The Debt

by Glenn Cooper

  Cal stopped dead and listened, trying to pinpoint the attacker’s exact position. When he thought he had it, he moved as far away from the bookcase as the narrow corridor would allow then charged the case with the blind anger of a skewered bull going for a matador. He possessed a fraction of the mass as a bull but just as much rage.

  The tall bookcase was firmly grounded but he kept pressing forward well after his shoulder made contact, getting the case up on to its rear set of feet. At the tipping point, the contents of the shelves began to rain down until the case lightened enough for Cal to be able to finish the job.

  It fell with a crash that intermingled with another sound.

  A high-pitched shout and then a low ugghhh.

  Cal ran to the end of the row and circled around to get a look at the toppled case and the mound of books underneath it.

  He began digging through the pile, trying to get to the shooter before he could free himself.

  The pistol, a semiautomatic with a long suppressor threaded on to the barrel, was lying under a pile of ledger books. He picked it up and backed away when he saw the pile begin to move.

  ‘Stay down,’ Cal shouted. ‘I’ve got your gun. I swear I’ll use it.’

  The pile kept shifting, books and file boxes falling away as the man tried to stand.

  With a final push, a bald head emerged through the toppled shelving, then a shoulder, then an arm, then a hand clutching another pistol, this one a snub-nosed revolver.

  Cal fired until the clip was empty, a long run of muffled eighth notes, turning the man’s head into pulp.

  EIGHTEEN

  At five a.m. Cal was still waiting for that chilled vodka but he had moved on and he was now fixated on coffee instead. One of the crime-scene investigators told him that the nearest Starbucks opened in half an hour.

  Dawn wouldn’t break for two hours on the day he’d killed someone. It wasn’t the most glorious of feelings.

  He’d been consigned to the archivist’s desk as detectives, uniformed officers, and forensics people buzzed around. The lead homicide detective from the 19th precinct, a sleepy-looking guy with a drooping moustache and a cigarette voice named Gonzalez, stopped by every so often asking follow-on questions to his initial interview.

  Gail Sassoon had arrived on the heels of the police. Cal hadn’t thought to call her; she was on file as the bank’s official contact in the case of an emergency. He had been impressed by a couple of things, first that she’d sobered up so efficiently considering how smashed she’d been, and second, how well-put-together she looked for someone yanked out of bed at two in the morning. When she arrived she went into full lawyer mode, hovering over Cal protectively, zealously representing the bank’s interests, and personally calling Consuela Gomes’s husband to offer support and arranging for a bank employee to stay with the children so he could come to the scene.

  After a prolonged absence Gail reappeared with two cups of coffee from the office machine. ‘Hanging in there?’ she asked him.

  He thanked her and took a long, grateful sip. ‘Better now. Any idea how much longer they want me here?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be long,’ she said. ‘One of our people finally came in and unlocked the security closet. The detectives are upstairs reviewing the closed-circuit cameras. Once that’s done, I’m sure they’ll have everything they need.’

  ‘To prove I’m not a murderer?’

  ‘I think what happened is pretty clear even without the cameras. The police know this was self-defense.’

  ‘The why it happened isn’t so clear,’ he said.

  ‘Once they’ve identified the body hopefully a motive should come into focus.’ She sipped at her cup and said, ‘You know, I didn’t ask you. Did you find it? The contract?’

  He opened Gomes’s upper desk drawer and gently removed the acetate folder from the university directory.

  She smiled for the first time since arriving. ‘You did find it!’

  ‘It was in a shelf of material for restoration. There was a fire in the mid-nineteenth century, when the bank was based in London. In the 1920s your first archivist, Conrad Wilkins, set aside partially burned documents for a conservator. That’s where I found the annex. It was damaged.’

  ‘What about the signature page?’

  ‘It’s readable.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Please.’

  He tweezered out the pages for her inspection.

  ‘Look, Cal, I can’t speak to the validity of a contract of this age with these kinds of jurisdictional, provenance, and I expect, myriad legal issues, but purely from the viewpoint of its completeness with a clear execution by lender and lendee, it’s got a shot at being valid and enforceable.’

  Detective Gonzalez appeared. It looked like he had found the same coffee machine upstairs.

  ‘OK, Mr Donovan, it looks like the security cameras support your version,’ he said, dragging out his words so slowly it drove Cal crazy. ‘You’re either lucky to be alive or you’re one smart cookie, the way you ran through the place under fire.’

  ‘Mostly lucky,’ Cal said.

  ‘So there won’t be any charges?’ Gail asked.

  ‘Open and shut. Self-defense,’ Gonzalez said. ‘That’s what I’ll put in my report. The district attorney will have a look but I wouldn’t lose any sleep. The cameras tell the story.’

  Cal nodded in weary relief. ‘Still, I’ve got to live with what I did.’

  ‘Get over it, is my advice,’ Gonzalez said, bluntly. ‘This prick walked right up to Mrs Gomes and shot her in the face. Then he takes her watch and her wallet.’

  ‘The poor woman,’ Gail gasped.

  ‘What time did it happen?’ Cal asked.

  ‘Just before ten according to the time log. You returned at a quarter past ten so you just missed it.’

  ‘But that means he waited almost three hours,’ Cal said. ‘What the hell was he doing?’

  ‘Not a lot from what I could see on the footage. He was hanging out by the elevator mostly, biding his time by the looks of it.’

  ‘But whatever did he want?’ Gail asked. ‘There’s nothing of any intrinsic value down here.’

  ‘Let me tell you folks something: not all criminals are brainy. This guy probably saw Mrs Gomes coming in late. He sees the word bank on your plaque. He thinks to himself, banks have money. Maybe she didn’t close the front door properly. Maybe he just pushed in after her. The front door closes real slow. Did you know that? And you should also know that there’s something wrong with the camera on that door. You should have it fixed. Anyway, he follows her into the basement where he kills her. We see him looking around until he hears you returning after your dinner and then he hides, waiting to see what’s what. All he knows is that the place is full of papers, not the green folding kind. Eventually he gets tired of waiting and decides to do to you what he did to her.’

  ‘Who is he, do you know?’ Cal asked.

  ‘No ID, none whatsoever. We’ll have to wait on fingerprints. A guy like this is bound to have priors.’

  ‘So you think it was just a crime of opportunity and he was just a petty thief?’ Cal asked.

  ‘Unless something else surfaces, yeah, I do.’

  ‘He had a suppressor on his pistol,’ Cal said. ‘What kind of petty thief walks around with that kind of gear?’

  ‘This is New York. I’ve been working homicides for a long time. Nothing amazes me anymore. Well almost nothing. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a civilian’s going to call it a silencer. How come you know the correct terminology?’

  ‘I was in the army.’

  ‘Oh yeah? See any action?’

  ‘Only in the bars around Fort Campbell.’

  ‘Shit, I was in the Airborne too, man,’ the detective said, extending his arm.

  ‘You might not want to shake my hand,’ Cal said. ‘I got tossed out for punching my sergeant.’

  Gonzalez shook it anyway.

  ‘Shit, I
could tell from the cameras you were a brawler. I didn’t think professors were tough guys.’

  ‘Depends on their department.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What’s yours?’

  ‘Religion.’

  Cal slept through the afternoon and well into the evening. When he awoke, his hotel suite was already dark. Momentarily disoriented, the events of the night came back to him fast and hard. Standing in front of the coffee station and mini-bar, he considered his options and went for the vodka.

  By the time he’d showered, a note had been slipped under his door. He had turned his mobile off and put the hotel phone on do not disturb so Gail had resorted to a hand-delivered message. The message was an invitation to a dinner at her apartment. Marcus would be there. They had a lot to discuss, she wrote.

  He texted her. That’s when he saw he had a bunch of voicemails.

  Switching to coffee, he made a few calls then dressed for dinner. Before he left he opened the room safe one more time to lay eyes on the contract.

  At least something good had come out of this awful day.

  He walked to the Sassoons through the first snow showers of the season, cutting over to Park Avenue through residential streets, their townhouses decorated with strings of lights and wreaths in a last, post-Christmas gasp before January broke the spell and winter became just winter.

  A butler greeted the private elevator that stopped inside the residence and took Cal’s snow-dusted coat and scarf. The dinner party of five was dwarfed by the grand sitting room that was designed for huge gatherings. Henry looked spent and droopy in his wheelchair, laboring over every sentence. Marcus kept his conversation to the bare minimum. Marcus’s wife, one of those women who had spoiled her natural good looks with too much surgery, said nothing at all beyond her initial ‘Oh hello.’ It fell upon Gail and Cal to keep things flowing. Over a white burgundy they recapped the traumas of the previous night.

  ‘Did the police contact you today?’ Gail asked.

  ‘I had a message from Detective Gonzalez. I got his voicemail when I returned it,’ Cal replied.

  ‘They only finished up at the bank a few hours ago. I spoke with him when he left.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Cal asked.

  She had a perplexed expression. ‘Apparently, the killer’s fingerprints weren’t in any state or federal database. Also, all his clothes appeared to be brand new.’

  ‘That doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy,’ Cal said. ‘When I talk to him I’m going to suggest he check the fingerprints with Interpol.’

  ‘Why?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Just to be thorough. In case this wasn’t a crime of opportunity, as Gonzalez called it.’

  ‘You? You think he was – after you?’ Henry rasped. ‘Why?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Gail said. ‘The contract. Who else knows about it, Cal?’

  ‘From what I understand, very few, but the Vatican’s never been good at keeping secrets. It’s more like a colander than a pot.’

  Gail noticed that her husband was crying and asked what was wrong.

  It was hard for him to get it out. ‘I can’t stop – thinking about her. Consuela Gomes was – a lovely woman,’ he said. ‘We must take care of – her family.’

  Gail got up to dab at his eyes. ‘Of course we will.’

  ‘What will we do without her?’ Henry asked.

  ‘I don’t know why we needed an archivist in the first place,’ Marcus said, his tone as cold as the winter night. Cal caught his silent wife flinching.

  Henry breathed the word, ‘Legacy.’

  ‘I don’t know what kind of return on investment you’re expecting by keeping ledger books from 1899 and paying someone to catalogue more paper than the regulators require,’ Marcus said.

  Gail asked if Cal would answer as a historian.

  He took the bait. ‘I’ve found that sometimes the most mundane documents are the ones that shed the brightest light on key moments in history. So you never know. It’s a mistake to preserve documents selectively and it’s a disaster to not preserve them at all. Carefully archive them all and you serve the future best. I applaud your efforts.’

  ‘Well said,’ Henry puffed. ‘Thank you.’

  Gail thanked him too and Marcus grunted something unintelligible. ‘Cal, before we go through to dinner,’ she said, ‘could you tell us about the marvelous discoveries you made before you were attacked?’

  His glass of wine had been refilled; he hadn’t seen the butler sneaking up on it. He sipped at it and said, ‘Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?’

  Henry laughed and began to choke. Everything came to a halt while the nurse who was on call, waiting in the kitchen, was summoned to wheel him away for suctioning.

  Henry’s color restored, to its baseline gray, he returned and begged to be spared further humor.

  ‘I do better with grief – than mirth,’ he said.

  ‘You have my word,’ Cal said. ‘What happened last night was awful and what happened a hundred sixty years ago was awful too. What I’m piecing together is a depressing story that went well beyond the kidnapping and extortion at the heart of the loan. Your ancestors were murdered; their property was set on fire. My best guess – and it’s only a guess – is that this was a concerted effort to erase all knowledge of the loan. When the perpetrators were done with their dirty work, it was as if the loan never existed.’

  When Cal finished describing the body of evidence, Gail asked, ‘Was the Vatican behind these atrocities?’

  ‘I found nothing directly implicating Vatican officials. But we have a letter from Cardinal Lambruschini to Cardinal Antonelli, proposing that this duke, Duke Tizziani, help them, quote-unquote, deal with these bankers in Venice and in their foreign offices. So the presumption has to be that the Vatican did play at least some role in orchestrating the affair.’

  ‘But even so,’ Gail said, ‘the contract was sitting in the archive all along.’

  ‘Fire-damaged but largely intact,’ Cal said. ‘We don’t know how it survived and why Claude Sassoon’s successor didn’t pursue a claim for payment. But here we are. I would have brought it over tonight to show everybody but it’s in a fragile state.’

  ‘It’s our property, goddamn it!’ Marcus shouted.

  His wife finally spoke. ‘Marcus, please!’

  Gail jumped in. ‘I asked Cal to hold on to it,’ she said. ‘He’s going to recommend a restoration expert.’

  ‘I’ve got an appointment with someone tomorrow morning, at a company that does a lot of work for the Met,’ he said. ‘They’ll photograph it and keep it in their safe. I’ll provide you with an estimate for the work.’

  Marcus fidgeted in his chair, looking like he wanted to get up and leave.

  Henry adjusted his oxygen prongs and said, ‘Marcus, what the hell’s – bugging you. You look mightily – pissed off.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s the matter,’ his cousin fumed. ‘We’re all sitting here seriously contemplating doing business with these bastards at the Vatican, the same gang of thieves that killed our relatives and stole our money.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ Gail said.

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ Marcus said. ‘I say we get a copy of the contract to our lawyers and send these bastards a demand letter.’

  Henry hit the arm of his wheelchair with the heel of his hand and labored to spit this out. ‘No. We’re going to – talk to them. Gail will be the point person. You can participate – in the process or you can choose – not to. I have the majority. We’re going to do this – my way.’

  It was like throwing a match into a barrel of gunpowder. Marcus flew out of his chair and demanded his wife come with him.

  ‘Always your damn majority,’ he shouted. ‘It was the same thing in 1858. You saw the letter. My side of the family was supposed to have an equal say in things. That never happened, did it? You’ve never known what it feels like to play second fiddle, Henry. I’ll tell you what it feels like. It stink
s.’

  Henry began to cough and barely managed to tell his cousin to calm down before the nurse had to be called again. By the time she’d finished attending to his secretions and brought him back in, Marcus and his wife had left.

  Cal had been squirming as the family drama played out but he brushed off Gail’s apologies.

  ‘I think everyone’s been under stress,’ he said.

  ‘You were the one who was almost killed,’ she said. ‘Marcus’s behavior was unacceptable.’

  ‘I agree,’ Henry said.

  ‘I’m glad you’re still willing to talk to the Vatican,’ Cal said. ‘I was able to speak with the pope’s private secretary. Celestine has invited us to meet with him to discuss his ideas for a foundation.’

  ‘When?’ Gail asked.

  ‘Ideally, in the next day or two. He’s very concerned about leaks.’

  The butler whispered to Gail that dinner was served and that he had reduced the number of place settings.

  She rose to push her husband’s chair and said to Cal, ‘Unless you’re right and there’s already been a leak.’

  Henry told them that his private jet was at their disposal. ‘But see if you can get Marcus – back in the fold,’ he said. ‘I wish I hadn’t – pulled rank on him again. Smooth it over with him, Gail. Smooth it over.’

  Marcus Sassoon lived on the Upper West Side, on the opposite side of Central Park from his cousin, with high, sweeping views over the treetops. He could stand in his living room with a glass of scotch in his hand and see his cousin’s building. There was a fine brass telescope on a wooden tripod in one corner of the living room. Personally, he had never used it to get a bead on Henry’s windows, although his son had used it to spy in the past and was doing so now.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ Marcus said. ‘You’re acting like a peeping Tom.’

  Albert persisted. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know if Gail is having it off with Donovan?’

  ‘She was giving him the eye,’ his father allowed. ‘Henry’s no use to her anymore.’