Recoil (6 page)

Jan burst into abrupt laughter. Mathieson reached out and she sagged against him, burying her face against his chest, the laughter going into sobs.

“You're alive,” Bradleigh said in his stern monotone.

“Are we supposed to be grateful about that?”

“You will be when you've had time to think about it.”

“What about right now? How are we supposed to feel right now?”

“They don't make rules about it.”

“I just want this to be a bad dream.”

2

By midnight Amy Gilfillan was in bed, drugged to sleep, and the house had emptied out but there were still cops outside standing guard. The TV trucks and lights were gone. Ronny dozed on the couch; most of the lights were off; Roger had taken Billy back to put him to bed; Jan sat half drunk on the ottoman.

Mathieson went to the bar. Anger made his hands shake and Bradleigh shouldered him aside. “I'll do it. What are you having?”

“Might as well stick with bourbon. Rocks.”

He waited without patience and finally took the glass from Bradleigh; he turned. “What now?”

“We'll have to get you out of here. They'll try again.” Bradleigh closed the refrigerator door. He was drinking orange juice. “It was my job to prevent this.”

“Don't get maudlin, Glenn. You're not responsible. You didn't sling any bombs.”

The phone rang and Bradleigh took it; Mathieson couldn't hear what he said but afterward Bradleigh came across the room and stood beside him. “Looks like they've slipped the net. If we were going to collar them locally we'd have had them by now. Either we'll get a tip from a CI or we'll have to go at it from another angle.”

“CI?”

“Sorry. Confidential informant. We've made some progress toward finding the leak in the office—narrowed it down to three or four people. As soon as we pin it on one of them we'll go to work. We'll find out who bought the information, I promise you.”

“We know who bought it.”

“Not to get a prosecution we don't. We've got to have evidence.”

“When does Pastor go out in the street?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

Silence dragged along for a while. Jan had fallen asleep sitting up, one shoulder tipped against the wall, the hair falling across her eyes. Mathieson looked down at Ronny's sleeping face.

Some time later he said, “I feel like a goldfish here. Suppose they throw a bomb into this house? We ought to clear out.”

“We may as well.” Bradleigh looked embarrassed; he was a poor dissembler.

“What's the matter, Glenn?”

“Guess I've been playing dirty pool with you. Chalk it up to an excess of zeal. We should have moved you out of here six hours ago.”

“Hell, I know that. You've kept us here because you wanted them to make another try.”

“Believe me this place is covered inside out and upside down. They'd never get near you.” He put his glass down. “But you're right, we'd better move out. Let's start waking them up.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Long Island: 2-3 August

1

F
RANK
'
S DAUGHTERS CARRIED THEIR STRIDENT RIVALRY ONTO
the screened porch and Anna Pastor slumped with the fatigue of dealing with them. She retreated from the parlor, out onto the flagstones.

Beyond the statuary the lawn was neatly cut, two acres of grass sloping down to the beach. She could see Frank on the dock with Ezio: In silhouette against the silver water of the Sound they looked like cutouts of Mutt and Jeff. Ezio used his body expressively whenever he spoke; his arms rode up and down incessantly, his head rocked back and forth, he pivoted and stamped and took up defiant poses. Frank stood motionless, perhaps asking and answering, but there was no sign of it at this distance. Frank had outgrown the mannerisms of the streets long ago and prison had put a kind of rigidity into him.

This morning when he'd come outside the walls he'd stood on the curb with his head thrown back and his eyes half closed, presenting his face to the sun as if to draw strength from it. It had been ten minutes before he'd got into the car and then he'd just sat beside her holding her hand, letting Ezio's rapid-fire talk roll off him.

They'd driven straight out to the Island and he'd gone upstairs with her and without a word made love to her without even bothering to draw the curtains; then he'd put on his whites and told her he needed to be alone because he hadn't been alone in eight years and he'd taken the outboard onto the Sound.

He'd been gone until an hour ago; at midafternoon he'd tied the boat up to the dock and Ezio had gone down there to meet him and they were still talking.

In the meantime there'd been twenty phone calls and for a time the place had crawled with men but Ezio had sent nearly all of them away, some on errands and some simply away. Only two were left, somewhere around the place—George Ramiro down at his post in the gatehouse and C. K. Gillespie who had been on the phone in the dining room when she'd gone past a moment ago.

Every summer for eight years she'd brought the girls out here; every summer it had got harder as they'd got older. She had never lived out here with Frank: They had been married the year before he went to prison and they'd taken a honeymoon in Italy that summer and spent the rest of it in the Brooklyn house while Frank's lawyers tried to delay the sentencing.

The two men came up across the garden. Frank took her in his arms. He held her close and tight, not moving; she slid her fingers up his spine and rubbed the back of his neck. She felt a shudder run through him. “Jesus Maria,” he whispered, “sometimes I thought it'd never be.” Then he turned past her and patted her rump. In the house a phone was ringing; Ezio hurried inside. Gillespie had come outside and was politely looking away, down toward the water. Frank moved to the marble table and pressed the buzzer under its lip; after a moment Gregory Cestone appeared at the French doors in black trousers and white shirt and black bow tie. “Yes, Mr. Pastor?”

“Let's have some drinks out here.”

“Right away, sir.” Cestone neither nodded nor smiled. He had been in some kind of fire years ago; there were legends about it and none of them coincided; whatever the incident, Cestone's face had been burned. Plastic surgeons had reassembled it but the facial muscles were gone and it was an immobile mask. It had taken her years to get used to it.

Cestone turned back inside and Ezio brushed past him, coming out. Frank caught Ezio's eye and Ezio shook his head. “There's nothing. They've all gone to ground.”

“That's not good enough, Ezio.”

“We'll get them, Frank. It'll take a little time.”

“This time it's taken eight years. How long do you figure on the next one?”

“It won't be any eight years, I can promise you that.”

“Can you?” Frank never raised his voice but she edged away from him; when he spoke in that tone she felt uneasily as if she were in a cage with something untamed. Yet she had never seen him lift his hand to anyone. It was what had attracted her to him in the beginning; the sensation of raw savagery absolutely controlled by the power of his will.

Cestone pushed the wheeled drink cart outside through the doors. Gillespie came from the parapet and they gathered around the cart while Cestone made the drinks. She thought how handsome Frank looked in his nautical whites and cap.

But then he took the cap off and rubbed his pale scalp. “Those four gentlemen made me into a bald-headed old man, Ezio. They took eight of my best years. That's something a man can't ever get back.”

“I know that, Frank.”

“No. You don't. You've never been inside. Eight years with those stinking black animals. If I hadn't been who I am, I'd have got raped in there twice a day. Two thousand black junkie fags locked inside those walls. That's what I lived with those eight years.”

“You look damn good, though.”

“I kept fit. I made a point of it. You go too soft in there, it doesn't matter who you are or who your friends are. You have to keep command. Nobody respects a flabby leader.”

“Well you've never been flabby, Frank, that's for sure.”

Gillespie said, “Personally I never trust a fat man.”

It made Ezio look at him angrily. Ezio wasn't fat—he was thick but it was all solid—but she hadn't missed the insinuation in Gillespie's remark and she was surprised he had the nerve to utter it.

It hadn't escaped Frank but he decided to ignore it; he had other things on his mind. He gestured toward his wife with his drink; she smiled; Frank took a healthy swallow and turned toward Ezio. “What's in motion?”

“Hell, Frank, we're looking for them. What else can I tell you until we start hearing back? The word only went out a few hours ago. We've got photographs going out to every city and town where we've got contacts. Some of the cops here and there, the organizations, you know how it goes. It's the biggest manhunt we've ever started. We'll find them.”

“Particularly Merle. Edward Merle.”

“Particularly him, Frank.”

“I want all four of them. But the other three are just window dressing compared to him.”

“We know that.”

Frank turned his head. He was eyeing C. K. Gillespie. The younger man met his glance. She saw the flicker of a smile at the corner of Gillespie's thin mouth.

Frank said, “What about you? What are you doing about it?”

“Well I have an idea, Mr. Pastor.”

“You do? Let's hear it.”

“Sir, I wouldn't want you to take this the wrong way. Right now it's just kind of a wild idea I'm trying out. I'd just as soon not go into the whole thing before I find out whether it pans out.”

Ezio said, “Mr. Pastor doesn't like smartass young lawyers, Charlie.”

Gillespie spread his neat small hands openly. “Look at it this way, Ezio. If the idea works we'll all benefit from it. But if it's a dud, then I just raise Mr. Pastor's false hopes and I make a fool out of myself by bragging about it at this point. All I can say is I'm working on something and I think it's got a pretty good chance of producing results.”

“You coy little—”

“Let it go,” Frank said. “C.K. may have a point. In the meantime you get on the phone to Los Angeles and build some fires under those people.”

2

They walked together along the shore; she held Frank's hand. With the toes of her canvas shoes she kicked at seashells. Out on the Sound little sailboats wheeled like butterflies. Frank said, “You've done a job with the kids. I mean a fabulous job, Anna.”

“Forty lashes a day keeps them in line.”

“I'm serious about this. I married you—let's face it, I married you because you had good brains and good looks and a body that just won't quit. I wasn't looking for a mother for my kids; I wasn't even thinking that straight in those days. Nobody around me wanted this marriage. They all hated it. They put you through hell, I guess. And then those four gentlemen sending me away for eight years. But you're still here and you're the one that got me out of there, you more than anybody else—”

“Now that was Ezio, Frank; he's the one who reached the board.”

“Just between us and the seashells, little Anna, I get a feeling Ezio wouldn't have minded having a free hand to go on running the organization by himself for a while longer. You were the one who kept sticking the prod to him. What I'm saying, you turned out to be a lot more wife than I figured I was bargaining for and I'm not forgetting it.”

But then it went both ways and he knew that. All she'd had before she'd met him was her wits and her looks. She was a coal-dust brat from a rancid miner's shack thirty miles from Hazleton, Pennsylvania. She'd won a high-school beauty contest and quit school to go to New York and be a high-priced model, and she'd ended up getting two TV commercials because the director liked sleeping with young brunettes, and that was the extent of her life—that and a fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village that she shared with another girl and a hundred cockroaches and the occasional influx of freaked-out junkies with Beatle haircuts; and the promise of maybe eight or ten good years as a hooker before her looks got battered away and she disappeared from the world.

She didn't remind him; he became annoyed whenever she brought up her past. What she said was, “I love you, Frank.”

3

For an hour she and Nora played badminton against Sandy: Sandy was the athlete and won more games than she lost to the two of them. They were going inside to clean up when Gillespie drove down the driveway from the road. Anna saw George Ramiro go back into the gatehouse after closing the big gates. There was electric wire along the top of the wall all the way around the three landward sides of the six-acre estate.

The girls raced inside; Anna waited at the door while Gillespie parked the rented Cadillac and came up the slate walk with his briefcase, his sharkskin suit and his gentle friendly smile. “Been getting your exercise, I see.”

“The girls keep me hopping.”

“They're a great pair of kids,” he said. “I've got some good news for Frank.”

“In that case let's not keep him waiting.” She led him through the parlor and knocked on the door of the office. When she heard Frank's voice she opened it and stepped back and Gillespie went past her into the office.

Ezio and Frank were at the table leaning over a litter of blueprints. Gillespie stopped two paces inside the room. “That idea paid off.”

Over the back of Gillespie's shoulder she watched Frank's face. One eyebrow went up inquisitively. Ezio glanced at her disapprovingly but she stayed where she was.

Gillespie said, “I think it'll lead us to Edward Merle.”

Ezio said, “Shouldn't this be private, Frank?”