The Consignment (8 page)

CHAPTER 10

Fiona rolled the rough between her thumb and forefinger as we walked down the hall, then she dropped the stone into a plastic petri dish. “You’ve got a damn nerve,” she said.

“This is the first time I’ve ever asked.”

“The first time you take advantage, I’m meant to just roll with it, am I?” When I didn’t answer she looked up from the dish. “Okay, so what’s the deal here? Suddenly I’m meant to smooth the wheels of commerce in the arms trade.”

“That’s not what I told you.”

We turned in to one of the labs. Two long benches divided the room, each lined with flasks and bottles and Bunsen burners. A kiln sat in one corner, wired up to a series of instruments. No one was in the lab. I stopped at the opposite side of the bench while Fiona checked an experiment book that was lying there. When I’d phoned, she’d told me that the Geometrics lab in Yonkers had the equipment to do the analysis on the stone. She’d also warned me that without a few days’ notice, the analysis would be rudimentary. All we needed to know, I assured her now across the lab bench, was whether or not the rock came from Nigeria.

“Nigeria doesn’t produce any diamonds worth mentioning,” she informed me, inspecting the book. “What else do you want to know?”

“Can you tell if it comes from Liberia?”

“What if it is from Liberia?” she asked, closing the book. She set down the petri dish and opened it. “Don’t tell me you’re going to give the stone back.”

“If it’s from Liberia, the deal collapses. There’s an arms embargo on the place. And a trade embargo on their diamonds.”

“Blood stones.”

“Conflict diamonds,” I countered automatically, but the corporate euphemism didn’t go down too well. Fiona gave me a dark look. “Listen, call them what you like,” I said. “We just need the analysis.”

“What if you don’t get it?”

“Then we give our client the benefit of the doubt. We assume the stones are legitimate, and the deal goes through.”

She considered me. “Haplon didn’t volunteer to get the analysis done,” she decided.

“It’s at the request of Customs.”

Fiona nodded, her generally low opinion of my employer’s principles apparently reconfirmed. If the sole purpose of the analysis was to further Haplon’s commercial interests, Fiona wouldn’t have so much as considered it. Without the Customs fig leaf, I wouldn’t even have bothered to ask for the favor. But presented as a possible encumbrance to the transaction, an ethical hurdle that had to be cleared, the analysis was something Fiona could contemplate with a clear conscience. She might even see it as her liberal duty. Finally she replaced the lid on the petri dish.

“It’ll take two and a half hours.”

I nodded. I didn’t want to open my mouth and change her mind.

“It’ll cost three thousand dollars,” she said, and I nodded again. Rita was going to have a fit.

Then as we exited the lab, heading for Fiona’s office to sign the paperwork, we saw Olympia, Dimitri’s ex-wife, entering the Geometrics reception. Before Olympia could see us, Fiona grabbed my arm and hauled me back into the lab.

“Jesus,” she said. “You saw her?”

“Olympia. What’s she doing here?”

“We’ve got a lunch date,” Fiona explained. “She kept calling. I couldn’t put her off. She wants to talk to someone about Dimitri.” I nodded sympathetically. Fiona raised her hand to her forehead. “I am up to here in work, Ned. And I am not in the mood for any kind of heart-to-heart just now. Certainly not one about husbands, ex, dead, or otherwise.”

“So tell her.”

“How can I?” Fiona gestured to the door. “She’s driven all the way up from Queens.” I volunteered to go out and make an excuse on her behalf, but Fiona dismissed the offer. Then she brightened, struck by an idea. “Look, all she really wants is to make talk about Dimitri with someone who knew him.”

I saw where she was going. I raised my hands. “Hey. Olympia didn’t call me.”

“You’ve got a two-and-a-half-hour wait for the results of our analysis.”

“You can phone them to me.”

She held the petri dish up between us, turning it in her hand. The stone clicked softly against the sides.

“Hey,” I said again.

“There’s a table booked at Marco’s,” she told me. “I’ll push the lab. We’ll try and have the results ready when you get back.”

“I don’t want to speak to her.”

“Enjoy,” Fiona said.

Marco’s was a tony pizza place with a polished pine floor, the local eatery for Geometrics’ middle management. The tables were spaced far enough apart that you weren’t obliged to hear the conversation of every fellow diner, but even so, when the waiter showed us to a table by the window, I suggested somewhere farther back for the sake of privacy. Olympia overruled me.

“I’m not going to cry, Ned. Here’s fine.” She dropped her purse on a chair and sat down. I took a chair opposite and hung my head over the menu.

I’d always liked Olympia a lot. She’d married Dimitri a few years before the Gulf War, and they had twins soon after, girls who were locked forever in my memory as two-year-olds, the age they were frozen at in the photo Dimitri had always kept in his wallet. Identical dark-haired, sloe-eyed creatures in bright pink pajamas.

Since divorcing Dimitri a year after his return from the Gulf, Olympia hadn’t always had it easy. For years she worked as a hairdresser, every hour God gave, just keeping herself and her daughters housed and fed. Maintenance checks from Dimitri, so Fiona told me, arrived irregularly and were always light. Olympia finally opened her own salon, got herself into serious debt, and ended up marrying the accountant, Laurence Maguire, who’d saved her from the bankers. Things had gone well for a while, then Laurence was diagnosed with cancer. His health insurance didn’t cover the treatment. Olympia had told me that if Laurence hadn’t received some inheritance money from a long-lost relative, they would have had to remortgage their home just to keep him alive. Now Laurence was in remission, but things clearly hadn’t been easy for either one of them.

But during our five-minute stroll from Geometrics to Marco’s, Olympia hadn’t said a word about herself. Or, more surprisingly, about Dimitri. After explaining that I had the day off work, and that I’d brought a forgotten file from home to the lab for Fiona, we just talked. From Fiona’s appearance in reception, and the uncharacteristically half-assed apology, Olympia had intuited that something wasn’t right. She wondered if I shouldn’t maybe take Fiona on a vacation, she suggested they were working her too hard at Geometrics. I conceded that it was possible. No point telling her that the break Fiona really needed was from me. Olympia didn’t raise the subject of Dimitri’s death until we’d ordered.

“Fiona said you were there.” Olympia snapped a bread stick as the waiter removed our menus. “You know, with Dimitri? I couldn’t believe it when the police called. He had me on his passport as next of kin. It was a real hassle for them to find me.”

“What have you told the girls?”

“Everything. What the police told me, that it was a stupid accident.” Her eyes skittered up from the bread stick. I’d been preparing to console her, but she didn’t look like she needed consolation. If anything, she seemed curious. “You’re wondering why I’m not more upset,” she said.

“No.”

“Yes you are. The truth is, I was. When they told me, I mean, it was a shock. Four years married. Two kids. You can’t just turn that stuff off, can you. I can’t, anyway. Not that I haven’t tried.” She tilted her head. “They said there were no witnesses.”

“No.”

“So what happened?”

“Didn’t the police go through it with you?”

“Sure they did. But I just wondered, well, you’re not the police, Ned. You know what I mean?”

I collected my thoughts a moment, then I gave her the official version of what I’d seen out at Springfield. It hardly took me five minutes. She seemed disappointed that I didn’t know more, so I told her that the Fettners guys might have a better picture, and I scribbled the Fettners number on my business card and gave it to her. When the waiter returned I ordered the house red, then Olympia started quizzing me about Springfield again. I excused myself and went to the rest room. If there was one person in the world who could inadvertently trip me up on the subject of Dimitri Spandos, it was Olympia.

They’d gotten married while Dimitri and I were serving in the Rangers, but by the time of their marriage they’d been together, on and off, for years. I’d known Olympia for most of my adult life, and she knew me about as well as anyone did, apart from Fiona and Brad. Of all Dimitri’s buddies, it was me Olympia came to when Dimitri’s gambling became a serious issue within their marriage. She told me she’d gone three months without seeing a single cent from his pay. I’d done what I could, spoken to Dimitri about it, but he hadn’t been ready to face his problem, or even admit that he had one. Their marriage collapsed irretrievably before the year was out. Olympia moved away from the base, she went to New York with her kids to be close to her parents, but she and Fiona stayed in touch. When I took the job at West Point, our family friendship with Olympia was rekindled. By that time she’d remarried. When I’d told her that Dimitri had conquered his habit, that he was transferring from the Rangers to Delta Force, she’d made a wry crack, then let the subject lie. They hadn’t stayed in touch, and as far as I knew, their only contact since was the secondhand news that passed through Fiona and me.

Now he was dead, and it was hard to imagine how she must have felt. Surprised, certainly. Perhaps there was some measure of regret too, but whatever she felt, I didn’t want to say too much. Frankly, I had enough on my plate without having to fend off Olympia’s understandable but unwelcome curiosity. After zipping up, I went to the basin, washed my hands, and splashed my face. I decided that I hadn’t yet said anything out of line. I also decided that when I returned to the table, I was not going to recap on Springfield.

“How are the girls?” I slid into my chair, firing off the question before she had a chance to open her mouth. “Still cute?”

“Only in my dreams.” Olympia smiled, then she told me about her daughters, adolescents now, who were causing Olympia and Laurence the usual kind of grief. “I wouldn’t mind if they just once in a while confided in me,” she concluded. “As it is, I’m just pathetically grateful when they even bother to tell me where they’re going. Honestly. A girl hits thirteen, what happens? Some switch goes off in their brains.”

“Like you were any different.”

“If I’d behaved like my two at their age, my mother would have thumped me.” She paused, seeming to hear what she’d just said. She hooted. “God. At their age.” The wine arrived, she took a sip from her glass. “Tell you what, though. The boys they bring home? PlayStation and MTV. Doesn’t anyone want to be a doctor anymore? These days I’d settle for a kid who wants to be a damn politician.”

“How about a soldier?”

She pulled a face.

“Come on, Olympia. We weren’t that bad.”

“Maybe not you.” As she took another sip of wine, I found myself thinking back to that time when she’d first told me about Dimitri’s gambling habit. She’d started out joking about it, then real pain had broken through and she’d burst into tears. “When I imagine them getting married,” she went on, referring to her daughters now, “I kind of hope it’ll be to guys like Laurence. Nothing glamorous. Just a guy who’ll look after them. Someone who’s kind.” She smiled glumly. “You suppose I’ve got any chance selling that one to my pair of hormonal crazies?”

Her problem, though she didn’t say it, was that she recognized a good deal of herself in her daughters. Twenty years earlier, when she’d first alighted on Dimitri, she was something of a hormonal crazy herself. It wasn’t an accident that she’d ended up with someone like him, she’d flown to him like a moth to the flame. Back then she’d loved the fact that he was a soldier, she’d loved everything about him. His uniform. Army life. His popularity with his fellow officers. His dedication to his career. Before she married Dimitri, his life probably seemed quite exotic to Olympia.

Our pizzas arrived and we ate in silence a minute, then she asked after Brad. I admit I was starting to find her conversation odd, even somewhat weirdly detached. Dimitri, her ex-husband, had been killed by a bullet through the brain, and here she was asking me how my son was doing with his Ph.D. I told her about Brad’s new job. She was thoughtful awhile as she ate, and I decided to venture a question, one that was silently plaguing me.

“What do you think Fiona might say if I reenlisted?”

“The Army?”

“Yeah.”

“Weapons instructor at West Point? Your old job?”

I turned my head, no. She put down her fork and pointed with her knife.

“Active service?”

“Possibly.”

“Don’t do it to her, Ned.”

“It’s just hypothetical.”

“She’d kill you. Or maybe not you, but it might finish her. Jesus, I can’t believe I’m hearing you. Have you forgotten what she went through? I haven’t. I was there, remember. She was a nervous wreck after you came back from Kuwait. When you went to Mogadishu she spent the whole time shuttling between her shrink and the drugstore.”

“Forget I asked.”

“I’m trying. You wanna know what she’d say? She’d say exactly what she said to you after Mogadishu.” Olympia put down her knife. “You go back on active service—divorce.” I bowed my head. “Divorce instantaneous.”

“I get the message.”

“I hope so, Ned. I really do.”

When she saw I didn’t want to discuss it further she started on her pizza again. After a minute she said, “If you and Fiona divorced, how often would you see Brad?”

“Come on, Olympia.”

“Hypothetically. Say you moved out of town. How often would you come back and see Brad?”

I sliced my pizza, not much caring for this turn in the conversation. As often as I could, I said. I said that I’d visit Brad as frequently as he wanted to see me. When she fell silent again, I glanced at the clock. The lab results were still a long way from being ready.

“Dimitri saw the girls six times,” Olympia finally volunteered. “Four times the first year after the divorce, twice the second, then zero.”