The Lure (41 page)

All Noel wanted was sleep. And a few dozen painkillers. “Yes.”

“Only what your boss won’t know is that you’re going to have to pass a little loyalty test. If you don’t pass it, then start saying prayers. Because I’ll know you’re with them for sure.”

“With who?”

“Shut up, Noel. Listen carefully and don’t say a word until I’m finished.” Eric’s voice dropped to a clear whisper. “Listen, you and McWhitter are going to meet Mr. Vega two days from now. We’ve already been bullshitting him about opening a new club way down below SoHo. You and McWhitter will meet him there to discuss the place. Vega will come if he knows you’re coming, too. At a prearranged signal, you’ll get lost, leaving the two of them. You’ll wait outside for McWhitter, then the two of you will drive back. You’ll stay with me, under close scrutiny, from now until you go with McWhitter. Got that? That’s the deal.”

There it was: the deal. Take it or leave it. What Noel had most feared when he’d taken this job with Whisper—not his own life in danger, but someone else’s. Monica in the lake. Kansas in the warehouse. Randy in the back room. And now Vega. Another chance. Only this time he would win. Because Eric didn’t know that even at Eric’s he could communicate with Loomis, could take countermeasures.

“Wait until Alana hears about this,” Noel said.

“She isn’t going to hear about it.”

“You’d actually kill someone?” Noel asked.

“Is it a deal or not?” was Eric’s reply.

“Give me a cigarette,” Noel said. He wanted to seem to think.

After he’d smoked half of it, he said, “I’ll tell you what. You can lock me up from now until after McWhitter’s done. I’ll promise to make no attempt to leave, to do anything. You can even put me in the Red Room if you want. But I won’t go with him.”

“That’s tempting. Real tempting. But either you go or no deal.”

“Why?”

Eric leaned over and tapped Noel’s cheek. “Because you’re the bait, that’s why. You’re going to lure that big fish into my net.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll leave you on the street. Your friends will be back for you.”

The irony of the situation didn’t escape Noel. But it was a fair turnaround, perhaps one Loomis could use to snare Eric. And Alana wasn’t involved in it. Not at all. Which cinched it. Let Eric rush to his doom. Let Loomis get what he wanted. To hell with them, Noel didn’t care anymore.

“It’s a deal,” he said. “A deal.”

Once he hardened his heart to both Eric and Loomis, the rest was easy. Noel knew exactly what he had to do. He would go downtown with McWhitter to meet Buddy Vega. But he would warn the Fisherman. Let him worry about it. The matter would be out of his hands.

“I want to stop at my apartment to clean up and change,” he said as he made the painful adjustments necessary to getting into the back of the Silver Cloud. Eric and a man Noel didn’t know helped him out of the Baths. He was surprised to see it was early evening. The edge of the sun could be seen through the canyon of building façades down Twenty-eighth Street, slowly setting in a pollution-tinted haze refracted off the Hudson River.

McWhitter took over at the door of the car, and was surprisingly helpful and tender. Not like a man who’d ordered a mugging. More like someone who felt guilty about wanting to do it, now that he’d seen the wish fulfilled by someone else. Who were those two thugs anyway?

“I’ll help you upstairs,” Eric said when they reached Noel’s building. Naturally: Redfern wasn’t taking any chances.

Noel undressed with difficulty—the brush of denims over a thigh bruise where he’d been repeatedly kicked was intolerable. He found some codeine tablets, popped two into his mouth, then got into the shower. The water stung, then soothed. When he turned on the massage action, he felt almost human again.

Eric had sat down in the rocker and was reading a magazine when Noel came out of the bathroom. He dressed as though he were alone, and even sorted out some clean clothing from a package of still unopened laundry to pack a flight bag.

“Your phone rang while you were in the shower.”

Noel hadn’t heard it. He disbelieved Eric, but didn’t know why he’d bother lying about it. “Who was it?”

“I let your machine answer.”

“Oh,” Noel said. “I didn’t hear it.”

“It rang three times, then stopped. I heard the machine turn on.”

Noel still didn’t understand. He zipped up the bag. “I’m ready.”

“Don’t you want to know who called?”

“I’m not in the mood for sympathy calls.”

“I’m in no hurry,” Eric said casually. “Play back the tape.”

So that was it! He wanted to know who had called while Noel was out. There hadn’t been any telephone call while Noel was showering.

“Whoever it was,” Noel said, “it can wait. I still feel shitty.”

“Suit yourself. Here! I’ll carry that.”

At the town house, Noel went directly up to his room, saying he had to rest. There, he wrote five messages on the onionskin paper, bunched them up, put them in his pocket, then took a long nap.

When he awakened and went downstairs, Okku told him Eric and Alana had gone out for the evening. It was almost two o’clock. Noel ate alone—a salmon omelet and watercress salad—in the half-moon dining room, listening to a new easy-listening tape. Then he said he was going out for a stroll in the garden.

Circling the grounds slowly, he wished to look to any observer as though he were merely thoughtful, convalescing. Nevertheless, he managed to get each of the paper balls out of the yard in ways that were almost sleight of hand, given the darkness, then turned inside the house.

He watched one of Eric’s two copies of
Casablanca
he found in the film library. Just as the last reel was coming on, he thought he heard an odd whistling from somewhere outside. Looking out the window, he could make out no one to account for the whistle. Then it happened again, from higher up. Could Loomis have already gotten his message? Was this some manner of reply? He couldn’t go down into the yard and raise Okku’s or McWhitter’s suspicions. Or risk the elevator.

He left the film running, and painfully, quietly, walked the three and a half floors up to the roof. There, he stood on the open deck for several minutes.

It hit him on the side of his head with a tiny rap. Noel located the ball of paper at his feet, and scooped it up. There seemed to be a shadowy figure on the parapet of a building half a block away, but no one else even vaguely in sight any closer. Must have been put into a pellet gun and shot over. He remained on the roof, as though admiring the night for another few minutes.

Then, by the flickering light of Bogart and Bergman he read:

Message received. Vega will be covered. McWhitter taken care of. You will just get out. Do as told. Good work.

F.M.

Outside he heard the soft thump of the Rolls hitting the rampway down to the garage. He burned the paper and sat back to watch the film.

“Why aren’t you dressed?” Eric asked when Noel came down to breakfast late Sunday morning.

“I don’t see any company,” Noel responded, taking a seat and drinking off his cranberry juice in two gulps. Only McWhitter and Eric were present in the dining room, its curtains opened this morning to fully reveal the bright sunlight and greenery surrounding them. Alana had left yesterday morning for a shooting in Milan. Noel and she had met on the stairway; she had looked at his bruised face, then rushed past him to her rooms. Not a word had been exchanged.

“Get dressed right after you’re done eating,” Eric said, smacking the top of a soft-boiled egg so repeatedly it was a shambles of yolk and shell in his plate. He put it aside without touching it. And then, Noel knew.

“Today?” he asked.

“You’re to meet at two o’clock. He ought to be waiting there,” Eric said, his nervousness now smothered by his ability to spell it all out. “The two of you will go inside. Here’s a set of keys. I gave him a set, too. It ought to be unlocked.”

The manner in which Eric spoke of his intended victim seemed to suggest no personality, no character, as though he had already dismissed from his mind everything individual and unique about Buddy Vega in order to see him as one thing only—the enemy, that which must be eliminated.

“Here are the plans you will give him,” Eric said, lifting a long cardboard tube from the unoccupied chair next to him. He took out the plans and unfurled them on the table, pointing to various parts of the diagram as he spoke. “You enter here. Make a left at the foyer, here, then go into that large room. It’s two stories high. The roof is partially open. That’s where the skylight will be.”

“Do you own this place?” Noel had to know.

“Are you kidding? A rental agent showed it to Chaffee months ago. We had a second key made.”

Eric stretched out the roll of plans again and continued: “Leave the plans with him. That’s important. Make sure he opens them and begins looking at them. Even do it for him, if necessary. Then, Noel, you go here.” He pointed to a small room off the corridor. “Make some excuse. You have to check the plumbing, the wiring, anything. Then you quietly go out the entry again to the street. Go directly to the car, sit down, and wait for Bill to come out again.”

He made Noel repeat the instructions. When they came to the part about Vega holding the plans in his hands, Noel asked why that was so important.

“So his hands are busy when I come up behind him,” McWhitter answered softly. “He won’t have a chance to move. I’ll get him from behind just perfect, then flick.” He snapped his closed fists apart as though garroting someone.

“Just do as you’re told,” Eric said. His nervousness contrasted so markedly with the bodyguard’s imperturbable, almost technical calm that Noel had the sudden total conviction that Eric had never done anything like this before, as he had the equal unshakable belief that McWhitter had, often, and with no thought but how to do it with the least trouble to himself.

Noel finished repeating the instructions, looking down at his own two uncracked soft-boiled eggs, in their neat, egg-white-colored little bowl, set in turn on a similarly colored, flatter plate, set against the slightly luminescent flat white of the tabletop, and he suddenly thought, yes, this is where my life has led me, to discussing the murder of a friend among all this elegant breakfast china. The shapes and colors in front of him made him furious with their purity and unity; he wanted to smash them, all of them, to smash all the white clean pure perfect things in the world for their hollow deception, for their utter fragility.

“Would you prefer something else to eat?” Okku asked at Noel’s elbow. “Oatmeal? Cereal?”

“Yes, thank you,” Noel said, but by the time the cereal had come, he had reminded himself that Loomis knew and Vega would be safe, and had eaten both of the eggs.

Upstairs he wrote N
OW!
all over a sheet of onionskin paper, and stuffed it in his denims’ pocket.

The anonymous sedan Eric had had rented for the mission was parked down the street. Noel pretended to find the paper in his pocket before he and McWhitter got into the car. He looked at it as though it were nothing of importance, tore it up, and scattered the fragments out the car window.

McWhitter drove in silence downtown, past the congestion of Sunday traffic around the bridge and tunnel, over to the West Side—almost solitary in the glaring hot weather. Below Canal Street, even scattered cars and pedestrians ceased to appear. McWhitter slowed down, turned a corner near a series of four-story warehouses with metal awnings that jutted out to the edge of the sidewalk. He seemed to be looking for the address, then advanced around a second corner, identical to the first, and stopped the car.

He sat at the wheel without making a sound. Noel saw a bright metal object transferred quickly from McWhitter’s pants to his shirt pocket. It made a bulge and so was returned to the pants. The garrote?

The street was empty. Not a car, not a parked truck. It was two o’clock by the car dial clock. What were they waiting for?

“Want to have a far-out time?” the bodyguard said so suddenly and huskily that Noel answered, “What?”

“Instead of coming back to the car, stay in the room Eric told you to go into. When I’m finished, I’ll come in and let you screw me.”

Noel was so astonished he didn’t speak.

“It’s the only time I can take it that way,” McWhitter said huskily, stroking Noel’s thigh lightly. “The only time I can relax enough. You know.”

Noel overcame his disgust by telling himself it wouldn’t happen.

“What do you say?” McWhitter asked, his big hand moving into Noel’s crotch.

“Sure.”

“I promised Eric. But it will be too late by the time I get back to the house. And,” he added huskily, “if you listen real good from the other room, it’ll sound like he’s coming when I put it on him. It’s real exciting.”

“Let’s go,” Noel said.

McWhitter gave his groin one more stroke, then got out of the car.

Even with his sunglasses on, Noel was temporarily blinded by the glare of the white-bricked buildings reflected off the empty asphalt road. It was beating hot, airless, the way it must be on the prairie in midsummer, he thought.