Holy Terror Read online

  ‘Air – please, give her some air!’ he called out, and everybody shuffled back a few inches. He laid his hand on her forehead. ‘Heat exhaustion … she’s dehydrated. I need to get her to a hospital.’

  ‘You want I should call 911?’ asked the little Italian behind the counter.

  ‘Sir – I have a cellphone right here,’ offered a young businessman in yellow suspenders.

  ‘No, no thanks. She’s been having this trouble for weeks. I should take her directly to her specialist. If somebody could hail a taxi for me?’

  ‘Sure thing.’ The little Italian went to the door and let out a piercing whistle.

  Lacey began to murmur and stir, but Conor bent over her and whispered, ‘Stay floppy, OK?’ He could see a yellow taxi draw up outside. The little Italian came back in and said, ‘I got one. You want me to help you carry her?’

  Conor turned to the skinny old man in the wheelchair. The old man’s mouth was still cramful of pastrami sandwich. ‘Sir … do you mind if I borrow your chair… just to take her out to the taxi? I’ll bring it right back to you.’

  The old man said, ‘Mmmmfff, mmmfff,’ unable to speak, but he waved his arm to show that he was agreeable. He let down his left-hand armrest and heaved himself onto the chair next to him.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ said Conor. He lifted Lacey up from the floor and sat her in the wheelchair. The skinny old man raised the armrest for her and gave her a reassuring pat on the arm.

  ‘And, er, maybe your hat?’ asked Conor. ‘Just to keep the sun off her head.’

  ‘Mmmfff,’, said the man, and handed over the beaten-up old blue cotton hat that was resting on the table next to his coffee cup.

  ‘You’re a true gentleman,’ said Conor.

  ‘Did you see that?’ said a woman by the counter. ‘That’s what I call differently abled.’

  Conor pushed Lacey through the crowd of customers until he had almost reached the deli’s front door. Then he leaned forward and said quietly in her ear, ‘I want you to get out of the wheelchair and walk across to that taxi that’s waiting by the curb. Get in, and ask the driver to take you back to the office. Whatever you do, don’t look back.’

  More customers were coming into the deli doorway, but they stood aside to let Conor and Lacey out. For a moment there was a minor flurry of jostling and pushing on the sidewalk outside.

  ‘Now,’ said Conor, and patted Lacey on the shoulder.

  She climbed out of the wheelchair and elbowed her way through to the sidewalk. There were complaints of ‘Hey!’ and ‘Pardon me! Conor meanwhile took her place in the wheelchair. He tugged the old man’s hat right down over his eyes, and heaved himself out of the door. He took a sharp left toward 51st Street and kept on going, wheeling himself through the lunchtime crowds as fast as he could. He found the wheelchair almost impossible to control and he collided with shopping bags being carried by a large black woman in a loud African-patterned dress. ‘You one crazy driver,’ she told him.

  He had no way of telling if the waiting cops had realized who he was, and as he weaved his way toward the next intersection he expected at any second to hear a challenge or a gunshot. He didn’t dare to turn around. But he reached 51st Street and nobody shouted out. He slewed the wheelchair to the left, and kept on pushing himself as hard as he could until he reached the wide, descending entrance ramp to an underground parking facility. He turned into it and gave his wheels a final heave. A car was coming up the ramp toward him with its headlights blazing. It gave an echoing blast on its horn but he couldn’t stop himself. He pulled the wheelchair to one side and deliberately tipped it over, rolling onto the concrete floor and colliding with the curb. The car pulled up only inches away from him, and the driver climbed out, open-mouthed in horror.

  Conor climbed to his feet and limped down the ramp toward him. It’s OK,’ he said. ‘There won’t be any lawsuits.’ The driver couldn’t even speak; he watched in bewilderment as Conor hobbled to the elevators. As he did so, he heard a police car come howling down Lexington Avenue, closely followed by another.

  Conor reached the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. Just before the doors closed, two women joined him. Both wore wide-shouldered suits and their foundation was a concentrated shade of orange. They stared at him unblinkingly until the elevator chimed their arrival at the lobby and Conor was able to escape.

  Chapter 10

  The following morning he met Eleanor Bronsky at the Staten Island ferry terminal. The weather was still hot, but a refreshing breeze was blowing across the Upper Bay and ruffling the water. Eleanor was wearing a flowing white pants suit with blue flowers on it, and a blue straw hat. Conor wore dark glasses and a baseball cap and a big floppy sweatshirt with St Francis College printed on the back.

  He kissed Eleanor on the cheek and then said, ‘How did you find him so quick? I should have had you on my team when I was chief of detectives.’

  ‘It wasn’t too difficult. The Vaudeville Artistes’ Benevolent Fund didn’t know where he was. In fact they thought he was dead. But they put me on to Renata Valli, who was part of a famous mind-reading act. She gave me this address on Staten Island.’

  ‘And she thinks he’s alive?’

  ‘She knows he’s alive – unless he’s died since last Thursday. She had a letter from him dated August 5. He told her that he’s writing the definitive book on hypnotism and mind-reading and clairvoyance, and he wanted to know how Renata and her husband worked their famous truth-and-consequences act.’

  They shuffled on board the ferry in the middle of a chattering crowd of Japanese tourists.

  Eleanor said, ‘The Vallis’ act was very clever. Renata would go into the audience and touch the shoulder of anybody who had recently lied to their partner; and her husband would tell them exactly what they had lied about. I don’t know how they did it. Maybe they could read minds. Maybe they were nothing more than good judges of human nature.’

  They walked across the ferry’s deck and stood by the rail. ‘I haven’t done this since I was at school,’ said Conor.

  Eleanor took off her hat and let the breeze blow through her hair. ‘I used to take the ferry two or three times a week. I had a lover who lived at Oakwood Beach. An artist. Rex, his name was. Somewhere in this world there’s a very beautiful painting of me, lying on a couch wearing nothing but a pearl necklace.’

  The ferry sailed out into the bay, past Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty. The water glittered like broken glass, and seagulls circled around them, keening and crying.

  ‘Rex used to say that gulls sound so sad because they’re the souls of people who have drowned at sea. All the people who went down on the Titanic and the Lusitania. All those poor merchant seamen who were torpedoed during the war. That’s why he always brought crackers with him, to feed them.’

  She took out a cigarette and inserted it into her cigarette-holder. ‘Poor Rex. He was a very good artist, but he couldn’t stay away from the booze.’

  Conor looked back at the Battery and the shining towers of the World Trade Center. ‘You’re quiet,’ said Eleanor, after a while.

  ‘It’s this robbery. It’s driving me crazy.’

  ‘Well, tell me what’s bothering you about it. Maybe I can help.’

  ‘It just doesn’t make any sense. I mean, two gangs of thieves, both going after the identical safety deposit boxes, all within the space of a couple of hours? I believe in coincidences but I don’t believe in miracles.’

  ‘I suppose Ramon and Magda must have hypnotized you into giving them the combination to the strongroom.’

  ‘Well, me and Darrell Bussman both. I knew half of the code but Darrell was the only person who knew the other half. Even my deputy Sal didn’t know it.’

  ‘And of course you don’t have any way of proving that you’re telling the truth?’

  ‘I should have let the other two guys get away with the boxes, shouldn’t I? Then everybody would have thought it was them, instead of me.’


  Eleanor blew a stream of cigarette smoke into the wind. ‘You were only doing what you thought was right, weren’t you? Sometimes, when you do what’s right, the consequences can be very unfair. Then all you can do is grin and bear it.’

  Conor had the feeling that she wasn’t talking only about the robbery. She turned her face away for a while, and he didn’t say anything to interrupt her thoughts.

  Eventually, though, she said, ‘It’s interesting, you know, that both pairs of robbers went for exactly the same boxes. How do you think that happened?’

  ‘The only feasible explanation is that they both had an identical list.’

  ‘But where do you think they’d gotten that from?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I guess there’s a remote possibility that Ramon and Magda hypnotized me into downloading the list from my computer… but how those two other buttheads got a hold of it… who knows? Apart from Spurr’s lawyers, the only people who had access to it were me and Sal – and Sal, well, he had his problems, poor bastard, but he was straight as they come.’

  The ferry was passing the Military Ocean Terminal with its cranes and its containers and its railroad cars. Off to the south-east, past the Narrows, they could see the cat’s cradle of the Verrazano suspension bridge. Beyond the bridge, in the Lower Bay, an opalescent haze hung over the ocean, and a white-painted ferry was sailing out of it like a ghost ship.

  ‘There’s another thing that’s been bothering me,’ said Conor. ‘When those two thieves held us up in my office and told us to open the wall safe, the white guy went directly to the picture that it was hidden behind and took the picture down himself. Now, I’d be really interested to find out how he knew where it was.’

  ‘It does sound more and more like an inside job, doesn’t it?’

  Conor shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Eleanor. None of this has any logic to it. I have this really strong hunch that something’s going down here, something big, but I just can’t get any kind of a handle on what it is, or how it’s being done, or why.’

  ‘That’s why we’ve come to talk to Sidney, isn’t it?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Conor. They were approaching the Staten Island pier. The ferry blew its whistle and children waved at them from the shore. ‘The last thing I want to do is get you involved in any kind of trouble.’

  ‘Trouble? My dear man, I’ve been in trouble most of my life. I can’t get enough of it.’

  Just as they docked, Eleanor’s mobile phone rang. It was Lacey, speaking from a callbox outside the Rockefeller Center.

  ‘Michael Baer called me about five minutes ago, from your lawyers. Almost all of the safe deposit box owners have doubled their offers to pay you a reward. They say they just want their property back as soon as possible, no questions asked.’

  ‘They’ve doubled their offers? All of them?’

  ‘Almost all of them. They told Michael that you called every one of their lawyers personally and that you insisted on it.’

  ‘I’m pretty goddamn demanding, aren’t I?’

  ‘You sure are. But it looks like it’s paid off. Michael says we could be looking at over seventy million dollars.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God. Michael has to tell them that I’ve got nothing to do with this. Whoever’s been calling them, it sure wasn’t me.’

  ‘He tried to tell them. They won’t believe him. They thought he was just trying to screw the price up even more.’

  ‘I’m really beginning to wish I had taken the stuff. Did I say anything about how I wanted the money paid over?’

  ‘It seems like you’re going to call everybody later and tell them exactly what to do. Where to drop the money, where to pick up their property.’

  ‘How am I going to tell them all that when I don’t even know it myself?’

  ‘I guess the person who’s pretending to be you will fill them in with everything they need to know.’

  ‘Listen, Lacey, keep me up to date, huh? I need to know how the safety deposit box owners are going to hand over the money. The money-drop, that’s where they’re going to be really vulnerable.’

  There was a pause, and then Lacey said, ‘Are you OK, Conor? You don’t know how much I miss you. I know it’s stupid, but I’ve almost forgotten what you look like.’

  ‘I miss you, too. But I’m OK. I’m making progress. I think so, anyhow.’

  ‘I feel like we’ve lost each other for ever.’

  ‘We haven’t, believe me. Two or three days, tops, this will all be straightened out.’

  ‘I can hear seagulls.’

  ‘They’re not seagulls, sweetheart. They’re souls.’

  Sidney Randall lived in a tall, three-story house on Seguine Road, right down on the southern tip of Staten Island by Wolfes Pond Park. The house was made of stained red wood, with cream-painted windows and elaborately carved woodwork along the veranda; and it was deeply shaded by elms. In the driveway a ginger tomcat slept away the morning on the rusting gold roof of an elderly Chrysler New Yorker. The front yard was overgrown with wild-flowers and creepers; and convolvulus had already started to embrace the house, as if it wanted to drag it down into the earth.

  Conor and Eleanor climbed out of the taxi into the heat.

  ‘You know this guy?’ asked the taxi driver.

  ‘He’s a friend,’ said Eleanor, sharply.

  The taxi driver shrugged and said nothing, although he clearly implied that Sidney Randall was a well-known local fruitcake. ‘You want to be rescued, call this number,’ he said, and handed them a card.

  ‘Funny,’ said Eleanor. ‘I never thought that I’d ever come back to Staten Island. Rex had a studio not far from here, on Sharrott Avenue.’

  The front yard was busy with crickets. They climbed the steps and Conor pulled the doorbell, which had the cast-iron head of a snarling wolf. They waited a long time, listening for any response. Eleanor shaded her eyes with her hand and peered in through the diamond-shaped panes of yellow stained glass. ‘I can’t see anybody,’ she said. ‘But it looks like the back door is open, and I’m sure that I can hear music.’

  ‘Let’s try the rear,’ said Conor.

  They walked around the side of the house, negotiating a narrow path prickly with briars. The music grew more distinct: it was Pavane pour une infante défunte by Ravel – slow, melancholy piano music, in time with the heat and the chirruping of the crickets, and the treacly feeling that they had left the city behind and arrived in another world.

  In the yard, in a hammock slung between two apple trees, a tall bony old man was sleeping, with a white linen hat over his face. He wore a blue-striped shirt with a white collar, and voluminous white pants. A butterfly was perched on his bare big toe.

  ‘God, he’s aged,’ said Eleanor.

  She approached him through the knee-length grass. The butterfly flickered away. She stood beside him for a while, just looking at him. Then she slowly lifted his hat.

  He opened his eyes. He had an angular, sculptured face, with a prominent nose and a straggly gray beard. He looked like one of those characters standing third from the left in a Civil War photograph, while Sherman sits in front of him at a small folding table.

  ‘Saints alive, I’m dreaming,’ he said.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Eleanor. ‘It’s really, really me.’

  He sat up and peered at her. ‘By God, Bipsy, you’ve grown older.’

  ‘It’s been a long time, that’s why.’

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. You’re just as beautiful as you ever were.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Eleanor, in mock-petulance. ‘You’ve said it now.’

  ‘But it’s true! Did I ever lie to you? Did I ever lie to you once?’

  ‘Oh, stop all the sentimental nonsense. I’d like you to meet a new friend of mine, Conor O’Neil.’

  Sidney swung awkwardly out of his hammock. He came forward and laid his hand on Conor’s shoulder. ‘Glad to know you, Mr O’Neil. I won’t shake hands with you, it’s just a little problem I h
ave. But you’re welcome all the same. How about some iced tea? Or maybe a glass of wine? It’s damned hot, isn’t it?’

  ‘The Vaudeville Artistes’ Fund said you were dead, Sidney,’ Eleanor told him. ‘You’d better call them up and tell them that the rumors are exaggerated.’

  ‘Hell, no. I told them that I was dead to stop them pestering me. They kept calling me and asking me to come to charity cookouts and old folks’ get-togethers. I never worked for nothing before I retired and sure as hell I’m not going to work for nothing now. Just because I’m a senior they think they can take advantage.’

  He led them inside the house. It was much cooler here, even though he didn’t have air conditioning. He had left the doors open so that the heat could flow through and six or seven windchimes jangled in chorus.

  The floors were bare-boarded and varnished, with a scattering of threadbare rugs. The furniture looked as if it had been ordered from a Sears catalog at the turn of the century. Heavy quarter-sawed-oak chairs with leathercloth upholstery; sideboards that whole families could have lived in; Roman couches and china cabinets. In the hallway there were scores of framed posters advertising ‘Sidney Randall, Mesmerist Extraordinary’ with photographs of a much younger Sidney with his eyes bulging and his fingers extended in the archetypal pose of the stage hypnotist.

  ‘Never thought that I’d ever clap eyes on you again, Bipsy,’ said Sidney. He led them through to a high-ceilinged living room with a tigerskin rug and two bronze statuettes of naked Native American girls with feathers in their hair. The blinds were drawn but it was so sunny outside that the whole room was suffused with light. ‘Sit down … what’ll you have to drink?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  Sidney touched two fingertips to his forehead and then he said, ‘Sure I do. White Witch. Not sure if I have any Cointreau.’