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
Carver 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 attache 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 attache 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
