door behind her and looked around at the familiar place. She wished her father were still alive, sneaking in late at night and sitting down at the old desk to pursue some perfectly dotty arcane study. He had been completely mad, of course. Even as a child she had known it, although her mother had behaved as though it were the furthest thing from her mind until she had known she was dying. Then she had sat Meg down and told her simply, “Take care of your father, if you can.” There had been no moment of doubt in either woman’s mind that Meg could. He had been beatific and peaceful much of the time, the way she imagined idiot savants must be.
She remembered the day he had let her have the run of this place. She was ten, and she had been at a birthday party for Gwendolyn Ap-Witting. She had told one of her stories to Gwendolyn, a scary story with ghosts that came up out of the ancient mounds between their estates. Gwendolyn had told a duller, less-sophisticated abridged version to her aunt Clara while she was upstairs fixing her hair. The aunt had come downstairs and made a public announcement that the other children were to believe nothing that Meg said, and followed it with a lecture about Jesus sending angels to make indelible black marks in their books whenever little girls told lies. The children had been more terrified by this than by the ghosts, and they had spent the rest of the long afternoon maintaining a distance of twelve feet from Meg. Their rudimentary religious training had convinced them that God had a history of striking down sinners in groups rather than singly. The criteria were vague; usually just falling into some broadly defined category like “the wicked” seemed to be enough, so self-preservation dictated that their status be unambiguous. Whenever she came near any of them, they would recoil and move away. As Gwendolyn opened her gifts in the drawing room surrounded by all the other children, Meg had hovered in the doorway, looking at all of them from an immense distance, as though she were one of the ghosts in her story, caught alone on the earth in daytime. When the driver had pulled up in front of the big manor house at four, little Margaret had appeared suddenly from behind a thick yew tree and clambered into the back seat as though the Rolls were the last steamer out of Krakatoa.
At home she had sat alone in the garden contemplating the wreckage of her life when she had noticed her father standing nearby, staring at her. Probably he could see she had been crying, although she had taken pains to hide the signs because they were not only a consequence but also evidence of her guilt. It was unusual that he paid any attention to her, and often she suspected that he was unaware of her existence for long periods. But now he was absorbed in his study of her, looking down at her with the same benevolent curiosity that he was devoting that year to his list of medicinal herbs mentioned in ancient texts but not identifiable among modern flora.
Finally he had said, “Come with me,” and walked through the French doors into the library without looking back to see if she had heard him. When they were in the secret little room behind the walls of books where nobody would ever disturb them, he had spoken to her as he probably spoke to his contemporaries. “There are times in life when it’s useful to know of a place like this. Hiding places are extremely difficult to come by, so treat it with respect. You may come here whenever you please.”
She missed him now as she lay on the leather couch, staring up at the vaulted ceiling and wondering if she had seen the last of Michael Schaeffer. The whole day had degenerated from a succession of bright, vivid, jarring sights and sounds into a collection of events she was too exhausted to remember very well. He was gone already, back to a place where serious people had serious things to do, and engaged in awful, deadly struggles to accomplish some ephemeral advantage. It wasn’t so much his disappearance that disturbed her; it was the discovery that he really belonged to that life instead of hers. It didn’t even matter that he’d told her all those lies about being a spy. That she, of all people in the world, understood. He had only wanted to make it all seem nicer and prettier for her. If he came back, she knew she would probably marry him. She already was listed in Debrett’s as the last of the Holroyds, and she was a whole generation too late to do anything selfless about it. Perhaps she couldn’t do anything about the fact that he was obviously some kind of criminal, but she could be his place to hide. Gwendolyn’s aunt Clara would probably have said it was typical of her to fall in love with the worst person she ever met. She devoted a moment to hoping that Clara’s angels had volumes of black marks on her when she had died a few years ago, and this took her mind off the present just long enough for sleep to come.
As the passengers shuffled up the aisle toward the door, Charles Ackerman reached under his seat and retrieved his small suitcase. He had brought only one. The place to trap a man like him was in an airport baggage- claim area, when he had just stepped off an international flight that required going through metal detectors at both ends and was standing mesmerized in front of a turning carousel of luggage.
He joined the agonizingly slow queue with the others. Here it was only ten in the evening, but it was three o’clock in the morning for the load of prisoners straggling into the airport. This suited him perfectly.
When the tired functionary at the Customs and Immigration barrier looked at the passport, a hint of interest almost snapped him out of his lethargy. “You haven’t been home in some time, Mr. Ackerman.”
“No,” he said. “I live in England now.” He watched with fascination as the man placed his open passport on a machine that appeared to be an optical scanner. That was new. He was glad he had used the Ackerman passport. He had obtained it fifteen years ago on the strength of a bogus birth certificate, but the State Department had issued it and he had renewed it regularly, so it was real enough. The man read something on a computer screen that didn’t surprise him, then handed it back.
“Here on business?”
“No,” Ackerman answered. “I just haven’t been home in a long time.”
“Anything to declare?”
“Nothing.” It was all negatives, all denials: I’m nobody, doing nothing here, bringing nothing with me; forget me. The man ran his hands inside the suitcase quickly and moved on to the next person in line.
He latched the suitcase and moved into the open terminal, where rows of faces glanced hopefully at him, scrutinizing his features, and then, instantly failing to recognize the right configuration, discarded him and looked behind him for the brother, the father, the business associate. He passed the waiting throng and moved toward the lockers built into the far wall. He saw one with a key sticking out of it, then remembered he had no American coins. He moved on to the gift shop. There was a woman who seemed to be an Indian behind the counter, staring intently at a garish tabloid she had draped over the cash register. As he approached, she set it aside and he could read the headline: RUSSIANS FIND WORLD WAR II BOMBER IN CRATER ON THE MOON. Meg would have said it had something for everyone she knew.
“I need to change some English money,” he said.
She pointed out into the hall. “The yellow booth.” Then she added confidentially, “They give you more at the bank.”
“Thank you,” he said, and turned to go.
“Haven’t you got an ATM card?”
He had no idea what an ATM card was. There was probably another name for it in England, but he certainly didn’t have one. “No.”
“They’ll screw you out of ten percent. I’ll do it for five.”
He resisted the temptation to smile. New York. It must come from the air or the water. They’ll screw you, but I won’t; we’re in this together. Even the ward politicians got elected that way. “How much can you give me for five hundred pounds?”
“Seven-fifty.”
He had read in
He used the coins to free the locker key, left his belongings in the locker, then strolled to the ticket counter and paid more pounds for a ticket to Los Angeles leaving at seven in the morning. He looked up at the big clock on the wall and reset his watch. He still had almost nine hours.
Out in the street, the cabs were lined up, with an airport policeman flagging them forward whenever a prospect stepped up. As he presented himself, a dirty yellow Dodge shot ahead crazily and rocked to a stop on its useless shock absorbers.
The ride into Manhattan hadn’t changed much in ten years. The buildings were a little older and dirtier than he remembered them, and the cars seemed a little better and cleaner. He was thinking about Antonio Talarese.
The young idiot with the gun had been Mario Talarese. There was no question that he was a relative. More than twelve years ago he had met Antonio Talarese in the back of a small gourmet-food store in lower Manhattan.
