The Wrath of Angels

24

Back at Nicola’s, Epstein had resigned himself to the absence of his bodyguards, not that he had a whole lot of choice in the matter. Nick’s office was warm and smelled faintly of fresh baked bread, and his coffee was very good. At first I felt that I was being more hospitable to Epstein than he probably deserved given the nature of our previous encounter, but it didn’t take me long to realize something about the confrontation that my anger had caused me to underestimate at the time: the extent to which Epstein had been frightened, and frightened of me. Even now he remained uneasy, and it wasn’t due only to the absence of his protectors. Despite all of my protestations, and Liat’s nod of salvation, I was still a troubling figure for the old man. The presence of Louis in the room probably wasn’t making him feel any better about the situation. Louis could make the dead nervous.

‘Your hand is shaking,’ I said, as I watched him sip from his cup.

‘It’s strong coffee.’

‘Really? I could have walked on the surface of that Arab stuff you served me last night if the cup had been big enough, and Nick’s coffee is too strong for you?’

He shrugged. ‘Chacun a son gout.’

Louis tapped me on the shoulder

‘That’s French,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘It means,’ said Louis very carefully, as if explaining something to a small, slow child, ‘“Everyone to his own taste.”’

‘You done?’ Sometimes I wondered if Angel didn’t act as some kind of stabilizing influence on Louis. It was a possibility that I found worrying.

‘Just helping,’ said Louis. He looked at Walter Cole as if to say, ‘What’s a man to do?’

‘I didn’t know it was French,’ said Walter.

‘See?’ said Louis to me. ‘He didn’t know.’

‘He’s never been further east than Cape May,’ I said. ‘The closest he’s been to France is patting a poodle.’

‘What does it mean?’ resumed Walter. ‘What he said?’

‘I just explained what it meant,’ said Louis. ‘Everyone to his own taste.’

‘Oh,’ said Walter. ‘It sounded different the other way.’

‘That’s because it was in French,’ said Louis.

‘I guess,’ said Walter. ‘French people got a lot of words for stuff, don’t they?’

At that point, Louis stopped talking to him, and therefore missed the wink that Walter threw my way.

‘So what now?’ asked Epstein.

‘You speak German, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I speak German.’

‘Jesus,’ said Walter, ‘it’s like Ellis Island in here.’

‘Do you know what Seitensprung is?’ I continued.

‘Yes,’ said Epstein. ‘It is the act of changing partners while one is dancing.’

Walter shifted in his seat and tapped Louis on the arm.

‘The Germans got a lot of words for stuff too, don’t they?’ he said.

‘You’re fucking with me, man, I know it.’

‘No, it’s like a whole other language . . .’

I tried to ignore them and concentrated on Epstein. ‘I don’t know why or how I ended up on that list, but you have no reason to believe that I’d harm you. That’s why I brought you here, and that’s why you’re without your bodyguards. If I’d wanted you dead, then you’d be dead, and these two men wouldn’t be here to witness it.’ I caught Louis’s eye. ‘Well, one of them wouldn’t be.’

‘My fear, as I explained to you last night, is that there may be a presence within you that has not yet revealed itself,’ said Epstein.

‘And I told you that, if I was like them, whatever was sleeping inside me would have awakened by now. There were so many times when, if I was a host for something foul lying dormant in me, it could have shrugged off its torpor and intervened to save those like it, but it didn’t. It didn’t because it isn’t there.’

Epstein’s shoulders slumped. He looked old, older even than he was.

‘There is so much at stake,’ he said.

‘I know that.’

‘If we were wrong about you—’

– ‘then you’d all be dead, every one of you. There would be no percentage in not killing you.’

Epstein did not answer. He closed his eyes. I thought he might be praying. When he opened them again, he appeared to have reached a decision.

‘Seitensprung,’ he said, and nodded. ‘We don’t change partners during the dance.’

‘No.’

‘So what now?’

‘What do you think?’

‘We need to find that plane,’ said Epstein.

‘Why?’ asked Louis.

‘Because there’s another version of the list on it,’ I said. ‘Barbara Kelly was killed because the people she worked for found out that she was trying to repent, to save herself by revealing what she knew. Her list is gone, but that list in the forest remains. It’s probably older than Kelly’s, but that doesn’t matter. It’s still worth securing.’

‘But we don’t know where the plane is,’ said Walter.

‘You could call your friend, Special Agent Ross, at the FBI,’ I said to Epstein. ‘He could look at satellite images, try to track changes in the forest that might reveal the path of a fallen airplane.’

‘No,’ said Epstein.

‘Don’t you trust him?’

‘I trust him implicitly, but as I told you yesterday, we don’t know who else is on that list. It may be that even the FBI is infected. The risk of alerting them to what we’re trying to do is too high.’ He leaned forward on the table, clasping his hands together. ‘Are you sure that the Vetters woman doesn’t know the location of the plane?’

‘She told me that her father didn’t say.’

‘And you believe her?’

‘Her father and his buddy were lost when they came across it. It may be that he gave some more specific indication of the area to her before he died, although if he did then she didn’t share it with me.’

‘You have to go back to her and discover everything that she knows. Everything. Meanwhile, we’ll try to trace the movements of Barbara Kelly and find out all that we can about her. It may be that she secreted away a copy of the list before she died.’

I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my face. Epstein might have been right about Kelly making a second copy of the list and storing it away from her house, but if she did I was pretty certain that she gave up its location under torture.

‘Marielle Vetters,’ I said.

Epstein looked confused.

‘What?’ he said.

‘That’s the name of the woman who gave me that list. Her father’s name was Harlan, and his friend’s name was Paul Scollay. They come from a town called Falls End, at the edge of the Great North Woods.’

Epstein’s face cleared.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he asked, although I think he already knew the answer to the question.

‘Because I trust you.’

‘Even after what happened last night?’

‘Maybe especially after what happened last night. I didn’t like it at the time, and I don’t want a repeat of it, but I understand why you reacted the way that you did. We’re on the same side, rabbi.’