and officious, but they didn’t get jealous.
“I’m sorry to come to your house so late,” said Jane. That was a good start—“your” house. “But my business really is urgent.” She hoped that the use of the word “business” might help dispel the tension.
This time it was his voice. “Jane?”
“Yes, George?”
The intercom cut off, there was a beeping sound, and the gate swung inward. Jane started walking up the long, curving cobblestone driveway. She could see the tile roof of the huge three-story white villa beyond a distant stand of trees. A bright light went on at a spot that she judged must be the front entrance.
Jane followed the driveway across the middle of a flat lawn the size of a golf course fairway, then between tall, umbrella-shaped trees with flowers blooming among the leaves that she could smell but not quite make out, through a zone of short, bushy citrus trees, and then into the open again. When she could see the lighted entrance, she smiled. There were a couple of twisty baroque pillars that looked as though they had been stolen from Saint Peter’s in Rome, and between them, a pair of doors that were a full two stories high. One of them had a man-size door cut into the bottom of it, and that was what was open.
George stepped out wearing white shorts, a pair of sandals, and a striped T-shirt. His merely human size and the childlike clothes he wore made him look ridiculous next to the imposing building he lived in. The little figure began to walk toward her quickly, the sandals slapping on the cobblestones. Jane thought of Richard Dahlman’s comment on the place. “It was the sort of villa you would expect to find on the Mediterranean, but wouldn’t.” Dahlman had been summoned here in the middle of the night, led here by a waitress from his hotel because Dahlman was a surgeon and George was in pain. He had taken out George’s appendix at the local hospital. Since Dahlman wouldn’t accept money, George had insisted on giving him the name and address of a woman who could make him disappear if he should ever have the need.
George saw Jane emerge from the little forest and began to trot awkwardly toward her. Finally, he stepped out of his sandals and went the rest of the way barefoot. He stopped abruptly in front of her. “Jane!” he said. “I can’t believe it!” He hugged her, then held her at arm’s length to look at her in the dim light from his doorway. “Come inside. Is anybody chasing you, or did you get out clean?”
“Nobody’s chasing me,” said Jane. She was already looking over his shoulder for the woman whose voice she had heard. She saw the face in an upper window—a brown, perfect oval, with large black eyes. It turned and disappeared from the window. Jane moved her eyes to the next window and caught a glimpse of a tall, thin shape clothed in a gauzy white nightgown as it passed by. “As far as I know, I’m not being chased, followed, hunted, or watched … until now.”
George feigned disappointment. “Oh, I was hoping to return the favor you did me.”
Jane said, “You’ve been well—other than the appendix?”
“You know about that?” He frowned. “Then the doctor did get himself in trouble. I knew it. American doctors and lawyers are down here all the time hiding money from the IRS. I told him that someday he might have a problem. He wouldn’t believe me.”
“He’s all right now.”
George Hawkes looked at Jane affectionately. “I feel wonderful, since you asked. I feel like I’m in the story about the lion and the mouse. The lion spares the mouse, and later the mouse gnaws the net so the lion can go free.” He bared his teeth and gnawed feverishly. “Ngyah-ngyah-ngyah.”
Jane looked at him through half-lidded eyes.
He said, “You’ve been here for thirty seconds, and already you’ve made my night.”
“I think there was somebody else upstairs who wanted that job,” said Jane. “Who is she?”
“Clara?” His smile returned. “She’s my wife. Local girl.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“Spectacular,” said George. “You should see the kids that woman produces … of course, you will, when they wake up.”
“George,” said Jane. “I’m afraid I won’t be here that long. I came this way because I needed to talk to you with no chance of being overheard or having a call traced.”
He turned to contemplate Jane’s face in the light. “I thought you weren’t in trouble.” He began to pull her toward the house, but she resisted.
“I’m not yet. This is business, and I need to keep it secret. I’d like to be on a plane for home before daylight.” She stared at him. “I’m sure that if you’ve lived up to the agreement we made, your wife hasn’t heard this kind of conversation before.”
When she had met him, George Hawkes had not been his name. He had been a travel agent for money, who specialized in sending it on complicated world tours. He had just managed to leave his building in Los Angeles as the police were coming in the front door, and he had done it masterfully: he had brought with him a suitcase full of his clients’ cash and some enormous checks made out to their Los Angeles company. George’s clients had misinterpreted his escape as an attempt to rob them, and he had come to Jane. She had negotiated a treaty. Under its terms, the clients’ capital would complete its round trip, with George’s regular percentage deducted. George would go out of business, so they wouldn’t worry about his being caught and trading them for a light sentence. They, in return, would never do him harm, search for him, or mention his existence to a third party.
George said, “She doesn’t know where the money came from. She thinks I was the heir to the Wright brothers’ fortune.”
“There’s a Wright brothers’ fortune?”
“How could there not be?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I can do this quickly. I just need a name.”
“A name of what?”
“I need a person who can make some unusual financial transactions for a friend of mine.”
George squinted. “Unusual means illegal. I understand that. But I think I need to narrow it down a bit.”
Jane shrugged. “It has to be somebody who knows his way around, but can also get lawyers and bankers and brokers to cooperate in some moves that might make them curious. In other words, it has to be somebody I can trust absolutely, but nobody else can trust, even a little.”
“What are you paying?”
Jane shrugged again. “I don’t know what the going rate is. He would have to devote himself to this for a few weeks, and at the end of it, he never heard of me or my partner.”
“How much money are you moving?”
“About ten billion dollars.”
George stared at her in silence for a moment. “Ten billion. You have it already?”
She said, “We know where it is. Nobody else does.”
She watched George’s eyes narrow. They burned into her for a few seconds, then turned up toward the window of his house where Jane had seen his wife. He shook his head, and it grew into a shiver. “It’s better if you don’t tell me where it came from. I can’t afford to know that kind of thing anymore.” He sighed, as though he were saying good-bye to something. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The answer would be the same. Henry Ziegler, CPA.”
“Henry Ziegler,” she repeated. “I take it he’s somebody you dealt with in the old days?”
He shook his head. “I was never big enough to be worth his time and trouble, but he was a friend, so he helped me out a few times.” He amended it. “More than a few times.”
Jane couldn’t help looking away from George’s face at his house. It was bigger than the high school she had gone to in Deganawida, New York. The walk she had taken from his front gate had been longer than the distance from the end of the track to the girls’ locker room. “That gives me a new worry. There will be some men who start getting very dangerous the second that the money starts appearing. If he’s that big, they might know him.”
“That’s the way it is when you handle money, love,” said George. “The more there is, the more people there are who have an interest in it. But Henry Ziegler is discreet. Even if he passes on the deal, he’ll never mention it.”
“What is he, anyway?”
“The reason you never heard of him is the same reason he never heard of you: he’s no more interested in getting famous than you are. He’s an accountant. When I met him twenty-five years ago, he was going to law school at night and handling small accounts in the daytime. He wasn’t doing it so he could go argue cases, it was so
