her brush with death, but held back. Somehow she was afraid that it
would diminish her authority–that she would sound vulnerable, fearful,
easily spooked.
“Right, then,” Arsenault said, and there was a hesitation in his voice.
“Well, I guess I’ll be heading home. I don’t suppose–I’ll be driving
by your way, so if you have any second thoughts about grabbing a bite
…” He spoke haltingly. “Or having a nightcap.” He was obviously
trying to keep it light. “Or whatever.”
Anna didn’t reply immediately. In truth, she wouldn’t have minded
company just then. “That’s nice of you to offer,” she said finally.
“But I’m really tired.”
“Me, too,” he said quickly. “Long day. All right, then. See you in
the morning.” His voice had subtly shifted: no longer a man talking to
a woman, but one professional talking to another.
She hung up with a slight sense of emptiness. Then she closed the
curtains to the room and started sorting through her documents. There
was still plenty of stuff to work through.
She was convinced that the real reason she hadn’t yet gotten married,
had veered away from any relationship that seemed to be getting too
serious, was that she wanted to control her own surroundings. You get
married, you’re accountable to someone else. You want to buy something,
you have to justify it. You can no longer work late without feeling
guilty, having to apologize, to negotiate. Your time is under new
management.
At the office people who didn’t know her well called her the “Ice
Maiden” and probably a lot worse, mostly because she dated infrequently.
It wasn’t just Dupree. People didn’t like to see attractive women
unattached. It offended their sense of the natural order of things.
What they failed to realize was that she was a genuine workaholic and
seldom socialized, hardly had time to meet men anyway. The only pool of
men she could draw from were in the OSI, and dating a colleague could
only mean trouble.
Or so she told herself. She preferred not to dwell on the incident in
high school that still shadowed her, but she thought of Brad Reedy
almost daily, and with ferocious hatred. On the Metro she’d catch a
whiff of the citrus cologne Brad used to wear and her heart would spasm
with fear, then reflexive anger. Or she’d see on the street a tall
blond teenage boy in a red-and-white-striped rugby shirt, and she’d see
Brad.
She had been sixteen, physically a woman and, she was told, a beauty,
though she didn’t yet know it or believe it. She still had few friends,
but she no longer felt like an outcast. She quarreled with her parents
almost daily because she could no longer stand to live in their tiny
house; she felt claustrophobic, she couldn’t breathe.
Brad Reedy was a senior and a hockey player, and therefore a member of
the school’s aristocracy. She was a junior and couldn’t believe it when
Brad Reedy, the Brad Reedy, had stopped by her locker and asked if she
wanted to go out sometime. She thought it was a joke, that he’d been
put up to it or something, and she scoffed, turning away. Already she’d
begun to develop a protective layer of sarcasm.
But he persisted. She flushed, went numb, said I guess, maybe,
sometime.
Brad offered to pick her up at her house, but she couldn’t bear the
thought of his seeing how humble it was, so she pretended she had
errands to do downtown anyway and insisted on meeting at the movie
theater. For days before, she pored over Mademoiselle and Glamour. In
a Seventeen magazine feature on “How to Catch His Eye” she found the
perfect outfit, the sort of thing a rich, classy girl might wear, the
kind of girl Brad’s parents would approve of.
She wore a Laura Ashley tiny floral-print dress with a high ruffled
collar she’d bought at Goodwill, which she realized only after she
bought it didn’t fit quite right. In her matching lime-green
espadrilles and lime green Pappagallo Bermuda bag and lime-green
headband, she suddenly felt ridiculous, a little girl dressing up for
Halloween. When she met Brad, who was wearing a ripped pair of jeans
and a striped rugby shirt, she realized how overdressed she was. She
looked like she was trying too hard.
She felt as if the entire theater were watching her enter, this
overdressed fake preppy with this golden boy.
He wanted to go out to the Ship’s Pub for pizza and a beer afterward.
She had a Tab and tried to play mysterious and hard to get, but she
already had a wild crush on this teenage Adonis and still couldn’t
believe she was on a date with him.
After three, four beers, he began to get coarse. He drew close to her
in the booth and put his hands on her. She pleaded a headache–it was
the only thing she could think of on the spur of the moment–and asked
him to drive her home. He took her out to the Porsche, drove crazily,
and then made a “wrong turn” into the park.
He was a two-hundred-pound man, incredibly strong, fueled by just enough
alcohol to make him dangerous, and he forcibly removed her clothes, put
his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams, and kept chanting, “Aw,
you want it, you wetback bitch.”
This was her first time.
For a year afterward she went to church regularly. The guilt burned
inside her. If her mother ever found out, she was sure, it would
destroy her.
It haunted her for years.
And her mother continued to clean the Reedys’ house.
Now she remembered the bank records, tented on the armchair. Couldn’t
ask for more compelling reading material during a room-service dinner.
After a few minutes, she noticed a line of figures, then looked at it
again. How could this be right? Four months ago, one million dollars
had been wired into Robert Mailhot’s savings account.
She sat down in the chair, looked more closely at the page. She felt a
rush of adrenaline. She studied the column of numbers for a long time,
her excitement growing. An image of Mailhot’s modest clapboard house
popped into her head.
A million dollars.
This was becoming interesting.
Zurich
The streetlights flashed by, illuminating the backseat of the taxi like
the jittery flashes of a strobe light. Ben stared straight ahead,
looking at nothing, thinking.
The homicide detective had seemed disappointed when the lab results
showed that Ben hadn’t fired the weapon, and processed his release
papers with a show of reluctance. Obviously, Howie had managed to pull
some strings to get his passport returned.
“I’m releasing you on one condition, Mr. Hartman–that you get out of
my canton,” Schmid had told him. “Leave Zurich at once. If I ever find
out you’ve returned here, it will not go well for you. The inquiry
concerning the Bahnhofplatz shootings remains open, and there are enough
unanswered questions that I would have reason to swear out a warrant for
your arrest at any moment. And if our immigrations office, the
Einwanderungsbehorde, gets involved, you should remember that you can be
held in administrative detention for one year before your case reaches a
magistrate. You have friends and connections, very impressive ones, but
they will not be able to help you next time.”
But more than the threats, it was the question the detective had put so
casually that haunted Ben. Did the Bahnhofplatz nightmare have anything
to do with Peter’s death?
Ask it another way: What were the odds it didn’t have anything to do
with Peter’s death? Ben always remembered what his college mentor, the
Princeton historian John Barnes Godwin, used to say: Calculate the odds,
and recalculate, and recalculate again. And then just go with your gut
instinct.
His gut told him this was no coincidence.
Then there was the mystery surrounding Jimmy Cavanaugh. It wasn’t just
the body that had disappeared. It was his identity, his entire
existence. How could such a thing happen? And how had the shooter
known where Ben was staying? It made no sense, none of it did.
The disappearance of the body, the planting of the handgun–that
confirmed that the man he knew as Cavanaugh had been working with
others. But with whom? Working on what? What possible interest, what
possible threat, could Ben Hartman be to anyone?
Of course it had to do with Peter. That had to be it.
You see enough movies, you learn that bodies are “burned beyond
recognition” only when something’s being covered up. One of Ben’s
first, desperate thoughts upon hearing the unbearable news had been that
maybe there’d been a mix-up, that it wasn’t really Peter Hartman who’d
died in that plane. The authorities had made a mistake. Peter was
still alive, and he’d call, and they’d laugh over the bungle in a grim
sort of way. Ben had never dared suggest this to his father, not