Reaction of the tiger, p.6
REACTION OF THE TIGEr, page 6
part #4 of André Warner, Manhunter Series
‘And Lindy? She sounded as full of beans as ever over the phone.’
‘She’s good. Enjoying school. She misses you, and Andorra, talks about you constantly.’
It didn’t help to know that.
‘Let’s walk,’ I said, standing up. ‘Let’s grab a coffee.’
We walked, past Hans Christian Anderson, stolid in stone, dodged the bikers on East Drive to the Loeb Boathouse Bar. We were lucky to find a seat on the terrace bar, with its view across The Lake, swarming with rowboats, the setting presided over by the art deco San Remo apartment building that, with its twin towers, resembles a castle keep.
Our conversation drifted back to last winter, to the days in Andorra when we had the makings of a real family. Sad reflections on happy times.
‘Don’t slam the door on me again, love,’ I said as we started on our second coffee – espresso for me, decaff for her.
She looked down into her coffee cup. ‘I won’t, I promise. I’ll never close it, however long it takes.’
It was almost too tempting to seize the moment to take her up on her original offer: if I foreswore the killing, she would live with the risk of retribution from Il Sindicato. Retribution that would likely include her daughter. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to put her in the line of fire then, and I wasn’t able to do it now. That much hadn’t changed.
Five
Three and a half days after I left it to travel to New York I re-entered my house. It was late evening, dark, chilly, raining, and I was dogtired and jetlagged. Dumping my bag in the hall, I headed for the bar in a straight line, deviating only for furniture, to pour a generous shot of Glenfiddich, with a less generous splash of soda, then to accompany the blend to the nearest armchair. My iPod was on the round table beside it. I started it up where it had left off before I departed for the States – a few bars into Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3.
One sip and few more bars later, my non-business cell phone buzzed.
‘Yes?’ I said, through a yawn.
‘Hello, you.’ Her voice had a slightly husky timbre, as if she were getting over a cold.
Jacqui.
‘Hi yourself, beautiful. How are you?’
‘I called earlier. You were out.’
‘Away, actually.’
‘Oh.’ A couple of beats went by; I imagined her mind ticking over. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Paris.’ A white lie. If I’d said New York, it would have involved more white lies, and I didn’t like lying about Maura.
‘What for?’ she blurted and was instantly contrite. ‘Sorry, André, sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. What I meant to say was what were you doing there. Just idle curiosity. Or is it too soon in our relationship for curiosity, even the idle kind?’
Questions about my movements would always be too soon.
‘Not at all. It was a business meeting with my stockbroker.’
‘I see.’ A break in the conversation while both of us thought. Then, ‘I can hear music. Is it Tchaikovsky?’
The second movement had just kicked off, light-footed and lilting, the cello intervening. Jacqui struggled to identify the classical composers from their music alone, albeit she was a great fan of the Opera.
‘Bach.’
She sighed. ‘I wish I knew classical music the way you do.’
‘No reason why you should share my tastes.’
‘But I want to,’ she protested.
I heard the sound of glass chiming on glass.
‘Are you drinking?’
‘Just a small sherry – or two. You?’
‘Just a small Scotch. A nightcap to send me to sleep. I used to drink too much, then I reformed, and now I don’t drink much at all.’
‘You know, darling, you seem old before your time in some ways. The classical music, the avoidance of alcohol, old school manners, that kind of thing.’
‘Funny you should say that. Someone … else said the same thing a few years ago. Called me a dinosaur.’
That pressed her laugh button.
‘Maybe we should go clubbing together the next time you’re over here, ease you into the twentieth century.’
‘Don’t you mean the twenty-first?’
‘No, mustn’t rush these things. One century at a time.’
It was the first time she had really made me laugh. I’d been beginning to think she had no sense of humour.
We talked on. Mostly humdrum stuff, nothing deep. Just as well, as I was brooding over Maura and the challenge of making a decision that could have terminal consequences. Having Jacqui say something mushy like ‘I love you,’ would just make me feel lower than I was feeling already.
I asked after Sam. He was asleep. Eventually the flow of trivia ran dry.
‘Better let you go,’ she said with such obvious reluctance that I felt a stab of sympathy for her. If she was getting seriously serious about us, it might be the moment to call a halt. Hurting her was not in my game plan.
‘Well, I am a bit bushed,’ I said, and that was no lie, after a total of sixteen hours crisscrossing the Atlantic.
‘All right. See you on Saturday then.’
‘Sure thing. Looking forward to it. How about I call you when I get to Tintagel?’
‘Or before.’ A small pause. ‘Or any time.’ A more extended pause. ‘André …’
‘Yes, Jacqui?’
In the void that followed I imagined I could hear her heartbeat.
Bach had moved on from Concerto No. 3 and was well into the dotted rhythms of the dance-influenced Orchestral Suite No. 1 before she said, ‘Call me from the village and I’ll open the gate for you.’
My thanks were on the tip of my tongue when she cut them off with a brisk goodnight. Before I could even reciprocate in kind she pulled the plug. Whatever she had wanted to say wasn’t about opening the gate. Just as well it was left unsaid. Much as I would appreciate the stability that a togetherness with Jacqui would bring into my life, she wasn’t Maura, and couldn’t replace her, and there was the rub. Jacqui was the Band-Aid over the wound that Maura had inflicted, no more than that.
* * * * *
When in residence I did a minimum thirty-minute stint in my basement gym before breakfast. It could have been my imagination but my workouts seemed to produce more copious quantities of sweat and leave my heart thudding ever faster these days. Sort of inevitable, part of the ageing process, though reconciling myself to it was hard. To do my job I needed to be fit. To be fit I needed to put myself through the mill. No compromise, no wussing out.
Over a breakfast of croissants and fruit salad, my hair still damp and my skin still tingling from the hot-cold shower, I turned my mind to what I remembered of the dossier on Pauline Weldon. Upstairs, good old Señora Sist was keeping the dust at bay with her new vacuum cleaner. According to the commercial blurb the machine was near-silent; in reality, it complained like a whistling kettle.
The Weldon woman’s specialty was the illegal importation into the UK of teenage girls from Eastern Europe, Russia and some of the former SSRs. After arrival their passports were taken from them, they were ill-treated and under the threat of even worse treatment forced into prostitution. The Weldon woman ran the pimps who in turn ran the girls. A lucrative racket no doubt. Albeit as slimy as rackets come. It wasn’t my first encounter with the likes of sex traffickers; as a criminal activity, it seemed to be on the up-and-up. Profit over morals every time.
I spooned a slice of peach into my mouth, chewed on it, and mulled over, as I had so often before, the human race’s capacity for evil. Was there more of it about than when I was a boy? Or was I just less aware of it then, despite my mother’s entreaties about not speaking to strangers? The upside of my profession, maybe the sole upside, was that I was paid to rid the planet of a lot of filth. You could even say it was my mission, and the financial rewards almost secondary.
According to what I had learned, Weldon’s big mistake, and the one that was supposed to cost her her life, was when she received a bevy of new talent in January this year. Among the no-doubt terrified recruits was a certain Tatjana Maximova, sixteen-year old only daughter of Maxim Maximov, head of a criminal network that operated in western Russia, from St Petersburg down to Kiev in the Ukraine. Maximov, understandably, was a little put out at the girl’s failure to show up at breakfast without even a goodbye.
She went missing en route to Malaga Airport, at the end of a vacation on the Costa del Sol. Over the two months following her disappearance Maximov sent out emissaries in all directions in a quest to restore her to the family bosom. Money was spent in prodigious amounts. When it failed to produce results, ammunition was spent instead. The search area was narrowed down to the UK, where Maximov had significant business interests and political connections. Leaving a spoor of corpses across the country, by early August his team had traced the girl to a bed-sit in a pub in Birmingham, where several other girls of similar ages and background were housed. Tatjana was whisked away, the other girls turned loose, and the pub burned to ashes, along with the owner and his wife and two dogs and an iguana.
Those responsible fled the UK with the law breathing down their necks. At that point, Maximov, sensing that he had strayed a country too far in his vendetta, decided to hand over the remaining loose end – disposal of Pauline Weldon – to a third party, in this case Il Sindicato, of which he was a paid-up member. Enter Il Sindicato’s only English-speaking enforcer, André Warner. I was selected to make the hit. Like most revenge hits the deed itself entailed passing on a personal message from the contractor to the victim. A variation on the Last Rites. I suppose this need by the contractor to make his identify known arose out of having to deliver the coup de grace by proxy. It was no hardship for me. It came with the territory, and I never defaulted on it.
The last of the fruit salad found its way into my mouth. I set down the spoon and took a sip of my espresso. It was barely lukewarm. I swallowed it down anyway and gazed through the French window at the hillside, towards the villa of Lucien and Madeleine Bos, my next-door neighbours. It was a scene devoid of colour, the brooding skies leeching the green from the trees and grass and turning them monochrome.
Neither the coffee nor the view spawned a solution to the rare dilemma that confronted me. Do the job or put the lives of loved ones in jeopardy. Not really a dilemma at all. Even if I were doomed never to set eyes on Maura again I couldn’t condemn her to death because of slavish adherence to a personal code that forbade killing women. Weldon was worse than worthless, and merited the chop. No humming and hawing over the extent of the woman’s vileness. I should squeeze the trigger and feel nothing.
I should.
I would. I guess. Squeeze the trigger, that is. Feeling nothing might be tougher.
Living with my conscience afterwards would be toughest of all.
Señora Sist entered, pushing the lightweight battery vacuum cleaner, the household’s latest labour-saving acquisition.
‘Shall I do in here, Señor André?’ she enquired.
‘Vas-y,’ I said. Go ahead. ‘I’ve nearly finished. Fix me another espresso first though, will you, Señora?’
‘Avec plaisir.’
Marta Fuentes from Sothebys had phoned to arrange a viewing with a prospective client from Belgium. I planned to be out when they came. Selling the house with all its memories was something I had to stay detached from. Let Marta handle the sordid details. When the time came to sign the contract, I would take the money and run. Fast and far.
* * * * *
Lucien and Madeleine invited me over for aperitifs at six. We indulged on their terrace. From there the outlook was similar to mine, but being a little higher up the slope they could see beyond La Massana and on down the valley as far as the village of Ordino, just a blur of buildings except for the splash of green that defined the football pitch. The evening was still, as if the earth were holding its breath, the trees listless, the first leaves beginning to loosen their grip and drift earthwards to come to rest like toy gliders making a touchdown. The only sound was the mournful bleating of the sheep that outnumbered the inhabitants of the little principality. A late working bee ascended from the cluster of pink azaleas that sprouted in one of two faux-Grecian urns at the top of the steps to the terrace.
‘What a beautiful evening,’ Madeleine gushed, her head back, her eyes shut, savouring the tranquillity, that quality of Andorra she loved the most.
‘Ah, yes,’ Lucien agreed, a touch of regret in his lined features. He was not a well man. He never talked about it, but I suspected it was one of the cancers. The treatment he was receiving was probably more debilitating than the illness. He didn’t talk much these days.
‘The day after tomorrow, I have to go to the UK,’ I said.
Lucien looked into his glass of kir, nodded.
‘Business?’ He wasn’t being nosey, just making conversation.
‘Mostly. I might visit the family.’
‘Your sister?’ Madeleine said, opening her eyes. ‘A charming woman, and their children, so well behaved. I hope they will come again.’
‘You never know.’
Unlikely though, as I planned to put the house on the market.
‘Please give her my fondest regards,’ Madeleine said, and Lucien perked up enough to contribute ‘Mine too.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Have you heard from Lizzy lately?’ Madeleine asked.
Lizzy, who had taken to calling herself Liza, pronounced Ly-za. She would be eighteen years old now. For a few glorious months she had been my ward. Until she was abducted, and I thought I would never see her again. After months searching for her across half the continent I got lucky and a fracas or two later she was back in the fold. It couldn’t last though, and when her mother, Clair, the victim of a related abduction, turned up, the two of them resumed their interrupted journey to the USA, there to settle.
About every other month I received a letter from Lizzy/Liza. A love letter, I suppose you’d call it. Full of endearments and swearings of devotion. I didn’t take them seriously. I didn’t throw them away either.
‘Yes, a letter came while I was away,’ I said to Madeleine, topping up my glass with kir from the jug, the liquid glinting amber in the sunset’s rays. ‘She’s fine. Enjoying life in the States.’
‘Send her our love when you write,’ Madeleine said.
‘You bet.’
A white lie. I never replied to Lizzy’s letters. It was another of those closed chapters in my life that refused to stay closed.
* * * * *
Much as it grieved me, the house had to go. My home these past three years, it evoked too many memories of Maura and Lindy, my family that might have been. Every room, every stick of furniture brought their ghosts to life and made it impossible for me to carry on living there alone yet not alone. Leaving would be a wrench, but I would get over it. Perhaps I would rent someplace for a while, spend more time on my yacht where Maura and Lindy had never set foot.
The building was of recent vintage, the outside walls finished in cream crépi, with abundant arches and enough woodwork inside and out to build a galleon. To the rear, on its west side, the site was dominated by the peak of the Coma Pedrosa, highest piece of real estate in the principality. The nearest community was the village of La Massana; I shopped for groceries at the Veritas supermarket there.
The top immobilier in Andorra-la-Vella, capital city of the principality, was Sotheby’s. They sent me their top saleswoman to assess my homestead and put top price on it. The name on her business card was Senyoreta Marta Fuentes. Like most Andorrans she spoke some sort of French, though Catalan is the official tongue. She was about my age, somewhat plumper at all levels, and armed with a tablet that she used to photograph every angle in 3D and record every measurement. She was sporting one of those little laser measuring gadgets and seemed to delight in using it. I half expected her to measure me, such was her thoroughness – “the owner of this desirable residence is six feet one inch tall, or whatever the equivalent in metres, has fair hair, blue eyes, and no distinguishing marks …” Other than the bullet wound scars, all in places that my clothes screened from public view.
‘Pourquoi voulez-vous vendre telle belle maison?’ she asked me at one point.
Why did I want to sell such a beautiful house? A fair question.
‘Too many ghosts,’ I said, tongue in cheek.
She looked startled. ‘Ghosts?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, throwing in an apologetic grin. ‘My English humour.’
‘You are English?’ she said, in slightly halting English.
‘Oui, d’une manière.’ I replied. In a way. Thanks to my Quebec-born mother and quite a few years living in Francophone countries I was fluent in French, and could switch from one to the other quite naturally.
That was the only occasion when she lapsed from professional to personal. After more than an hour of inspecting every corner and crevice, and entering copious notes into her tablet, she came and stood before me in the living room, where I had retreated when traipsing around after her ceased to be amusing.
I invited her to sit, offered her a coffee, which she declined in favour of a glass of water.
‘Well?’ I said, as we sat on opposite couches, her sipping her Evian primly, me partaking of a glass of vodka and lime, less primly.
‘Your property is in excellent condition,’ she told me, which I already knew. ‘When was it built?’
‘Twenty-ten,’ I said. ‘Still covered by the builder’s warranty.’
She snorted at that. ‘It would be, if he was still in business.’
That was news to me.
‘Isn’t he?’
‘Josep Garallà sued for bankruptcy two years ago.’
That took care of the builder’s warranty.
‘But he was good at his job,’ Miss Fuentes went on. ‘The house is very solid.’
I waited politely for her to tell me the bottom line.
‘Market conditions could be better,’ she said, after another sip or two. ‘Still, I would like to list your property at one point eight million euros.’
