“Not a problem.” Atwater reaches out sideways with his right arm and leans against the wall, propping up his vast bulk with a splayed-out hand.
“I have instructions to authorize the release of funds to you in escrow.”
“Yes.”
He pauses briefly before saying, “The money is being held at the Chase Manhattan Bank in Philadelphia. Inside this envelope you will find the account details.”
He passes me the small white envelope, lick sealed and with no writing on it. I place it in the back pocket of my trousers.
“Thank you.”
Atwater lifts himself away from the wall and makes a move toward his jacket pocket.
“I also have something that my client wanted me to give to you. A gift. A gesture of thanks.”
I was waiting for this to happen. One day.
“My client said that you would understand their not giving it to you in person.” He is finding it difficult to extract the gift from his pocket. It is a rigid blue box, something heavy. He eventually frees it and passes the box to me.
“Go ahead. Open it up.”
I flip the catch and lift the lid to reveal a silver Rolex watch draped over a hand-stitched baseball. I do not know what is more absurd: that they should have balked at paying me two hundred thousand dollars for the data and then splurged on a five-figure Swiss watch, or that they thought it was appropriate to throw in a baseball as well.
“Wow,” I say. “How generous of them.”
“What is it?” Atwater asks.
“It’s a Rolex,” I say, swiveling the box so that he can take a look. He must have known this already. “And a baseball.”
“That’s a beauty,” he says. “Put it on.”
I take out the watch, house the baseball in my coat pocket, and thread the broad silver links of the strap onto my wrist.
“Will you thank them on my behalf? Tell them I won’t be declaring it as a corporate gift.”
Atwater manages a meager laugh and takes a firmer hold on the file as he slips it under his arm. He says, “Of course,” as I rattle the watch, which weighs heavy on my wrist.
“I really wasn’t expecting anything so generous,” I add, privately wondering if the watch contains a bug, a tracking device, a small plastic explosive. This is the ludicrous state of my movie-fueled mind.
“Yes, it is a fine gift,” Atwater replies, suddenly sounding bored. His job is done. I have a feeling that he is keen to get rid of me.
“Is there anything else?” he says, confirming this.
“No. Not really. Just to thank them.”
Atwater says nothing. We find ourselves swaying in the wind of another lengthy pause. The baseball knocks lightly against my hip bone as I rock from foot to foot.
“Alec,” he says finally. “I have things I need to be getting on with. So if there’s nothing else…”
I have a bizarre desire to keep him here, to ruin his night with a needless hour of talk. This man does not approve of me. I would like him to suffer for that. But instead I say, “Yes, I should be leaving.”
And he quickly replies, “Whatever you like,” with a quick leftways jerk of his chin.
“Maybe see you again,” I say, turning to go. The watch slips on my wrist with the movement of my arm. I’ll need to have it adjusted for size. Take a couple of links out.
“Yes.”
Everything feels rushed in these final seconds. I shake Atwater by the hand, but his skin is damper than before, a nervous heat spread out across the palm. Then I turn around and pull the handle on the front door. It does not budge. I look back at Atwater, who says, “Wait just a minute,” as he hits a small black button to his left. This buzzes the lock electronically and I open the door, passing outside onto the unlighted porch. I am still holding the copy of The Sunday Times in case anyone is watching from the street. The door swings shut behind me. Deep inside the hall I hear Atwater say, “Good-bye now,” but I am given no opportunity to reply.
I walk back to the car and unlock it just as a little girl in a Don’t Look Now raincoat is crossing the road from the river, tightly clutching her mother’s hand. She looks wise and canny, old for her age, staring at me for that too- long length of time known only to kids. What’s she doing up this late?
When the two of them, mother and daughter, are out of sight, I drive away with an odd sentimental feeling that nothing will ever be the same again with Katharine and Fortner. Why I think this now, so suddenly, I cannot be sure, yet the gift of the Rolex has already acted like a seal on our arrangement. They have what they think of as the main prize, and my usefulness to them may well have ended. Often, the immediate aftermath of a handover is like this. There are a lot of questions in my mind, many doubts and queries, but the predominant sensation is one of anticlimax, as the adrenaline seeps away and all that remains is exhaustion. For some inexplicable reason, I start to miss the thrill of the drop, the risk of capture. Everything that follows is dull by comparison. And this feeling soon bleeds into solitude, into self-doubt.
The streets are drenched with the early evening drizzle that turned to rain at midnight. I like the noise of tires on soaked roads, the quick wet whip of water thrown up by speed. In my tiredness, I listen to this sound above the quiet noise of the engine, driving more or less on instinct, barely paying attention to what is happening on the roads. For once, I feel capable of sleep. I can drive home now and get seven straight hours with no need of booze or pills or useless, lust-filled walks around the streets of Shepherd’s Bush. The odd, edgy meeting has left me with a rare feeling of calm. Perhaps I know now that the worst is over.
28
I see the black Volkswagen in my rearview mirror three times on the way home: once at the lights coming onto King’s Road; again on Holland Road, which is where I start to get suspicious; and finally on Goldhawk, when it sweeps behind me as I make a right turn onto Godolphin Road on my way back to the flat. I can’t, of course, be sure that it was the same car every time. My mind has been wandering, and the second sighting was obscured by a night bus heading east along Kensington High Street. It would be wrong to write off the reappearance of the same car-same color, same lines-to mere coincidence. Someone might have been tailing me from Cheyne Walk.
So I don’t take any chances. I park about five hundred feet short of my front door, which is on the corner of Uxbridge and Godolphin roads. This is farther away than I need to be-there are several spaces nearer to the flat-but I want a good clear sighting of the street. Now I wait, inside the car, staring out through the windshield, waiting for the Volkswagen to reappear. The rain starts up again and an old man appears at a bedroom window high up to my right, closing curtains in a dirty white vest.
Nothing happens. No cars, no pedestrians, no cyclists. After ten minutes I get out and lock up, convinced that there’s nothing more to worry about. It’s just the play of my paranoid mind, the cautious proddings of self- preservation. So I begin walking toward the flat, relaxed and ready for bed. An animal-but not a cat or a dog-darts across the road in front of me, sleek and wet. Just as it vanishes behind some broken fencing, a car turns into the north end of the street directly ahead of me. I halt beside a wall. The headlights are so bright that I can make out neither the type of vehicle nor its color: it might be the black VW, it might not. The car stops directly opposite my front door, three hundred feet ahead, engine still running.
The driver remains there for several seconds and then moves off, coming toward me now, creeping malignly down the street. Slowly I move forward, edging away from the wall, walking through the pools of orange light thrown onto the road by streetlamps. I halt again almost immediately, pausing under the shadow of an overhanging bush. The car stops 150 feet away, and I hear the gearbox shift into reverse. The driver is backing up into a parking space.
I can see the make now. It’s a Vauxhall, like mine: a bottle-green, four-door B-reg with worn hubcaps and a
