.

  Not boats. People holding lights. They seemed to float on the water. Then I realized they were on the sandbar.

  I was a hundred feet away from the base of the small cliff beneaththe house. I moved toward it. There seemed to be no trash here, just a few large rocks. McIntyre obviously didn’t want his immediate surroundings looking like a building site.

  The noise had stopped. The lights were no longer moving.

  Keeping one eye on the motionless lights in the bay, I clung to the eaves of the cliff, feeling the sand turn to coarse reeds on a marshy base. The blades of grass swished against my thighs and a few birds rose into the sky with a clatter of wings and a chorus of indignant squawks.

  I could hear shouts. I kept my head below the tops of the reeds. Even if I’d stood up and waved my arms, it was unlikely I’d be seen, but whoever was out on the sandbar had been spooked by the birds, and they’d be wondering what had spooked the birds first.

  A boat engine growled and spluttered, followed by several more. A flotilla. The retreating armada on the move. I could see lights slide at speed out of the bay and into the Sound.

  People, equipment. They’d gone.

  Was Carol huddled in one of those boats? Did she know what McIntyre had planned for her?

  I walked farther along the edge of the cliff. It was only twenty feet high, but there seemed no way up it.

  There was another noise. I stopped.

  It had been nearby. An animal, maybe? But there’d been no scurry in the undergrowth, no thrash of reeds.

  I held my breath.

  A whimper, a rustle. Just a few feet away.

  I moved toward the sound. Whatever it was would be able to hear me. It could escape or attack if it wanted. But it stayed put.

  I parted the reeds. A small, solid bundle lay trembling on the boggy reed bed, like an oversized hedgehog, curled up for safety. I could feel its fear rise up to meet me.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered.

  The ball stayed curled up. I prodded it gently. Somehow it was still an animal to me, although I could see it was human.

  A face appeared; huge eyes catching the meager moonlight, blinking in its beam.

  The face of someone little more than a child. The corner of her mouth drooped; in fact the whole of one side of her face sagged. If she’d been older, one might have thought she’d had a stroke. But kids didn’t have strokes, did they? I looked closer; there was scar tissue across her cheek.

  But she was still beautiful, still recognizable as the girl in Raj’s photograph. My father’s wood nymph.

  I put down my bag and touched her shoulder. “Preeti?”

  She unfurled a little.

  “Who are you?” The voice was so feeble, a helpless murmur.

  “I’m a friend of your brother. Raj asked me to find you.”

  And I had found her. I’d been looking for someone else, but I’d still found her. That was only part of the promise, though. Make sure she’s all right, Raj had pleaded, as the flames consumed him.

  She didn’t look all right at all.

  Preeti sat up a little. “I have not heard from my brother. You say he was a friend of yours. How is he?”

  I hesitated, tempted to lie, but her open, damaged gaze made it impossible. “He’s dead, Preeti,” I said. I reached for her little hand and held it in mine. “I’m so sorry.”

  She sat stock still, her hand limp.

  “I felt it,” she said. “I felt his heart stop beating. A brother’s heartbeat can be felt in a sister’s breast.”

  She looked up at me. “How did he die?”

  His boss had tied him up in red tape and torched him.

  “There was a fire.”

  She removed her hand from my clasp and placed it on her cheek.

  “Someone burned me once,” she whispered. “Now I know why. It was so that I could feel some of Raj’s pain.”

  “What happened here, Preeti?”

  “They moved us out. They told us we would be taken to a safer place, where the immigration authorities cou
ldn’t find us. Then we would be put to work again.”

  “But they said that I was unlikely to find work.” She stroked her face. “Because of this . . . I think they were going to kill me. So on the way to the boats, I slipped away.”

  “Was there a white girl?”

  She shook her head. “Everyone was from India. About fifteen of us, boys and girls.”

  “Is the house empty?” I asked.

  “I do not know. I saw no one, but we only passed through a little part of the house to get here.”

  She pointed along the cliff. “We came down some steps, onto the beach. They were very dangerous. One girl fell. That was when I ran.”

  She started to curl up again. “I hope she is all right,” she whimpered. “This is a place of pain. I cannot believe Mr. Askari would have sent me here if he had known what it was like.”

  Elaboration on the true nature of Mr. Askari could be adjourned for the moment.

  “I want you to wait here for a while,” I said. “If I don’t come back within an hour, then carry on down the beach until you get to a house. Go around the side of the house and walk along the track until you reach the road. There will be a silver car parked a little way along. There will be a man in the car. He is a friend; stay with him and you’ll be safe.”

  Preeti rolled herself into an even tighter ball. “I will not go to a man in a silver car. I will only go with you. Or on my own, if you do not come back to me.”

  “I’ll come back.”

  I almost passed the dark scar in the rock before I noticed it. A rusty ladder climbed vertically from the beach, narrow, unwelcoming, and treacherous. On the cliff face itself hung a thick rope. Following it upward, I could see that the rope was connected to something at the top.

  A gantry, maybe.

  A winch.

  The rope just dangled; there was no hook, no nothing. Scanning the immediate area, I could tell that there had been a good deal of activity recently. The scree and sand was scuffed and pitted. By feet and heavy objects.

  I placed my foot on the first rung of the ladder. My hip exploded with pain and I dropped my leg back onto the beach.

  Twenty feet wasn’t such a great height, but in my condition it was K2.