Drummond unlocked the door to the last in the row of five small offices that had been built out from the storeroom’s back wall. On entering, he twisted the coin advance handle on a gumball machine. A soft lightbulb within the globe blinked on, revealing four walls of warped wood paneling stained an orange-brown not found in nature. The file cabinets and bookshelves pressed against the paneling appeared to be all that held it up.
Drummond knelt and examined the small cube refrigerator. Nodding his satisfaction that it hadn’t been tampered with, he pulled the door open and removed an armful of Chinese take-out containers-aluminum trays with waxed cardboard tops. He set them on the cracked leather desk blotter and pried off the lid of the topmost. Charlie backed away. The odor was like a punch in the nose.
“This is nothing,” Drummond said. “An agent of ours in Berlin used to leave microfilm hidden inside dead rats in his cellar. And times I had something really important to hide, I submerged it in here.” He tapped a stout wooden door, which swung inward, revealing a tiny bathroom that made the one at the subway station seem spiffy. The toilet bowl was filled with brown water. Or brown something.
“You’ve made the eight-year-old Chinese food seem appetizing,” Charlie said.
“Actually I have a feeling you’ll find it mouthwatering,” Drummond said with a smile. He pried away a slab of congealed chicken and peanuts, revealing a plastic-wrapped brick of twenty-dollar bills and another of hundreds. “Not incidentally, the peanuts aren’t peanuts. They’re uncut diamonds.”
Charlie found Drummond’s smile infectious.
This was the Christmas morning they’d never had.
“Actually, it’s the most beautiful dish I’ve ever seen,” Charlie said.
Laughing, Drummond took the top off another container of now-petrified lo mein. The odor was fresh flowers as far as Charlie was concerned. Drummond removed a block of noodles to expose documents including two blank United States passports and two more United States passports with his photograph inside. The names were Bill Peterson and John Lewis.
“Are these your emergency aliases or pseudonyms or whatever?” Charlie asked.
“Bill Peterson is a fabrication, pure and simple. John Lewis took some doing. He was born in Altoona, Iowa, in 1947, then was committed to an insane asylum in Des Moines in 2002. So he’s not going anywhere. I ‘borrowed’ his social security number in order to get a duplicate of his birth certificate sent to an accommodation address I set up for him in Stamford, Connecticut. Then I used the birth certificate to get the passport as well as a Connecticut driver’s license, and, over time, all this-” He popped a hardened layer of rice from the next container and poured onto the desk blotter Fairfield Textiles LLC business cards belonging to “John Lewis” as well as cards of others in the textile industry, receipts, a New Haven library card, about ten department store charge cards, and another ten ordinary debit and credit cards. “Most of these cards work, but using them in the next couple of days will be too risky. We may as well send Fielding a note saying ‘Wish You Were Here.’ Still, this one could be vital.” He tapped a Sears card.
“In the event of an emergency where we need a blender?”
“In the event we want to draw on the account at the Bank of Antigua. It’s a numbered account, so there’s no link to my name. Do you think you’ll be able to memorize the number on the card?”
Charlie glanced at the sixteen digits. “For eight million bucks, I could memorize all of Moby-Dick.”
Drummond regarded Charlie with what looked like contentment; Charlie wasn’t entirely sure, never having seen that expression on him before.
“Charles, please know I never wanted you to be in the position of having to flee the country,” Drummond said. “As it stands, though, I’m grateful to you for having gotten us this far. And I’ll be very happy to have you along.” He thrust out his right hand.
Charlie clasped it with matching energy. Still, the handshake felt lacking.
It was interrupted by three raps at the door between Bedford Avenue and the vestibule the offices shared with the candy store.
“This is the police,” came a man’s voice from the sidewalk. “Please come out now or we’ll be forced to come in.”
Charlie flashed back to his clumsy, boxes-of-malted-milk-balls-rattling move when the car drove past. He groaned inwardly.
“I can take care of this,” Drummond whispered. He put the lid back on the container of cash and diamonds, then grabbed a card from the pile on the desk. “Stay put for just a minute.”
He stepped out of the office, blending into the darkness of the corridor leading to the vestibule. He reappeared for a moment, red, then white, and then blue from the flashing light bar on the patrol car. Then he vanished into the vestibule.
Charlie heard him padding down thick rubber matting. He heard too the raspy slide of the bolt, the groan as the door opened, the tinkle of a little bell on top of it, the influx of the Brooklyn night, then Drummond delivering a very convincing, “It’s okay, officers, I’m Bill Peterson. I’m a tenant here. With too much work due tomorrow morning, unfortunately.” What sounded like a brief exchange of formalities between him and the policemen came next, followed by another jingle of the bell as the door fell back into its frame, the relocking of the bolt, the patrol car rolling away, and, finally, Drummond ambling back down the dark corridor.
“So did you have to buy tickets to the PBA dinner?” Charlie asked.
There was no response.
“Dad?”
Out of the darkness came a stocky young man. Charlie knew him as MacKenzie, but his name was really Pitman-assuming Cadaret hadn’t lied about that too. Pitman held the Colt that had been tucked into Drummond’s waistband seconds ago.
“Dad had to go to a meeting,” he said.
46
Pitman pried a block of wood from a corner of the bookshelf. It matched the triangular braces on the shelf’s other corners. He shook it until a small transistor-like gadget fell out and onto the desk blotter. An eavesdropping device, guessed Charlie, who sat at the desk per Pitman’s promise to shoot him if he didn’t.
With the butt of the Colt, Pitman smashed apart the gadget, then swept away its remains, along with the Chinese food containers, sending them clattering against the fake-wood paneling and then to the floor. Spreading the charge cards out onto the blotter, he asked, “Okay, which one is it?”
Evidently he’d overheard what Drummond said about the Bank of Antigua and was looking to get in on the money himself-how else to explain his furtive solo entry coupled with the destruction of the eavesdropping device? His problem was Drummond never identified the card by name; he’d merely tapped it.
“Which one is what?” Charlie said.
Pitman grabbed him by the collar and thrust his face toward the desktop. The bulb of Charlie’s nose flattened against the blotter. The cartilage was a hair’s breadth from exploding when Pitman jerked him to a stop.
“Why make this hard on yourself, Charlie?”
“I don’t know what you want,” Charlie said, trying to buy time to think.
No doubt Pitman could torture him into revealing it was the Sears card. Probably the spook knew dark artistry that would hurt just to hear about. And even more disturbing: Once Pitman got what he wanted, he couldn’t risk Charlie breathing a word of what had happened.
“I know it’s not one of the gas station cards, because you can’t buy a blender at a gas station,” Pitman said. “So, which is it? Nordstrom’s? Spiegel? Sears? JCPenney?”
Charlie felt the heat of Pitman’s scrutiny with the mention of each. “Really, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Do you have Alzheimer’s too? I overheard your entire conversation.”
Pitman gripped the Colt by the barrel and appeared only to flick it. When the handle struck Charlie’s nose, though, it felt like a wrecking ball. Hot blood burst from his nostrils, he saw at least two of everything in the room, and he wanted to shriek. But while shrieking would release some of the pain, it would get the neighbors’ attention, and draw the police. Then Pitman would simply flash his G-man badge and drag Charlie somewhere else to torture
