Sailing to Capri (15 page)

He fished the invitation out of the wastebasket and read it again.
One hundred thousand dollars.
Bob surely knew how to bait the trap, he thought with a thin smile. And “Sir Robert’s will is to be read at the Villa Belkiss in Capri.” Well now, wasn’t that interesting?

He thought for a moment, then still nervous, picked up the phone and dialed the RSVP number. “Charles Clement for Daisy Keane,” he said when the operator answered. He was asked to hold; moments later she came on the line.

“Mr. Clement? I assume you’re calling in response to my invitation?”

“I am. And I’m asking myself why Bob Hardwick would like my presence at his wake.”

She laughed, a pleasant sound, and he remembered that he’d met her, a tall redhead with a sexy mouth and no clothes sense.

She said, “Sir Robert’s last wish was to have a group of his friends get together in a sort of celebration. Actually, it’s just that he wanted everyone to have a good time at his expense. It’s for the last time, you see. And believe me, if Bob could be there with us, he would.”

“I believe it,” Charlie said, suddenly making up his mind. “I’ll be there, Miss Keane.”

He put down the phone and glanced at his watch. Time for lunch. It was still cold out and he shrugged into his overcoat and walked down the stairs to street level. London’s Soho was its usual crush of too many cars and too many people in too-narrow streets.

He’d noticed the fellow earlier, lounging opposite his office, reading a newspaper. Aware that the man had fallen in behind him as he walked away, Charlie felt little prickles of goose bumps rise on his skin. Was it the police? A plainclothes detective? He shot a quick glance behind him. The man was still there. Charlie quickened his pace. He stopped and lit a cigarette, glancing over his shoulder again. The man had gone. He heaved a sigh of relief. With Bob Hardwick’s invitation from the grave where he’d thought he had him safely dead and buried, he’d become nervous. Smiling, he strode on. He didn’t notice the new man who fell inconspicuously into line behind him.

Charlie walked fast, pushing his way arrogantly through the crowd until he came to a small club with photos of scantily clad girls outside. The sign over the closed dark blue door said MARILYN’S. The seedy doorman in a pale blue suit with a gold
braided cap unfolded himself hastily from against the wall where he’d been smoking a cigarette and contemplating the racing form, and Clement gave him a sharp lecture, then pushed past him into the club.

They always drew a good crowd at lunchtime. The men came to watch the girls strip, do their pole dances, lap dance if you had the price. Though of course, the real pricey “show” took place elsewhere, in an upmarket mansion in Paris, which was where Charlie was headed next. It was, after all, his favorite place in the world. In his view there was nothing to beat the École de Nuit.

He caught the Paris train out of Waterloo, thanking God for the Chunnel—the tunnel that linked London and Paris via rail. In a couple of hours he’d be there.

And so would Montana’s man who was trailing him.

It was a pleasant day in Queens, New York, but the sun filtering through the cloud cover only emphasized the littered gray streets and shuttered storefronts of the poorer part of town, populated by immigrant families, often illegal and living on the fringes of society. The blackened brick tenements zigzagged with iron fire escapes looked out onto treeless streets that blended into slightly more prosperous areas of fourplexes. Farther out were the small single-family homes that were all the immigrants, most of them Hispanic from Central America, could hope to strive for. That is if they could get jobs that paid enough to live more than hand-to-mouth, because without that elusive green card that proclaimed them residents of the United States of America, they had no bargaining power in the employment market.

The women worked as domestics in the suburbs or even
Manhattan, bringing back tales of the kind of lifestyle none of them had ever dreamed of, while the men were picked up for employment on street corners where they grouped, waiting to be selected for a day’s work moving furniture or hauling equipment or gardening, and any other backbreaking job no one else wanted for under the minimum wage.

They sent their children, of whom there were many, to school using false identities, and when school let out, the older children went to work in the small local stores: the bakery, the butcher, the hardware shop. In fact life wasn’t much different from that in the country they’d left, the country they still referred to as “home,” even though it was a country to which they never wanted to return. America was the promised land, and they wanted to catch hold of that promise, to make something of themselves. Their only alternative was to lie and cheat and grab at whatever opportunity presented itself: drug dealing, protection rackets, armed robbery, gangs. After all, nobody was perfect and everybody had to survive.

Walking down the treeless avenue, Davis Farrell didn’t look much different from any of them. A little more eccentric perhaps: his long dark brown hair straggled across his shoulders, his skin was olive color and his eyes brown. A beard hid the lower half of his face and he wore a gray T-shirt, jeans and worn sneakers. He stopped at a storefront, its windows crisscrossed with metal security gates, as was the door, which he now unlocked.

Stuck on the storefront window was a banner on which was written in Spanish, “Farrelisto. Assurance. Specialista en Immigracion.” But Davis was more than just an insurance
agent; he helped the immigrants with their visas and their housing.

He was not surprised to find people waiting outside his door. Worry drove people to him, searching for answers to insurmountable problems. Davis Farrell knew these people. He lived where they lived, in the same tenements. He dressed like they did. He spoke Spanish like they did. Here, he felt more Hispanic than in Connecticut, which was where he came from.

He opened his door and ushered his customers in. Telling them to wait, he’d be right with them, he pulled up his window shades, took a seat behind the wooden desk that had seen better days, leaned back in the Windsor chair, the seat of which was polished to a sheen by many years of bottoms, then pushed the button on the answering machine, listening to the distraught rattle of Spanish from his clients while he ripped open his mail.

He glanced up as the doorbell pinged. The door was kept permanently locked. Around here you never knew who might be outside. This time, though, it was a bike messenger. Farrell pressed the button to allow him to come in, signed for the envelope he handed him and made sure the door lock clicked as he left. He turned the envelope over, surprised. A thick white envelope with his name and address in calligraphy. He hadn’t seen quality like this in many years. He grinned. Maybe he was being invited to dinner at the White House.

He put it to one side while he dealt with the waiting clients, conversing with them in their own language. One of the men he knew well; he’d helped him get a visa two years ago. Now he’d progressed; he worked steadily, had just bought an old car
and needed insurance. Farrell got him a good deal. The second was a youth, no more than seventeen, Farrell guessed. He was illegal, just off the boat, scared as hell and with nowhere to go. Farrell made a couple of calls, then told him to wait, he would personally take him to a house that would give him shelter, and the people there would try to straighten out his situation. It was better than leaving him on the streets, easy prey for drugs and gangs and guns.

The third was a woman desperate to obtain a loan. Farrell knew it was impossible; he couldn’t help her, but he took out his money clip and peeled off a couple of twenties; at least she and her kids would eat today. He promised to speak to the immigrants’ association and see what they could do for her. It was only one of the many requests he would receive that day, and no day was any different from any other.

Alone but for the silent waiting youth, he picked up the envelope and studied the writing. Puzzled, he slit it open and removed the white card.

He laughed uproariously when he read it. Obviously he’d thought about Bob Hardwick a lot these past years. Hardwick had always been a joker, but this time the joke had been on him.

One day, out of the blue, Hardwick had cut Davis Farrell’s life in two. One minute he had been the young hotshot Wall Street guy; the next he was out on the streets, and nobody—not one single person he knew—would employ him. He hated Hardwick for that, hated him with a passion that he’d known would never die—until Bob Hardwick did.

After he’d taken care of the scared young illegal immigrant, Davis locked up his office. He took the subway to midtown
Manhattan, then walked to the parking lot where his BMW waited. He changed his shirt and slipped on a dark well-cut cashmere jacket and a pair of good loafers, changed his shabby bag for a leather case containing a laptop, then walked over to Lexington. In just a few minutes he was in another world; a modern minimalist office, all leather and steel. A well-dressed shiny-haired young woman sat at the reception desk. She smiled in a greeting, saying she hadn’t expected him back today.

In his own large office, he took out his laptop and called the receptionist to get him some coffee—hot and strong—from the deli downstairs. He hadn’t been able to work like this out in the open again until Bob was dead and unable to talk. But now Davis Farrell was back in biz.

Picking up the phone, he called Daisy Keane in London. Suddenly worried, he figured he’d better accept the invitation and find out what was going on.

When I’d gotten back to London, a messenger had arrived with a copy of the invitation to the cruise and a note from Montana saying they had already been sent out and I should expect replies very soon. He was on his way to New York and would be in touch later. The note was brisk and businesslike. He said nothing about our night together at Sneadley, only thanked me for taking him in out of the storm.

Restless as a cat, I prowled Bob’s huge Park Lane penthouse, stopping to stare out the windows at the gray sky hanging over Hyde Park. The trees were just showing their first early skin of green, like moss on a damp stone, and here and there daffodils poked their way through the stale clumps of gray snow, spring bursting through what was left of last week’s blizzard.

While I waited to hear from the suspects and Montana, I filled in my time by going methodically through Bob’s papers, putting aside those I considered needed his lawyer’s attention.
I’d never had access to Bob’s personal safe before, but now I had the key and I knew it was my job to check what was in there. It was only a small wall safe, half-hidden behind a rail of jackets in the closet off his bedroom, and when I opened it I found there wasn’t much in it, just another of those manila envelopes he always used like a quirky personal filing system.

There was no name written on the envelope, nothing to indicate what might be inside. Not wishing to pry into Bob’s personal affairs I hesitated to open it, but then I decided better me than anyone else. If the contents proved too intimate and definitely not for other eyes, I would destroy them.

Bob had sealed the envelope with strips of Scotch tape. I peeled them back and removed a packet of letters in old-fashioned, flimsy airmail envelopes clasped with a rubber band. All of them were to Señorita Rosalia Alonzo Ybarra at an address near Málaga, Spain. And every one of them was unopened and marked “Return to Sender.”

I knew at once these were Bob’s love letters to Rosalia begging her to come back to him. And she had not even opened them. Sadly, I imagined how desperate he must have felt as he wrote her yet again. The postmarks on the envelopes dated from forty years ago and spanned a period of three years. Three years of hoping, waiting.

I put the letters back in the safe and locked it. I wasn’t about to read Bob’s outpourings of grief and love. They had been meant for only Rosalia’s eyes.

But at least now I had an address for Montana to follow up on, though after all these years, who knew if Rosalia would still be there? I put her out of my mind, cleared out my desk and
packed up the office, then went to tackle my own suite of rooms.