The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (28 page)

Inside the terminal, Ford hung back beside the rental booths and cash machines. He kept his eye on the police. Three lonesome security guards. Two at the entrance, one, a free wheel, walked a length between the bureaux de change and the Hertz booth. Each of these men short, black-haired, weighty. He measured himself against them and realized that with very little effort they could catch him if they needed.

The flight, marked as landed, topped the message board. Ford watched the first passengers waddle through customs in a sudden huddle. He watched the backs of the waiting families and greeters and noticed how they steadily pressed forward each time the glass doors parted. Most of the passengers arrived in pairs and once through the gate they either scanned the crowd or walked purposefully on, burdened with luggage. He waited to see who would come forward at each arrival and had the feeling that these selections were random, as if these people did not know each other at all, as if this were a job in which some people were employed to arrive and others employed to greet. To stop himself fidgeting Ford crossed his fingers in his pocket.

Eric Powell did not appear.

Family groups welcomed friends and relatives, held them close, hugged and kissed with closed eyes and compressed smiles. Fewer arrivals now, and still Ford kept his eye on the greeters. If he could not identify Eric’s mother he would miss his only opportunity. No older single women stood out, so he walked to the back of the hall and stood by the automatic doors with an impatient eye on the arrivals. The security guards came together, chatted briefly, parted. A stubborn indolence locked in their movements.

Within half an hour the last fussing groups trooped out of the building and the taxi drivers returned to their cars, which left one lone woman in thin summer slacks and sandals, waiting with her back to a rental counter. Her hair a little flat from the rain, her shoulders damp. Her arms tightly crossed. The security guards stayed fixed to their positions.

The woman strained for a glimpse about the barrier. Ford held his breath. This woman, crisp, slight, dressed out of season, self-aware, a kind of quote about her ash-blonde hair clipped straight at her shoulder: the image of a professional who has to work at appearing casual. He wouldn’t have guessed that this was Eric’s mother, although the connection, now drawn, could be seen. A face too gaunt, too white, too proper: Northern European, while Eric appeared southern. Latin, perhaps Spanish.

She stood on tiptoe each time the automatic doors parted. She walked the length of the arrivals hall, past the clean line of desks to a solitary attendant closing the airline booth. She spoke with the attendant and appeared distant at first, then irritated. He could hear her questions repeat through the hall.
Was it possible that someone might still be in the baggage area? Or the toilets? Was there any way of checking?
Without a satisfactory answer she returned to the gate.

The announcement board began to clear. Air Malta, Libyan Arab, Lufthansa. The flights from Tunis, Bari, Zurich, and Tripoli disappeared in a neat clatter as the slates slapped blank. Ford stood under the board, head upturned, giddy at the idea that this was it, he’d found the boy’s mother but not the boy.

That Eric hadn’t appeared wasn’t exactly a surprise. For the boy to walk through customs bag in hand would be too simple a solution. Too occupied to properly consider this, the fact hung before him undigested. No Eric: no money.

The woman waited close by the gate. She asked the security guards if there were people still to come through. The men shook their heads and directed her back to the airline desk. As she returned through the hall she brushed her hair back, self-conscious now, a little brusque.

Ford followed behind and when the woman stopped at the desk he stood slightly behind and slightly to the side, as if waiting in line, close enough to listen. His only interest now was to locate the villa.

The woman gave a tight smile to the clerk. ‘Would you check to see if someone was on the flight?’ English, yes, but American also. The slightest lilt. She’d noticed Ford, half-turned, was that for him?

The attendant gestured at the computer and explained that she’d shut down the system but couldn’t in any case give information about the flight.

‘I understand. But I’m asking about my son. You can look, can’t you, for my son? The passenger list? It can’t be complicated.’

The attendant looked at her, cold. A girl, hard-faced, eyeliner etched fine along the lower lid. It wasn’t a matter of simplicity, she explained. She simply didn’t have the information.

‘My son’s name is Eric Powell. My name is Anne Powell. I have my passport. Check under Henderson. Eric Henderson. He might be travelling under his father’s name.’ The idea clearly aggravated her. She pinched the brow of her nose, summoned patience. ‘No. I bought the ticket. It’s Powell. He should be under Eric Powell. Has everyone come through from the baggage area? Could you check? They obviously won’t allow me through.’

Ford gave no visible reaction to the name.

The attendant, stiff in every gesture, said she would return.

‘It’s Powell,’ Anne repeated. ‘Eric Powell.’

Anne Powell waited at the desk, one arm on the counter. She turned to Ford with an expression of fixed irritation, and they looked at each other without remark, her eye catching on the small cut under his eye.

‘I’m sorry – are you waiting?’

When the attendant reappeared through the automatic doors, Anne immediately forgot her aggravation at Ford and walked toward her, brisk and clipped. Ford followed after, then asked the attendant himself if everyone had come off the flight. ‘I’m also waiting,’ he explained.

‘I’m sorry?’ Anne stopped and appeared puzzled. ‘But do you have information about my son?’

Ford tipped his head to the side and blinked. What was she asking?

‘Do you work for the airline? Do you know if my son was on the flight?’

‘No,’ Ford replied. ‘I don’t work for the airline.’

‘Then can’t you wait?’

Stung, Ford stepped back.

Anne turned to the attendant. ‘Did you find anything? Was he on the flight?’

The attendant gave a sympathetic frown as she explained that she had asked someone to check the arrivals area and the baggage-claim area, but there was no one there, and no one either in the facilities, the toilets. The manifest did not show her son on the flight. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.’

The security guards hovered close by with folded arms.

Anne Powell stiffened. ‘What do you mean, he wasn’t on the flight? Are you certain?’

The attendant apologized and slowly repeated that there was no one travelling under the name of Eric Powell. No such name on the manifest. It happens all the time.

Ford asked if
everyone
was off the flight and the attendant patiently repeated the information. ‘Sir, everyone has come through.’ The halls and lounges were all clear.

The guards grouped closer.

‘I don’t understand. What are you saying? Was he taken off the flight? Would you know if he had changed his booking?’

The attendant explained that it would be impossible for her to know what Anne was asking for, not without a booking reference, and this information couldn’t be retrieved right now. She would have to wait until the morning. She could either come to the airport or go to their offices in Valletta. Irritated, Anne turned smartly about and walked to the exit. The guards separated. The slap of her sandals clacked through the hall.

Ford followed quickly after and came purposefully out of the terminal to find Anne Powell with a mobile phone in her hand: if she was speaking with Eric he wanted to hear. Instead of speaking, she snapped the phone shut and signalled a cab.

The woman hesitated before she opened the door, as if she sensed him, Ford couldn’t be sure, but some doubt caused a momentary pause. When she sat in the cab she closed her eyes, and Ford saw her mouth the name of the village, the name he had read in her letter:
Marsaskala
. She leaned forward, the cab window opened, and she repeated the name to the driver, a hint of anxiety over her pronunciation.
Marsaskala
.

He watched the cab round away from the terminal and repeated
Marsaskala, Marsaskala
, into the night.

The next morning Ford set up post in a café opposite the airline office. He sat in the shade cast by a statue of Queen Victoria, obstinate, pig-faced, the grey stone flecked white. He watched the streets, the offices, the surrounding shops with a sharp eye, alert to every change. The sun slowly crossed the square. Anne Powell did not show.

Ford revised his plan. He would go to Marsaskala and find a similar café where he would wait. The waiter brought him a newspaper which he scanned quickly for news of Howell, HOSCO, and again found nothing.

5.3

The rain stopped in the late afternoon, the sky broke in one moment from grey to a mellow blue. On his way from his hotel to the bus terminal Parson browsed through a small market. He took with him a baseball cap he’d bought in Istanbul, and bought a plain short-sleeved shirt, a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses he thought he might keep afterward, but chose them mostly because he thought
this
or
that
suited his idea of Sutler. In front of the mirror he asked himself how a man who’d stolen fifty-three million might dress. This shirt, that shirt? These sandals, those flip-flops? He found himself distracted by the buses rounding the fountain with their white roofs and sunny yellow sides, as if these were familiar to him, part of a memory – or were strangely some kind of a joke, too small and toy-like to take seriously.
Laura would like this
, he told himself.
This would be her thing.
Finally, everything ready, he was satisfied that with the hat, shirt, sunglasses, he looked nothing like himself. As there were no photos of Sutler, this would have to do.

He took the bus to Msida then walked along the marina, the sunlight beginning to dry the pavement. He liked the view across the inlet, the watchtowers at the bastion walls, the water flat in the bay, silver and alive, the boats, their ropes slapping at masts, and how lazy this appeared, picture-perfect: there wasn’t anything he didn’t like. He began to prepare for Sutler’s departure, thinking all the time what a great game this was, and under the name
Paul Geezler
he upgraded the room he’d reserved at Le Meridien to a suite, then booked a passage, second-class, from Valletta to Palermo and on to Naples. If he was to negotiate Sutler’s silence, then he would first need to find the man, and this could take some time. Sutler, under Geezler’s name, would travel at night to Sicily, and slowly roam the small Italian islands on his way to Naples. He asked for the booking information to be passed to the hotel and gave a fake credit-card number, knowing that this would be reported first to the hotel, then to the police. He couldn’t gauge the amount of fuss he should stir: how much trouble would a man who’d stolen fifty-three million dollars make? He couldn’t guess. Just as he had no real knowledge of what fifty-three million dollars would look like, or what, in any real sense, fifty-three million dollars actually meant in any meaningful way. What, for example, would that be in yachts? Fifty yachts? Thirty? Twenty? Every yacht in the harbour? How much did these things cost? It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but imagining the harbour without thirty or fifty yachts made little difference to him and would barely alter the view. Busy or empty the harbour would appear just as picturesque.

A kind of melancholy grew in him as he walked along the promenade. It troubled him to realize how so much money could mean so little.

While most of the boats were occupied, only one appeared occupied, with a couple on board, who were preparing for the evening:
L’Olympia, Bordeaux
, stately white and blue, held herself politely in the water.

On a first pass Parson saw through to the saloon. A woman in the lower cabin, dressed in a long cream-white dress, prepared for her evening. Above, on deck, a man in slacks, similarly presentable, busied himself tying ropes, securing blue hoods over white seats, a cloth in his hand, an impatience about him. Two worlds in one view. The man on deck, in public. The woman alone, studying herself, hand roving down her stomach, shifting from side-view to three-quarter to make up her mind. Sunlight softly breached the port windows and bounced off the water, the water, untroubled, stirred with a soft lick and a lap.

Parson found shade and sat on the wall so that when the man straightened up he would look across the promenade and see Parson, or rather, not Parson but Paul Geezler, or rather, not Geezler, but Stephen Sutler as Paul Geezler. For this to work they would need a name, Sutler or Geezler. Either would work.

When the couple came off the boat Parson stood up, brushed pastry flakes from the front of his shirt, and swore loud enough to get the man’s attention.

He followed them along the promenade’s curve. As they walked the couple admired the boats massed about the slat-wood piers before the Sailing Club. He allowed them to move ahead certain that he had fixed himself as an event in their minds.

Once the couple entered the restaurant bar of the Msida Sailing Club he decided to return to his hotel.

Parson reserved a table under Geezler’s name at the Hotel Blass Grand – why be subtle now? If Sutler had money, this would be the time to spend it. He leaned over the counter as he made the booking, spelled out the name, insisted that the clerk repeated it, and gave him a tip for pronouncing it right. After roughing it in Iraq and Turkey, the luxury of the Blass Grand would be impossible to resist, and Parson wanted the idea put out that Sutler was beginning to spend his money. The hotel sat on the harbour edge, elegant in the day, but splendid at night with strings of light reflecting in the bay from the terrace, the city appearing as an extension of the hotel, as wings opening out, honey yellows and gold.

The next afternoon Parson returned in the same clothes to the Msida Sailing Club restaurant and bar, and was the only client for the first hour. When a group of women came breezily off the promenade, he assumed that they were tourists and noticed that some of them were dressed alike. He watched out of idleness as they took two tables by the windows, and realized that the women were in pairs because they were twins, not all identical, but still, twins. He counted as more came off the promenade, seven couples now, eight couples and more, all of them women, and this time their likenesses being very close: not only their faces and build, but the clothes and hairstyles were matched without flaw. Parson welcomed the diversion. He no longer wanted to think of Sutler, the whole situation having occupied him continuously for so long that the idea just tired him out.