It was that thought which brought Alice back to something approaching reality, looking around the cheap room for the first time, trying to remember how she’d got there, why she’d chosen the place. She hadn’t chosen it. Those first minutes, hours, had been driven by panic. There was the memory of the Live at Five coverage with the stills photographs of the partially sheeted-off truck and then a studio portrait of John and the commentary about the tragedy of coincidence and of the unique place in the city held by the firm of George W. Northcote. She had the recollection of fleeing the building, but not in blind panic, because she’d grabbed the packed case, still unopened on the bed beside the money satchel. How she’d got here was a blur. It had to have been by cab but she had no memory of it: of getting into this room or of trying to curl herself into the smallest ball and closing her eyes and hoping… Hoping what? That she’d go to sleep and never wake up again, to confront – exist with – what lay ahead.
Alice sat again in the unsteady chair, but properly now, with her back against its back so that her face wasn’t against its tainted cushions. What did lie ahead? An impossible, far too complicated question. But she had to confront it. Not totally. That was definitely impossible. Isolate the priorities then. Staying alive, she thought at once, coherently at last. Whatever the empty, unknown future, she was going to live it. Exist in it. Endure it. Not curl up and die. Who would be pursuing her? John had warned her they actually knew her name. It was a miracle they hadn’t already got to her, snatched her, whatever it was they did. Her salvation had to be that their total concentration until less than twelve hours ago had been John, not her. She’d had one miracle. She wouldn’t get another. As she’d tried to get across to John, who hadn’t listened and who was now dead – her breath caught and tears welled up and she strained against crying again – there’d only be one chance. So it had to be right. More than right.
She couldn’t work it out here, in this flea pit where things were literally moving – noisily now – around her. The cabin was the place. The cabin which she believed now to have been somewhere in her mind when she’d fled Princes Street. The cabin was where she could safely hide until she’d completely worked out how to go on living.
Alice knew she should eat something to quell the nauseous hunger pangs but couldn’t face the hotel’s babbling self-service cafeteria. Instead she checked out, walked past the already assembling city tour buses and found a reasonably clean deli just past a news-stand where she bought the New York Times. Her coffee cooled and the Danish stayed virtually uneaten as she read the story and studied the photographs. The portrait of John was the same as that used on television the previous evening and she had to swallow heavily, using the cover of sipping her near-cold coffee, to keep down the emotion. There was something about the stills pictures of the scene that Alice believed should have some significance but she couldn’t decide what and kept the paper with her, to study again later.
Alice was sure there was no possibility of her pursuers discovering her long-term parking facility for her precious Volkswagen, because she had been of no interest to them when she’d last used it, more than a month earlier. She still approached cautiously before recalling her embarrassment at trying to isolate surveillance on the Space for Space cybercafe but still she didn’t hurry, lingering on the long-stay floor before directly approaching her car. She tensed at the slowness with which the engine turned but after two attempts it fired. She made the usual stop-start cross-town journey but the flow was easier on West Side Highway and she crossed the bridge before midday. She made Paterson her marker and reached it just before two. Before buying supplies she forced herself to eat scrambled eggs with milk at a drugstore diner. There was a newscast on television but this far from the city it was local.
It was four before she finally reached the cabin and the nostalgia engulfed her the moment she crossed the threshold. She let the packages stay where she dropped them, slumped in the all-encompassing chair in which she and John had wedged themselves together, just holding each other, the last time they had been there, and wept at the memories until she ached again. This chair smelled, too: smelled of him and his cologne and of them together. She said, aloud: ‘I don’t know what to do, darling. I’m so frightened. So very frightened.’
Gene Hanlan caught an evening shuttle to Washington DC, the appointment with the regional director and legal counsel arranged for nine the following morning.
They were back in the rear room of the Thomson Avenue restaurant in Queens but the atmosphere was very different and the phrase ‘payback time’ echoed in Burcher’s mind like a litany. Emilio Delioci, strangely strong-voiced with no hint of asthma, conducted the meeting like a trial, which Burcher supposed it was, demanding individual explanations and questioning each of them with the expertise of a trial lawyer. Burcher recognized the trial lawyer’s technique of patronizing humiliation in every demand directed at him.
‘So in an unreachable New York safe-deposit box there’s a bomb that could blow into oblivion our entire organization throughout the United States of America?’ judged the old man, after an hour’s inquisition.
‘That’s exactly it,’ agreed the son, at once. ‘It’s a complete fuck-up.’
‘Which might have been prevented if you’d gone back,’ said the father, relentlessly. ‘Just as the needless killing of Northcote might have been prevented if you’d moved your ass and gone up to Litchfield.’
Burcher stirred at the accusation, reading from it. Everyone else in the room was definitely treating this humiliation as his payback time. But Emilio Delioci was assessing it properly – as a Don should assess it – and acknowledged that what remained in Carver’s safe-deposit box did have the destructive capability of more atomic weaponry than existed in the world’s arsenals. With himself and his Family as the first potential casualties even before it all exploded. ‘We have quite rightly had the inquest. It was an accident that should have been prevented but wasn’t. That’s in the past. Now we have to go forward.’
‘We will go forward,’ declared Enrico, looking at the lawyer. ‘But without you. Northcote was ours. The operation was ours. We’ll put it right.’
Burcher didn’t have to force the derisive laugh. ‘That’s not a decision for you or for this Family. Don Emilio has quite rightly identified the potential risk that exists, to every Family in this country. It is they – in the form of the New York ruling Families – who should decide upon who should resolve the problem…’ He staged the pause. ‘… and who should not. Which is why, before coming here tonight, I requested a meeting with those Family representatives. You will do nothing until you hear from them. Through me.’
No one was patronizing him any more, Burcher recognized. Just as he recognized that having made the challenge he had to survive it.
Eighteen
Jane Carver knew they were talking about her, could hear most of what they were saying and recognized from it that the stranger was irritated with Paul Newton but it didn’t seem to matter, although she wished they weren’t doing it as if she wasn’t there, non-existent despite being propped up between them against supporting pillows. She’d never liked being ignored. She disliked even more how their faces kept receding, blurring like their words, and then coming back so that she could properly see and hear them again. It was important to hear what they were saying because it was about her.
‘Mrs Carver?’
Jane turned towards the stranger, who’d sat by the bed. It was one of her clear moments and she could see he had a heavy, drooping moustache and very thick black-rimmed glasses. He was bald at the front but his hair was long at the back.
‘Mrs Carver? Jane?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’ What sort of stupid question was that? Of course she could hear him now: she hoped the words wouldn’t drift off, making it difficult to hear them again.
‘My name’s Mortimer, Peter Mortimer. I’m a psychiatrist.’
Jane smiled but didn’t bother to say anything. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Why was there a psychiatrist, as well as Paul Newton? He was their doctor in Manhattan, not somebody with a drooping moustache and long hair.
‘What did I say my name was?’
Jane frowned. ‘Mortimer.’ Then she smiled. ‘Cat’s name.’
