Cowboy Angels (25 page)

‘Something like that,’ Stone said.

Lipscombe let that go. ‘I was told it was nothing personal, they were checking out all of Tom’s associates from the good old days. Ever since, these gorillas have been following me everywhere I go, plus, I believe, a couple of your guys. The Real can’t throw its weight around like it used to, but it still gets cooperation from the COILE when it needs it. So that was one thing, them looking for Tom, but now they’re looking for you, too. Stein called by in person just an hour ago, asked had I seen you. I told him the truth, told him I hadn’t seen you for a dog’s age. This was after you made contact with me, so if he’d asked me had I
spoken
to you, that would have been another matter, I would have had to perjure myself. Anyway, that’s how I heard about what happened to Tom. Stein told me himself. He wanted to see my reaction, the son of a bitch. So, now you understand why my guys had to be extra careful bringing you in. Did they treat you okay? Think the old switcheroo was good enough to fool Stein’s gorillas and the Company guys?’

‘It wasn’t bad, for an amateur operation,’ Stone said.

‘I see you haven’t lost the sense of humour that was always a comfort to me in those dark days before the revolution. Let’s pretend I know what I’m doing, which is why you came to see me. Which is why you need my help. No, don’t tell me
why
you’re here, not yet. You don’t mind me saying so, you both look pretty ragged. You need to freshen up, have a drink or two, kick back and relax. Phil will take you upstairs, find you a couple of bedrooms—’ Walter Lipscombe raised a shaggy eyebrow ‘- if you need separate bedrooms, that is. Make yourselves at home. Meanwhile, I have some people I need to shout at, make them buck up their ideas. When I’m finished, we’ll catch up over dinner.’

 

Stone soaked in a marble bath so large it had three steps down into it. He floated in an acre of eucalyptus-scented foam and tried to relax, but pictures of Susan kept crowding in whenever he closed his eyes, glimpses of happier times mixed up with scenes from the funeral. The way Petey had looked at him down the length of the church; Nora Ellison folding the little boy into herself when he’d started to cry. Stone tried to push the memories away. He didn’t have the time to mourn properly, not yet. He had a job to do. He had to keep frosty. He had to stay sharp. He tried to organise a story he could tell Walter Lipscombe. He flipped through news channels on the imported plasma TV, but gleaned precious little hard information from the brief talking-head segments squeezed between five-minute-long blocks of ads.

When he emerged from the steamy bathroom, he found a tuxedo and starched white shirt laid out on the king-size bed. As he was trying to work out how to fasten his bow tie - he hadn’t worn one since he’d taken Suzy Segler to the high school prom - the butler knocked on the door and told him that dinner would be served in ten minutes. Stone held out the strip of black cloth and asked the man if he knew what to do with it; asked, while the butler expertly fixed up a neat bow under his chin, what it was like, working for Walter Lipscombe.

‘He’s a very considerate employer, sir.’

‘You’re a Brit, right? I heard you guys make the best butlers, and I guess Walter demands the very best these days.’

‘Technically, sir, I am Canadian. My parents came over as refugees in 1948 because my father was in service with the King. I had the honour of being a footman in service to the present Queen before I took up employment with Mr Lipscombe.’

‘Like I said, nothing but the best for Walter.’ Stone was trying to remember how history here had diverged from history in the Real. There’d been a Second World War against fascism in Germany and Italy, but the American Bund had kept out of it, and the fascists had been defeated by an alliance between the Soviet Union and the British Empire. And after the war, there’d been a popular uprising in Britain, it had some kind of grim, utilitarian social democracy . . . He said, ‘Last time I was here, wasn’t America at war with the Brits?’

‘If you mean the United Community of Europe, sir, the war ended two years ago, after your President Carter presided over negotiations in Iceland.’ The butler gave the bow tie a final tug and said, ‘I believe that does it, sir. Would you care to look in the mirror?’

Stone rattled off the names of Walter Lipscombe’s bosses from before the revolution, asked if any of them ever came visiting. The butler, his bland expression giving away absolutely nothing, said that Mr Lipscombe had many acquaintances, but he couldn’t recall those particular gentlemen. Stone supposed that even if Walter Lipscombe and his old gangster pals frolicked in the blood of slaughtered virgins each and every night, his manservant would remain the epitome of tight-lipped British discretion.

He said, ‘Walter has gone up in the world.’

‘He aspires to the position of gentleman, sir. I believe that your companion is waiting next door. Perhaps you would allow me to escort both of you to the dining room.’

Linda Waverly was a vision in a low-cut gown of watered green silk, her mass of red curls piled up and threaded with black ribbons, a few strands artfully dangling at her forehead. She said that she felt like a floozy in a cheap spy novel, gave Stone a shaky grin when he assured her that she was a show-stopper.

As they followed the butler down the corridor, Stone said quietly, ‘Walter is a generous host, but bear in mind that he’s also an operator, and never passes up the chance to gather information.’

‘I haven’t forgotten.’

While they’d been waiting for Walter Lipscombe’s men to pick them up, Stone had told Linda that they’d need Walter’s help when they had to leave the sheaf, but he could only be trusted up to a point. If he found out that they were looking for her father’s apartment, for something valuable that might have been hidden there, he’d want a piece of the action.

Now, Stone said, ‘If he pushes you about anything that upsets you, tell him to drop dead. He won’t mind - he likes it when women stand up to him.’

The dining room had stained-glass windows from the Metropolitan Museum’s mediaeval collection, and a huge stone fireplace flanked by a pair of stone gryphons. The long oak table, with seats for thirty guests, was set at one end with Meissen porcelain and a big gold cruet by Cellini. Stone and Linda sat with Walter Lipscombe and his wife, a cool slender brunette half her husband’s age, the daughter of a congressman from Tennessee who had adroitly changed sides at the beginning of the revolution, after the army had refused to move in when student riots had set fire to campuses across the country.

‘You were going to tell me the story of how you scuffed up your jeans,’ Lipscombe said to Linda, over the first course of salmon mousse and white truffle shavings.

Stone cut in, gave a précis of how he and Linda had escaped from the train. When he’d finished, Lipscombe said, ‘This woman who caused you such grief, she was working for who, exactly?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Stone said.

‘I hear it’s internal. Something to do with a conspiracy inside the Company.’

‘Your sources are still good, Walter.’

‘I try to keep up. I also heard it was something to do with your old boss, something he set up before he had his stroke.’

‘Like I said, we’re trying to find out what exactly is going on.’

‘Well, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I understand how it is. I’m happy to help out, no strings, no one owes anyone anything. So, how’s retirement working out for you, Adam? I hear you’re living in one of those wild sheaves. What are you now, a farmer? Cattle rancher? Gambler on a riverboat?’

Although Stone knew that Lipscombe couldn’t possibly know about Susan, he felt a sudden chill across his skin, an ache at the back of his throat. He said, ‘It isn’t exactly like the Wild West. Most of the time I don’t do much of anything, which is the point of retirement. I fish, I hunt—’

‘Ever hunt those big animals they have in those wild sheaves, the ones that are extinct here?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘You and me, when this is all over, maybe we could arrange a hunting trip together. What’s so funny?’

‘I’m trying to imagine you out in the forest, Walter.’

Lipscombe grinned. ‘It’d be an experience, right? It’s good to see you back in the saddle, Adam. Really. What happened to you, what happened to all you old-time cowboy angels, the hearings, the resignations, people falling on their swords for the good of the Company ... It was a fucking shame. You were betrayed, you want my opinion. You shoulda risen up and got rid of that lily-livered clown calls himself President.’

‘Walter,’ his wife said. She laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Let’s not talk politics at the dinner table. It gets you too excited.’

‘He gave us full independence,’ Lipscombe said, ‘but what good is that if the Commies get together and try to take us down? I met the son of a bitch once. He was on his so-called peace mission. I told him people here thanked God and the Real every night for getting rid of the Dear Leader, they would never forget that the Real had once had the guts to go to war on our behalf. He gave me the fish-eye and a clammy handshake and moved on down the line.’

‘Walter,’ his wife said again.

‘I’m a passionate man,’ Lipscombe told Linda. ‘Aside from my good wife here, and my two boys, know what I’m most passionate about?’

Linda guessed that it might be fine art. ‘I noticed the painting in the drawing room. The one on the easel? It looks like Botticelli’s
Annunciation
.’

‘That’s because it is. Are you an art lover?’

‘I remember seeing it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Real.’

Walter Lipscombe’s grin made him look like a frog who’d just swallowed an especially juicy fly. ‘That’s where I got it from.
My
version of the Met, that is, not yours. And it’s my
Annunciation
too, the one that belongs right here, not the one you saw back in the Real. But if you swapped one with the other, no one would be able to tell, including the guy I’m about to sell it to, a private collector in the Real. It’s an everyday miracle of quantum physics, like the multiplication of the True Cross.’

Linda said, trying to work it out, ‘You’re a trustee on the museum board?’

‘Honey, I
own
the place. When the Dear Leader turned tail and ran, God rot his black soul, I stood on the steps of the Met with a couple of dozen soldiers and saved the place from the looters. Later on, I bought it from the city.’

‘It was his single stroke of genius,’ Stone said.

‘I’ve made plenty of good deals since then, but I have to admit, the time I moved in on the Met was a defining moment in my life. I know what you’re going to say,’ Lipscombe told Linda. ‘You’re going to say that I’m no better than the looters. That I’m pillaging a public institution for my own gain. Honey, I heard it all. If I sell off the odd painting, it’s to keep the poor old place going. And besides, the museum was built in the first place by Boss Tweed, using part of the fortune he made by stealing the city blind, and more than half the stuff in it is plunder from other countries bought by tycoons who weren’t much better than gangsters and pirates. Anyway, we were talking about passion. Maybe you’re passionate about art, Linda, but for me, it’s a business. I learned to love it, but learning how to love something is different from
being
in love, am I right? No, what I really love is history. You learn everything from history, or else—’

He grinned at Stone, who dutifully supplied the old punchline. ‘You learn nothing.’

‘He still remembers,’ Walter Lipscombe said. ‘I know a bit about your history, I know you never had what you’d call a real Second World War, that you took sides when the Russians had a revolution in 1947, and you ended up atom-bombing Stalingrad. Here, just a little earlier, the Russians and the Brits were fighting against Hitler and his National Socialism. The American Bund declared that it was staying out of the war, but of course it didn’t - it supplied arms and raw materials to the Germans. That made the Brits pretty sore, I can tell you. After they invaded Europe, and the American Bund’s merchant fleet lost the protection of the German U-boats, the Brits sank most of our ships and bombarded New York and Washington to drive home the point that they could do what they liked. And after they won the war, the Brits and the Russians imposed monster reparations on us. We had two decades of depression and high taxes, and if you guys hadn’t come along, our Dear Leader would probably have lost a war against the United Community of Europe, we’d’ve had world peace, world government, everyone ground down under the same boot-heel forever . . . Adam and me, we were part of the fight against that, once upon a time.’

Stone said that the revolution had been about to happen anyway; he’d simply helped to give the local resistance a little boost.

‘Stone and his pals trained people and brought in guns,’ Lipscombe told Linda. The three glasses of ashen-yellow Pinot Gris he’d drunk with the first course had lit him up. ‘I should know, because I was the guy helping move them. Those were good times. You lived every day, every hour, right there in the moment, because any second the FBI could arrest you and cart you off to the dungeons at Buzzard’s Point, torture you to extract every bit of useful information, then shoot you, bing bang boom. They were killing a thousand a day toward the end, dumping them in the river in such numbers the politicians on Capitol Hill were complaining about the stink. Adam and your father and me, Linda, we were fighting against that.’

His wife deftly turned the topic of conversation to her husband’s funding of arts projects in the city, the season at the Opera House he’d sponsored, the charities she worked for. Stone saw how Walter Lipscombe waxed proud in the reflected glow of her elegance; the tough, cynical fixer was definitely in love. While the main course of rare beef and watercress sauce was being served, Linda told Lipscombe that she couldn’t help noticing that he had the little finger missing on his left hand, and asked if he had lost it while fighting in the revolution.