“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Collins,” she said, “you can be a bit of a contradiction.”
“How’s that?”
“You want to send me on a mission of peace, but the first thing you do is supply armament.”
“It’s a cruel, mean world,” he said. “I want you to be safe.”
She smiled. “Sounds like
“I rather have my hopes up,” he said.
She grinned slightly and pushed back from the table. If nothing else, the offer was both flattering and exciting. But she wasn’t sure how much flattery or excitement she was in the mood for these days.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll look at everything. Then I’ll call you tomorrow.”
From Collins’s lips, she saw the trace of a grin.
“Thank you, Alex,” he said.
By the entrance to the terrace, there was a sudden commotion that grabbed her attention. Outside on the sidewalk, a noisy homeless man accosted an older couple passing by. Alex watched as the man aggressively pursued them. The older couple hurried their pace. Alex rose to her feet. If no one else would do anything about it, she would.
Collins placed a gentle hand on her wrist. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said.
“But-?”
Collins then nodded to his bodyguard. The bodyguard, obviously seeking any small piece of action he could find, moved with the grace and speed of a much younger man. He interposed himself between the couple and their assailant.
The panhandler attempted to shove the bodyguard in return. Bad idea. Mr. Collins’s hired hand sent the vagrant hurtling in a different direction, and he disappeared.
FIFTY-SIX
Alex’s apartment on East Twenty-first Street in Manhattan was a very quiet unimposing place, considering its location, and perfectly suited to her needs.
It was nestled into the back of a walk-up building first constructed in 1900, third floor rear, just twenty yards east of Second Avenue. The block itself was quiet, although traffic rumbled southbound on the avenue all day and all night.
Inside the furnished one-bedroom apartment, all windows overlooked a rear courtyard. The two rooms were a witch’s brew of clashing wallpapers, lamp shades, aging furniture, and worn carpets. It reflected the lifestyle of Joseph Collins’s son, Daniel, whose interests were far from the worldly or the run-of-the mill.
The younger Collins, single and about forty, had grown up wealthy, had worked in his father’s businesses for many years, but had also gone to seminary at Southern Methodist. Alex had never met him but had spoken to him on the phone from time to time. At age thirty-five he had left his father’s industries to help administer his father’s Christian philanthropies. There were a collection of pictures on the walls and on tables of Daniel trotting the globe; in Africa, in central America, in South America, in New Mexico, and one-presumably to get a nasty dose of some colder climates-in Labrador.
The pictures showed the young man-these days forty was considered young-in various villages or cities. He looked content with his mission and his missions. Everyone should be so lucky.
Alex quickly took a measure of the other people in the building. The upstairs neighbor was an actor who was out of town, and the downstairs neighbor was the landlord, “Lady Dora” Rose, as she called herself.
“Lady Dora” was a quintessential New Yorker, an elf of a woman in her late sixties. She had been left a pair of brownstones including this one. But the story, as Alex heard it on arrival, got even better.
Lady Dora’s late husband, Marvin, had owned a newsstand that had specialized in thoroughbred and harness racing tout sheets and sporting publications. His store also featured a telephone that never stopped ringing. Marvin, who was fifteen years older than Dora when they wed, had gone out for a walk one night in June 1977 and never came back. Presumably he was still walking.
The “Rose” in Lady Dora’s name was a truncation of “Rosenberg,” which had been Marvin’s name, and the “Lady” was a figment of her own inflated sense of grandeur.
“I made it up so I could be an interesting person,” she told Alex when Alex asked about it. “Then for ninety- four dollars I had had it legally added to my name.”
Lady Dora showed Alex a New York State driver’s license to prove it. Not that she drove or owned a car. Over the years, Lady Rose had also acquired a hint of a British accent, though more often than not the Brooklyn one she had been born with also surfaced. Lady Dora also introduced Alex to Sajit, the handyman, who came in for ten hours a week off the books to sweep the floors, fix the plumbing, and replace lightbulbs.
Sajit was from Sri Lanka. He was a slim, tiny, fastidiously neat man who always wore a white dress shirt with shiny black pants. Today was no exception. Under Lady Rose’s critical eye, he set up a rickety card table with a pair of heavily dented metal folding chairs, the type often seen as props at wrestling matches.
“You will take good care of everything in Daniel’s place, won’t you?” Lady Rose asked. “Daniel’s a wonderful young man. He has a famous father, you know.”
“Daniel’s father arranged with you to let me in,” Alex said.“ Remember?”
“Yes. Of course.” Lady Dora shook her head. It was four in the afternoon the day that Alex had met with Joseph Collins at the Stanhope. The landlady was barefoot in the front vestibule and wore a pink bathrobe, her gray hair in bobby pins. She was on one of her daily rants. This one ended when she spotted the resident of 3-C, a self-proclaimed “documentary film maker” whose work was sold only over the Internet. Alex had a hunch that the man’s oeuvre might be unsuitable for family viewing.
He was in trouble with Lady Dora for something, so Alex headed upstairs with the file in her hand and closed her door on the argument that ensued. It was at this moment that she made a note to phone Ben later that evening, just to vent. Calls between them were becoming more frequent. Alex appreciated the friendship more with each passing week.
That evening, Alex settled into this cozy atmosphere on East Twenty-first Street. She spread out some yogurt and fruit on the small dining table, turned it into her evening meal, and then repaired to the sofa in the living room to read.
Alex embarked upon her reading at a few minutes past eight in the evening.
For years, as the file explained in detail, Collins had been quietly financing the missionaries at a village named Barranco Lajoya in a mountainous region of southeastern Venezuela. The missionaries rotated in and out. There were several teams of them who worked in shifts ranging from six months to two years.
They had been living among a large tribe of primitive indigenous people, learning their language so that they could translate the Bible into it and bring the Christian faith to them. Some of the missionaries doing this work lived with the Indians for at least a year or two in order to learn the language and create an alphabet for it, and then translate the Bible. Some of them brought their families. Their children grew up in these remote villages. There had been considerable early success, first bringing literacy itself to these people, then bringing the Christian faith. And yet, after considerable early success, there then appeared to be an effort to destroy the missionaries’ work and force them to leave the country.
A school built by the missionaries and the villagers had caught fire one night. Livestock had disappeared. The local streams, tributaries of the Rio Xycapo, had been polluted by industrial waste from a higher elevation. Yet there was no industry at higher elevations, and no known settlements. That meant that the waste had been brought in and dumped.
But why? The villagers had nothing that anyone would want. They were simple people who had been self- sufficient for centuries. Why should anything change now? The people were so remote that who could care enough about them to victimize them?
Perhaps, conjectured the writer of this document, the interest of outsiders was enough by itself to put the small tribe on someone’s list of enemies.
Alex began making notes in the margins, observations and questions to ask Mr. Collins when she reported back to him. She started to feel a pull toward these people. It was as if this was the path now intended for her.
