Holy Terror Page 14

  They couldn’t miss Davina Gambit. She was standing in the far left-hand comer in a bright yellow suit and a hat that looked like a monstrous daffodil. She was a tall woman, a tanned, gleaming blonde of 48, with a pouting red mouth and eyes that had the wind-tunnel look of somebody who has had all their wrinkles erased by cosmetic surgery; and probably more than once.

  Next to her was her lawyer, David Dempsky, a small man with thick black curly hair and a face like an unhappy lemur, with dark-ringed eyes and a pointy nose. He was wearing a dark three-piece suit and a black yarmulke.

  Conor approached them cautiously, looking right and left, with Sidney following close behind. He made a quick check of the tourists and worshipers in the immediate vicinity, but it looked as if all of them were genuine.

  ‘Ms Gambit?’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Conor O’Neil.’

  Davina Gambit held out a yellow-gloved hand. Conor didn’t try the handshake induction on her. He didn’t dare.

  ‘Who’s this character?’ asked David Dempsky, nodding tersely toward Sidney.

  ‘He’s a friend, that’s all. He’s totally neutral. You don’t have to know who he is.’

  ‘So why did you want to meet here, of all places?’

  ‘Because it’s the house of God, that’s why, and I wanted to make sure that you honored your word. No wires, that’s what you promised. No cops, no nasty surprises.’

  David Dempsky looked around, as if he half expected to see God watching him from one of the balconies. ‘You stole my client’s property and you’re talking about honor?’

  ‘I didn’t steal your client’s property.’

  ‘Are you trying to be funny here? You sent me copies of three of her private letters.’

  ‘Not me, Mr Dempsky.’

  ‘Not you? What do you mean, not you? What are you trying to do, screw her for even more money? She’s given you two and a half million, for God’s sake—’ He ducked his head down and said, ‘Forgive me, Lord.’ Then, ‘She just can’t afford any more.’

  If you were trying to bankrupt me, Mr O’Neil,’ said Davina, in a strong Estonian accent, ‘then believe me, you have succeeded.’

  ‘You’ve already sent me the money?’ asked Conor, in bewilderment.

  ‘Transferred it yesterday afternoon, as per your lawyer’s instructions. I hope you’re satisfied.’

  ‘Ms Gambit, I didn’t take your money, and if my lawyer accepted it then he was certainly acting without my authority. I didn’t take your letters, even though the police and the media are convinced that I did. However, I have some idea who might have taken them, and the reason I asked you to meet me here today was to see if you could help me to locate them.’

  David Dempsky shook his head from side to side. ‘I don’t know about this. What can I say? I talked to Lieutenant Slyman just yesterday afternoon and he said that he’s one hundred per cent convinced that you’re the perpetrator.’

  Davina Gambit said, ‘If it wasn’t you who took my papers, Mr O’Neil, then who was it? Please, I beg you! I have to get those letters back, or else I really will be ruined! My reputation, my alimony payments, everything!’

  ‘Davina – will you please try to keep your mouth closed?’ David Dempsky demanded. ‘We still don’t have any evidence that Mr O’Neil here isn’t playing some kind of double bluff.’

  ‘But he has such an honest face!’

  ‘An honest face? John Gotti has an honest face!’

  ‘It’s ridiculous!’ Davina Gambit suddenly sobbed, with tears glittering in her eyes, ‘They are only love letters!’

  ‘Love letters, and that’s all?’ Conor asked her.

  ‘Maybe a little more than love letters. Some of them contain other things … wild things, fanciful things. Things I should never have done. Things I should never have written about, anyway.’

  ‘Davina, for God’s sake will you shut your trap?’ David Dempsky protested. Then, ‘Forgive me, Lord.’

  Conor said, ‘When the perpetrator called you up and made his demand, did you tape-record that conversation?’

  ‘The perpetrator? What the hell are you talking about? You were the perpetrator!’

  ‘Mr Dempsky, I was not. And I really need to know if you made a tape recording.’

  David Dempsky sniffed and twitched. ‘Tape? No, no tape.’

  ‘You mean to say you don’t normally record conversations with your callers?’

  ‘Not in this case, no.’

  ‘But you’re a very good lawyer, aren’t you?’ Sidney put in.

  ‘Yes, I like to think so.’

  ‘And you work for Litwak & Dempsky?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you represent Ms Davina Gambit personally?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you always make sure that you protect her best interests?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which makes you feel quite comfortable?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In fact it makes you very comfortable. Very comfortable indeed. You don’t have to worry about anything I’m saying because you’re still in control of everything that matters. You’re very comfortably in control. Your mind will act as your secretary, taking care of all the minor details.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So after the man called, asking for money for Ms Gambit’s letters, where did you put the tape? Did you file it? Did you put it in your desk? Did you give it to one of your assistants?’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ asked Davina Gambit, in a forced whisper. ‘What are you doing to him?’

  ‘Ssh,’ said Conor. ‘Let him finish.’

  ‘I put the tape into my deshk drawer,’ said David Dempsky. His voice was wet and blurry, as if he had just had a local anesthetic at the dentist. ‘My middle deshk drawer, and locked it.’

  ‘You locked it?’

  ‘Yesh.’

  ‘Is it still there?’

  ‘Yesh.’

  ‘In that case I want you to go back to your office with Ms Gambit and take the tape out of your drawer. I want you to give it to Ms Gambit, that’s all you have to do. Then I want you to sit at your desk and stay there and write out “Some say the world will end in fire … some say in ice”, over and over. After a while the phone will ring and you will hear my voice. I will count to five and you will then be fully awake. You will remember nothing about the tape whatsoever. You will remember nothing about coming here to the synagogue.’

  ‘Are you hypnotizing him?’ asked Davina Gambit. ‘My God!’

  Sidney smiled. ‘We’re just encouraging him to be a little more co-operative, that’s all.’

  ‘Ms Gambit, will you go back to his office with him and collect the tape?’ asked Conor. He took hold of her hand, grasping it firmly at first and then slowly and provocatively letting go, in the way that Sidney had shown him. ‘Meet us in the entrance lobby, by the news-stand.’

  He looked into her eyes, except that he focused on the pillar just behind her. ‘You know that this is the best thing to do. You can trust us completely.’

  Davina Gambit frowned at him. ‘All right,’ she said. Then, with much less confidence, ‘All right.’

  She kept on blinking as if she couldn’t decide where she was or what she was doing. She took hold of David Dempsky’s hand and the two of them walked off together toward the temple’s Fifth Avenue entrance. Her yellow high heels clicked and clattered on the floor like a young filly trying to negotiate a slippery ramp up to the horsebox.

  Sidney took off his glasses and held them up to the light. ‘I really must clean these. Thumbprints. You had her in a trance. A light trance, admittedly, but she was extremely receptive. She was looking for somebody to tell her what to do next; with any luck she’ll do what you suggested. Now – let’s get down to Litwak & Dempsky and see if that luck holds out.’

  * * *

  They loitered around the lobby of the American Legal Building for over twenty minutes, trying not to look conspicuous. This wasn’t easy, because the lob
by was a vast marble-clad atrium that went up three floors, with over a third of an acre of floorspace, and splashing fountains and elevators continually sliding up and down its sides.

  Two security guards in brown uniforms came out of the elevators and walked around the atrium for a while. Conor recognized one of them as John Shaughnessy, a detective who had been retired from Conor’s squad after a shooting incident, and lifted his newspaper higher in case he recognized him.

  The elevator doors opened again and Davina Gambit emerged, her high heels clickety-clacking. She came straight over to Conor and thrust a tape cassette at him as if she were returning it to the store because it was faulty. ‘Here,’ she said, her accent thick, very back-of-the-throat.

  ‘Thank you, Ms Gambit, you don’t know much I appreciate this.’

  ‘I don’t care whether you appreciate it or not. You just make sure that you get my letters back.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can. But listen … whatever you do, don’t pay out any more money to anybody until you hear from me.’

  ‘And supposing they threaten to send my letters to my ex-husband? Or the media, even? What do I do then?’

  ‘Call this number. Talk to my girlfriend. She knows how to get in touch with me.’

  ‘You really think I can trust you?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Conor. ‘You can trust me.’

  ‘You give me a strange feeling, you know, like I’ve known you for a long time.’

  Maybe it was the lighting in the atrium but Conor suddenly saw her in a different way. Underneath all the foundation and the blusher, she had a strong, plain, well–structured face. He saw her for what she was: an Eastern European woman of no particular background who had determined to make herself into a wealthy New York socialite.

  Conor said, ‘You won’t remember that you gave me this tape.’

  ‘Oh, yes I will. You think that you can hypnotize me, too? Well – maybe you can – but not in the way that your friend can do it. A different way.’

  They went back to Sebastian’s apartment and played the cassette on his elegant Bang and Olufsen tape deck. The voice of the blackmailer was very indistinct: he had obviously covered the telephone mouthpiece with a scarf or a handkerchief. There was no question that he was trying to sound like Conor: his voice had the same thoughtful pacing and the same resonant timbre, and there were one or two attempts to use the kind of Irishisms that Conor might have used – ‘You’ll not be wanting to keep me waiting, will you?’

  But they all agreed that it wasn’t Conor. ‘It could be Ramon Perez,’ said Sidney. ‘It’s a long time since I talked to him, but there’s kind of a Spanish lisp to it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Sounds more like a Southerner to me,’ said Ric. ‘And a gay Southerner, at that.’

  Conor said, ‘That doesn’t help us much. And the only contact address he gives is my own lawyer, Michael Baer.’

  ‘Did you manage to talk to him yet? Your lawyer?’

  ‘He’s in court for the rest of the day. But I left him a message.’

  ‘Play the tape again,’ said Ric.

  ‘We’ve heard it a hundred times already,’ Sebastian protested. ‘God, I thought Cats was boring.’

  All the same, Conor played the tape again.

  ‘There!’ said Ric.

  ‘Where? What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘There, in the background. Don’t listen to the voice. Listen to the background.’

  Sure enough, when they strained their ears, they could faintly hear music playing, and an extraordinary whumping noise. Whump and whump and shuffle and whump.

  ‘That’s a rehearsal,’ said Ric. ‘Whoever made that call was making it from a theater, someplace backstage. Listen, play it again, that is definitely dancing. Very ragged dancing, too. A pretty big ensemble, maybe twenty or thirty people, and a lot of them are out of sync’

  ‘So he must have called from a theater where a musical’s being rehearsed?’

  ‘That’s right. They’re rehearsing a musical. And a big musical, too, if they have that many dancers. And a new musical, if they’re that much out of step. What do you think, Sebastian?’

  Sebastian gave an airy wave of his hand. ‘I think you missed your vocation. You should have been a detective, instead of a dancer. Ric the Dick.’

  Ric played the cassette again, and then again, keeping his ear pressed to one of the speakers. ‘I’m sure I know this number. Pve heard it before. One of my friends played it to me, about three or four months ago. It came from some show he was hoping to audition for.’

  ‘Can you remember anything about it?’

  ‘No … but I can call him.’

  They waited while Ric sat crosslegged on the floor with the telephone in his lap and punched out his friend’s number. Conor said to Sidney, ‘Sebastian’s right … I should let Ric solve this whole case on his own. He has contacts in places where I didn’t even know there were places.’

  Ric’s friend answered. ‘Tyne! It’s Ric. Yes. Wonderful. Won-der-ful. Well, terrible, if you really want to know the truth. Tyne, listen, heart, you remember that musical you were going for – yes, that’s it, the one at the Rialto. What was it called?’

  ‘Franklin,’ he told Conor, with his hand over the receiver. ‘A musical based on the life of Benjamin Franklin, God help us.’

  ‘Yes, I know about that,’ Eleanor put in. ‘George Kranz, with a book by Felix Steinberger. One of my juveniles has a part in it.’

  ‘Tyne – what was that song you sang? That’s right – the lightning one.’ He listened for a while, nodding, and then he covered the receiver again and said, ‘That’s it … I was right,’ and haltingly he started to sing along with his friend on the phone.

  ‘There’s a storm brewing between us

  Lightning and thunder they’re threatnin’ to crack us apart

  But I’ll fly my kite

  Up into the night

  Carryin’ the key to your heart.’

  Conor nodded. ‘It’s the same melody. The same as the tune on the tape.’

  Isn’t it just awful?’ said Eleanor. ‘If it doesn’t close in three days, I’ll give up smoking. If it doesn’t close in ten days, I’ll give up breathing.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Conor. ‘What matters is that Ramon Perez made his call from the Rialto; so that’s where we’re likely to find him. It’s logical when you think about it. Where does a vaudeville act go to hide? No better place than the theater district. That’s where their friends are. That’s where they can move around backstage without attracting attention.’

  Sidney said, ‘What are you going to do? You can’t go after them unprepared. They’ll put you into a trance as soon as you look at them, and then God knows what they’ll make you do.’

  ‘Well, I’m ready, Sidney,’ said Conor. ‘If I need to be prepared, prepare me.’

  ‘It’s going to take at least two days to make you capable of even the minimum amount of hypnotic resistance.’

  ‘Then what are we waiting for?’

  Chapter 14

  At 7:09 p.m. Conor managed to get through to his lawyer, Michael Baer, in the Oak Bar at the Plaza. He reckoned it was highly unlikely that Slyman had thought of setting up a wiretap there. In the background he could hear the tinkle of cocktail glasses and the deafening sound of egos colliding.

  ‘Michael, what’s happening?’

  ‘People are sending me money, that’s what’s happening. Over sixty-five million dollars at last count.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Michael, sixty-five million dollars? We can’t accept sixty-five million dollars. We can’t accept any of it.’

  ‘Conor, we can’t not accept it. These people want their private papers and their property back and they don’t want anybody else involved, especially not the police.’

  ‘But this makes us part of a conspiracy to blackmail.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that? But let’s worry about that when somebody makes a complaint. Meantime
we’re dealing with people who are prepared to pay sixty-five million dollars for their personal privacy, and I can tell you something for nothing: I’m a whole lot more frightened of them than I am of the law. I’m not ready to trade in my Gucci loafers for cement boots, not just yet.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Conor, and pressed his hand to his forehead.

  ‘There’s only one problem – two or three people are insisting that you show them samples of their property in person. You can’t blame them. They’ve been asked to hand over anything up to five million dollars, and they don’t want to find that they’ve been hoaxed.’

  ‘How can I do that? I don’t have their property.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m ignoring them for now. I don’t know what else to do.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do with all of this money?’

  ‘Well, I had two calls from our friends yesterday afternoon, just to make sure that the deal’s in shape.’

  ‘Did they give you any indication who they were?’

  ‘Not a clue. The guy didn’t try to disguise his voice, though. I’d say southern. Alabama, Louisiana, something like that.’

  ‘How about a contact number?’

  ‘Unh-hunh. As soon as I receive all of the payments, I’m supposed to make an electronic transfer into their bank account.’

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘Oslo.’

  ‘Oslo, Minnesota?’

  ‘Unh-hunh. Oslo, Norway.’

  ‘Oslo, Norway?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be sent to the Fjords Finanskompaniet, Karl Johansgate, into a business account registered in the name of J.A.S.’

  ‘Michael, this is insanity.’

  ‘All right, it’s insanity. But if you’ve been telling me the truth, this scam is absolutely nothing to do with you. As your lawyer, my advice to you is to stay well out of it. Let the ransom money be paid: let the property be given back. Then you can start to prove that you weren’t involved.’