Cut and Run (17 page)

For a long time, neither man spoke.

“In most things, it's true, I take care of myself first,” Hendrik said at length. “I've always been that way.”

“Not always, Hendrik.”

“Yes, Johannes, always. When we were boys, you took no notice—and it never mattered then. What harm could I do? Little Hendrik with the bright blue eyes and curly blond hair. I was harmless. But during the war, you finally saw what I am. I know you don't trust me—God knows I've given you enough reason not to—but in this you must.” He pulled the old cutter's arm and made the Dutchman look at him. “Do you understand, Johannes?
You must.
I repeat: if you do as I say, if we act quickly, nothing will happen to your sisters or to your niece.”

“You promise?” There was no hope in Johannes's voice, only sarcasm and resignation. Hendrik de Geer would never change.

“You
must
get me the Minstrel.”

“Why don't you tell your people I threw it into the sea?”

“Because they wouldn't take my word for it. The Minstrel presents too important an opportunity for them to pass up without being positive that it's lost. Johannes, if you know anything, know now that I'm telling you the truth.”

Johannes lifted his bony shoulders in an impassive shrug, feeling the wind slice through his jacket, his shirt, his very soul. He couldn't remember ever feeling so cold. “It's there,” he said, looking out at the city skyline. “In Amsterdam. We have only to go to my safe-deposit box and get it. I told you.”

“I hope so,” Hendrik said.

For a moment, Johannes could sense the weariness in him and suddenly wondered if he might be wrong after all. Perhaps Hendrik, too, was tired of the sparring, the memories, the grief, the hatred. Was it too much to forgive? But, no, Johannes thought, I mustn't be sentimental; I mustn't imbue Hendrik with my own values and morals. Hendrik de Geer would never tire of the games he played with people's lives for his own advantage. He would never tire of believing in himself, believing he could involve his friends in his schemes, put them into danger, and everything would work out because he wanted it to.

“Trust me, my friend,” the aging mercenary, the one-time friend, said softly, leaving the deck as silently as he'd come.

Johannes welcomed being alone. He continued to stare at the water and looked out toward the west, toward the sea, thinking about its seeming infinity, and in that he found comfort.

 

Hendrik de Geer drank straight from the bottle of good Dutch gin—
jenever
—in his dirty cabin. He liked to drink alone, preferred it. He'd never really been a lush: too dangerous, given his lifestyle. There were lost days, of course, but generally speaking, in drinking, as in everything else, he was a man of supreme self-control. He knew exactly how much he could consume without endangering himself.

Yet now he wanted to finish off the bottle, and perhaps another. He wanted oblivion.

How could I have let this happen?

Boyhood friend, lifelong foe, premier diamond cleaver, old man. Whatever he had been and whatever he was, Johannes Peperkamp no longer had the Minstrel's Rough.

It wasn't in Amsterdam. This trip was an act of desperation—a ruse. The Minstrel was not here. There was no safe-deposit box.

Hendrik moaned aloud. “What am I to do?”

Run…

It was his first impulse. Always his first impulse.

He gulped the gin and rose from his chair, stumbling as he made his way to his bunk. His eyes brimmed with hot, worthless tears, blinding his vision but not the images that burned in his head.

Catharina tearing at his sleeve, screaming “No, no, no!”…the unearthly emptiness of the house…the smug looks of the Green Police when Hendrik had confronted them.

Images. Memories. But what was done was done. That the Steins and the Peperkamps had been captured by the Nazis wasn't his fault. He had been cheated—lied to!

And yet he hated himself, now more than ever before, with desperation and anger, without hope. The cool detachment of recent years was gone. He knew he couldn't change. Johannes was right. As always, Hendrik thought he could handle everything. Make everyone happy. Get the stone, get Ryder off the hook with Bloch, maintain his own position with Bloch, keep the Peperkamps out of it. He'd never considered the possibility that Johannes wouldn't have the Minstrel's Rough.

Hendrik swore fiercely but broke off when a young deckhand rushed into the cabin. “It's the old man—something's wrong.”

The Dutchman threw down the gin and moved quickly, but when he got to the deck, Johannes Peperkamp was lying on his back, ashen and unconscious. The sharp, cold wind gusted, but the old man made no attempt to get out of it.

“My God!” Hendrik felt a faint pulse in Johannes's neck and tore open the old cutter's jacket and shirt. “My friend, don't die now. It won't help either of us.”

He pounded on Johannes's chest and screamed to the deckhand, a red-faced boy, and together they administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Hendrik continuing to scream orders.

“It's no use,” the deckhand cried, tired and repulsed. He'd never touched a dying man before.

“Keep going!”

“I'm cold—”

“Damn you, there's still a pulse!”

The boy sat back on his knees, frightened. They'd picked up Hendrik in Antwerp—he was an old friend of the captain's—and the boy had steered clear of him. “He's not going to make it.”

Hendrik gave the boy a fierce look and said in a low, deadly voice, “Keep going or I'll kill you. I can do it.”

“You're crazy,” the deckhand said, but he kept going.

 

It was dawn, and a pinkish light glowed over Central Park. Juliana sat at her piano. It was quiet in her apartment; there was no music on the rack. She rolled up the sleeves of her flannel nightgown and shut her eyes.

Behind her, the aquarium bubbled. She could hear herself breathe.

She had tried to call Uncle Johannes in Antwerp. He wasn't at his shop or his apartment. She didn't know where else he could be.

She had resisted the temptation to call her mother at the bakeshop. She would be there, baking cookies.
Speculaas.
Dutch spice cookies. For Christmas.

Juliana's fingers found the keyboard. They brushed the cool ivory.

She played.

Something, nothing. She didn't know what. Her fingers were her only cues. They knew the right keys, the right phrasing. Her mind wasn't involved. It didn't matter, not here, not alone. Everything blended together. Scales, arpeggios. Beethoven, Schoenberg. Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington. Music poured out of her, uncontrolled, and filled the room.

The sound ended the silence and the bad thoughts.

When you have bad thoughts, her mother used to say when Juliana was small and woke up crying from her nightmares, you should try to think of something else. Something happy. Imagine yourself at a picnic in the country with your father and me. Picking wildflowers. Playing in the stream.

Think happy thoughts.

Repress.

It was always easier to do at the piano.

She played until she hurt, and when she stopped, tears and sweat poured down her face and her back and between her legs, and her muscles ached, and she didn't know how long she'd been at it. Hours? Minutes?

The first bright light of morning shone over Central Park. She went over to the couch and sat where Matthew Stark had sat and watched the street below fill with people. She would remain upstairs, alone, playing piano and talking to her fish.

Thinking happy thoughts.

“S
tark—shit, man, I was hoping you wouldn't be in.” Weasel's voice was low and nervous over the telephone. “Thought maybe you'd be a step ahead of me, you know?”

Matthew held the phone with one hand, his forehead with the other. He'd drunk a few too many beers last night during the last period of the hockey game, trying to figure out what the hell to do about his promise to Weasel. What did he have to work with? A gorgeous flake of a piano player. A diamond that maybe existed, and then again maybe didn't. A screwup of a United States senator that only some warped sense of obligation to Weasel kept Matthew from going to see and ask some questions. A Dutchman who might already have exited the scene. A dead Hollywood agent. A couple of Peperkamps.

And Weasel himself. A half-dead former door gunner who'd been able to hit eighty-four targets with ninety-six bullets but still didn't know that the Sam Ryders of the world didn't need his help.

What he had to work with, Stark had decided, was zip. But some ingrained, persistent item in his code of honor had flipped on, and he knew he couldn't walk away and just let events take their course. He'd tried to call Juliana Fall late, after the hockey game, to say he was sorry for needling her and charm her into telling him whatever it was she wasn't telling him. He'd gotten her goddamn message machine, the golden voice saying she couldn't come to the phone right now. Drinking his final beer, he'd wondered what she was doing, who she was with tonight. He'd conjured up an image of her, pale blond hair flowing over her raccoon coat, a delicious mix of J.J. Pepper, jazz pianist, and Juliana Fall, concert pianist. A mix that didn't exist. She was one or the other, not both, maybe not either.

He hadn't left a message.

Now he was back at the
Gazette,
avoiding Feldie and wondering if maybe the best way to keep Otis Raymond alive was to do nothing. Tell the little jackass to crawl back into his hole and stay there. To live, dammit.

“You know I'm never a step ahead of you,” Matthew said now, aware Weasel would love that. “What's up?”

“You make any progress on the diamond?”

“No.”

“Shit, Stark, maybe you have lost it.”

Matthew took no offense. “Whoever said I had anything to lose?”

“I do, buddy,” Otis Raymond replied, confidence creeping back into his voice. One thing he knew: he could count on Matt Stark. Hadn't they survived as a scout pilot and scout gunner, part of a “pink team,” when so damn few did? “Hey—I ain't got time for bullshit. Got a pencil? Jot this one down: Johannes Peperkamp, diamond cutter, Antwerp. I don't have the spelling.”

“I don't need it,” Matthew said, swearing to himself. “Where'd you hear that name?”

“Things starting to hang together, huh, Stark?”

“No, things are not starting to hang together, goddamnit.” His head was pounding; from now on, he'd limit himself to two beers. “Where the hell are you getting your information? Damn it, Weaze, level with me. I can't get a handle on this business if you don't give me everything you've got. Who's behind all this, who—”

“I can't talk, man.” Weasel's voice dropped even lower. “Folks know I've given you this much, I'm dead.”

Matthew sat very still. He'd stopped breathing. His headache had vanished. His thinking was clear and ice-cold. Otis Raymond never exaggerated the danger he was in. Never. Vietnam had taught him that. If Weaze said over his CVC that there were a half-dozen NVA regulars firing up at him, then there were a half-dozen NVA regulars firing up at him. Not three. Not ten. Six.

Stark felt something clamp down in his gut. “Get out,” he said, his voice like stone. “Don't get yourself killed over Ryder. Wherever you are, Weaze, get the fuck out. Come to Washington. I'll put you up.”

“I don't know if I can get out.”

“Do it.”

“Man, if I can…”

“Do it, goddamn you.”

“Jeez, Stark, I—” Weasel stopped, and the nervousness turned to panic as he went on rapidly, “Shit, oh
shit,
I got a guy bird-dogging me!”

Matthew jumped to his feet, but he didn't lose control. He couldn't. It was a self-indulgence that wasn't going to do Otis Raymond a damn bit of good. “Weasel, where are you? I'll come for you myself.”

The line went dead, and Stark lost his control because now nothing that he did mattered.

“Goddamnit, Weaze!”

The only answer was the patient hum of the dial tone.

Stark's teeth were ground together so tightly his jaw ached, but he took a breath, sucking in his emotions with the stale air of the overheated newsroom. Weasel was going to let himself go down because of Sam Ryder, and there wasn't a damn thing Stark could do about it—except keep plugging away at all the fucking crazy leads. The Minstrel's Rough, more damned Peperkamps.
I told you, I don't know anything about diamonds…

Bullshit, toots.

Slowly he became aware of Alice Feldon at his side. He had no idea how long she'd been standing there. “Are you all right?” she asked, more curious than worried. He understood—no one had better rein on himself than Matthew Stark.

He nodded and cradled the receiver.

“This buddy of yours is in trouble,” she said.

“Nothing he thinks he can't handle.”

“What do you think?”

He looked at her without expression, but the despair was eating away at him. “Life expectancy zero.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's what the grunts used to say about door gunners.”

“Weasel?”

“Yeah. He was a door gunner, and he lived. He was twenty-one years old when he left Vietnam. You might say the rest of his life has been anticlimactic.” Matthew pulled his leather jacket off the back of his chair. His arms and legs were rigid; he moved without grace. “If the Weaze calls again, find out where he is. Don't let him hang up until you do.”

“I'll try.”

He looked at her, the black eyes remote. “Don't try, Feldie. Do it.”

Anybody else would have nodded her head and kept her damn mouth shut, but that wasn't the kind of smart Feldie was. She put out a hand and touched Stark's elbow. “Hey, there, slow down.”

He took a breath. “I'm sorry.”

His voice was tight and sandpapery, and none of the tension went out of him, but Feldie nodded, satisfied. “At least now you don't look like you're going to go off and kill somebody.”

He tried to smile. “Who me?”

“Yeah, now what aren't you telling me?”

“Feldie, Weasel's got to get out of there. Make him understand that.”

“I'll try, okay? But what—”

“When I've got anything that makes sense, we'll talk.”

“All right, fine. Look, I've got a guy on hold. The call came through on my line. You want to take it?”

“Who is it?” He was thinking of Juliana.

“Some guy. Wouldn't give his name.”

Ryder? Stark headed over to Feldie's desk and picked up the phone; she hung in there right beside him, glasses on the end of her nose. He scowled at her. “You mind?”

“Hell, yes,” she said, and remained rooted to her spot.

He ignored her and punched the button on the phone. “Yeah?”

“You always did have a winning way with people,
sir.
”

The voice on the other end was deep and precise, the sarcasm just hinted at, all of it disturbingly familiar. Matthew sat down, tense and alert.

“Lucky your competence made up for your personality.”

“Who is this?”

“You don't remember?”

There was a short, spasmodic laugh, and then Stark did remember. He didn't move; he didn't breathe. He sat very still and listened, hoping he was wrong, knowing he wasn't.

“And here I've been thinking I was the basis for the villain in that book of yours,” the voice went on. “I read it, you know. I forget what cesspool I was sitting in at the time but sure did get some chuckles out of that one. At least you didn't whine. Christ, I get sick of all the whining.”

Matthew reached for a pencil and a scrap of paper, just to have something to grip, to keep him anchored in the present. His mind—his very soul—had begun to drift back.

In heavy black letters, oblivious to Alice Feldon, he wrote: Bloch.

Sergeant Phillip Bloch. He'd been a platoon sergeant in Vietnam, a hard-bitten, ritualistic man on nobody's side but his own. He'd saved people, and he'd killed people. It didn't matter to him which or who.

“I'd heard you were dead, Sergeant.”

“Did you have a party?'

“No. I didn't do a damn thing.”

The laugh came again, a laugh of nightmares and ghosts. “You're a cold bastard,
sir,
but that's okay. Wouldn't have made it out of 'Nam two times as a chopper pilot if you weren't. I kinda was counting on you not making it out, you know, but you and me—we're a lot alike. We know how to survive.”

Matthew made no comment. There was no need. Bloch knew what Stark thought of him.

“How's the newspaper business?” Bloch asked, his tone deceptively jovial.

“I do my job.”

He glanced at Feldie, who didn't even roll her eyes.

“Working on a big story?”

“You didn't call to chitchat.”

“That's right, buddy.” The jovial tone disappeared. “I'm calling to warn your ass off a story. Whatever you got, drop it. You hear? That way, nobody gets hurt. Our paths just ain't meant to cross, you know? Shit happens every time. So you just bow out now, and we'll go our separate ways.”

Stark pressed the pencil hard into the paper. The point snapped. He kept pressing. So Bloch was in it. From the moment Matthew had first seen Otis Raymond's thin, yellowing, bug-bitten body in the
Gazette
newsroom, he'd guessed, deep down in a place inside him he didn't like to go, that Phil Bloch's name would come into it, sooner or later.

Bloch went on smoothly, “You know what story I'm talking about.”

“No,” Stark said, although he knew lying would be pointless. Yet he had to try. For Weasel's sake, maybe even for Ryder's—and maybe even for his own, although he didn't care to think so. He preferred to think he could handle Phillip Bloch. If necessary, beat him.

“Then let me refresh your memory—Otis Raymond.”

The pencil snapped in half, the sharpened end skidding across the desk onto the floor. Behind him, Feldie jumped, startled. But Matthew remained very still. He had no room in which to maneuver. Right now Bloch was in control. He knew what was going on; Matthew didn't.

He had to listen. Play the sergeant's game. Buy time.

“Ya'll used to call him Weasel,” Bloch said. “That help?”

Matthew set the eraser end of the pencil down on the pad; his hands were rock steady. “I haven't seen the Weaze in ages. He checks in every so often and lets me know he's alive.”

“He check in last week? He drop in, Stark?”

Bloch's tone was smug, knowing. If he'd been within reach, Stark would have strangled him. But that, too, was Phillip Bloch: he always managed to stay just out of reach.

“Why should I tell you, Bloch?”

“I know about the calls,
sir.
” The sarcasm wasn't as subtle now. “You can quit protecting him; the sonofabitch tipped you off. Now I gotta deal with you, and no use pretending I don't, that right?”

Matthew maintained rigid control. “Ninety-nine percent of the time Weaze talks bullshit. I know that.”

“Forget it, Stark. I know, you hear me?” There was that curt, terrible laugh again. “I fucking
know.
Whatever Raymond told you, you ain't treating it like bullshit. I suggest you start doing so, right now.”

“Let me talk to Weasel,” Matthew said stonily.

“I don't give warnings twice. Remember that.”

Bloch hung up.

Stark slammed down the receiver, but there was no satisfaction in that, so, lunging to his feet, he picked up the whole damn phone and hurled it to the floor. Fellow reporters glanced up, saw it was Matthew Stark, and resumed working, looking nervous.

Feldie simply said, “Jesus Christ.”

Without a word, Matthew picked the phone up off the floor and set it back on the desk. It wasn't broken. Given the often volatile nature of reporters, newsrooms were generally equipped with sturdy telephones.

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” Feldie asked. “No.”