Holy Terror (2 page)

He pushed his way into the store's revolving door and almost collided with a highly groomed middle-aged woman in a pale lemon suit. ‘Pardon me, ma'am,' he told her. She raised one eyebrow at him. ‘Oh,
no
. My fault entirely.' She might almost have said, ‘Take me!'

Inside the store there was a midwinter chill. He walked through the brightly lit perfumery department, between the gleaming counters with their bottles of Chanel and Giorgio and Dolce e Gabbana. From the Ted Lapidus counter, the crimson-haired Doris Fugazy gave him a flirtatious little finger-wave.

‘Chief O'Neil? Can I
talk
to you for a moment?' she called.

‘Sure, Doris. But later, if you don't mind. I'm running behind.'

It was 12:39. He had almost reached the brown steel door in back of the perfumery department when he saw that two people were waiting outside. A man and a woman. The man was carrying a black canvas holdall.

Conor approached the door, taking out his security keys. ‘Anything I can do for you folks?'

They didn't answer – just stood outside the door as if they expected him to open it without delay.

‘I'm sorry,' said Conor. ‘I can't admit customers to the strongroom area unless they've made a prior appointment with one of the managers. You see that guy over there? The guy with the glasses? Mr Berkowitz. He'll help you.'

Still no response. Conor said, ‘You do speak English?
Habla Inglese
?'

The man and the woman didn't even blink. The woman was very tall, nearly six feet, and dressed entirely in black. Her black hair was swept up like a crow's wing and her face by contrast was deathly pale, so white that it was almost silver. Her eyes were so dark that she could have been wearing black contact lenses. She was wearing a heavy distinctive perfume, like decaying roses and overripe fruit.

The man was two or three inches shorter than the woman. He was Latin-American, with luxuriant black curls that grew over his snowy white collar and
a thin black mustache that could have been drawn with an eyebrow pencil. His light houndstooth blazer hung over his shoulders so that the sleeves swung empty.

Conor said, ‘You understand me? You have to have authorization to enter the strongroom.
Permiso
. It's the rules, that's all. I don't make the rules. But I have to carry them out.
Comprende
?'

The man slowly raised his right hand, almost as if he were making a blessing. He was wearing black cotton gloves, fastened at the wrist with a mother-of-pearl button.
On a day like this, with the temperature over 100
? thought Conor.
But then maybe he has a skin affliction or something like that
.

But the man took off his glove and held out his hand in greeting and there was nothing wrong with his skin at all. ‘Do you know me?' he asked, and that was all.

Conor found himself standing outside the door alone. The man and the woman had both vanished. He looked around the perfumery department, totally perplexed. He was sure that—

He was sure that
what
? He just couldn't remember what he was supposed to be sure of.

He hesitated for a moment longer. He looked around at Doris but she was busy spraying perfume over a large woman in a white dress. Frowning, he unlocked the door and walked through to his office. On the left-hand side, sixteen closed-circuit television monitors were flickering, each of them showing a different part of the store. His desk was
on the right-hand side, with his name printed on a perspex block: CONOR T. O'NEIL, SECURITY DIRECTOR, and a blue plastic lunchbox.

But it was the digital clock on the wall that caught his attention the most. It read 13:08 – nearly a half-hour since he climbed out of the taxi.

He stepped back into the marble-floored corridor. What the hell had he been doing for the last twenty-nine minutes, and how come he couldn't remember them? Surely he couldn't have been standing outside the security door all that time. And where had the man and the woman disappeared to?

The corridor was deserted. To the left, at the very far end, the massive hardened-steel door which led to the strongroom was firmly shut, and the closed-circuit television camera that watched over it was still blinking its single red eye. Conor walked back to the brown security door and peered out through the window.

Business in the store was carrying on as normal. The spotlights were shining off the bald marble flooring and women in splashy summer dresses were walking backward and forward between the perfumery counters.

Conor returned to his office. He stood by his desk for a moment, with his hand pressed over his mouth, completely disoriented. He couldn't think what had
happened to him. He hadn't blacked out. He hadn't fainted.

He checked the television monitors. He scanned the entire eight-story department store floor by floor, camera angle by camera angle. He ranged through corridors, changing facilities, stairwells, restrooms. There was no sign of the man and the woman. But after twenty-nine minutes they could be anyplace at all.

‘The hell,' he breathed.

He rewound the videotape that had covered his movements outside the security door, when he had first talked to the man and the woman. There were three and a half hours of surveillance, up until 12:41. He fast-forwarded it so that the shoppers scuttled around like termites. After that the tape ran totally blank, only a few blips and passing meteorites on the screen, and an unintelligible blurt of noise. He shook his head in frustration. In twenty-nine minutes, a professional gang could have stripped the store of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stock.

There was no sign that he had admitted the man and the woman into his office – and even if he had, nothing appeared to have been disturbed. His computer was still languidly displaying its screen-saver – a flock of white seagulls against a dark blue sky. His desk was still mathematically laid out with three Pilot pens, a letter-opener with the crest of the New York Police Department and a ceramic-framed photograph of Lacey in a red-and-white crop-top, taken at Wild Dunes golf resort in South Carolina.

He pulled out all of his desk drawers, starting at the bottom and leaving them open, in the way that
an experienced police officer would. Paperclips, stationery, notebooks – all undisturbed. In the corner, his green steel locker was still locked. He opened it and took out his Smith & Wesson .38. It was still in its holster, with the stud fastened, and no ammunition had been taken from his belt. Nothing else had been stolen, either.

Nothing except time. He had lost twenty-nine minutes from the moment he had walked into the store to the moment he had looked around and realized that the man and the woman were gone. And in those twenty-nine minutes, what had he done? And, more importantly, what had
they
done?

He was still searching his locker when Darrell Bussman came in, carrying a clipboard and a raspberry donut with sprinkles on it. Darrell was the store's operations manager, plump, crimson-cheeked, like the kid who nobody ever picked for their football team. He was only 23 and he had a catastrophic taste in neckties, but his uncle Newt Bussman owned 47 per cent of Spurr's Fifth Avenue and had as much sense of humor as a hammerhead shark and those were all the vocational qualifications that Darrell had ever needed.

‘Hey, Conor, what kept you?' he wanted to know, in his high, clogged-up voice. ‘We had to go through the delivery schedules without you. And nobody knew when UPS was supposed to drop off the Gucci collection.'

‘Accept my apologies, Darrell. The custody hearing went on for ever.

‘So, what happened?'

‘What do you think happened? I'm a man who cheated on his wife. I got shafted.'

‘You still got visitation, though?'

‘Qualified, at Paula's discretion.'

‘Well, better than nothing, hunh?'

‘You think so? You don't know Paula.'

‘Listen, how about getting UPS to pick up those Rolex watches the same time they deliver the necklaces?'

‘OK. Good idea.'

Darrell stopped and looked around the office, at the open locker and the open drawers.

‘Hey, Conor, you're not – ah –
clearing your desk
here, are you?'

‘No, no, everything's fine. I was looking for something, that's all.'

‘Must have been pretty damned lost.'

Conor stood up straight. ‘To tell you the truth, I had a kind of strange experience, and I was just making sure that everything was OK.'

‘You had a strange experience? Don't tell me. You were abducted by Cardassians. No, stranger than that. My uncle came in and offered you a raise.'

‘This isn't a joke, Darrell. This is for real. I can't even begin to work out what happened.'

‘You saw ghosts, right? They always said that Spurr's Fifth Avenue was haunted. A woman with no head who walks around the hat department. Get it? A woman with no head who—'

‘Unh-hunh. These two characters weren't ghosts. A man and a woman. A tall woman, dressed in black, and a kind of Cuban-looking guy.'

‘Hey! No kidding! I saw them, too!' Darrell
nodded his head as if he were never going to stop. ‘They were in luggage.'

‘
You
saw them?'

‘For sure. They walked up to me and asked me something. They said—'

Darrell opened his mouth and then he closed it again. He lowered his clipboard and pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Isn't that stupid? I don't know what they said. I really can't remember.'

‘Try, Darrell. This could be critical.'

‘I'm sorry, Conor. I just can't remember. Still, it couldn't have been anything much, right? One minute they're talking to me and the next minute, piff, they're gone.'

‘When did this happen?'

‘Oh … forty minutes ago, maybe a little less. Thirty-five, maybe.'

‘I wish you'd called me.'

‘I did call you as a matter of fact, just to see if you were back. You didn't answer. But anyway, what are you worried about? They didn't say anything, they didn't
do
anything. Not that I can remember, that is.' He took an anxious bite out of his donut, and then another, and then another.

‘I think we'd better check the strongroom,' said Conor.

‘The strongroom? What the hell for?'

‘I want to make sure that nothing's missing, that's all.'

‘How could anything be missing?' said Darrell, his mouth crammed.

‘I don't know. What happened to you up in luggage, that exact same thing happened to me, too,
only I didn't lose a few seconds. I lost twenty-nine minutes.'

‘Twenty-nine minutes? Are you serious?'

‘I met them outside the security door and that's the last I remember. That's why we have to check the strongroom.'

Darrell lifted his mountainous gold Rolex. ‘Conor, I'd love to, but I'm real busy right now. And – come on – anybody who wanted to break into that strongroom would need an M60 tank. You didn't see any M60 tanks pass by your door, did you?'

‘Darrell, indulge me, will you?'

‘For Christ's sake, Conor. We have alarms, we have infra-red sensors, we have cameras, we have time locks. Neither of us can open the strongroom on our own and I sure as hell wasn't here, was I? You had a memory lapse, that's all. It could have been the heat.'

Conor tried to be patient. It wasn't easy to be patient with a short podgy boy with his mouth full of donut and silhouettes of hula girls on his necktie. ‘Help me out here, Darrell, and let a suspicious old chief of security put his mind at rest. I've got this gut feeling, that's all.'

‘Conor, do you realize the magnitude of what we're talking about here? The
magnitude
? We're probably talking about more than a billion bucks' worth of stuff here, Conor. We're talking about stuff that belongs to customers like Mrs George Whitney IV, and Harold D. Hammet. If you have any kind of gut feeling, I think you'd better start praying that it was something you ate.'

* * *

Conor crossed the office and lifted down the print that the police department had given him when he resigned. It was Norman Rockwell's famous painting of a young runaway boy perched on a stool in a 1950s diner, next to a fat, benign cop. It hadn't been given to him without irony.

Concealed behind the print was a small wall-safe. Conor punched out four numbers and then Darrell immediately punched out four more. If the second batch of numbers weren't keyed into the safe in sixty seconds, it would automatically lock and stay locked. The door opened. Inside the safe were two shoulderless safe keys. Conor took one out and Darrell took the other.

Together they walked down to the strongroom door, with Darrell's rubber shoe-soles squelching on the marble floor.

‘I should be in beachwear by now,' Darrell complained. He prodded at his mobile phone but there was no signal down here, under reinforced concrete ceilings.

They reached the strongroom door. Again they had to punch out an eight-figure security code, four figures each. Then they had to insert their keys and turn them simultaneously. The closed-circuit television camera swiveled on its perch like an inquisitive gray parrot.

They stepped inside. The strongroom was coldly lit, about fifty feet long and fifteen feet wide, with rows and rows of bronze-painted deposit boxes on either side and three more rows along the center. This was where some of Spurr's wealthiest customers preferred to keep certain items of jewelry and
bearer bonds and videotapes and whatever else they didn't want even their banks or their spouses to know about. In the last century, Spurr's Fifth Avenue had been of service to Jay Gould the railroad swindler, among many others; and its more recent clients had been Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Pamela Harriman.

Conor walked along the aisles, jingling his keys and running his eyes up and down the tiers of boxes to make sure that all the key slots were in the horizontal (locked) position, and that none of them was missing.