“Max Byrd’s plots, like his wit, are sinister and charming.” —Diane Johnson, bestselling author of The Shadow Knows
“ Max Byrd is an expert at mingling real historical figures with his invented characters.” —The New York Times
“Lock Byrd’s cage and throw away the key—until he slips out a few more thrillers.” — The Philadelphia Enquirer
“Max Byrd is a fine and forceful writer.” —Lawrence Block, bestselling author of Eight Million Ways to Die
“Max Byrd is in the first division of American crime writing.” —The New York Times
And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:
There were two blackbirds
Sitting on a hill;
The one named Jack,
The other named Jill.
Fly away, Jack! Fly Away, Jill!
Come again, Jack! Come again, Jill!
—English Nursery Rhyme
Chapter One
Kensington would have been more fashionable, I suppose. Chelsea would certainly have been tonier, or Hampstead or Carnaby Street or wherever the hell the beautiful people had been blown this year. I braced my hands against the window sill and stared out at the rain coming down in the usual English way, squeezed out of the dirty gray sponge of the sky in an endless drizzle. Beneath the window a trailer truck ground its gears together, grunted, and coughed black diesel smoke. Then it turned slowly at the comer, and dowdy old Bloomsbury Square reappeared below me in the rain, a dim green face staring up.
Bloomsbury. The Levittown of George the Third. You can’t find many sights like it even in London anymore: three full sides of a city square bordered by uniform eighteenth-century red-brick townhouses, still trim, shapely, and calm, built to a human scale that left no room for air conditioners, TV antennas, or any of the other dental frontwork of modern architecture. I liked it better than, say, the new Hilton, which I couldn’t afford anyway, despite Carlo Angeletti’s expense account. Besides, the oldest structures I ever see in California are Chevrolets with running boards.
An old lady with a black umbrella stumped across the square. Just ahead of her, on the east side facing my window, rose the block-long Great Northern Assurance Company, ten stories high, a pale twentieth-century mass of squinting windows and granite facade. A neon sign ran all the way around the top. In the square the hackberry trees swayed with an invisible breeze, and on the sign the dull red letters ASSURANCE came and went, just like the real thing.
I turned around and yawned at the untouched bed. I needed a nap. I needed a two-day nap. The flight from New York had taken seven hours, and the flight from San Francisco before that had taken five. But Carlo Angeletti was paying me to find his missing lady, not to stretch out and sleep. Cherchez la goddamn femme. I shoved my suitcase to one end of the bed and sat down to make a phone call from my list of numbers. When I hung up I yawned again and read the little folded card on the nightstand that said the White Horse Hotel was not responsible for lost valuables, theft, fire, flood, or anything else unpleasant that might happen to you in the city. Cheers. I patted my empty jacket pocket where the gun would go and locked the door behind me.
Soho is never entirely deserted, day or night. But at ten a.m. on a rainy Monday morning, the signs of life along Rupert Street had dwindled to two cats skulking in a broken food crate and the tired flashing lights around the doorway of Raymond’s Exotic Revue. As I faced Shaftesbury Avenue, a heavy-set redhead swinging a light paisley suitcase in one hand came briskly in my direction from, a side street. A stripper, probably, with her change of costume in the suitcase, heading for Raymond’s. By some quirk of British unionism, only a dozen or so women make up the whole Soho strip force, and you can see them at all hours hurrying from club to club, making the same dreary rounds six or eight times a day, sometimes just ahead of the same dreary customers. An endless grind, my partner Fred would say.
She sailed past me with a professional look of contempt for loitering men in slightly faded raincoats, but her red hair had already reminded me of Dinah, and I stood in the drizzle a little longer being reminded.
Dinah had driven me to the San Francisco airport two days before, when I thought I was only going to New York and when my ancient blue Mercedes was in the shop for one of its periodic cures. While we had waited at the curb in. front of American Airlines, a low-rider had driven slowly past, eyeing us and gunning his motor with a sound like a Howitzer clearing its throat.
“Do you see his bumper sticker?” Dinah asked in fascination. “It says ‘Kill Them.’ Just ‘Kill Them.’”
“Probably left over from Christmas,” I said. The driver had a steering wheel made out of links of stainless steel chain. What looked like a real bone was hanging from the mirror where the plastic bootie should have been. “He looks like raw material for you,” I said as he slammed the car into second and drove away. We crossed into the terminal. Dinah is a psychiatrist at the Washington General Hospital. She is also short and plump and redheaded and the other half of what her older brother, the last square peg in the mellow round state of California, uncomfortably calls our “relationship.”
“Or you, Haller,” she said. I am a private detective, a specialist in missing persons. I am also an uneasy transplant from the east, from Cotton Mather’s Boston, though I’ve been in California long enough for my brain to have turned into a hot tub like everybody else’s. In the plate glass window beside the long counter, while the clerk checked the credit line on my VISA, our Mutt and Jeff reflections shimmered and wobbled like two transparent shadows. Once upon a time I was a newspaperman as well, and a security cop, and a college dropout. Dinah’s medical colleagues, who put a premium on stability and high credit lines, tend to think I should be her patient instead of her relator. Dinah herself just smiles and introduces me as an incurable romantic.
My ticket stamped and bags checked, I led her upstairs to the sky lounge where we could watch the planes take off and land and the luggage cart drivers dash around like finalists in a bump-car derby.
“You don’t have to stay,” I told her as we followed a 747 lifting off the runway. “I can’t even board for another half hour.”
“I want to check out the stewardae on your plane,” she said, watching the plane climb. “You’ve been such a grouch for the last month that I want to size up the competition.”
“Won’t Mendelsohn be annoyed that you left the office early?” Shirley Mendelsohn is the senior resident in the department of psychiatry. A three-time divorcee and mother of five, she specializes in marital problems and once wrote a book called The Nuclear Family Must Be Shut Down, which had been published by a vanity press in Berkeley.
“Mendelsohn is with her women’s action group against sexism today. I have the rest of the day off.” Dinah sipped her Brandy Alexander through a plastic straw. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. “They’re debating a revised version of the Lord’s Prayer for the Berkeley schools,” she said. “It begins, ‘Our Resource Person who art in heaven.’”
“I may have to go on from New York,” I told her. “I don’t know where. Maybe even Europe. I could be gone for two or three weeks.” I don’t know why I was trying to give her a hard time, but I was. I had in fact been a grouch, and there was a part of me that thought she might be the reason. She and I. Us. There was another part of me, of course, that looked at her round face and warm eyes and realized that if I were tired of her I ought to see a psychiatrist.
“Is Goldilocks going to take a long time to find?” she asked. She had seen the photograph of the missing girl that Carlo Angeletti had given me and promptly called me a cradle snatcher. I shrugged. “If I didn’t know you were an aging and prudent youth,” she said, “I would figure that you have gone temporarily gaga over that girl. Over the picture of that girl.”
I shrugged again, annoyed, and pulled out a cigarette. “A routine case,” I said. I don’t know why I lied. This particular Goldilocks had skipped out of the house too fast, and one very large, very dangerous papa bear wanted her back. It looked about as routine as heisting the Golden Gate. I don’t know why I kept quiet about the picture either, since Dinah was obviously right. My tongue picked up a shred of tobacco from the end of the cigarette, bitter and sharp. Aging youth, she had said. They age whiskey and ham to improve them, not unmarried men trotting out of breath toward forty. What compulsions were stirring beneath my surface, like massive, shadowy sea beasts crawling along an ocean floor, I couldn’t say. I had had glimpses of them before, and would again. Goldilocks’ face had floated out of a forgotten dream.
“A routine case,” I repeated pompously.
“A witchhunt,” Dinah said. “While you’re gone I think I’ll drive over to El Cerrito to see Daisy.” Daisy is her brother’s teenage daughter, “But I’d better read up on angel dust and the more exotic forms of marijuana first, Billy tells me. He’s worried about her.” She finished the Brandy Alexander with a slurp.
“You don’t do drug therapy,” I said in surprise. “She ought to go to some teenage drug center.”
“Mike, anybody who does psychiatry today does drug therapy, just the way any internist in San Francisco does alcoholism counseling. It’s the ’80’s.”
I grimaced and watched a single-engine plane take off in the wake of a big jet. It wobbled in the tailstream like a baby bird pushed out of the nest. Then it banked and vanished into the cold, gray fog that was billowing over the city, as gone as the girl in Angeletti’s picture. I pushed back my chair to get up. There is always cold, gray fog in San Francisco in August, and I would be glad to get away from it.
In the cold, gray rain of London the redhead turned off Rupert Street and started down Shaftesbury Avenue. I raised my raincoat collar and walked past the West End Adult Bookstore (“Rubber Goods a Specialty”) to a grime-blackened building that had been new when Queen Victoria was a tot. On the ground floor lurked an Indian restaurant named, like every third restaurant in London these days, the Taj Mahal. In the window a greasy, villainous-looking slab of lamb—or possibly cat—turned slowly on an electric spit, accompanied by a few flies enjoying the ride. Underneath a white silhouette of the Taj Mahal itself somebody had hand-lettered the word “Kebab” over and over across the length of the glass. And underneath that, “E. Hamid, Prop.”
I took a deep breath of street air, pushed the door hard against the. wet frame, and went right on in.
It was darker and damper inside than out and completely deserted, but I took a chair along the wall, like a real paying customer, away from the roasting flies, and eventually a morose young waiter with a turban came over and worried a few things into place on my table.
“Lunch, sir?”
“A pint of bitter, and tell Hamid that somebody wants to chit-chat, will you?”
“Thank you, sir.”
The pint came right away. Hamid took his time. I was aware of eyes peering through bead curtains at the back of the room and occasional singsong murmurs. I drank my beer and opened a pack of Players.
When Hamid appeared, he sat down without a word. I pushed the cigarettes toward him.
“Bloody back again, mate?” Hamid grinned.
I loved hearing him use his fake Cockney accent. It fit his narrow olive face and heavy-lidded eyes about as well as a Santa Claus suit, an insolent little tribute to his adopted country. Or just the nervous tic of a bom mimic. He claimed to be Pakistani, though I had heard more than once in the old days that he was a Berber Arab who had slipped out of French North Africa in an illegal hurry and used a borrowed visa to scuttle into England. He certainly spoke French, and people who knew said he spoke Farsi and Kurdish as well. I had first met him fifteen or sixteen years ago, when I was trying to squeeze a living out of UPI by writing features about English lowlife and he was widely regarded as the best-informed petty criminal in London, a cheerful tutor for any reporter with cash in hand. Now seventy at least, and smooth-skinned as a gypsy baby, he still knew most of what went on in the expanding Pakistani and Indian underworld; but ever since the Middle East had brought its violent politics to town and stirred up the Metropolitan Police, he had dealt mainly in girls and guns, staying cautiously away from the center of action. Both police and terrorists considered him more useful than dangerous, so far.
I thumbed my lighter for his cigarette. “Can’t keep away from the food, Hamid. How’s tricks?”
“Nice enough till I see your bloody mug again.”
It was three years since I had been in London and we had done business. He probably remembered his profit to the penny. We exhaled blue smoke together over the table, and he smiled the way I imagine a hornet would.
“Still playing crime stopper then, Haller?” He deepened his voice and went into his Indian Basil Rathbone imitation. “Bloody Giant Rat of Sumatra, hey? Good God, Watson, it’s the shadow of a bleedin’ gigantic hound!” Gales of laughter, white teeth bursting against olive skin, finally wound down into a spasm of coughing. Meanwhile the young man with the turban brought us plates of prawns, brown glop sauce, and fried bread. Hamid thumped his chest with one hand to stop his coughing and with the other hand waved away some curious flies.
“Still playing, Hamid,” I told him. “But I need more toys. You can’t get anything bigger than a paper clip through the buzzers at Heathrow these days.” I took a prawn with my fingers and bit one end gingerly, like a man testing a coin. Hotter than sin.
His eyes narrowed theatrically and the fake Cockney accent returned, thicker, part of the act. I had never heard him speak in a normal voice. “Christ, Haller, why should I ’elp you? You picked the bloody flesh off my bones last time you came around here. Bloody flesh off my bones. Besides, the fucking Irish have got every bobby in London pissing down his leg. Dropped another bomb in a letter box in Bayswater yesterday. You can’t just pick up hardware on call anymore. They’ll twist your soddin’ balls off.”
A careless fly circled his plate and paused for an instant on an edge. Hamid clapped his hands together in a blur, then slowly wiped his palms on the dark table cloth.
“They take off bloody backwards, you know that?” he said.
“A Smith and Wesson .38,” I said through the prawn. “I can get wildlife lectures at the zoo. With a box of ammunition and a shoulder holster. Don’t bother with a pillow.” For some reason, silencers were a standard item with the English sporting set, usually thrown in without asking, even though the best ones in the world are no good after two or three shots. A nation of good manners. “And I’d like it this afternoon.”
“I’ll put in a requisition with Margaret bloody Thatcher,” Hamid sneered.
“For seventy pounds.”
“One hundred.”
We settled on ninety, and he wrote an address in East London for me on a paper napkin.
“What is it?” I asked as I got up. “One of your kinky specialty brothels? Lounge chairs and leathercraft?”
“You’ll feel right at ’ome, cocky,” he grinned. “Take a cab back if you get winded.”
I took a cab both ways, because of the rain and because I was impatient. People will argue that a London taxi is the most civilized form of public transportation in the world. But then people will argue that everything about London is civilized, that she’s still the grand old lady of cities, lifting the hems of her skirts and tiptoeing reluctantly into the squalid twentieth century. The cab got bogged down in the thick mid-day traffic heading toward Temple Bar, and I tapped my fingers on the seat and wished that this time it weren’t so civilized and sluggish.
Why the hell did I think I needed a gun anyway? Not to chase down one erring bride, hardly old enough to have bought the license. A girl half my age. Goldilocks. But she had run too fast from California. And from New York. And people who worked for Carlo Angeletti probably got in the habit of wearing guns.
On my left the Bank of England sailed impressively by in the rain. Threadneedle Street. The next signs were for Eastcheap and Comhill. I sat back in the cab and relaxed a fraction. Anyone who speaks English starts out with a feeling for London, I suppose, when every street sign seems to pop out of a nursery rhyme or a novel. For me it had the added attraction of nostalgia, since the two years of my UPI stint were long enough ago to seem perfect and unrenewable. I managed a smile to myself. It had also been raining on the day I first arrived in London, nineteen years old, fresh off the boat train from Paris, and I had stood on the ramp outside Victoria Station with a map and a guidebook asking stranger after stranger how to get to a bed and breakfast house in Russell Square. I knew perfectly well how to get there, of course—the map in my pocket had it circled—but I couldn’t believe that all those people really had English accents, and I kept asking just to hear them talk.
I shook my head. Nineteen years old, as innocent and empty-headed as a guppy. And now I was being chauffeured to a brothel to buy a pistol. Freud or Dinah would have a field day.
The meter ticked off ten pences like a clock in a hurry. The streets grew narrow and ugly, even in the obscurity of the black rain, as we left the financial district of the City and entered the part where the tourist buses never run, the immense warren of East London, explosively crowded with a few million dark-skinned immigrants of the empire and a few million more resentful whites. Misery doesn’t like company. East London is a melting pot that regularly boils over into gang fights and race riots. It is also the birthplace of Punk. I leaned forward and wiped condensation off the window. Row after twisted row of blackened stoops and bricks. There were parts of London it seemed impossible anybody ever found twice.
The cabbie turned and circled purposefully for ten minutes more, then pulled over in front of a nondescript block of flats as impassively as if we had stopped at Claridge’s for tea. Nobody was on the street, and a pair of open garbage pails let the rain drum in monotonously.
“Number sixty-three,” he pointed. “Want me to wait, guy? Nearest tube is five minutes’ walk.”
“Keep the meter running. I won’t be long.”
He nodded doubtfully and took a five pound note as security. I got out into the bleak rain.
It looked like a brothel, all right, but not for the jet set. From the sidewalk I saw a door with three sets of locks, sooty brick walls that ran like cheap mascara in the rain, a double window discolored with unidentifiable smears, and a tattered Playboy foldout taped to one pane. Next to it, in a plastic candle holder, somebody had stuck an oversized red light bulb, Christmassy or tumescent, depending on your mood. I climbed the steps and stood jamming the bell-press with my finger until an overweight Indian woman in a dirty orange sari opened the door.
“Too early for girls,” she said with a giggle. “Not till two o’clock.”
“Hamid called about me. Mike Haller.”
She glanced over her shoulder into the dark hall, squinted and then bobbed her head five or six times.
“You have to wait a little time.” She grinned. “He just called. We have a special room.”
“I bet you do.”
But the special room turned out to be in the back of the building and nothing more than an airless plasterboard cubicle where the customers could lounge. Its furnishings consisted of a stack of folding chairs, like a funeral parlor, and a line of unemptied plastic ashtrays on the window sill. Near the chairs somebody had abandoned a cheap cup and saucer still half-filled with coffee. The whole place smelled of wet dogs.
The woman gestured vaguely with another giggle and went out. I pried a Players from the pack to deaden my nose and waited. In the hallway outside a blond young Englishman was vacuuming intensely, bumping the wall molding rhythmically as he rolled the machine over and over the same small space. He wore a bra and panties.
Two cigarettes later I had learned that flies do take off backwards, just as Hamid had said, and I had unfolded one of the rickety chairs for what was beginning to look like a long wait.
“You agreed with Hamid for a hundred guineas?”
An Indian man about my own age stood in the doorway, gripping a plastic Marks and Spencer shopping bag in front of his belt with both hands. Giggles peeked over his shoulder. I got up gratefully.
“I agreed with Hamid for ninety. Pounds, not guineas.”
He shrugged with the air of the perpetual small-time loser and handed me the shopping bag. I gave him a packet of ten-pound notes, which he counted slowly twice while I looked at the pistol and checked the date on the ammunition box. Then we nodded at each other distantly.
“Cheers,” Giggles said with a smile.
Chapter Two
“Which part of Angeletti’s story don’t you believe?”
Magnus had just sent back a bottle of wine—something I had never actually seen done before—and asked the waiter for Chateau Lynch-Bages ‘64 instead.
“I don’t suppose the club lets you take it home in a doggy cask,” I said, buttering a stony dinner roll and wondering whether to send it back.
“My dear Michael,” Magnus murmured with that forgiving air so many Englishmen take on when they talk to Americans. We were bent over New Zealand lamb and frozen vegetables in the Reform Club, his club, just off Pall Mall, though the heavy oak woodwork and thick dark drapes muffled the outside world so effectively that we might have been miles away in the country. The Reform Club, Magnus had told me, was founded in 1832—making it one of the newer ones—by supporters of the first Reform Bill for Parliamentary elections, raving democrats according to the standards of the day. Not the slightest taint of democracy, however, had reached the room where we sat, a long handsome dining hall mostly filled, like a taxidermist’s showroom, with elderly men in gray wool suits and neckties of rousing colors like black and olive green. Why the English male still flocked to these mausoleums I couldn’t say, unless it was the wine. No women belonged—Reform has to stop somewhere—and apart from Magnus the membership so far seemed limited to the better class of zombie. The waiter returned with surprising quickness, before I could figure out a truthful answer to Magnus’ question, and started to pour the new wine reverently, frowning at the sediment that drifted up the neck of the bottle.
“‘And Time that gave does now his gift confound,’” Magnus recited with an apologetic quaver in his voice to let me know it was poetry. The waiter twisted the bottle at the last moment, so that the sediment just reached the lip, then stopped.
“Auden?” I tried.
He shook his head.
“I dropped out of college around Beowulf”—I shrugged—“as you know.”
“My dear Michael, drop out you did indeed. But you have probably read tnore books of this and that than half the dons at Oxford. Unsystematically, of course. You are not a systematic man.” He sipped the wine and nodded dismissal at the waiter. “Shakespeare,” he said, turning the full force of his smile on me. “One of the sonnets. We don’t quote modern poets in the club, you know. Godawful lot of corpses, aren’t we?”
Magnus Harpe. The least likely zombie in London. He pushed my glass along the table with another smile, and I took a sip. When I first met Magnus I had been on a summer vacation in Europe after my freshman year of college. The trip was a present from my father, a reward for making it through the first year of his Ivy League alma mater without disgracing him, and the Harpes were old family friends I was supposed to look up. For three days I had resisted calling anybody in London remotely associated with Boston, but on the fourth night, homesick and lonely, I finally picked up the telephone. And Magnus to my surprise turned out to be a figure of great glamor then—fifteen years my senior, dashingly handsome in a blue-blooded way, an Oxford bachelor with the run of Mayfair debutantes (“a free hand,” he called it) and a famous general for a father. Dazzling stuff to a nineteen-year-old an ocean away from home. “We are going to knock the rough edges off,” he had announced, inspecting my clothes and my haircut. “Starting with the opera,” he had said after inspecting my empty head, and the next night I found myself bundled in the back of a long blue Bentley and deposited with Magnus at Covent Garden. The rough edges were there to stay, but if the world held anything more beautiful than the duet at the end of the first act of La Bohème I had never heard of it, and I spent the rest of my time haunting all the other operas in London and tagging along after Magnus for more revelations. On my last day in England he had driven me to a celebrity charity shoot in Essex, where potted earls tried to blast flying crockery out of the sky; then to Keats’ house in Hampstead, where he made me read “Ode to a Nightingale” in the garden where it had been written; and finally to a black-tie casino and whorehouse in Grosvenor Square, where he had given me fifty pounds and a pat on the back. England in a nutshell, he had called it. The result, of course, was that when I should have boarded the boat to Boston and my second year of college, I had stayed back and taken up La Bohème in earnest, living with a second string blond soprano in Paris and ignoring my father’s unhappy letters. A year later I came back to London to work for UPI.
“Big nose,” Magnus said, twirling the wine in his glass. Some old friends you meet awkwardly and never seek out. But Magnus’ was the first number I called when I came to London. My worldly tutor, who still sometimes made me feel like a clumsy younger brother around him. The perfect, unrenewable past.
But time sticks out his foot for all of us. Although Magnus had kept his considerable charm, at the age of fifty-two his good looks had started to crumble in wrinkles and patches, eroded by drink and inactivity. The tall, elegant body had started to look angular instead of lean, the wide shoulders had begun to droop like the wings of a heavy plane. A new moustache was in compensation for the hair, I suppose, a flight officer’s clipped brush that made him look a little like Terry Thomas with his teeth fixed; and he was dressed more than ever like a Jermyn Street dandy, creating an effortless patrician effect with a clubbable gray suit cut to perfection, a powder blue tie that puffed out over the Turnbull and Asser silk shirt, shoes from the dark rippled leather of some extinct beast. In the middle ages he would have been an up-and-coming cardinal, a pope’s emissary, traveling his diplomatic rounds with the easy security of the quick and well-born. In the declining years of the twentieth century he was something called a consulting architect. A troubleshooter, he had once explained indifferently to. me, a fixit man who flew off at a moment’s notice to Manchester or Reading or Surbiton-upon-Crawley or wherever a big project like a shopping center had suddenly run into trouble. His specialty was evidently electrical circuitry, the care, feeding, and rerouting of it, though I had always thought his success was probably due more to his ability to manage people than to technical wizardry.
“Now,” he said, leaning confidentially toward me, wine and food all properly arranged. “Now. Which part of Angeletti’s story didn’t you believe?”
He really wanted to know. The family connection had been fathers—my father had worked for his father in the war, running small-time intelligence operations from various anonymous flats near Hanover Square—and Magnus had always considered that I was carrying on the paternal line of work, while he had lapsed into the inelegant world of commerce, letting us all down. Besides, like everybody else, he thought a private detective mixed with a far more interesting class of people, slept late in the mornings, and shared his trenchcoat with Lauren Bacall. I need my illusions too, so I sat in his club, drinking his wine, and I told him about Carlo Angeletti. And Caroline.
“Angeletti. Kind of a snake,” Fred had announced two weeks before, after spending an afternoon checking with whoever it is he checks. I’d sat back to listen as he’d paused to roll his cigar into the comer of his mouth. Willie Mays never swung a bat as big as one of Fred’s cigars. When he had retired from the San Francisco PD three years ago, I had talked him into helping me out as part-time personal assistant, gadfly, and grandfather figure. He had argued for a while—tracking lost kids was too depressing, he just wanted to loaf—but he had finally come around. You can be an ex-cop, but you can’t be an ex-Irishman. He missed the talk, he had explained, more than the money; the talk and the life on the streets. I watched him tip his pork pie hat up from his big Irish nose and hook one thumb under his belt.
“Angeletti’s got some riceland in the Delta near Stockton,” he said. “Angeletti Farms. But he’s not a farmer. Most of his dollars—and there’s five or six million—come from three oil tankers that he works freelance all over, but mainly in Europe.” He looked at a brown envelope covered with notes. “Marseilles, London, Bremen. Like that. Makes him kind of an absentee owner, but apparently that’s the way a lot of small tanker people operate. Set up an office in Monrovia where the boat buys its flag, then you go retire to the Alps and bank by mail. He’s a widower, late sixties. Came across in 1947 from the old country on a French visa—Italians sometimes did that after the war if they had political problems—never been back, which means either he likes it here or he had problems. Got bad asthma and a gimpy leg. Got one son, twenty-four, went to Stanford, bums around now. Got two Sevilles he buys every October, always dark blue, same color as Nixon’s suits. Got a houseboat, a powerboat, an office in the Wells Fargo building on Montgomery Street, and a permanent suite at the Mark Hopkins. But the houseboat is where he lives, maybe on account of the asthma, maybe on account of the Federal Reserve bank inspectors.”
“Is that the snake part?”
“Yeah. He’s got controlling stock in a couple of Valley savings and loans, and the Feds have been wondering for years why so many guys come from so far just to open accounts there. And why they usually make their first deposit from a grocery bag.”
“He runs a laundry?”
Fred shrugged. “It’s not against the law to accept cash in your bank,” he said. “You know that, Mike. You can take anything from anybody. You just got to make a report to the FDIC on any cash deposit over $10,000. Angeletti’s banks make ten, twelve reports like that a quarter. Mostly hippies, the Feds figure, bringing in the hash money, or whatever.” He rolled the cigar to the other corner. “Hell, there’s a lot bigger operations than that. There’s a couple of banks in Miami don’t deposit ten personal checks a year. ’Course they’re holding hands with the Cubans, who grow more goddamn dope than sugar cane under Castro. Now Angeletti, he’s not Family, or hooked in with the racket, but he’s not a softball player either.” He had taken out the cigar and sucked his teeth noisily. “I can’t imagine what you got that he ain’t already bought.”
Three hours later I was stopped on a narrow asphalt road in the heart of the Delta and staring at a simple wooden signpost that had “Angeletti” painted neatly across the top. Parallel to the road on the left ran a high bank of brown earth, fifteen or twenty feet high. On the right the roadbed slumped into brackish mud and tall, coarse pampas grass, then rose abruptly into another levee. Beyond that were the endless mazes of brown dikes and green waterways and locks that make up the five hundred square miles of the Delta, the swampy mass of roads and canals just east of San Francisco, where the Sacramento River meets the bay. After the sample of its convolutions that afternoon I felt like a laboratory rat that couldn’t find the cheese.
In the gold miner days there used to be Mississippi-style gambling boats floating up and down the Delta from San Francisco to Sacramento, and more than one floating brothel. Now there are a few bait shops and package stores, a few settlements of tubercular Chinese, descendants of the ones who came to build the railroads, and some scattered hippie communes that live on fish and herbs and bootleg drugs. Them and Carlo Angeletti. The cheese stands alone.
I sighed and started to nurse the Mercedes along the road, wondering if its 1958 paint job was going to blister and peel in the August sun. The last temperature I had seen was on a bank in a little town with the wishful name of Winters, ten miles back. 102, it had read. When I came to another signpost I stopped again. Next to it sat a small white guardhouse, like a bus stop shelter, and a ten-foot cyclone gate in the levee.
I leaned out into the fierce heat. Overhead, in a sky the color of chromium, a few black shadows circled. Hawks.
“Haller? Michael Haller?”
A rangy man in sports shirt, slacks, and his early thirties bounded out of the guardhouse, much too energetically, and walked to the car, bending toward me with a bright, toothy, professional smile. Even the little alligator on his shirt was smiling.
“Haller,” I agreed.
“Right on time.” I was half an hour late. “Mr. Angeletti can see you in about five minutes.” He peered into the car, not carelessly. “Mind if I ride up to the house with you? It’s damn hot out here.”
He waved to the guardhouse before I could answer, and a dark-skinned man in a security uniform emerged to swing open the gate. I watched the barbed wire glint along its top while the smiling man got in.
“My name’s Hunter Merriman,” he said pleasantly, pumping my hand and smiling again. “Mr. Angeletti’s attorney. Just drive straight ahead and pull up by the left side of the house. We’ll go right to his office.”
On the other side of the levee was a deepwater channel, black and sparkling. Maybe a quarter of a mile across it stretched a long line of grass, beyond that other lines of grass crisscrossing, and finally the distant shadows of the coastal range mountains, humping out of the black water like gigantic shadowy fish. The road, all mud and rut now, ran along the channel to another gate, left open, and then to a flat, beautifully tended lawn.
“Just park right there with those others,” Merriman instructed, and I sailed us in next to a snarling Maserati convertible that looked as if it needed to be defanged. Merriman’s, I figured. People who smile that much usually want to bite. Next to it stood somebody’s Buick, then a little apart, looking straight ahead like solemn watchdogs, was a pair of dark blue Sevilles. On the grass in front of them some grackles browsed. Then a hedge of bottlebrush, a short dock, and at the end of the dock, smug and white as a Georgia plantation house, floated Carlo Angeletti’s houseboat.
“A beauty, isn’t it?” Merriman said, swinging his door open. “Mr. Angeletti can’t take the damp in San Francisco anymore—arthritis—so he had this custom-made.”
“Who was the architect? Robert E. Lee?”
Merriman squeezed out a chuckle. “It does look Southern, doesn’t it? He had one of those old Sacramento riverboats converted. The paddle wheel was his own idea, and the steampipes. It never leaves the dock, though.” The grackles took off with a squawk as we slammed our doors. “The office is on the second floor.”
Angeletti made us wait five minutes, to keep things clear. Meanwhile Merriman dealt me a cup of coffee from a sideboard and I looked around admiringly at the office, a big room comfortably stuffed with desk, leather club chairs, bookcases, filing cabinets, and expensive knick-knacks. The floor was covered with a red and blue Mishkin rug like the one in Shirley Mendelsohn’s office, the kind the Iranians won’t sell to us anymore. The walls had a few paintings of landscapes and castles, beautifully framed in carved wood, and a big travel poster of the Coliseum in Rome, probably hiding a wall safe full of Confederate money. Half a cup later, somebody coughed outside, the door whispered open, and Carlo Angeletti himself limped in, followed by a tall young man in a suit.
If I had been expecting the godfather, I was disappointed. Angeletti turned out to be a bony, horse-faced old man, tanned the color of cardboard, a harmless Italian papa in Hawaiian shirt and khaki trousers. He bobbed his head and shook hands with a smile, showing a gap on the right side of his mouth where the teeth used to be, and hobbled on the bad leg to his desk. The young man went to the other side and sat down. What hair Angeletti had was neatly trimmed in a gray wreath around his ears. His face was furred with a two-day stubble of beard. The mouth kept smiling as he sat down, pink and moist like a baby bird’s beak.
“Merriman is here to see that everything is arranged right,” he said in a thick accent that sounded as much French as Italian to me. Merriman slid an espresso cup in front of him. “Money, travel, whatever. I want you to find my boy’s wife.”
He jerked his hand toward the young man who had come in behind him. Piero Alberti, but known as Peter A. at Stanford, according to Fred. Less of a snake, apparently. An economics major of no particular academic distinction, graduated two years ago with a varsity letter in gymnastics, swinging on the rings. All set to take over the tanker-banker business one of these days, maybe sooner rather than later. He was already dressed for the part, beige tropical suit, brown loafers, checked sports shirt, and one of those very trim haircuts. If he wore a tie, it would probably light up and say “preppie.” Right now he just wore the sullen look of the very young and wealthy. Merriman let him get his own coffee.
I glanced at Peter A. and sat still. People talk more, Fred is always saying, if you don’t.
“She disappeared on July 28.” Merriman took over. “Last week. She drove into town to do some shopping, at the J. Magnin’s on Arden Way. In Sacramento. She took Piero’s car, the Maserati”—I sloshed coffee in my cup—“which we found the next day at the Sacto airport in the short-term parking lot. But no Caroline, not a trace.”
“Did you call the police?”
Angeletti spread his hands wide in a Mediterranean gesture of fraternity, and I looked back at him.
“Mr. Haller.” He smiled, very serious, very friendly. “Mr. Haller, I’m the old school, you know? You see how I live out here.” The hands took in Mt. Vernon, the glistening water outside, the long flat horizon of canals and scrub vegetation. “We like our privacy, Mr. Haller. You know?”
I nodded back fraternally. He probably had millions of good reasons in the bank not to call the police.
“And so naturally you prefer a private operative.”
“Prego, Mr. Haller.” The hands fell back. “I prefer you.”
“Did you try to track her?”
“Merriman did.”
“She took an Air West flight at 11:30 to San Francisco,” Merriman said. “After that—zero. She could have flown off again, she could have gone into town. We didn’t check any airlines or limousines. That’s not my kind of work.”
Prego. He made it sound menial and distasteful, which isn’t far wrong sometimes.
“Did she take anything with her?” I asked. Merriman cocked an eyebrow and I explained: “Cash? Jewelry? Traveler’s checks?”
“Oh. She had a little over eight hundred dollars with her. Pocket money.”
“Sure.” I enjoy lawyers. “Credit cards?”
He looked at Angeletti.
“I give ’em both American Express,” Angeletti said with a flip of his hand toward Piero.
“We won’t know if she used it until the bills come in.” Merriman again. “This is her picture.” He handed me a manilla folder. “Vital statistics, background.”
I held it unopened in my lap and shifted slightly toward Piero. “Was there a quarrel between you two? Bad feeling? Any kind of immediate cause for her to leave?”
“Nothing like that.” Merriman answered for him too. I was getting a little tired of Merriman. “Caroline was a girl Piero met in South Tahoe working as a cocktail waitress in one of the clubs.” He smiled as cheerfully as if she had been a debutante from Hillsborough.
Piero said, “Yeah,” and stroked his chin in embarrassment. Not so great in the Stanford alumni news.
“The marriage was fine,” Merriman said. “They had the usual spats, but Mr. Angeletti was content.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Six months,” Piero mumbled.
“January 19th,” Merriman said.
“So why me?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Why not Bums or Pinkerton or somebody with a big organization that can work ten airports at a time?”
“We’ve heard of you, Mike,” Merriman said. Angeletti showed his gums in approval of this friendly informality. You get first names only in most of California now, anyway. Some say it defuses hostility. Dinah says it’s because of short attention spans.
“Michael,” I said, just to be a snot.
“Michael.” You could bounce rocks off Merriman’s smile. “You’ve built up quite a reputation for finding missing persons. It seems to be your specialty, right?” He didn’t expect an answer. “And you have the qualifications for this. Caroline is English, you see, and Mr. Angeletti and Piero have the idea that she might have returned to England. Homesick, maybe, some problem back there she didn’t want to talk about. They wanted somebody who has experience in Europe.” He gestured toward a pile of papers on Angeletti’s desk. My folder, I assumed. “You spent one year working in France, then two more working in London for the wire services. You spent a year with Interpol, some time in the Army, then three more years in LA before you came up to San Francisco and opened your own office. You left LA because of a fist-fight with another reporter, Carlton Hand, over a woman. You spent your year with Interpol on the French-Italian border.”
“Uh-huh.”
He tapped the papers with his finger. “You scored 590 out of 600 on the State Department French exam in 1972, but never followed it up.”
“There were two gold fillings in 1958 you missed.”
“Mr. Angeletti likes things thorough”—smugly. He folded his arms across his chest, indicating that he was going to talk about money. “Mr. Angeletti is prepared to pay you a three thousand dollar advance, two hundred dollars a day, and expenses. Within reason.”
Mr. Angeletti was just then toying with a foot-long polished mahogany model of an oil tanker that must have cost twice the advance. It would make a wonderful cigarette lighter, I figured, or you could just use it to spill oil in the bathtub. The brass plate on the hull said “Luchon.”
“Two fifty,” I said. “And I have two questions.”
Merriman didn’t even glance at the desk. “All right. Your questions?”
“First, why do you want her found? You could have any marriage less than a year old annulled under California law, no community property, no financial liability. Second, what do you want me to do if I can find her?”
Piero flushed. Papa turned the model tanker around and pointed it toward the far wall, as if he could give it a push and watch it float through the air. Merriman tilted his head significantly toward the manilla folder I held. I turned the cover and looked at the first picture of Caroline Angeletti.
She looked back from beside a swimming pool at somebody’s house, one hand on the diving board, one hip cocked and aimed at the camera in a gesture she meant to be provocative. But she was much too young to carry it off—no more than twenty—and the effect was oddly beguiling, innocent, like a little girl in lipstick and playing dress-up. Medium height, long blond hair. Small high breasts. No smile, just the too-wide, heartbreaking curve of mouth you often see in the English, sensual and sad. A colt.
“She’s a lovely girl,” Merriman said.
“She’s a beauty,” Angeletti growled. He was holding the tanker extended between his palms now, the way you might measure a fish. “Piero wants her back.” Piero squirmed. “I’m the old school,” his father continued. “These are just a couple of kids, that’s all. But I don’t like to see them break up a marriage. You marry, you stay married.” The accent sounded more Italian every minute. I nodded to show I would remember. “And I don’t like my boy to be unhappy,” he said, tipping his head toward Piero.
“All right. What do you want me to do if I find her?”
“You should report to me,” Merriman said, “every two days. My office and home numbers are in there; an answering service will always reach me. We—Mr. Angeletti—wants no action taken. Simply report where she is.”
Angeletti put down the boat and stood up. We all stood up too. “She’s not a bad girl, Mike,” he said. I looked around at the indentations on the backs of the chairs, hoping I could give Piero my empty coffee cup to put away. Merriman took it instead. “You find her,” Angeletti said, “we talk to her, get her back home. That’s all. Very reasonable.” Merriman swung the door open for me. “But hey!” Angeletti’s voice went hoarse, holding me a moment longer. “You be damn sure you don’t find her with somebody else.”
He showed me his empty gums and laughed to take the bite off, but on the way out I still wondered if that was an instruction or a warning. I also wondered what a nice young Stanford graduate was doing wearing a pistol holster in the small of his back.
Continued….
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At the heart of every crime, there’s a family…. That fact is what drives Barbara’s fiction. It’s issue oriented, threaded with elements of suspense and defined by its particular emphasis on how crime effects families, the victim’s family, the perpetrator’s family. She indie published her first novel, The Ninth Step, in August of 2011 and she hasn’t looked back since. The Volunteer came out in October of 2011 and in November 2011, The Last Innocent Hour, originally published by Panther Creek Press in trade paper was digitized for release as an indie e-book.
