The Consignment (9 page)

I reminded her that by then she was remarried. “Maybe Dimitri didn’t want to screw up your new family,” I said.

“Dimitri? Mr. Consideration? Let’s stay in the real world here. I’m not saying he wasn’t glad Laurence took the maintenance problem out of his hands, but listen. If Dimitri didn’t come and see the girls it was because he’d written them out of his life.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Why?” She looked at me with sudden challenge. “What makes you so sure?”

“They were his kids.”

“That’s it?”

“Olympia. He’s dead.”

Her gaze never wavered. Now I seriously wanted to get lunch over with and return to the Geometrics lab. Dimitri’s death seemed to have hit her harder than I’d first thought, maybe even unbalanced her a little. This was Fiona’s territory, not mine. I bowed my head over my pepperoni pizza. Olympia set down her cutlery.

“I thought I loved him, Ned. But you know what? I never even knew him. I only realized that after I married Laurence. I had a lot of good times with Dimitri, sure, but we were never close the way Laurence and I are now. Dimitri wouldn’t let me get that close. He always had the goddamn Rangers to fall back on, you guys were his real family. When you told me he’d gone into Delta, it was, like, no big surprise. He was full of that whole Army bullshit, death before dishonor.”

“He was probably the finest soldier I ever served with.”

“He was a crappy husband and father.” She shook her head. “Then when Fiona told me he’d quit Delta, that he was making this big career move, going into the private sector, selling guns—”

“I did that too.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And you know how Fiona felt about that.” I stared at my fork. What Fiona had told me at the time was that if my decision to resign my commission was genuinely heartfelt, then she was behind me. But I knew, of course, that she was never really one hundred percent behind my move to Haplon. It was just that for Fiona, any job I took, even a job selling arms, was infinitely better than seeing me return to active service. “I’m not saying I didn’t know what Dimitri was like,” Olympia went on. “Hell, if it hadn’t been for the gambling, I’d have stayed with him. I wouldn’t have even met Laurence.” She paused, then added, “Maybe if I’d stuck with him, Dimitri wouldn’t have gotten involved in that other stuff either.”

When I lifted my eyes, she was watching me.

“Other stuff?” I said, and she nodded. I felt my heart beat. My first thought, naturally, was Hawkeye. Was it possible that, contrary to every operational rule in the book, Dimitri had told Olympia what he was doing? But after a moment’s reflection, that thought seemed crazy. He wasn’t in any kind of regular contact with Olympia, and even if he had told her, she wouldn’t have been able to keep it from Fiona. And Fiona wouldn’t have kept it from me. “What other stuff?” I ventured at last.

She shook her head. She said it wasn’t my problem.

“Olympia.” I looked at her.

Sighing, she pushed aside her plate. “The IRS has frozen Dimitri’s assets. His papers were lodged with this lawyer. The IRS was on to the guy the day after Dimitri died. They put a freeze on everything. Deeds to Dimitri’s apartment. Stock certificates.”

“This lawyer called you?”

“Dimitri left everything to the girls. He put me down as a trustee until they reach twenty-one.”

The earlier part of our conversation suddenly came into perspective. This is what had been playing on her mind. “So he hadn’t written them out of his life.”

“His estate’s worthless, Ned. At least it will be by the time the IRS is through with it. Somehow, you know, that wasn’t a real big surprise. You know what Dimitri was like with money. Some bank’s seized his apartment, he was way in arrears on his payments.” She took a sip of water, then considered the glass. “Was it an accident?” she said.

“Did someone say that it wasn’t?”

“His lawyer told me the IRS was asking questions about Dimitri’s work. Like maybe that had something to do with his death.”

“It was an accident,” I said firmly.

She frowned at her plate. She was still holding something back, so I folded my arms and waited. She took a few seconds with herself, then finally came out with it.

“There’s a trust fund. I’d never heard a damn thing about it, but it turns out Dimitri set it up after we divorced, for the girls. It’s not part of his estate. The lawyer never mentioned it to the IRS. He says they can’t touch it anyway. But he doesn’t want any more to do with it either, so he’s putting the paperwork through to make me sole trustee.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

She grimaced. “Was it really an accident?”

It took me a moment. “You’re drawing a connection between the trust fund and Dimitri’s death? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t it?”

I averted my gaze. Olympia read me.

“I’m not going crazy, Ned.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “There’s five hundred thousand dollars in the fund, and I don’t know where Dimitri got it.” I sat frozen. Stunned. Five hundred thousand? Olympia’s hands bunched into fists on the table. Her knuckles were white. “If I’d known the son of a bitch had half a million dollars sitting there while I was snipping out grocery discount coupons, I’d have killed him myself.”

The results were delayed, so I waited in the hall outside the Geometrics lab, where I had time to ponder Olympia’s story. She wasn’t going crazy. There was simply no way Dimitri could have accumulated half a million dollars from regular savings out of his monthly paycheck. Gambling? But how many gamblers have those kind of wins? The only other obvious source was some cloak-and-dagger corner of the arms trade, and after what Channon had told me, it seemed possible. Given where and how Dimitri died, Olympia’s concern made a whole lot of sense. She didn’t want the same kind of violence spilling over to her and her family, but equally she didn’t want to relinquish the money, not to the IRS or anyone else. Laurence’s illness had taken a heavy financial toll on them, and she’d told me over coffee that she wasn’t sure they’d have enough savings to put the girls through college. The trust fund, if they could hold on to it, would make everything possible.

God, that would be so weird, she’d said, gazing into her cup. Dimitri dead, finally doing something right.

She wanted to send me the trust deed and the statements of account. I couldn’t see what good that would do, but I didn’t have the heart to refuse her. Besides, there was always a chance, a very small one, that the statements might give me a clue as to what Dimitri had been up to, and with whom, before he died. After thinking it through, I decided that for the time being, at least, there was no need to reveal the existence of the trust fund to Channon. He might feel obligated to report its existence to the IRS, and that wouldn’t help Olympia at all. She deserved better from me than that.

When Fiona finally emerged from the lab, I got to my feet. She handed me the petri dish containing the stone as we headed for her office.

“What are they trying to buy from you?” she asked me.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes I do.”

I tapped the container. “Liberia?”

She turned in to her office. I asked her if they’d confirmed it D flawless.

“It’s a D flawless,” she said, dropping the lab printout on her desk and facing me as I went in. “What are you selling them, Ned?”

“What do you think we’re selling them?”

“Okay, how much are you selling them? A lot?”

“Enough.” I flipped through the printout. It was full of numbers and symbols, geophysical terminology as incomprehensible to me as hieroglyphics. “So where’s the stone from?”

“Enough for what?” she said. “To fight a war?”

“A small one,” I admitted.

“If there’s an arms embargo on the country, you can’t sell them anything.”

I dropped the printout on her desk. She knew me better than to believe I was going to embark on an impromptu debate on the ethics of the arms trade. She sat and dropped her head onto one hand. I asked her again if she’d gotten a fix on the stone. This time she nodded.

“Liberia?” I said.

“No.”

I was surprised. I raised a brow.

When she looked up, her eyes had filmed over. “Mbuji-Mayi,” she said. “The goddamn Congo.”

CHAPTER 11

“Up here!” Brad called after I’d shouted his name a few times. “In the loft!”

I went up the stairs to the landing, where I found the loft ladder locked into position. At the base of the ladder lay a jumbled pile of small canvas sacks. Geologists’ sample bags. Another one dropped from the loft as I neared.

“Hold fire!”

“They’re empty,” Brad called, dropping another.

I mounted the ladder and climbed on up. Brad was seated on a crate, sorting through a trunk I hadn’t seen for years, a piece of U.S. Army surplus I’d acquired somewhere along the way. Fiona had requisitioned it in the days before she rose into management. She used to store her field equipment in the trunk, occasionally she’d even taken the whole damn thing with her out to a site.

“Mom thought I might find some stuff in here.” Brad rummaged in the trunk despondently. “All’s it is is sample bags and rocks.”

I stepped off the ladder onto the warped wooden floor. Brad asked me what I was doing home.

“I was over at Geometrics. One of our customers needed a stone looked at.” I cast around for some subtle way of approaching what I had to say. “How was your dinner with Barchevsky?”

“Okay. What kind of stone?”

“I guess you told him you got your visa.”

Brad nodded, hanging his head over the trunk again. Another canvas bag arced through the air past my face and plummeted down to the foot of the ladder. “Mom’s already given me the routine, Dad, so save your breath. I’m not gonna change my mind.” He rummaged some more, then dropped the trunk lid. Turning, he opened an old chest of drawers. “If her field kit’s not in here, I give up.”

“Did you discuss the situation out there with Barchevsky?”

“Oh, give me a break. Were you listening? I’m not gonna change my mind, okay?” There was a sharpness to his tone that had nothing to do with the Congo. I decided, foolishly, to tackle it head on.

“Brad. There is nothing going on between me and some other woman.”

His back turned to me, he shrugged. “Whatever,” he said.

I felt my hackles rise. Looking back, I can see that I’d already lost the argument, that he was going to hire himself out to Barchevsky regardless of any objection from me. And on the subject of my relationship with his mother, he’d thrown up a wall that was simply unbreachable. The one time in years when I really needed to communicate with my son, and there was absolutely no way through. I took out the petri dish.

“This is what I had Geometrics look at.” When Brad looked over his shoulder, I told him, “It’s a rough diamond. By all accounts, a good one.”

I tossed the dish, he spun around and caught it. His professional curiosity finally got the better of him, and he rolled the rough in the dish, then popped off the lid and pushed the stone with his finger. “Did they grade it?”

“D flawless.”

“Be worth somethin’,” he remarked, then his glance suddenly shot up. “This isn’t, like, for Mom, is it?” It took me a moment to understand his concern. When I did, I screwed up my face. Was it a gift, he meant, to assuage my guilt over the mysterious other woman. “If it is—” he said.

“It isn’t.” I lifted my hand. “It’s nothing to do with your mother and me, all right? Someone’s offering a heap of those as payment for Haplon materiel. I took it to Geometrics to see if they could tell us where it’s from.”

“That’s a problem?”

“If they’re conflict diamonds, it’s a big problem.”

He asked me about the End User Certificate. Living under the same roof with me, he had not completely missed the mechanics of my purported trade.

“Nigerian,” I said.

He studied the stone in the dish. “So now I’m guessin’ this isn’t Nigerian.”

“No. That’s from the Congo.”

Brad kept his eyes down. After a second he dipped his head, resealed the dish, and handed it back to me. Stepping past me, he swung himself onto the ladder and started down.

“Brad. It’s from the Congo.” He continued his descent. When I looked down through the opening, he was gathering up the sacks from the foot of the ladder. “Haplon won’t be the only supplier they’ve approached,” I told him. “And there’s every chance that whoever’s behind this has already done other deals. Someone in the Congo’s rearming.”

“You’re guessing.”

I went down the ladder fast, then faced him. “What if I am? If the shooting starts up again out there, you know what they’ll be fighting over. They’ll be fighting over the diamond fields. And where are you going to be?”

“Barchevsky says it’s cool.”

“Barchevsky’s not a soldier.”

“Well, neither am I. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Dad, neither are you.” Having delivered this low blow, he wrapped his arms around the bundle of canvas sacks and started down the stairs. When the phone in my study started ringing, he jerked back his head. “That damn thing’s been going half an hour.”

Ignoring the phone, I went after Brad. I caught up with him in the garage, where he dropped the sacks, then knelt on the concrete floor and began sorting through them.

“I’d like you to postpone your trip. I think your mother would too.”

“Did she ask you to say that?”

“No.”

“This isn’t like some camping trip I’m goin’ on. It’s a job, not a vacation. You don’t just phone in and cancel.”

I asked him if he would mind me calling Barchevsky. His head rose sharply.

“Yes, I damn well do mind.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know—”

“For chrissake, you want it in semaphore? N. O. No. Don’t speak to Barchevsky, it’s none of your damn business.” He eyed me a moment, then got up and kicked aside the sacks, making for the stairs to his room.

“I’m asking you not to go, Brad.”

“And I’m tellin’ you I’m goin’,” he said.

“For your mom’s sake.”

He stopped and swung round. “Oh, Jesus, that is too good. For Mom’s sake, like that really matters to you. Like you really care about her feelings.” I stayed silent. I did not trust myself to speak. Brad took a step toward me. “I come down this mornin’, I find her in the goddamn kitchen, crying. Not just a little teary, honest-to-God crying. She’s got her elbows on the table, her head’s in her hands, and the tears are just pouring into her Cheerios. It was like when Grandpa died. That’s what I thought at first, you know. Who’s died?”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Don’t you get it? Or is it you don’t wanna get it?”

I turned for the door, there was no point staying. We were not going to have any kind of rational discussion on the security situation in the Congo. But Brad cut in front of me.

“She doesn’t need you to talk to her. She wants you to stop screwin’ around.”

I tried to step by him, but he moved and blocked my way. We looked at each other.

“I could tell you it’s none of your damn business,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “So tell me,” he said.

It was well and truly time for me to leave. I lifted a hand, intending to ease him out of my way, but suddenly his shoulder dipped and his fist came swinging up. My left arm rose instinctively, blocking the punch. Appalled, my arm remained frozen in the air, locked against Brad’s arm.

“Son,” I said.

Then he hit me with his left, a straight jab that caught me full in the mouth. I staggered back, he swung again, and I ducked, grabbed his arm, and drove my shoulder hard up under his ribs. He buckled and fell backward, slamming into the door. I kept hold of his arm as we slid to the floor. He was strong, and if I let go of his arm he would keep swinging until I was forced to really hurt him to make him stop. Pulling his thumb back to his wrist, I twisted and pushed his arm high up his back as he hit the floor. Then I jammed my other forearm down across his shoulders and pinned him with the weight of my body.

Ah, he cried. Jesus.

“Settle down, Brad, I’ll let you go.”

“Get off. You’re breaking my fucking arm!”

He bucked, pushing with his knees, twisting his body, but I held on. I leaned some more weight on his thumb, and he cried out again and kept fighting. He cursed me.

I ran my tongue over the backs of my teeth. There was a taste of blood, but no teeth were dislodged or broken. In some ways I might have felt better if they were. My own son had slugged me. After twenty-three years, this is where we’d ended, what we’d come to. From me, ineffective good intentions riding on a wide sea of deception, and from my son, the overpowering urge to strike.

“Okay, I’m going to let go of your arm.”

He went rigid, one cheek resting against the concrete, breathing hard. I gave it a moment, then I eased the pressure off his thumb. As his arm slid down his back, straightening, I lifted my weight off him, then I shuffled back on my knees and stood up. He rolled onto his back, holding his shoulder. He didn’t rise.

“You okay?” I said.

He sat up, still holding his shoulder. He wouldn’t look at me. My fingers went to my bottom lip, it was starting to swell, but the real hurt went a hell of a lot deeper. I felt about as bad as I’d ever felt in my entire life. The doorbell rang, a long, insistent peal. It stopped, then rang again.

“You expecting someone?” I asked Brad.

He didn’t reply. He clambered to his feet, crossed to the stairs, and climbed up to his room. The door closed behind him.

I clasped my hands behind my head and looked up at the ceiling. There was not a damn thing I could say, nothing I could do, that would even begin to put things right. When the doorbell rang again, I strode out to the hall and flung open the door. Rita Durranti was standing on my doorstep, looking wild. Wild and worried.

“You too busy to answer your phone?” she said. I lifted my chin. “Greenbaum needs the diamond,” she told me, holding out her hand.

“What are you doing here?”

“They’re going to sign the deal.”

“What the hell are you doing at my home?” I said.

She put a hand on my chest. “Trevanian’s going to Rossiter’s office to sign the deal. Those papers you took?” Those papers, the ones stashed upstairs in the ceiling of my study. I felt my heart lurch. “Have you got them here?” she asked me.

I nodded, momentarily dazed. When Rossiter got to his office and opened his cabinet, he would find the papers gone. She clicked her fingers, asking me for the diamond again. I took out the petri dish and gave it to her.

“I can get the stone back to Greenbaum,” she said, slipping the dish into her purse. “But if you want to keep Hawkeye alive, you’ll have to do something about that paperwork. They’ve just left Rossiter’s apartment.”

I didn’t have the first idea what I was going to do. Rita read that in my face.

“At least get it out to your office,” she suggested.

“Then what?”

Turning, she hurried down the front path, calling over her shoulder. “I don’t know, Ned. But whatever it is, do it fast.”