Backflash. Part 3

"Yes."

"But- Mr. Sternberg lives in London."

"That's where I'm calling him."

"Wouldn't he have to be resident in the United States?"

"For a little while."

"Oh, I see. This wouldn't be a full term, then. Completing someone else's term, something like that."

"Something like that. My friends and me, we think Mr. Sternberg has the right look, he could inspire confidence in people."

"Probably so. Well, I have no idea if Mr. Sternberg would be interested. May I have him ring you when he gets in?"

"When would that be?"

"I expect him, oh, in ten minutes."

"I'm calling from the States."

"Yes, I a.s.sumed that."

"The number here's two oh one five five five nine nine one three."

"And is that a business or residence?"

"It's a gas station."

"Ah. Petrol, we call it here. If Mr. Sternberg is interested, he'll ring you within fifteen minutes. If he doesn't ring back by then, you'll know he isn't interested."

"We say 'call back' here."

"Yes, I know. Goodbye, Mr. Lynch."

Parker sat in the car next to the phone booth and watched the customers pump their own gas, then pay the clerk in the bulletproof gla.s.s booth. Nine minutes later, the phone rang.

8.

Claire made meals for herself when Parker was away, but when he was at home they always ate out. "You wouldn't want what I eat when I'm here by myself," she told him once. "No man would think it was dinner." So they'd drive somewhere and eat.

Tonight's place was competent and efficient and, like a lot of country restaurants, too brightly lit. Claire waited until the waitress had brought their main courses, and then she talked about Cathman: "He's a bureaucrat. He's exactly what he says he is."

"Then he doesn't make any sense," Parker said, and carved at his steak.

Claire took a small notebook from her bag and opened it on the table beside her plate. "He's sixty-three," she said. "He has an engineering degree from Syracuse University, and his entire adult life he's worked for state government in New York. He was in some sort of statistical section for years, and then he moved on to fiscal planning. Two years ago, he retired, though he didn't have to. I think what it is, he disagreed with state policy."

"About what?"

"Gambling."

Parker nodded. "That's where it is," he said. "Whatever's thrown him out of whack, the gambling thing is where it is."

"You mean that would make him change his spots."

"Change the whole coat."

Claire sipped at her wine, and said, "Maybe he needs money after all. A mid-level civil servant, retired early, maybe it's rougher than he thought it would be."

"What about this consultant business?"

Claire shook her head. She sliced duck breast, thinking about it, then said, "I don't think it's doing all that well. Mostly I think because he's advising state governments against gambling and they're all in favor of it."

"He told me about that," Parker agreed. "The pols see it as painless taxes."

"People don't want you to consult with them," Claire said, "if you're only going to advise them not to do what they've already decided they're going to do. So what jobs he gets, mostly, have to do with fund allocation for ma.s.s transit and highways and airports. Here and there, he gets a job doing research for anti-gambling groups in state legislatures, but not that much."

The music in here was noodling jazz piano, low enough to talk over but loud enough for privacy. Still, when the waitress spent time clearing the main course dishes from the next table, Parker merely ate his steak and drank some of his wine. When she left, he said, "But he isn't in it for the money, I don't think. The thing with me, I mean."

Claire nodded, watching him.

Parker thought back to his dealings with Cathman. "It doesn't feel like it," he said, "as though money's the point. That's part of what's wrong with him. If it isn't money he wants, what does he want?"

"You could still walk away," she said.

"I might. Bad parts to it. Still, it's cash, that means something."

"The boat isn't even here yet," she pointed out. "You still have plenty of time to be sure about him, learn more about him."

"You do that," Parker told her. "His home life now. Wife, girlfriend, children, whatever he's got. People bend each other; is anybody bending Cathman?"

"You want me to do that?"

"Yes."

Claire nodded. "All right," she said, and ate a bit, and then said, "What will you be doing?"

"The river," Parker said.

9.

It was called the Lido, but it shouldn't have been. It was an old bar, a gray wood cube cut deep into the ground floor of a narrow nineteenth-century brick house, and at two on a sunny afternoon in April it was dark and dry, smelling of old whiskey and dead wood. The shirtsleeved bald bartender was tall and fat, looking like a retired cop who'd gone to seed the day his papers had come through. At the bar, muttering together about sports and politics other people's victories and defeats were nine or ten shabbily dressed guys who were older than their teeth.

Not looking at any of them, Parker went to the corner of the long bar nearest the door, sat on the stool there, and when the barman plodded down to him like the old bull he was, he ordered beer. The muttering farther along the bar faltered for a minute, while they all tried to work out what this new person meant, but Parker did nothing of interest, so they went back to their conversations.

Parker paid for his beer, drank it, and left, and outside the sunlight seemed a hundred percent brighter. Squinting, he walked down the half block to the Subaru he was still driving no reason not to, and he'd dump it after the job, if the job happened and leaned against its trunk in the sunlight.

He was in Hudson today, a town along the river of the same name, another twenty miles north and upstream from Rhinecliff, where he'd met Cathman at the railroad station. The town stretched up a long gradual slope from the river, with long parallel streets lined like stripes up the hill. At the bottom was a slum where there used to be a port, back in the nineteenth century, when the whalers came this far up the Hudson with their catch to the plants beside the river where the whale oil and blubber and other sellable materials were carved and boiled and beaten out of the cadavers, to be shipped to the rest of America along the Erie Ca.n.a.l and the Great Lakes and the midwest rivers.

The whalers and the whale industry and the commercial uses of the waterways were long gone, but the town was still here. It had become poor, and still was. At one point, early in the twentieth century, it was for a while the wh.o.r.ehouse capital of the northeast, and less poor, until a killjoy state government stepped in to make it virtuous and poor again. Now it was a drug distribution hub, out of New York City via road or railroad, and for the legitimate world it was an antiques center.

The Lido was just about as far from the water as it could get and still be on one of the streets that came up from the river. Where Parker waited in the sunlight he couldn't see the river at all, just the old low buildings in two rows stretched away along the upper flat and then downslope. Being poor for so long, Hudson hadn't seen much modernization, and so, without trying, had become quaint.

About two minutes later, one of the shabby guys came out of the Lido, looked around, saw Parker, and walked toward him. He looked to be about fifty, but grizzled and gray beyond his years, as though at one time he'd gone through that whale factory and all the meat and juice had been pressed out of him. His thin hair was brown and dry, his squinting eyes a pale blue, his cheeks stubble-grown. He was in nondescript gray-and-black workclothes, and walked with the economical shuffle Parker recognized; this fellow, probably more than once in his life, had been on the yard.

Which made sense. To find this guy, Parker had made more phone calls, saying he wanted somebody who knew the river and could keep his mouth shut. Most of the people he'd called were ex-cons, and most of the people they knew were ex-cons, so why wouldn't this guy be?

He stopped in front of Parker, reserved, watchful, waiting it out. He said, "Lynch?"

"Hanzen?"

"That's me," Hanzen agreed. "I take it you know a friend of mine."

"Pete Rudd."

"Pete it is," Hanzen said. "What do you hear from Pete?"

"He's out."

Hanzen grinned, showing very white teeth. "We're all out," he said. "This your car?"

"Come on along."

They got into the Subaru, Parker pulled away from the curb, and Hanzen said, "Take the right."

"We're not going to the river?"

"Not in town, there's nothing down there but jigs. Little ways north."

They drove for twenty minutes, Hanzen giving the route, getting them out of town onto a main road north, then left onto a county road. Other than Hanzen's brief directions, there was silence in the car. They didn't know one another, and in any case, neither of them was much for small talk.

From the county road, Hanzen told Parker to take the left onto a dirt road between a crumbled barn and a recently plowed field with some green bits coming up. "Corn later," he said, nodding at the field; his only bit of tour guiding.

This dirt road twisted downward around the end of the cornfield and through scrubby trees and undergrowth where the land was too steep for ready plowing. Then it leveled, and they b.u.mped across railroad tracks, and Parker said, "Amtrak?"

"They always yell when they're comin," Hanzen said.

Just beyond the tracks, the road widened into an oval dirt area where a lot of cars had parked at one time or another and a number of fires had been laid. Low ailanthus and tall maples crowded in on the sides, and the river was right there, at the far end of the dirt oval. Its bottom was mud and stone, quickly dropping off. To the left, downstream, three decayed and destroyed small boats lay half in and half out of the water. One of them was partly burned. About ten feet from the bank a gray outboard motorboat pulled at its mooring in the downriver current. A rough-made low windowless cabin painted dark blue covered the front half of the boat.

Parker and Hanzen got out of the car. Hanzen took off his shoes, socks and pants, rolled them in a bundle and put them on the ground. He wore white jockey shorts that bagged on him, as though they'd been washed too many times. He waded out into the water, grabbed the anchor line, and pulled the boat close, then untied the line from the float and used the line to tow the boat to sh.o.r.e, saying as he came in, "I got to keep it out there or the kids come and shoot up in it." Pointing, "Set it on fire, like that one."

"Nothing's easy," Parker said.

"Amen," Hanzen said. He waded out of the water, pulling the boat after him until the prow sc.r.a.ped on dry land, then pulled on the side of the boat until it came around far enough that the deck behind the cabin was reachable from the bank. "Climb aboard," he said.

Parker stepped over the gunwale. The interior was recently painted, gray, and very neat. Two solid wood doors were closed over the cabin, with a padlock.

"Take this stuff, will you?" Hanzen said, holding out the roll of his clothes, and Parker took them and put them on the deck next to the cabin door, while Hanzen pushed the boat off again from sh.o.r.e until it floated, then climbed over the side. "Give me a minute," he said.

"Go ahead."

Hanzen unrolled his pants, found a ring of keys, and unlocked the padlock on the cabin. He pulled the doors open, and Parker got a look at a narrow lumpy bunk under a dark brown blanket, some wooden boxes and cardboard cartons used as shelves and storage, and Playboy bunnies on the inside of the cabin doors. Then Hanzen stooped inside, found a towel, dried his legs, tossed the towel in on the bunk, shut but didn't lock the doors, and dressed himself. Only then did he go to the wheel beside the cabin doors, put the key in the ignition, and start the motor.

By then they'd drifted a ways south and out into the stream. There was no place to sit, so Parker stood on the other side of the cabin doors from Hanzen and the wheel, put one forearm on the cabin top, and looked at the bank. As they floated farther from sh.o.r.e, he could see other landings north and south, a few old structures, some small boats at anchorage. There was no apparent commerce, and he didn't see anything that looked like vacation settlements or estates.

Hanzen said, "It's north you care about, right?"

"Yes."

Hanzen turned the wheel, and goosed the motor, and their slow drift backward became a steadily increasing push forward. Wake hissed along the sides. "We'll go up this bank, down the other," Hanzen said. He had to speak a little louder now.

They rode in silence for about five minutes. There were no boats around at all, though Parker knew there was still some barge traffic sometimes along here, and in summer there would be the pleasure boaters, both sail and motor. But off-season the river wasn't used much.

They were keeping close to the east bank, and it stayed pretty much the same until they pa.s.sed another river town, smaller than Hudson, and looking poorer, its clapboard houses climbing above one another back up the hill from the water. Hanzen steered farther away from sh.o.r.e at that point, out closer to the middle of the river, which was very wide here, the other bank visible but not clear, just a blur of green and the colors of structures.

North of that town, Hanzen steered closer to the bank again and said, "You don't mind, I got some stuff of my own to look at along here."

"Go ahead."

"First we see if my alarm's okay," Hanzen said, and steered abruptly leftward, toward the middle of the river, so that Parker had to press his forearm down on the cabin top to keep his balance. Hanzen drove out a ways, then swung around in a wide half-circle, looking toward the sh.o.r.e, and smiled in satisfaction. "There it is," he said. "You see the big branch bent down?"

Parker shook his head. "Just so you do," he said.

Hanzen grinned at him. "That's right, I guess. We know what we have to know, and we see what we have to see."

Parker said, "What is this branch?"

"I've got some stuff in there," Hanzen said. "n.o.body's gonna bother it except law. If the law finds it, they're gonna touch it, probably pull it outa there. The minute they do, the minute they touch it at all or come at it the wrong way, that big tree branch I got tied so it bends down, it'll release and go right back up. I come here, I don't see my branch bent down, I just drive on by. Happened to me once, three years ago. Not here, another place."

What Hanzen was doing here, Parker knew, was showing his credentials, his qualifications, should it be that Parker might have further use for him and want to know what sort of man he was. Because all they had between them so far was that Parker would give him three hundred dollars for a tour of the river north of Hudson up toward Albany, and more money if he was needed for anything else later. The subject of this trip was not for Hanzen to worry about, and the trip was not for him to talk about with anybody else. But of course he had to know something was being planned here, and wonder if maybe they could use a trustworthy river man later on.

Maybe. Time would tell.

As they neared sh.o.r.e, Hanzen slowed the boat to an easy glide, so the prow was no longer lifted and they left barely a ripple of wake. Ahead of them was a stretch of undeveloped bank, tangled with undergrowth. Large tree branches reached out over the water. It would be almost impossible to get to the bank anywhere along here, and probably just as tough to get to the water from the other side. Whatever Hanzen was hiding, he'd picked a good spot for it.

"There they are. My babies." Hanzen grinned with fatherly pride. "See?"