decades. He was murdered up in Litchfield – it was disguised as an accident – when he wanted out.’
‘You got a Family name?’
Two minutes, calculated Alice. ‘Northcote had a personal assistant. Janice Snow. She was killed – again disguised as an accident – out at Park Slope in Brooklyn. They thought she had what they want.’
Two minutes, thirty seconds. ‘What do they want, Martha?’
‘The proof that Northcote kept back, believing it was his leverage to bargain a way out.’
‘Let’s take this nice and slow,’ said the man.
‘We’re taking it too slow,’ said Alice. ‘Wait for my next call. Get on to Litchfield – the sheriff’s named Al Hibbert – and on to Brooklyn.’
‘Martha…!’ but already Alice had replaced the telephone and started to walk with her satchel restrapped across her chest.
Second Avenue wasn’t as congested as cross-town and Alice rode the bus past 34th Street, automatically looking towards the East River and the bee-like rise and descent of helicopters that since Northcote’s killing had been so much of John Carver’s life. Where would John be now? Doing what now, in his naive and misconceived belief that he could win where – and what – George had lost. Was that it! she asked herself, incredulous at the thought. Surely John – whom she’d long ago uncritically judged to be in awe of his father-in-law – didn’t imagine what he was attempting today was a who-could-survive contest between a dead man, who horrifically hadn’t, and himself, believing that he could? Surely not, she thought again, the rhetoric that of anxiously needed reassurance rather than a positive answer, which she couldn’t anyway have provided. And for what? To prove what, apart from his own stupidity? If they were ever together again, properly – miraculously – together after he and Jane had been taken out of danger – would there be any way she could explain to him that he didn’t have – hadn’t needed – to prove himself? Would there be any benefit – any reconciliation – in trying? Of course not. By then it would be too late.
She got off at 14th Street, checking her watch once more as she did so. Ten fifty. In good time. Ahead of schedule now. The handset had been ripped from the wall of the first pod she came to approaching Union Square Park. There was one that worked at the Sixth Avenue junction.
Gene answered the call on the first ring. He said: ‘I think you’re jerking us around, Martha.’
‘If you believed that, you wouldn’t have taken this call yourself. I’m not one of your crazies and you know it.’
‘I want you to come in.’
‘ I want to come in. But not yet: I can’t, not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want to give it all to you. The proof. Their negotiator. Everything.’
‘You’ve got that!’
‘I’ll have a meeting place. The meeting place where it’s being handed over to their negotiator, who doesn’t know everything’s been duplicated.’ She’d keep the name of Stanley Burcher back. John was most probably right, about it being phoney. If the Bureau checked and couldn’t find the name it would be a further reason to dismiss her as a crank.
‘Handed over by whom?’
‘Someone who’s totally innocent. Who thinks he can handle it all by himself.’
‘He can’t!’
‘That’s why I’m talking to you.’ Three minutes, Alice saw. Too long.
‘What’s your involvement, Martha?’
‘Complicated. You’ll have to wait for that, too.’
‘How long?’
‘Today. That’s why I’m doing this. You’ve got to be ready.’
‘You know the penalty for wasting Bureau time?’
‘You spoken to Litchfield? And Brooklyn?’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘Be ready, when I call. There might not be a lot of time. The name’s not Martha, by the way.’ It was, in fact, her mother’s name.
‘I never thought it was. Mine’s Gene, though. Gene Hanlan.’
‘Wait.’
‘We’ll wait. Just make sure it’s worth our while.’
The tension, although not the fear, went from Alice as she rode downtown, her money satchel secure on her lap beneath her cupped hands, glad that she hadn’t needed to use the subway after all. She was by no assessment claustrophobic but she always had the vaguely uneasy impression of being too enclosed when she travelled underground. She was pleased, too, to be ahead of schedule. She hoped everything else worked out so well.
Alice was back in SoHo by eleven twenty and, uncomfortably remembering the perils of not eating, bought a tuna on rye and a pickle at a deli near the Guggenheim and still managed to get into her apartment, again through the delivery entrance, precisely on schedule. She made coffee to drink with the sandwich, realizing as she did so that she’d have to give the alerting call to Federal Plaza from her own telephone, risking identification. But that wouldn’t matter, she further realized. By then, with the Bureau in place and able to make their seizures, she’d want to be taken in. It was only the thought of telephoning that prompted Alice, belatedly, to look at her answering machine, upon which one call was registered. Panicked, imagining that Burcher had made the arrangements early, Alice jabbed at the reply button. There was audible breathing, vague, discordant music, but no words before the blank of disconnection. Alice felt sick again.
John Carver was more confident than he had expected to be and was grateful: relieved. The feeling was largely predicated upon the early morning meeting with Paul Newton, after the Manhattan physician’s examination of Jane.
Newton’s prognosis was that Jane’s symptoms were entirely predictable in someone who had been as close to her father as Jane and did not indicate any more deeply rooted mental problem needing psychiatric help. He’d prescribed something called chlorpromazine, which he described as much stronger than the tranquillizers given to her by Dr Jamieson, and in Carver’s presence briefed the nurses, whose attendance Jane was no longer resisting, upon the possible side effects, including disorientation and verbal communication difficulties.
‘The idea,’ Newton had told Carver, ‘is to block the recent, most painful memories.’
‘You sure she doesn’t need a psychiatrist?’ demanded Carver.
‘It’s your choice, of course,’ said the doctor. ‘I intend to monitor her every day. If, on any one of those days, I – or any of the nurses – see any change, then naturally we’ll react to it. At the moment all Jane is suffering from is extreme but postponed grief. She’s run herself dry, mentally as well as physically, trying to do all that she has since her father’s death.’
‘How long?’ asked Carver.
‘I’ll judge it on a day-to-day basis,’ said the doctor. ‘Maybe as little as a week.’
‘Anything else I need to do? To know?’
‘Avoid Litchfield, going there or talking about it: certainly any discussion about the sale of the estate. That’s where the awfulness happened: it’s that awfulness she’s got to adjust to in her mind and therefore, this early, she doesn’t need any reminders.’
Carver’s mood was also buoyed by listening to the tape, which he’d played and replayed in his locked office as soon as he’d arrived in Wall Street. The tape was the last thing he duplicated after copying everything he’d retrieved from Litchfield, West 66th Street and from Alice. There was no way Burcher or those the lawyer represented could do anything but agree the separation. And keep that agreement to the letter. Carver telephoned the securities manager that he was on his way and easily walked the two blocks to Citibank, still arriving by nine forty-five. Determined to avoid any oversight Carver used the entire table in the private safe-deposit room, laying everything out in two individual piles. The third collection was of all the personal and legal documents and photographs concerning Northcote and Anna Simpson and Carver was slowed by it, wondering if Northcote had been as happy with Anna as he was with Alice: wondering, too, if Northcote had rationalized his relationship with her and his wife as he ’d rationalized his with Jane and Alice. Intriguing but unanswerable speculation, he acknowledged yet again. And therefore pointless. Just as it was pointless keeping it all. He wouldn’t, Carver decided.
