Two Women (15 page)

Manuel led the maid back in with the serving trays, his irritation obvious at what he clearly regarded as an intrusion on to his territory.

Jane said: ‘I thought meat loaf was the easiest: I didn't know how today was going to turn out.'

‘Meat loaf's fine.' Carver took a token portion to rearrange on his plate.

‘I talked with Rosemary when I got back this afternoon.' Rosemary Pritchard was Jane's gynaecologist. Alice's, too. Upon John's recommendation, when she'd had an irregularity problem which Rosemary Pritchard had rectified to the point of Alice's complacency.

It would have been fatuous to ask what about. ‘What did she say?'

‘That there'd have to be some tests, obviously. But if they're OK I can start IVF right away …' Jane ate with her head over her plate, not looking at him. ‘She asked what you thought about it.' She looked up at last. ‘So how
do
you feel about it?'

Carver sipped his wine, delaying. ‘About our having a baby, I feel fine. About rushing into it now, as if we have something to prove, like it's a race, I'm not so sure.'

‘Rosemary told me it nearly always takes time, so we're not rushing into it.'

‘Maybe we should talk to Rosemary about it together. Other people, perhaps.'

‘Other people like psychiatrists, perhaps?' she said, in echo.

‘I didn't mean other people like psychiatrists,' he lied.

‘What other people then?' she demanded, trapping him.

‘I wasn't thinking any further than Paul Newton.'

‘Who's a medical doctor who's overcrowded this apartment with nurses I don't want or need and who are leaving the very moment their seven days are up.'

Carver pushed the meal away. ‘I won't let this get into a fight. It's not a situation to fight
about
. I'll come up to Litchfield at the weekend and we'll talk more about it and then we'll go to see Rosemary together and work it out.'

‘You …' started Jane but stopped.

Carver waited but she didn't continue. Instead she said: ‘I forgot you didn't like meat loaf.'

‘I wasn't hungry anyway.'

Stanley Burcher heard his telephone as he walked along the corridor to his room and finished at a run, snatching it off its cradle at what he guessed would have been its last ring. The voice he recognized at once to be Enrico Delioci's said: ‘She knows too much. She …'

‘Stop!' insisted Burcher. ‘Where are you?'

‘With her, in her apartment.'

‘Using her phone?'

‘Mine. Cellphone,' said the other man, heavily patronizing.

Burcher breathed out, heavily. There'd still be a trace to the Algonquin, on the cellphone. ‘What's she know?'

‘The names of all the companies. That records were never kept after she wrote up the official returns from Northcote's handwritten originals. She also told us Carver brought a bunch of stuff back with him from Litchfield. Needed a valise to carry it. And he's been asking her questions about it all.'

Burcher's mind was leapfrogging ahead of all that was happening, trying to keep everything in its proper order. This looked like another fuck-up, worse maybe than Litchfield. ‘She hurt?'

‘You told us to find out what she knew. She wouldn't tell us at first.'

The bastards were setting him up, making him responsible! ‘There has to be another accident. Get it wrong and there'll be a lot more.'

Eleven

C
arver carried the coffee that Jack Jennings had waiting for him into the West 66th Street study, where the previous night he'd made the most unexpected discoveries of all, and sat sipping it at Northcote's desk, looking more carefully through everything he took once more from the safe. It was easy to divide the papers between the two attaché cases Carver had brought, having been mentally able to plan overnight. The personal material and photographs took up more room in one than the additional inflated calculations for BHYF and NOXT in the other and Carver gave himself time to finish his coffee and study them more carefully than he had the first time. They unquestionably formed the missing section of what he'd found in the Litchfield nightstand and Carver wondered why Northcote had worked like this, piecemeal, leaving documents behind him like a paperchase, which, in fact, it was. And then he remembered Northcote's difficulties at the end with holding thoughts and words and decided the older man's problems had been greater than any of them had suspected. Or maybe it was intentional, dividing what he'd withheld to save some if he lost – or was forced to surrender – part. Whatever, it was time-wasting speculation. With what he now had – and whatever Alice had possibly unearthed – he now had virtually all he needed to get rid of the unwanted clients and protect the firm.

There was an internal email from Geoffrey Davis when he arrived in Wall Street, advising him that the Chase Manhattan security manager was expecting him at ten and reminding him that he would need the second key, for the unlocking procedure. It was the same, customary, system for his safe-deposit facility at Citibank, just two blocks further up along Wall Street – the key for which was already in his pocket – but Davis's reminder surprised him.

‘I've got no keys unaccounted for. I thought it would be here,' he told the lawyer on the internal telephone.

‘I don't have it. Maybe Janice keeps it,' suggested Davis.

Which was how Carver learned from Hilda Bennett that Janice Snow had not arrived for work that morning.

‘You said yesterday she was upset. Maybe she's taking the day off.'

‘I called. There's no reply. And no answering machine, to leave a message.'

‘Call again now. I'm looking for a key.'

Hilda did, hanging on for a full five minutes, before shaking her head and replacing the receiver. Hilda identified all the keys they found going through Janice's desk drawers and finally, impatiently, Carver called Davis back and told him to alert the bank security manager that he did not have the necessary duplicate. Before he left his own office Carver carefully locked the two attaché cases into his private safe.

Carver arrived at the Chase Manhattan imagining that the warning in advance would be sufficient but was irritated at the extent of the officialdom. Even though the vice president in charge of the division had met Carver both in the Plaza receiving line and later during Carver's dutiful mingling at the reception the man still insisted upon Geoffrey Davis personally bringing from the Northcote offices the most recent boardroom minutes unanimously accepting Carver's appointment, and even then he weakly protested that there should have been supporting legal proof of Carver's accession before a duplicate key could be issued. The approval was finally agreed when a senior vice president accepted Davis's argument that he physically represented legal proof. Carver thanked the lawyer for his help but said there was no need for him to stay for the opening of the box.

It contained half a million dollars, in easily counted one-thousand-dollar bills individually bound in ten-thousand-dollar bundles, yellowing certificates and diplomas confirming George Northcote's professional qualifications, two photographs, along with the lease, of Northcote's original Wall Street building before its demolition for replacement by the present skyscraper, and three more prints, with handwritten annotation, of Anna and Northcote's Italian and Spanish visit. Each yet again showed, to Carver's eye, two people blissfully in love. Unlike those he'd discovered in Litchfield, each of the three clearly showed Anna wearing a wedding ring.

There was nothing else.

Despite the West 66th Street findings, and his deciding earlier that morning that he had sufficient, Carver was disappointed that the box was empty of anything other than more personal memorabilia. Had Anna Simpson been in yesterday's cathedral congregation or the later receiving line of a thousand empty faces, the one mystery figure who, from all the photographs he'd now seen, he might have identified? What could – would – he have done, if he had recognized her? There would have been nothing he could have done in the church: little, with Jane so close beside him. But there would have been a chance for something as he moved about the room. An urgent whisper, for her to call him: an equally urgent demand, for a way to contact her. For what? Far better left in the past, a successfully – and properly – lost secret. He had to decide what to do with all the personal material, once he'd resolved the more important problem.

Carver straightened from the box but paused, uncertainly, before taking out the photographs and putting them into his briefcase. He secured it and rang for a security official to complete the necessary double locking and let him out of the vault. It was the vice president in charge of the division who responded, a young, fair-haired man.

As they went through the procedure, the man said: ‘I was not being intentionally awkward earlier, Mr Carver. I was strictly following regulations.'

‘You should always do that,' said Carver.

‘We value your business, here at the bank.'

There'd probably been some rebuke. ‘That's good to hear.'

‘Is there anything else I can do?'

‘Nothing, thank you.'

The man smiled. ‘Just one more regulation. You need to sign yourself out on the register against the box number.'

It was not until he was bending over the bound book that the idea came to Carver and he covered the quick examination by pretending to fumble with the pen.

‘It's ten forty-five,' offered the young man, for the required departure time.

Carver nodded, intent upon George Northcote's signature at the bottom of the preceding page. George Northcote's departure from the safe-deposit vault was timed at eleven-fifty-five and dated five days earlier, the day he'd had lunch at the Harvard Club with a person or persons designated in his diary as S–B.

Alice said: ‘It's been longer before, but this
seems
the longest.'

Carver said: ‘It's been a lifetime, in days.'

They stood strangely awkward in front of each other. Carver reached out and she came to him and they kissed and held each other for several moments before separating again.

‘There's coffee. Or do you want something else?'

It still wasn't noon but Carver said: ‘Something else?'.

'I mixed some, just in case.' She poured the Martinis straight, without ice. As she handed him his drink she said: ‘You found anything?'

She had to be kept out of it: kept out and kept safe. He was the only person capable of sorting everything out: of keeping everyone safe. Carver shook his head. ‘Nothing that properly helps. But you told me you knew what it was all about.'

Now Alice shook her head. ‘I'm only guessing what it's all
about
. I think I know how it works.'

Carver sat, drink in hand, waiting. He had to get everything there was to get from her. And then work from that foundation.

‘You're going to be angry. Disappointed in me. Please don't be.' She drank, deeply, the Martini made more for her benefit than for his.

It was an attitude, a meekness, Carver hadn't known in Alice before. ‘Why don't you just tell me?'

She'd rehearsed it, several different ways, but the admission of her hacking still came disjointedly and when she had finished Alice wasn't sure that she'd explained it as fully or as understandably as she'd intended.

Carver remained unspeaking for several minutes, his own Martini untouched. Then, quiet-voiced, he said: ‘For two days, longer, you've been hacking into their systems … into IRS records … company registrations … not just here in America … in other countries, too …?'

‘Yes,' she confessed, simply.

Carver shook his head, in genuine disbelief, his thoughts still coming out in bursts. ‘I can't begin to guess … no one can … how many laws you've broken. Not just broken here … broken internationally …'

‘No one will ever find out … can ever find out,' she insisted. ‘It's going to be all right.'

Carver wasn't angry. Disappointed, either. And although he'd said it, as if it was his major fear, he wasn't thinking of the law, either. ‘What if they detected you … the people who did what they did to George?'

‘I told you how I've made sure they can't.'

‘One hundred and one per cent, no-possibility-of-being-wrong sure?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘I've read, heard, that it's possible for hackers to be caught … that there are devices.'

‘I didn't use my own terminal, here. I used the double cutout of a computer cafe. And someone else's system, further to hide myself.'

Carver didn't properly understand what she was telling him but he thought – because it was what he wanted to think – that maybe it would be OK. It sounded as if she knew what she was doing. Kids of fifteen had got in and out of the Pentagon and NASA systems without being detected. ‘No more. Promise me – give me your word and mean it – that you won't do any more.'

‘I promise.'

‘Mean it this time,' he insisted. ‘Not like before.'

Alice didn't want to stop. There really wasn't a chance of her ever being discovered and to prove she'd guessed the scam correctly she needed to get into one of the systems so far denying her entry. ‘I won't do it again.'

‘So what is it?' he finally demanded.

‘Money laundering, pure and simple. But absolutely brilliant.'

‘Show me.'

She did, literally, leading him to her desk, upon which she had all the computer printouts sequentially arranged country by country, America dominant with Grand Cayman at the very pinnacle. ‘We'll go left to right, read it like a book, which I think we can,' she declared. ‘What we're looking at is a global shell game, things being moved so far so fast there's no chance to see which cup the pea's under. We start with five organized-crime – Mafia – offshore companies, out of reach and out of sight of any law, criminal or civil. Into them we have to channel – also out of reach and out of sight – all the illegal proceeds of every crime the Families commit: drugs, pornography, prostitution, loan sharking, protection, the lot. And if my theory
is
right it is a lot. Billions of dollars. You with me so far …?'