The Consignment (4 page)

“So,” I said.

She started talking about dinner; things she had to buy at the store.

“Oh, come on, Fiona, cut it out. Brad’s going to the goddamned Congo and this is how I find out?”

“I only just heard myself.”

I looked at her.

“What do you want to hear, Ned? That I encouraged him?”

“Did you?”

“He’s an adult. He wants to go, he goes.”

“And the fact that you teed it up with this Barchevsky guy, that’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She came and took my plate and shoved it in the dishwasher. She turned the dishwasher on.

I asked about Brad’s mention of Canada.

“It was an alternate site,” she said. “Some mine up in Ontario.”

“Ontario. Well, what’s wrong with that? Ontario.”

“Weren’t you listening?” She gestured in the direction of the garage. “He’s got a firm offer for the Congo. He’s made up his mind.”

“Nothing to do with you.”

“Right.”

“Where else was on offer?”

Her eyes skated past me so I asked again.

“Nowhere,” she said, and walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to our bedroom. I took a moment with myself, then went on up. She was standing at the dresser, loading her purse.

“Brad tells you he wants a few months in the field,” I said, “and with all your contacts, every geologist and mine manager you know, you’re saying that’s the best you could come up with. Ontario and the Congo?”

“He asked me last month,” she muttered into her purse. “It wasn’t exactly extended notice.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“What’s wrong, Ned?” Her tone was tight now, and mean. She kicked my old sneakers aside as she recrossed to the door. She tilted her head back and looked straight at me. “You’re not afraid of what he might see there, are you?”

So now she’d said it. And having said it, she regretted it immediately. She pushed by me and went out to her study.

I’d always tried, for obvious reasons, not to bring any troubles from my work back home. But a spouse can’t help learning something of a partner’s daily concerns—Lord knows, I’d heard enough of office politics at Geometrics to fill a library—and anyway, I’d have been less than human not to have mentioned the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Fiona sometime. A major African war had been raging there until the previous Christmas, when the exhausted combatants signed a peace treaty. Throughout the conflict, weapons had entered the country through the infinitely permeable walls of international sanctions and UN embargoes. And among those weapons, no doubt, were some supplied by Haplon. Weapons for which all the correct paperwork was in place, but which nevertheless arrived at the worst possible destination. Guns I sold.

Which is what Fiona meant by her remark about me being afraid of what Brad might see. Though there was peace there now, what Brad might see out in the Congo, apart from magnetic anomalies, was the aftermath of a war his father had helped to create. Ravaged towns and ruined lives. Brutalized men. Women permanently scarred by rape. Limbless children.

I stopped out in the hall while Fiona piled papers into her briefcase.

“This is wrong,” I told her. “So damn wrong.”

She screwed up her face and snapped her briefcase shut.

“Our problems are between us, Fiona. You and me. Not you and me and Brad.”

“Just you and me?”

“You and me,” I said.

She came into the hall and put her face up close to mine.

“If that was true,” she said, “then there wouldn’t be a problem now, would there.” She dropped her briefcase by my feet and went along to the bathroom, closing the door.

I slumped back against the wall. Six weeks to the day before Dimitri’s death, Fiona accused me of having an affair. I denied it, of course. But in the days and weeks that followed, she made my life a living hell of interrogations over supper, silences at breakfast, and casual inquiries loaded with well-disguised traps that any careless answer of mine was liable to trigger. She had sensed that I was lying to her. It wasn’t any one thing, more a series of lapses on my part. Out jogging one evening, for example, I stepped into a phone booth near home to phone Channon. I later learned that Fiona had driven past on her way to the store and seen me: so who was I calling that I couldn’t call from home? And twice when I had to meet late with Customs about Hawkeye, I rang Fiona with the lazy excuse that I was working late. Both times Fiona rang back, only to discover from my Haplon colleagues that I wasn’t there.

Once suspicion began to roll, it just snowballed. After nearly two years undercover, evasion was second nature to me, but it wasn’t too hard for Fiona to catch me in a series of small half-truths, not once she’d put her scientific mind to it. Her suspicions intensified daily. Her field of inquiry widened as she sifted her memory for possible earlier signs of my infidelity. That first time she confronted me with the accusation, I laughed. Six weeks later, I couldn’t even raise a smile. Our lives were becoming unlivable.

Now Fiona emerged from the bathroom; she grabbed her briefcase. “And for your information,” she said, striding away down the hall, “it was Brad who suggested the Congo. I didn’t like the idea. I told him I didn’t like it, but now he’s got the job and neither one of us can stop him.”

“It’s a war zone.”

“No it’s not.” She turned and came back. She planted herself in front of me. “And I resent the implication that I’d send Brad there just to get at you. That’s not why he’s going. He’s a geologist. What’s he supposed to do, cross out the places on the map that you’ve been selling God-knows-what to? Most prospective territory left in the world is in those places. What should he do? Put his career on hold just so you don’t have to feel guilty?”

“Listen—”

“No.” She threw up her hand. “If you’ve got any more to say, go tell it to your bimbo.” She veered into her study to retrieve a forgotten file. If I’d told her the truth at that moment, the arguments and recriminations would have ended. But our marriage would have ended too, I never doubted that for one second. So instead of telling her the truth, I remained silent out in the hall. When she came out of her study I put my hand on her arm. She tilted up her chin.

“Going to hit me?”

“There is no bimbo.”

She shrugged my hand off.

“There is no woman,” I said. “There is no affair.”

She peered at me. After a moment her look seemed to soften. She raised a finger.

“Very good,” she said. “Very good.” She walked along the hall, then turned down the stairs. “In fact, you get any better at it,” she called over her shoulder, “you’ll be lying like a third-rate goddamn lawyer.”

We had been married nearly twenty-four years. When she wanted to push my buttons she knew where they were. By the time I got to the head of the stairs she was down at the front door. I grabbed the landing banister.

“Fiona!”

She opened the door.

“I’m not fucking anyone,” I told her.

She regarded me coolly over her shoulder. “You’re not fucking me, anyway,” she said. “Not anymore.” Stepping out, she closed the door gently behind her.

I bounded down the stairs, then caught something from the corner of my eye, and turned. Brad. He’d come down the hall from the garage and was standing by the kitchen, facing me. He must have heard every word. I slowed, then stopped on the bottom stair. We looked at each other awhile without speaking. At last he gestured to the kitchen.

“I brought down a copy of Barchevsky’s offer.”

“You heard.”

He looked away. He said it was none of his business.

“It’s a misunderstanding.”

He made a face. “I don’t need a map, Dad,” he said, then he turned his back and loped off toward the garage.

It wasn’t hard, at that moment, to see that I’d risked, and possibly already blown, the most important part of my life. And for what exactly? Two years’ total immersion in an operation that Dimitri’s actions had turned into a tragic farce? I couldn’t accept that. There had to be more. I didn’t want medals or glory, but when Hawkeye finally folded I had to have more to show for my decision to cloak my life in a lie than a dead ex-friend, a firm handshake from Channon, and a full Army pension.

When Hawkeye began, it was meant to last six months. Six months had become two years, with Channon shifting the touchline quarterly. I’d embarked on the operation knowing that the price was to be a temporary deceit, but that was all. Temporary. With hindsight, of course, I can see that I’d dug myself into a treacherous emotional hole, one so deep it could destroy me. The months I’d spent on Hawkeye. The petty deceptions I’d practiced on my family. They’d become spurs for me to go on with the operation, as if I could somehow regain what I’d lost and be self-justified by some final overarching triumph.

But I glimpsed the truth that morning. Glimpsed it and pushed it aside. Two years of deceit. The sudden fracture in my family. Dimitri’s death. I was already in too deep to allow the truth any real life.

Brad disappeared into the garage, I called his name, and the door banged shut behind him. I stared at the wall a moment. Then turning slowly, I hauled myself up the stairs, and got ready for work.

CHAPTER 4

The Haplon offices were housed in a three-story aluminum-clad structure grafted to the front of the Haplon factory. The marketing department occupied most of the top floor, and Milton Rossiter had his office up there too. That gave us good access, but the downside was his access to me.

“Ned!”

My deputy, Gillian Streiss, was going through the leads from Springfield with me when Milton’s call came echoing down the hall. Arching her brow, Gillian flipped her notepad closed, then withdrew to her own office while I dragged myself out of my chair.

“Ned!” he shouted again just as I put my head around his door. He beckoned me in, hitting the intercom and bellowing instructions to someone in a far corner of the factory. His jacket hung over the back of his chair. A fax in the corner was churning out paper. “Can you lay your hands on Trevanian’s wish list?” he asked me.

I retrieved the list from my office.

“Trevanian’ll be here in two minutes,” Rossiter said, running a pen down the list, making crosses. “He wants to see the gear in action, whatever we can lay on for him. But definitely this stuff.” He handed me the list.

I remarked that it seemed like pretty short notice.

“You wanna tell him it’s not convenient or you wanna sell him the damn guns?” Rossiter hit the intercom again. This time he spoke to Darren down on our test-firing range, telling him to expect some customers in ten minutes. “And set up some fresh targets. And while you’re at it, how about runnin’ a broom over the place before they get there. I was down there this mornin’, looks like a fuckin’ sty.” He flicked off the intercom and faced me. “The Lagundi woman’s comin’ too.”

“Do we have any idea what name’s going to be on the End User Certificate? Presuming they place an order.”

Rossiter turned aside, tearing off a fax. “Nigeria,” he said.

I looked at him. An End User Certificate is attached to all arms transactions, it’s meant to guarantee the purchaser’s legitimacy and ensure weapons don’t end up in the wrong hands. In practice, the guarantee is frequently worthless. There are just too many corrupt public officials in impoverished countries who are willing to trade the appropriate signatures and rubber stamps for a relatively modest fee. And one of those impoverished countries, quite notoriously, is Nigeria.

“So we don’t know where they’ll go,” I said.

“They’ll go to Nigeria.”

When I snorted, Rossiter lifted his eyes.

“You wanna do this or not? Because if you don’t, I can always whistle Gillian in to handle it.”

I folded Trevanian’s list into my pocket. Rossiter kept his eyes on me steadily as I retreated into the hall.

Trevanian arrived in reception looking like he’d dressed for golf—checked pants and a green V-neck sweater. Lagundi was wearing a white slacksuit and a collection of heavy gold jewelry. She looked like a million dollars. I gave them each a pair of safety glasses, grabbed some for myself, then launched into the standard Haplon tour.

The factory and office block were on a thirty-acre site, the rear five acres of which were a dumping ground for obsolete and terminally broken-down machinery, a legacy from the days of Milton Rossiter’s father. The exterior of the main plant didn’t promise much either. It was a collection of buildings cobbled together from each decade of the late twentieth century, an architectural eyesore, but the interior really wasn’t so bad. The Pentagon can’t afford to be seen purchasing from sweatshops, and guys like Rossiter invest plenty to retain their preferred supplier status. The factory floor was always spotless. I led Trevanian and Lagundi around the machine shop, where our engineers were working on prototypes for the next generation of smart mortars. I showed them Big Tom, the automated lathe that had once reconditioned worn barrels from U.S. Army tanks that Rossiter’s father later on sold to various regimes in Central America. Trevanian acted interested when I gave him the history, but Lagundi didn’t bother.

From there we went out to the assembly lines, stopping behind the guy doing quality control on the night-sights. Trevanian gestured down the line of workers dressed in white overalls, hunched over a long bench, assembling electronic parts. He asked if we were busy. No more than usual, I told him. In fact, it was relatively quiet, we were almost down to a skeleton staff, but there was no sense letting Trevanian know how much we needed his order.

Next I took them out to the munitions line, a separate part of the Haplon plant, set away for reasons of safety. Though we’d never had an accident, there was enough missile propellant and gunpowder stored in our bunker to blow the average-sized neighborhood to hell. It was only a grandfather clause in Connecticut state law that allowed this part of the plant to operate at all, but Rossiter had grown tired of fighting the endless local petitions, and this whole operation was scheduled to move out to the Greenfield site in California before year-end. We watched some specially enhanced mortar shells being assembled on the line for a while, but when Trevanian started casting his eyes toward the giant wall clock, I knew that the recreational part of the tour was over.

Out back behind the plant, the Haplon firing range was about a hundred yards long, grassed banks to either side and a high earth bank behind the targets. Someone was already firing from one of the concrete bays when we entered the gallery. Micky Baker, who’d been standing behind the shooter, came over.

“We’re about done.” He jerked his head toward the armory. “Darren’s gone to get your stuff.” Darren, the Haplon rangemaster, the guy Rossiter had bawled out over the intercom. A yard broom, I noticed, was propped by the ammo cases, and the floor was clean.

I nodded to the shooter, asking Micky who the guy was.

“Rangemaster from Springfield,” he told me, and when I cocked a brow in surprise, Micky explained, “Cops were giving him the total third degree. Kind of blaming him for how that Fettners guy got killed. He figured he should get his own ballistics done on the pistols from the Springfield range. If the cops ever find the bullet that killed the guy, he figures he’ll be able to prove it didn’t come from the range.” Micky’s tone suggested that he thought the exercise was a waste of time.

Tapping my shoulder, Trevanian asked if there was a queue.

“You’re done,” I told Micky, and he went to tell the shooter.

Darren arrived then, pushing a trolley-load of weapons. While I looked the weapons over with Trevanian, Lagundi pulled up a chair. Micky and the Springfield rangemaster went to retrieve the bullets from the sand traps behind the targets.

“Someone said you knew Spandos,” said Trevanian, pulling the magazine off a P23 and inspecting the breech. I looked up. “Outside of business,” he added.

“We went through West Point the same time.”

“West Point.”

“What was he to you?”

“He handled some orders for me awhile back. Wouldn’t have picked him for a West Pointer.” He was fishing, but when I didn’t rise, he snapped the magazine into the gun, then turned to the range. Micky was still up at the targets, sifting the sand traps, so Trevanian replaced the weapon on the trolley.

“We had some Nigerian generals down here last month.” I gestured to the weapons. “They didn’t ask to see any of this.”

“Is that right?” said Trevanian. He couldn’t have cared less. Cecille Lagundi, seated behind the first firing bay, gazed up to the targets as if she wasn’t listening to our conversation.

Then Micky Baker’s voice came over the bunker speakers.
“Ned? You want bodies or circles?”

I glanced at Trevanian. Half and half, he said. I relayed the instruction over the intercom to Micky, who immediately set to work at the far end of the range. Once the targets were in place, Micky returned with the Springfield rangemaster. When Darren started taking Trevanian through the safety drill, I accompanied Micky and the other guy out of the bunker. I asked the rangemaster how everything finished up with the police.

“Finished?” He ran a hand over his bald head. “Jesus Christ, I wish it was. I tell ’em fifty fucking times the shot couldn’ta come from the range. You think they’ll listen?”

I indicated the envelopes he was clutching. “You going to write them?”

He opened an envelope. Inside was one of the bullets he’d retrieved from the sand traps. Then he showed me the number on the envelope: the serial number, he told me, of the gun from which the bullet was fired. “They ever find the bullet killed the guy, I’ll have my own ballistics ready.”

“I heard they’d given up searching.” Rossiter had told me that. I wasn’t sure if I believed him.

“Only the cops,” the rangemaster replied unhappily. “Those goof-offs dropped it in the too-hard basket. Sittin’ on their butts now, doin’ paperwork, blamin’ me.”

“The FBI are out there too,” Micky informed me.

“A whole fuckin’ team they got out there,” the rangemaster cut in. “Guys in suits directin’ guys in overalls. They marked out the parkin’ lot in square yards, checkin’ each square to see if maybe the bullet got buried in the tarmac. Take ’em weeks, the way they’re goin’.”

“What if they get a match with one of those?” I nodded to his envelopes.

“No fuckin’ chance,” he said. “No way.” He turned and started back to the Haplon offices.

When Micky Baker went to follow, I grabbed his sleeve. When the guy was out of earshot, I asked Micky, “What’s he doing using our range?”

“Rossiter’s deal. Rossiter called me in, said I should bring this friend of his down here. Let him blast away at whatever he wanted.”

“Friend?”

“Well, they seemed pretty friendly.” Micky drew away from me apologetically, anxious that the guy left in his charge might be found wandering the Haplon plant alone. I watched him jog off in pursuit of the rangemaster. I turned it over. The FBI’s arrival on the scene was no big surprise. Channon would have told the IRS what had happened out at Springfield, and they wouldn’t have hesitated to get the feds involved. But the connection between Rossiter and the Springfield rangemaster was unexpected. Unsettled, I returned to the bunker.

Darren gave me some ear protection, then we stood behind Trevanian as he took aim with a P23. When he squeezed the trigger, the gun jumped, and a metronomic thump-thump of semiautomatic fire went pounding into the target. Then he paused and switched to automatic. This time when he fired, the barrel juddered upward, the sound through my ear protectors was like a staccato clatter of drums. An odor of hot metal and burnt gunpowder filled the firing bays. From the corner of my eye I saw Lagundi raise a white handkerchief to her nose and mouth.

When he’d emptied the magazine, Trevanian flicked on the safety and reracked the gun. Pushing back his ear protectors, he went to join Darren, who was peering up the range through tripod-mounted binoculars. Darren stepped aside, and Trevanian bent to inspect the damage. Even with the naked eye you could see the body-target had been raked hip to shoulder.

“Ever have any trouble with the barrels?” Trevanian asked me, still peering through the binoculars.

I told him no, never.

“Fair rate of fire for a thing like that.”

“We’ve never had any trouble,” I repeated.

Stepping back, he squinted up the range. Unlike many buyers who came to try out the merchandise, Trevanian knew what he was doing. He wasn’t going to be rushed. He went back to the trolley and selected another gun.

He handled the bigger guns well, but his touch seemed to desert him when he moved down the scale. I noticed that he fired just the one magazine from the only pistol on the trolley, and he missed the bull by a mile. Half an hour it went on like that, Trevanian blasting targets, getting a feel for the guns, while Lagundi sat watching, not saying a word. Finally only one target remained, a full-body. When Trevanian reracked the last gun, Darren invited Lagundi to step up and take a shot. Trevanian declined on her behalf.

“Excuse me?” she said.

He looked over his shoulder. “You don’t need to.”

“I might want to.”

“Well, do you?”

His tone seemed to get to her. She rose, reached into her purse, and produced a Beretta.

Trevanian made a face. “This isn’t personal shooting practice. If you want to fire something, at least make it count. Choose a weapon off the trolley.”

She crossed to the firing bay. When Darren looked at me, I shrugged. As far as I was concerned she was a customer, she could do what she liked. Darren went and gave her some ear protection, and she clipped back her hair as he gave her the obligatory safety instructions.

“Can she shoot?” I asked, moving to stand beside Trevanian, watching her.

Trevanian bent over the trolley, reexamining the guns he’d been firing. He didn’t seem too pleased with her sudden display of independence. When Darren left her alone in the bay, Lagundi raised her pistol arm slowly and took aim like a sports shooter, like she knew which end of the gun meant business. Steadying herself, she sighted, then fired. Her gaze still fixed on the target, she let her arm fall.

“Low,” Darren announced, peering through the binoculars. “Six inches.”

She lifted her arm, then sighted and fired again.

“Still low,” Darren told her, less certainly.

She took aim a third time and fired. She didn’t wait for Darren’s verdict, she pumped three more bullets into the target, then ejected the empty magazine and returned to her chair. She took off the ear protection and starting rearranging her hair clips. Darren beckoned me across the bay to take a look through the binoculars. There were several white concentric circles on the head of the target, the bull’s-eye at the center. The circles were unmarked.

“Below the bull,” Darren said. I adjusted my gaze downward and saw it immediately, a grouping as tight and neat as you could hope for. Six bullet holes punched clean through the throat.

“Luck?” I wondered aloud.

“At seventy-five yards?” Darren pursed his lips and turned his head.

I contemplated the target a moment, the hairs prickling on my neck. Then I stood up and glanced over my shoulder. Trevanian was still at the trolley. Over on the chair, Lagundi’s pistol lay cooling by her purse. As she finished straightening her hair, her eye caught mine, and she smiled. Then she picked up the Beretta, dropped it into the purse, and told Trevanian it was time they were leaving. He rose, turning slowly from the trolley to face her. If looks could kill, she would have been dead.