Likely to Die (34 page)

 “Want to check out the grounds?” Mike could function on less sleep than anyone I knew.

 The luncheon and afternoon conference in which I would be participating started at one o’clock. I didn’t want Battaglia to get any bad reports about my presentation so I figured it was smarter to work on my notes. “I’m going to clean up, rest, and change for my speech.”

 “I’m taking a walk. Been sitting still too long. See you later, Lady Asquith.”

 I refreshed myself with a hot shower, then, wrapped in an oversized white terry robe with the Cliveden crest embroidered on its lapel, sat on the bed to work. The break revived me, despite the lack of sleep, and I was almost dressed and ready to leave the room by twelve-fifteen when Mike called me from the front desk.

 “Are you receiving?”

 “I’m just about ready to go down to the lobby.”

 “Thought I’d shower and change if you were out of the way.”

 I finished brushing my hair and putting on earrings as Mike came in. I gathered my notes and told him I’d meet him in the dining room for the luncheon. I took myself downstairs and through the expanse of the Great Hall, drawn to John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of Lady Astor, the American-born Nancy Langhorne, who had become the first woman to take a seat in Parliament in 1919. The painting dominated the room and I sat at the desk below it to review the remarks I would be delivering on Battaglia’s behalf.

 Once done, and noting that it would soon be 7A.M. in New York, I picked up the telephone and asked the operator to connect me with a number in New York City, billing the charge to my suite. When the switchboard answered at Mid-Manhattan Hospital, I gave the receptionist Maureen’s room number.

 “What is the name of the patient to whom you wish to speak?”

 I gave her Maureen’s name, and when I heard no response I spelled the surname for her.

 “Let me put you on hold, ma’am.”

 Several minutes passed until a voice returned to tell me that the patient I was trying to reach had been discharged from the hospital. It was only Thursday and my recollection was that she was not to be released for another twenty-four hours. I was relieved that someone had made the decision to take her out of harm’s way.

 The time difference was already proving to be a nuisance. I wanted to say hello to Maureen and knew that no one in a hospital could sleep long past six when the clanging of breakfast trays and bedpans roused everyone except the comatose. Now that she was at home I would place that call to her later on. It was a bit too early to hound Joan, still the middle of the night for Nina in Los Angeles, and I was determined not to speak with Drew until I knew what had driven the timing of our meeting at Joan’s apartment.

 Graham glided toward me as I sat at the desk, thinking to myself and gazing up at the delicate features of Lady Astor, bare shouldered in her white gown trimmed with pink satin ribbons. The pose was a bold one, perhaps struck when she was said to have refused Edward VII’s offer to join him in a game of cards with the line, “I am afraid, sire, that I cannot tell a king from a knave.”

 “Miss Cooper, Mr. Bartlett—that is, the Home Secretary—has asked me to tell you that the morning session has ended and your group will be lunching in the Pavilion. That’s the building just next door to the boardroom. Shall I tell him you’ll be joining them?”

 “Yes, thank you, Graham. I’m waiting for Mr. Chapman.” He stepped away and within minutes I could see Mike descending the staircase at the far end of the room, stopping every few feet to examine the paintings and armored figures that were part of the Cliveden collection.

 “C’mon, let’s do the sightseeing later. We’ve been summoned for lunch.”

 We returned to the front entrance, followed the path pointed out by Graham’s gloved finger, and made our way over to the series of rooms that housed the conference facilities. The Pavilion was a light-filled, cheerful area overlooking the notorious swimming pool—scene of the Profumo scandal—that had been set up with eight rectangular tables for the meeting participants and their guests.

 I immediately spotted Commander Creavey’s substantial figure as he stood to wave us into the room, where he had held empty seats on both sides for Mike and me to join him. He rose and bellowed to the polite diners after he kissed me on the cheek and embraced Mike with a few sound slaps on the back. “This ‘ere is Alexandra Cooper. Top of the line in America. She prosecutes rapists, wife beaters, child abusers—all that type of bloke. I don’t advise you to trifle with her while she’s here. And this is Commander Michael Chapman. I’ve promoted him a few notches, but that’s because over ’ere—with what ‘e knows—’e’d be running the show. Be no need for me.

 “Sit and enjoy your lunch. There’ll be time to mix with all these fine gents this evening.”

 Chapman and Creavey jumped right into discussing each other’s work and catching up with “on-the-job” events since they had last had the opportunity to talk at a session in New York. I played with my salad as I looked around the room to see whether I recognized any familiar faces. I knew from the list that Battaglia had passed along to me that most of the speakers and panelists were from the United Kingdom and Western Europe and it was quite clear that diversity was not an element in selecting voices to speak about the future of society as we neared the millennium.

 The sixty-something, blue-rinse matron with painfully pink skin sitting on my other side began to chat me up, introducing herself as Winifred Bartlett, wife of the Home Secretary.

 “And what is it exactly that your husband is going to be speaking about at the conference, dear?” she inquired, pausing between bites of her smoked salmon as she eyed me through cataract-dimmed lenses.

 “Actually,I am the one who’ll be speaking this afternoon. I’m not married. Michael is my colleague, not my husband.”

 “How refreshing, Alice,” came the cheerful response. “Commander Creavey wasn’t joking, then? Do you really deal with all those dreadful crimes yourself?”

 “Yes, I do. Fascinating work, Mrs. Bartlett, and enormously satisfying.”

 “We don’t have so many of those kind of problems in Britain. Not enough work for you here, dear, I’m afraid.”

 “Perhaps that used to be the case, but I understand there’s been quite an increase in reporting of rapes all over the U.K.”

 Now she was considering that perhaps she didn’t need me as a distraction from her meal. Every ounce of her concentration returned to the plate. “Can’t imagine that’s so. My husband used to be a Crown Prosecutor. Embezzlement, insurance frauds, the occasional murder. Nothing as unsavory as your work. You should get yourself a husband, Alice, and leave this disgusting business to Creavey and his ilk. It’s nasty for a girl. No wonder you’re unmarried.”

 I hadn’t been there long enough to answer as I would have liked to and held my tongue as I reminded myself I was standing in Battaglia’s shoes for forty-eight hours.

 John Creavey caught me back up in the tale he was spinning about how his men had foiled a Colombian drug cartel scam downriver at Tilbury until the waiters arrived with the sweet trolley and coffee to end the luncheon recess.

 “Nice to have met you, Mrs. Bartlett,” I lied.

 “Pleasure.” So did she.

 We followed the well-mannered group as they sauntered from the Pavilion back toward the Churchill Boardroom. Thirty or so stiff-looking men queued near the entry to the conference area and fifteen or twenty of the ladies paired off in the opposite direction. Lord Windlethorne stood at the head of the table and introduced himself as I moved past him to look for my seat. I guessed him to be in his late fifties, lean and angular, with the features and dark coloring of Gregory Peck cum Oxford don.

 He welcomed me and pointed to my name plate at the table. I was docked two places away, between Professore Vittorio Vicario of the University of Milan and Monsieur Jean-Jacques Carnet of the Institut de la Paix in Paris. Vicario bowed his head in greeting and Carnet smiled, giving me the once-over and an“Enchanté.”

 “Mr. Chapman,” Windlethorne told Mike as he entered after me. “We’ve only enough seats at the table for the speakers. Behind each one there’s a chair, as you can see. Those are for the spouses—or, shall I say, significant others—of the participants.

 “Most of the wives were here this morning. Actually, they’re heading off now on a coach tour—famous gardens, Windsor Castle, a trip on the Thames. Perhaps you’d rather—”

 “Wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

 I glanced around the room. The head of Australia’s Probation Services was the only other woman at the table. The chair behind her was empty. The spouse seats were almost completely deserted except for one backing up an older French Minister of Justice, whose trophy wife or mistress sat dutifully in place, and that of the Danish criminologist, whose barely-out-of-her-teens girlfriend stroked the back of his head as we waited for everyone to settle down.

 Chapman growled into my ear. “You really owe me for this one. Everybody’s treating me like I’m some useless appendage you’ve brought along to carry your luggage.”

 “Personally, I think you should have taken the garden tour with the significant others. You would have found someone to hit on in that group.”

 “Don’t throw yourself at Windlethorne too quick, Blondie. I know how you fall for that kind of sensitive-looking specimen.”

 I looked up to the head of the table. Lord W. was chewing on the end of his wire-rimmed glasses as he debated some weighty issue with a pudgy German who kept punctuating his comments with jabs in the air. I blushed when Windlethorne caught me looking and smiled back at me. Mike was right, he was exactly my type.

 Lord Windlethorne invited everyone to take his or her seat and called the afternoon assembly to order by introducing me formally to the politicians and academics who had presented papers or would be joining my panel for the rest of the day. He then proceeded to call on speakers in the order they were listed in the program.

 One of the Swiss finance ministers began the session with a forty-five-minute discourse on the problems of financial frauds and the Internet. He detailed instances of multimillion-dollar swindles that had been attempted in recent months and outlined a plan for combating technological hoaxes in the next century.

 The concentration then moved to interpersonal violence. Twenty-minute time slots had been allocated for each of the four speakers—the Australian woman who talked about her country’s novel techniques for handling teen offenders; the pudgy German, a sociologist who studied European ethnic violence of the last fifty years, predicting and projecting trends; Creavey’s analysis of terrorist tactics and how to combat them; and my slightly doctored version of Battaglia’s remarks about the prospect for America’s future—crime and punishment.

 Lord Windlethorne lit his pipe and opened the floor to statements from everyone present. Like many Europeans, these professionals seemed most interested in the problems of urban America, which had to this point in time seemed so extraordinarily unlike their own.

 “What aboutyour specialty, Miss Cooper?” Professore Vicario asked, “Do you think it has much, how do you say in English, relevance to our population here in Europe?”

 I had made only a short reference to the issue of sexual violence in my formal remarks but was delighted to get it on the table during the question-and-answer period. “As progressive as you all tend to be on a variety of topics, you’re light-years behind on this one. One need only consider the terrible cases of child abuse in Belgium last year—the pedophile rings that involved government officials—to understand how widespread the phenomenon is. And you’ll forgive me,professore, but your magnificent country still has some of the most archaic laws concerning spousal abuse that one can imagine in this day and age.

 “I don’t need to center this around my own personal interest, but itis just incredible to me,” I added, “that you could even contemplate a meeting of this scope without devoting attention to the issues of drugs, drug treatment, and gun control.”

 I thought Windlethorne was squirming a bit in his seat as he tried to reignite his pipe, but others in the room picked up on the subjects immediately.

 Creavey jumped in. “I assure you, Alex is right. If you don’t think these are your problems yet—and I can’t believe there’s one of you in this room who hasn’t had some exposure to them in your criminal justice systems at home—they’re coming in your direction.”

 The Home Secretary tried to pooh-pooh the trend toward violence, sheltered in this elegant retreat that seemed a world apart from the reality of city streets. “Oh, come now, people. Let’s not exaggerate this picture, shall we?” Battaglia had been right on the money. “A bit of hooliganism, joyriding—”

 Chapman had been waiting for his moment. He knew, from conversations with Creavey, how aware of this issue the British had become after the unspeakable tragedy in the elementary school at Dunblane.

 “You wanna know what you’re facing if you don’t start moving in the direction of gun control and funding drug treatment programs? You wanna know what kind of cases I work on every single day of the week?

 “John, you ever have a ‘dis’ murder?”

 Creavey frowned and stroked his mustache. No answer. Mike looked from face to face. “Any of you know what I’m talking about? Dis—that’s the motive to kill another human being.”

 Professore Vicario attempted to inject a note of humor. “You mean, Signore Chapman, dis or dat?”

 “No, professor. I mean disrepect. Last week, I got called to the scene of a homicide. The killer was fifteen years old. Deals heroin. Snoopy tabs, we call ‘em. Glassine envelopes with cartoon characters like Snoopy on the label. Big seller with kids, right outside the fence at an elementary school.

 “His victim? A five-year-old girl who dissed him. She stepped on his shadow after he told all the kids not to. He turned and put a bullet through her head just as a lesson to the others not to ignore him. Not to dis him.”

 The theoreticians were silent.

 “Maybe this was a culture in which guns were in the hands of the upper class—hunting grouse and pheasants and wild boar on weekends in the country. But if you don’t start acknowledging these problems today, you’ll be right up there in the record books with your American cousins.”