Stanley Burcher extended his hand towards Enrico Delioci and said: ‘I’d like the phone.’
The Don’s son frowned, in feigned misunderstanding. ‘What?’
‘The cellphone you called me on from the woman’s apartment.’
The fuck you talking about?’
‘The phone,’ insisted Burcher, soft-voiced as always and as always hating being on this Queens film set. ‘I want the phone you called me on, from Brooklyn.’
‘Why?’ demanded the younger man, truculently.
Burcher turned away from him, towards the father. ‘Don Emilio, this isn’t going well for any of us. I appeal to you!’
‘Do you not trust us, Mr Burcher?’
‘I trust you and your son and your Family totally and implicitly,’ lied Burcher. ‘What we can’t trust – predict – is the use the law would make of whatever is stored within the phone’s memory.’ He slowly reached into his pocket, to produce a new cellphone, a very recent introduction on to the market, from which it was possible to transmit photographs, and offered it to Enrico. ‘There! A replacement.’
‘We’ll destroy the old one,’ said Paolo Brescia.
‘I want it now, its memory card or battery or whatever it’s called, intact.’
There was total silence within the room. Alert though he was, Burcher did not detect the gesture from father to son. Enrico Delioci rose, left the room and returned again within minutes, offering the instrument in a hand shaking with fury. Burcher said: ‘Thank you.’ There was no guarantee that what he’d been given was the telephone upon which he’d been called from Brooklyn and upon which he’d given the order to dispose of Northcote’s assistant. The silence stretched on. Burcher said: ‘Now tell me what I need to know about John Carver.’
It came, tight-lipped, from Brescia again. Burcher listened dispassionately, wishing there were more but conceding there was enough for his intended confrontation with the accountant. It wouldn’t be the only confrontation, Burcher decided at that moment. When he’d established his personal control over John Carver, he’d enjoy telling these people that their usefulness was over.
There hadn’t been any prior telephone call, which there always had been before, so Burcher’s surprise was tinged with alarm at finding Charlie Petrie waiting for him at the Algonquin.
‘You come about Brooklyn?’ Burcher anticipated.
Petrie shook his head. ‘You seen Carver yet?’
‘Going to surprise him tomorrow.’
‘We thought you should hear about the hacking first.’
Thirteen
I t was more practical – his decision, about which there was later some ironic, even irritated, reflection – to meet Jane at her father’s estate, which is what Carver did rather than put down at their own country home to drive the ten miles around the separating lake. Jane hadn’t arrived but Jack Jennings was already there and together they toured the house. There wasn’t the slightest trace of damage anywhere. All the jack-hammered doors had been replaced and those torn off their hinges rehung. New refrigerators and freezers gleamed in the recesses. Cracked or too badly stained tiles had been relaid and overbalanced wine racks rebuilt and re-labelled, although there was obviously no wine. George Northcote’s bedroom and dressing room had been re-carpeted. The only hint of the work that had gone into redecoration was the faintest smell of paint and a lot of windows open to dispel that.
Carver said: ‘In the time you’ve had you’ve worked miracles, Jack.’
‘Mr Northcote was well liked around here. I called, things got done right away. The outhouses are the same. Everything fixed, all the damaged machinery gone…’ The man gestured in the direction of the hollow into which the tractor and cutters had flipped. ‘There was…’ He stopped, seeking the acceptable words. ‘… some stuff, mess, there. We cleaned that up, too.’
What might there have been for a proper forensic examination to find, wondered Carver. ‘You’ve still done damned well. Thank you.’
‘I heard about Mr Northcote’s PA. It’s terrible, poor woman.’
‘Terrible,’ echoed Carver. He wished Jane would arrive, so they could get it over with and he could get back to New York. In the circumstances he supposed he had to be here, supporting her, but he’d had again to reschedule his already rearranged appointments – which actually took away the need for any hurried return – but he felt cut-off here, too far away from things. Wasn’t that what – and where – he wanted to be, he asked himself at once: away from it all, where no one could find him? In truth – truth which he forced upon himself – Carver didn’t properly know any more where he wanted to be or what he wanted to be doing. There wasn’t a road that wasn’t blocked, no half- formed hope that stood up to examination. There was the one hope he hadn’t explored, he corrected himself: the one that had come to him the previous night, when he had been with Alice. Which wasn’t new. It was the one, the last one, that he’d inexplicably forgotten but which to pursue, as he had to, could be as destructive as everything else closing in around him.
‘Here they come,’ announced Jennings, from the newly restored front door.
Barry Cox was the senior partner in the real-estate firm that bore his name, a squat, quickly moving man able to smile and talk at the same time, which he did constantly. He, not Jane, led the tour of the property, making quick entries in a small notebook and frequently having Jennings secure one end of a long, spool-retracting tape to measure the main rooms.
As they followed the man around, Jane said: ‘I’m coming back to New York with you. I had Barry drive me over, so we can leave right away.’
‘You didn’t say, last night.’ He’d somehow make time to see Alice. He was glad after all that his diary was clear for the afternoon.
‘It hadn’t been fixed then.’
‘What hadn’t been fixed?’
‘Our first meeting with Rosemary. She got a cancellation so she called me. I tried to catch you at the office but you’d already left to come here. Hilda said she thought it would be all right. And there’s some more replies to condolence letters I need to sign, apparently.’
‘In future will you personally clear things with me first?’
She looked at him curiously, frowning. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I haven’t done any worthwhile work since I can’t remember when, in a firm I have now to run. I intended trying to fit some things in later today.’
‘I tried calling you! You weren’t there!’ she said, stiffly.
‘You knew I was coming here. You should have waited.’ There was no purpose in exacerbating it into an argument but he was irritated by her increasingly taking him for granted. It occurred to him to tell her that he was in charge of the firm now, not her, but decided against it.
‘I’m sorry!’ she said, in a voice that didn’t sound it.
‘Let’s leave it.’
‘All done,’ declared Cox, emerging from the main living room at the opportune moment. ‘Time to talk.’
Jane said to Jennings, who was already withdrawing, ‘Will you transfer my stuff from Barry’s car to the helicopter?’ and then to the realtor, ‘How long will it take to sell?’
The man gave a professional non-committal shrug and went into a well-rehearsed speech about market difficulties in an economic recession, concluding that it was a very valuable property, in the three-to-five-million band, which was a big commitment for a person to make.
‘Not for a person with five million,’ said Carver. ‘And people who haven’t got that sort of money don’t look at this sort of property. You’re going to concentrate upon the city?’ Cox had three offices there and the reputation of being the best country-house salesman operating out of Manhattan, which was why Jane was employing him.
‘I’m going to offer it to as wide an audience as possible, Mr Carver,’ said Cox. ‘The Net, with a picture display and digital viewing, major prominence in the housing mags all along the East Coast right down as far as Florida. Might even consider the Caribbean: lot of money in places like Antigua and the Caymans.’
‘What?’ broke in Carver, sharply.
