Persuader Part 35

I took a fast shower and stole another set of Duke's clothes. Kept my own shoes and jacket on, left my ruined coat in the closet. I didn't check for e-mail. Duffy had been too busy for messages. And at that point we were on the same page, anyway. There was nothing more she could tell me. Pretty soon I would be telling her something, just as soon as I got a chance to rip the headliner out of the Saab.

I wasted the balance of the thirty-minute lull and then walked downstairs. Found the family dining room. It was huge. There was a long rectangular table in it. It was oak, heavy, solid, not stylish. It would have seated twenty people. Beck was at the head.

Elizabeth was all the way at the other end. Richard was alone on the far side. The place set for me put me directly opposite him, with my back to the door. I thought about asking him to swap with me. I don't like sitting with my back to a door. But I decided against it and just sat down.

Paulie wasn't there. Clearly he hadn't been invited. The maid wasn't there either, of course. The cook was having to do all the scut work, and she didn't look very pleased about it. But she had done a good job with the food. We started with French onion soup.

It was pretty authentic. My mother wouldn't have approved, but there are always twenty million individual Frenchwomen who think they alone possess the perfect recipe.

"Tell us about your service career," Beck said to me, like he wanted to make conversation. He wasn't going to talk about business. That was clear. Not in front of the family. I guessed maybe Elizabeth knew more than was good for her, but Richard seemed fairly oblivious. Or maybe he was just blocking it out. What had he said? Bad things don't happen unless you choose to recall them? "Nothing much to tell," I said. I didn't want to talk about it. Bad things had happened, and I didn't choose to recall them.

"There must be something," Elizabeth said.

They were all three looking at me, so I shrugged and gave them a story about checking a Pentagon budget and seeing eight-thousand-dollar charges for maintenance tools called RTAFAs. I told them I was bored enough to be curious and had made a couple of calls and been told the acronym stood for rotational torque-adjustable fastener applicators. I told them I had tracked one down and found a three-dollar screwdriver. That had led to three-thousand-dollar hammers, thousand-dollar toilet seats, the whole nine yards. It's a good story. It's the sort of thing that suits any audience. Most people respond to the audacity and anti-government types get to seethe. But it isn't true. It happened, I guess, but not to me. It was a different department entirely.

"Have you killed people?" Richard asked.

Four in the last three days, I thought.

"Don't ask questions like that," Elizabeth said.

"The soup is good," Beck said. "Maybe not enough cheese."

"Dad," Richard said.

"What?"

"You need to think about your arteries. They're going to get all clogged up."

"They're my arteries."

"And you're my dad."

They glanced at each other. They both smiled shy smiles. Father and son, best buddies.

Ambivalence. It was all set to be a long meal. Elizabeth changed the subject away from cholesterol. She started talking about the Portland Museum of Art instead. She said it had an I. M. Pei building and a collection of American and Impressionist masters. I couldn't tell if she was trying to educate me or to tempt Richard to get out of the house and do something. I tuned her out. I wanted to get to the Saab. But I couldn't, right then. So I tried to predict exactly what I would find there. Like a game. I heard Leon Garber in my head: Think about everything you've seen and everything you've heard. Work the clues. I hadn't heard much. But I had seen a lot of things. I guessed they were all clues, of a sort.

The dining table, for instance. The whole house, and everything in it. The cars. The Saab was a piece of junk. The Cadillac and the Lincolns were nice automobiles, but they weren't Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The furniture was all old and dull and solid. Not cheap, but then, it didn't represent current expenditure anyway. It was all paid for long ago. What had Eliot said in Boston? About the LA g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger? His profits must run to millions of dollars a week. He lives like an emperor. Beck was supposed to be a couple of rungs up the ladder. But Beck didn't live like an emperor. Why not? Because he was a cautious Yankee, unimpressed by consumer baubles? "Look," he said.

I surfaced and saw him holding his cell phone out to me. I took it from him and looked at the screen. The signal strength was back up to four bars.

"Microwaves," I said. "Maybe they ramp up slowly."

Then I looked again. No envelopes, no reel-to-reel tapes. No voice-mail messages. But it was a tiny phone and I have big thumbs and I accidentally touched the up-down arrow key underneath the screen. The display instantly changed to a list of names. His virtual phone book, I guessed. The screen was so small it could show only three contacts at a time. At the top was house. Then came gate. Third on the list was Xavier. I stared at it so hard the room went silent around me and blood roared in my ears.

"The soup was very good," Richard said.

I handed the phone back to Beck. The cook reached across in front of me and took my bowl away.

The first time I ever heard the name Xavier was the sixth time I ever saw Dominique Kohl. It was seventeen days after we danced in the Baltimore bar. The weather had broken. The temperature had plummeted and the skies were gray and miserable. She was in full dress uniform. For a moment I thought I must have scheduled a performance review and forgotten all about it. But then, I had a company clerk to remind me about stuff like that, and he hadn't mentioned anything.

"You're going to hate this," Kohl said.

"Why? You got promoted and you're shipping out?"

She smiled at that. I realized it had come out as more of a personal compliment than I should have risked.

"I found the bad guy," she said.

"How?"

"Exemplary application of relevant skills," she said.

I looked at her. "Did we schedule a performance review?"

"No, but I think we should."

"Why?"

"Because I found the bad guy. And I think performance reviews always go better just after a big break in a case."

"You're still working with Frasconi, right?"

"We're partners," she said, which wasn't strictly an answer to the question.

"Is he helping?"

She made a face. "Permission to speak freely?"

I nodded.

"He's a waste of good food," she said.

I nodded again. That was my impression, too. Lieutenant Anthony Frasconi was solid, but he wasn't the crispest shirt in the closet.

"He's a nice man," she said. "I mean, don't get me wrong."

"But you're doing all the work," I said.

She nodded. She was holding the original file, the one that I had given her just after I found out she wasn't a big ugly guy from Texas or Minnesota. It was bulging with her notes.

" You helped, though," she said. "You were right. The doc.u.ment in question is in the newspaper. Gorowski dumps the whole newspaper in a trash can at the parking lot exit.

Same can, two Sundays in a row."

"And?"

"And two Sundays in a row the same guy fishes it out again."

I paused. It was a smart plan, except that the idea of fishing around in a garbage can gave it a certain vulnerability. A certain lack of plausibility. The garbage can thing is hard to do, unless you're willing to go the whole way and dress up like a homeless person. And that's hard to do in itself, if you want to be really convincing. Homeless people walk miles, spend all day, check every can along their route. To imitate their behavior plausibly takes infinite time and care.

"What kind of a guy?" I said.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "Who roots around in trash cans except street people, right?"

"So who does?"

"Imagine a typical Sunday," she said. "A lazy day, you're strolling, maybe the person you're meeting is a little late, maybe the impulse to go out for a walk has turned out to be a little boring. But the sun is shining, and there's a bench to sit on, and you know the Sunday papers are always fat and interesting. But you don't happen to have one with you."

"OK," I said. "I'm imagining."

"Have you noticed how a used newspaper kind of becomes community property? Seen what they do on a train, for instance? Or a subway? A guy reads his paper, leaves it on the seat when he gets out, another guy picks it up right away? He'd rather die than pick up half a candy bar, but he'll pick up a used newspaper with no problem at all?"

"OK," I said.

"Our guy is about forty," she said. "Tall, maybe six-one, trim, maybe one-ninety, short black hair going gray, fairly upmarket. He wears good clothes, chinos, golf shirts, and he kind of saunters through the lot to the can."

"Saunters?"

"It's a word," she said. "Like he's strolling, lost in thought, not a care in the world. Like maybe he's coming back from Sunday brunch. Then he notices the newspaper sitting in the top of the can, and he picks it up and checks the headlines for a moment, and he kind of tilts his head a little and he puts the paper under his arm like he'll read some more of it later and he strolls on."

"Saunters on," I said.

"It's incredibly natural," she said. "I was right there watching it happen and I almost discounted it. It's almost subliminal."

I thought about it. She was right. She was a good student of human behavior. Which made her a good cop. If I ever did actually get around to a performance review, she was going to score off the charts.

"Something else you speculated about," she said. "He saunters on out to the marina and gets on a boat."

"He lives on it?"

"I don't think so," she said. "I mean, it's got bunks and all, but I think it's a hobby boat."

"How do you know it's got bunks?"

"I've been aboard," she said.

"When?"

"The second Sunday," she said. "Don't forget, all I'd seen up to that point was the business with the newspaper. I still hadn't positively identified the doc.u.ment. But he went out on another boat with some other guys, so I checked it out."

"How?"

"Exemplary application of relevant skills," she said. "I wore a bikini."

"Wearing a bikini is a skill?" I said. Then I looked away. In her case, it would be more like world-cla.s.s performance art.

"It was still hot then," she said. "I blended in with the other yacht bunnies. I strolled out, walked up his little gangplank. n.o.body noticed. I picked the lock on the hatch and searched for an hour."

I had to ask.

"How did you conceal lock picks in a bikini?" I said.

"I was wearing shoes," she said.

"Did you find the blueprint?"

"I found all of them."

"Did the boat have a name?"

She nodded. "I traced it. There's a yacht registry for all that stuff."

"So who's the guy?"

"This is the part you're going to hate," she said. "He's a senior Military Intelligence officer. A lieutenant colonel, a Middle East specialist. They just gave him a medal for something he did in the Gulf."

"s.h.i.t," I said. "But there might be an innocent explanation."

"There might," she said. "But I doubt it. I just met with Gorowski an hour ago."

"OK," I said. That explained the dress greens. Much more intimidating than wearing a bikini, I guessed. "And?"

"And I made him explain his end of the deal. His little girls are twelve months and two.

The two-year-old disappeared for a day, two months ago. She won't talk about what happened to her while she was gone. She just cries a lot. A week later our friend from Military Intelligence showed up. Suggested that the kid's absence could last a lot longer than a day, if daddy didn't play ball. I don't see any innocent explanation for that kind of stuff."

"No," I said. "Nor do I. Who is the guy?"

"His name is Francis Xavier Quinn," she said.

The cook brought the next course, which was some kind of a rib roast, but I didn't really notice it because I was still thinking about Francis Xavier Quinn. Clearly he had come out of the California hospital and left the Quinn part of his name behind him in the trash with his used gowns and his surgical dressings and his John Doe wrist bands. He had just walked away and stepped straight into a new ident.i.ty, ready made. An ident.i.ty that he felt comfortable with, one that he would always remember deep down at the primeval level he knew hidden people had to operate on. No longer United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Quinn, F.X., Military Intelligence. From that point on, he was just plain Frank Xavier, anonymous citizen.

"Rare or well?" Beck asked me.

He was carving the roast with one of the black-handled knives from the kitchen. They had been stored in a knife block and I had thought about using one of them to kill him with. The one he was using right then would have been a good choice. It was about ten inches long, and it was razor sharp, judging by how well the meat was slicing. Unless the meat happened to be unbelievably tender.

"Rare," I said. "Thank you."

He carved me two slices and I regretted it instantly. My mind flashed back seven hours to the body bag. I had pulled the zipper down and seen another knife's work. The image was so vivid I could still feel the cold metal tag between my fingers. Then I flashed back ten whole years, right back to the beginning with Quinn, and the loop was complete.

"Horseradish?" Elizabeth said.

I paused. Then I took a spoonful. The old army rule was Eat every time you can, sleep every time you can, because you didn't know when you were going to get another chance to do either. So I shut Quinn out of my mind and helped myself to vegetables and started eating. Restarted thinking. Everything I'd heard, everything I'd seen. I kept coming back to the Baltimore marina in the bright sunlight, and to the envelope and the newspaper.

Not this, but that. And to the thing Duffy had said to me: You haven't found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.

"Have you read Pasternak?" Elizabeth asked me.