A wave of color rose up Pratt’s neck. “I didn’t sell you out,” she said softly.
“Of course not, you just reported our conversations to the man you thought might be behind the breakin and the tail jobs and neglected to mention any of it to me. Tell me, what did you get out of the deal? The promise of a job? Funding for a new business? Thirty pieces of silver? I hope it was something good.”
Pratt’s lip was trembling again and there were tears welling in her eyes, and I didn’t give a shit. “I didn’t know for certain that he had anything to do with… anything. I still don’t. It was just a conversation.”
“Sure, Irene. And part of that conversation was about how you shouldn’t talk to me anymore, wasn’t it?”
She glanced at me and then down at the floor. “I didn’t know he would… do anything. I-”
“For chrissakes, they threatened my nephews, Irene. They came after my family! Please don’t talk to me about what you didn’t knowor didn’t want to know.”
That did it. A sob bubbled up from Irene Pratt’s chest and her shoulders shook and she hung her head and cried. I let her go for a while, and then I went into her kitchen and found a glass and filled it with tap water. I went back to the living room and guided Pratt to the sofa and gave her the glass. She held it with two hands and rested it on her knees, and after a minute or two the tears began to subside. She sipped at the water and wiped her face with her hand. She looked up at me and looked away again.
“You all right?” I asked.
She nodded. “I… I’m sorry… I don’t know what to say. Things are just so fucked-up…” Her voice was tentative and hoarse.
“I know, Irene. I know they are.”
“He asked about me… about how I was doing. He wanted to know what all this… with Greg… would do to my job.” She took a shaky breath and another swallow of water. “He said I shouldn’t worry, that I could do much better. He’s… practically a legend, and he never talked like that to me before.” She looked up at me and her eyes were wet again. “That’s how it started.”
I nodded. This was the tricky part. I took a deep breath and tried to keep my voice even. “Did you ever talk to Pflug, or was it just Hauck that you spoke with?”
Pratt looked at me and grew very still. Her brows were furrowed and her small mouth was pursed. “Just Hauck,” she said softly, and my heart started beating again.
“What’s he got going with Danes?”
She shook her head. “Nothing… I… I don’t know.”
“But there is something going on?”
More head shaking. “I don’t know- really, I don’t. But… it’s like you said. Ever since Greg went away, Mr. Hauck has called a lot more often and I’m not sure why.”
“You have a phone number for him?”
“Yes,” she sniffled.
Forty-five minutes later I left Irene Pratt, red-eyed, in her living room and walked the few blocks to the subway station at 72nd Street. I had a gut full of soured anger and self-disgust, and a meeting the next morning with Marcus Hauck.
28
The Kubera Group was headquartered in a low unmarked building of fieldstone and glass that sat atop a rise about ten minutes from downtown Stamford. It was hidden from the street by a screen of fir trees and thick plantings and surrounded on three sides by parking lot. The lot was empty at 8 a.m. on Sunday, and I parked my rented Ford about fifty yards off the building entrance and ran the windows down. It was a mild breezy morning, and the air around Kubera was scented with pine and new-cut grass. It was quiet in the parking lot, for the two minutes it took security to show.
“Can I help you?” the guard said. He was in the driver’s seat of the unmarked white sedan that rolled up alongside me. He was young and crew-cut.
“I’m meeting with Hauck at eight-thirty. I’m early.”
“Yes, sir. If I could have your name, please.” I gave it to him and he thanked me and wrote something on a clipboard and drove off. I fiddled with the radio and found a college station playing Josh Rouse. I stretched my legs out and propped my feet on the dash. I closed my eyes and listened to the music and tried not to think about last night. I failed miserably at it.
After browbeating Irene Pratt into phoning Marcus Hauck, and forcing a meeting with him through thinly veiled threats to call the press and the police, I’d spent the rest of the day in a futile online search for more information about Hauck and the Kubera Group. By five o’clock I’d been frustrated and restless, and I took myself for a long walk, down to the Battery and up along Water Street. I’d lingered for a while at the Seaport, amid the tourists and the strings of white lights, and looked at the Brooklyn waterfront. I picked out a corner of a building that I thought was Nina Sachs’s and wondered how they were doing over there- if Nina was still angry and Ines still scared, if Billy was still worrying about his father. I could still hear the pleading in his reedy voice: Will you look for him anyway?
I’d continued north from there and stopped for dinner at a tavern in the East Village. It was a dark tin- ceilinged place, with a scarred black bar along one wall. I’d sat at the bar and drunk club soda and picked at what passed for a tuna sandwich while the place filled up with regulars. Their faces were animated and unfamiliar and their conversations swirled around me like smoke. I listened to their words without comprehension and found the murmur of voices somehow comforting. I walked home through a thin rain.
The lights had been on when I’d come back to my apartment. There was a black umbrella by the door and a gray raincoat on the coatrack. Lauren was standing at the kitchen counter, drinking tea and turning pages of the Sunday Times Magazine. Her black hair was pulled into a loose ponytail, and her sharp features were pale.
“Am I intruding?” I asked, but my sarcasm made barely a dent.
“You’re wet,” she said.
“Wet, tired, and not up for this.”
Lauren smiled thinly. “I notice your fingers look okay, though, and your phone is still working- so it must be your brain that’s out of whack. That must be why I don’t fucking hear from you.”
I tossed my keys on the counter and went into the bathroom and came out with a towel. I dried my face and hair. “What do you want, Laurie?”
She closed the magazine. “I don’t want anything, except to know that you’re all right. I heard about what happened… with those photos.”
“Well, I’m fine- superb, in fact.”
“So I see.”
“Is there something else?”
She looked at me and sighed. “Things will cool off with Ned and Jan. Just give it a little time.”
I threw the towel on the counter. “Sure, things will be fine. In no time they’ll be as warm and fuzzy as ever.”
“They’ll be okay, Johnny. They-”
“No, they won’t. When this passes, assuming it passes, there’ll just be something else and something else after that; it’s inevitable. Because they’re right- Ned and Jan and David- they’re right. I’m not like them, my life isn’t like theirs, and I’m not good company. And none of that is going to change.”
Lauren shook her head. “They just don’t get what it is you’re doing with yourself, Johnny. I’m not sure I do either, but so what? We’re your family.”
“That’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not real life. The world is full of brothers and sisters who have nothing to do with one another. Maybe we should take a page from their book.” I went around the counter to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of cranberry juice, and took a glass from the cabinet. “I’m best left alone, Laurie. It was stupid for either of us to think otherwise.”
“Meaning what?” she said softly. “You’re saying adiA?s to all of us?”
“I’m just being realistic.”
