Escape the Night (14 page)

He looked up from the pages with a look of strained amusement. “I should probably just read aloud,” he jibed, and then pushed the business section across the table. “Rumor has it that a charming little predator called Barth Industries—net worth, thirty billion, number forty-one on the Fortune Five Hundred—wishes to swallow a publishing house.”

“Could Barth swallow you?”

“Only if Phillip helped them.” Peter frowned at his coffee. “What's peculiar is that Phil insisted we have lunch today—alone. You know how seldom he does that.”

Noelle smiled faintly. “Maybe he's hungry.”

Peter glanced up, annoyed; Noelle held up one palm. “Does sleeping with you mean I have to share your obsession with your uncle? What good would I be for you, then, when you're not inside me?” Her hand reached out for his. “I just want you free of this constant need to watch him.”

Peter seemed to retreat within himself, searching for reasons, and then finally shrugged. “It's built into our situation—the will asks him to preserve for me the thing that he most wants, and this Clayton Barth is noted for exploiting weaknesses.” His face hardened. “In five more months
I'll
own Van Dreelen and Carey, and then Barth can come to me.”

“And you won't sell?”

Peter shook his head; almost playfully, he answered, “I promised my grandfather I'd hang on to it.”

Noelle sensed that she was being told the literal truth, passed off as an absurdity. “But what makes
you
so committed?”

For a moment Peter's eyes were hooded, as if he were reaching to retrieve some distant memory. Falling like a shadow, this look belied the quiet laughter in his words: “Because it's
ours
…”

Martin watched Peter Carey's apartment.

Soon Carey and the woman would go running.

He fidgeted; for now he must repress the way she made him feel. Carey was the target.

He leaned on the low wall surrounding the park, a half-block up and across the street from the Aristocrat, collar raised against the cold. There were six butts at his feet; as a distraction from the woman, he had counted them. It was his habit to count things.

He had been watching Peter Carey for thirteen days.

Dressed to run, Carey and Noelle rode the elevator ten flights down, passed two guards patrolling the lobby, and took the revolving door out. The doorman, a friendly, half-tough-looking man with thick hands and gestures, smiled. “'Morning, Mr. Carey, Miss Ciano.” He jabbed a finger toward the park. “Fit for Eskimos today, nine degrees. Don't know how you stand it, smart people like you.”

Carey grinned: when first he had moved in, annoyed at the imperiousness of other tenants, he had made a point of being friendly. Now the weather report was a daily ritual, as was his flippant reply. “It's Ciano's weight problem again—she's getting too fat to work.”

“Hell,
I
wouldn't be working if I had the money. Florida, that's the place—my brother-in-law has a condo there.” He turned to Noelle. “Was that your picture this morning—the cops pulling that little girl from the trunk?” When Noelle nodded, the doorman's low whistle turned to mist in the cold. “Jeezus—you two watch it out there.”

“Always,” Carey said. “And you, Art.”

They hurried along Central Park West, with its phalanx of taxis and limousines, toward the crosswalk leading from the corner of West 72nd Street to the park itself. The wind stung Carey's face. He moved closer to Noelle. “You didn't tell me about the girl.”

“I would have. Last night—that wasn't just for you.”

“Was it bad?”

“The way it always is. Her mother began calling me a ghoul. I must have taken fourteen shots by the time she broke down.”

“And that was all?”

“The cops took her away. I got that picture, too.”

Noelle brushed the black bangs from her eyes. Knowing the gesture, Carey stopped her. “Sorry to have been so obtuse.”

Noelle touched his elbow. “I chose this job,” she said softly. “You didn't choose your dreams.”

They began moving.

On the corner, they met Carey's two elderly neighbors, husband and wife, crossing with the small yipping poodle they walked each morning, and spoke to as if it were their child. Noelle knelt to ruffle the fur at its ears, smiling for the first time that morning. Carey smiled also. He liked the Krantzes, who seemed so devoted and whose stooped frames and bright blue eyes were so much alike that he thought of them as an entity that would die as one, alone in the apartment where they had lived for forty years, with no company save poodles. The woman nodded and smiled back: each day her husband spoke for both of them. “Good morning, Mr. Carey.”

“Good morning, Mr. Krantz.” Teasingly, because they were so shy, Carey had once suggested that they call him Peter, “at least until I turn thirty.” Neither had been able to: Noelle would always smile at the way Mrs. Krantz, who said nothing for herself, called him “Peter” through her dog.

“Say hello to Peter,” she said now. The dog yipped at Noelle.

“Hello, Abner,” she said.

The four humans smiled at the dog. Then the Krantzes turned back toward the building. Noelle and Carey crossed the street, to run.

Martin did not follow their running; he knew their route, and that it took them twenty-six minutes to return. Peter Carey was the slave of habit; his relation to the woman imposed patterns on her. Her work was the only professional complication: it lent her unpredictability and a sense of danger. She walked looking to the left and right, for the movement which did not quite fit. But there were always trade-offs: that walk, lithe and tensile, made her distinctive anywhere. He liked to watch it.

He stubbed out the cigarette, counting to seven.

Once more he forced himself to inventory Carey's set routine. The doorman was important: sometimes only humans, and not keys, could strip his targets of their privacy. Even Carey's elderly neighbors, so benign in their appearance, might become his weapon. And then, watching Peter Carey, he might also watch the woman …

Already she was part of the drama growing in his mind, a teasing focus of the special way he needed women, so long suppressed. Her parents had no money. Ciano was their fifth daughter. She had won a Pulitzer Prize for a picture taken in Cambodia, of a starving child watching over the body of his sister, curled as in sleep. She had worked her way through Boston University.

Martin wondered what she did with Peter Carey.

He would learn that, if the small man let him. He would learn everything—Carey's passions and ambitions, what frightened him in the stillness of the night—and then use the information to control him. Peter Carey's sanity had no more meaning than his life; both now depended on the small man's wish.

Up to a point.

Martin reached into his pocket, touching the tape cassette and then the revolver.

The small man did not wish him to carry these, the tools of his profession, for fear they might be turned against him. But his mentor needed him more now than in the past, and so the balance of their mutual needs was subtly shifting in his favor. He could be more discerning about the orders he received, hearing best those which gave him pleasure.

Martin took pleasure in having tapes of his own, which the small man did not control.

He might sit near lovers in a restaurant, using his delicate instrument to record their conversation: afterwards, listening in his room, he would enter the lives of those who would have shunned him, alone no more, the ostracism of his youth and childhood redeemed. On quiet nights, imagining what things they said in private, he might imitate their voices …

He had found the profession, and the man, to meet his needs.

Once more he touched the revolver, beguiling time. The gun reminded him of the most intense professional experience of his life, which had grown from a surveillance as obscure as this …

It was the last time he had killed.

He had been in Corfu then, six years prior; the rains had stopped, and it was whitewashed spring. He had watched the foreigner for eight days. On the afternoon of the ninth, riding a rented Vespa, he followed the man along a trail twisting up through the hills behind the white marble palace, where once the Hohenzollerns had lived. Seeing him, the man had panicked and abandoned his motorized bicycle, scrambling up and over a cliff. Martin dismounted and began tracking him. Night was falling on the green rugged hills and whitewashed stucco, on the trim sailboats moored in the natural bays and harbor, so blue and yet so clear: Martin knew that the man would never look on them again.

He had been watching the man, and now, like an animal hunting in the darkness, could sense where he would go.

His heart pounded as he climbed the hill.

He made no sound. Hearing none, he knew the man's time was running quickly. He paused, letting his eyes adjust to nightfall with its thin crescent moon, and then began stalking him through the stone and underbrush, softly as a cat.

He found the man two hours later, cowering in a tiny cave, and shot him through the head. He left him there. The man was Turkish; no one in the town would bother with him.

Finding the motorcycle, he drove slowly down the trail to a dark taverna where a woman sang and the
syrtaki
dancers still broke crockery, defying the colonels who sent decrees from Athens. Martin had ordered souvlaki and a bottle of retsina: now the memory of murder was the feel of a revolver in his palm, the taste of resin, the animal sense of tracking in the dark.

He had not known why he killed the Turk, and did not care.

He did not know now why he was tracking Peter Carey. He had not asked, and would not be told. Carey's amnesia was his only clue, and only from the small man's eyes did Martin sense this was important. This obscurity was better. He would learn it gradually, this play of his own construction, from the orders he received …

Looking at his watch, Martin began to count the minutes until the woman would return.

Noelle and Carey jogged down a macadam path which passed from 72nd Street through a bower covered with dead vines and then wound between gaslights and low green benches, over a crosswalk and along the traverse jammed with crosstown traffic running past Bethesda Fountain and the lake. Reaching the steps to the fountain, they turned toward the Band Shell: though the tunnel's image drew him like a flame, not since the nightmare started had Carey stood inside it, refusing even as a child to take his uncle to the lake or fountain. Those places were the province of his father, and his dreams.

The plaza they crossed was empty save for a few bare trees rising from circles of brown grass. Ahead, Noelle ran lightly, easily; Carey trailed a moment longer, content to feel her long, coltish strides become another portrait in his memory.

To Carey, she always looked full of energy, even when still: he had long since pried from her that—before she grew discernible breasts and hips—the boys in her Providence neighborhood had called her “Cricket,” after a day spent jumping rooftops and daring them to follow. She had broken both arms and legs as a girl; as a woman, she had covered a revolt and two famines in Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa, once taking a bullet through her shoulder. The scar, white and pinched, was still there: now Carey saw her bunch the shoulder and swing her right arm, to shake off stiffness. He moved next to her. “Time to retire, Ciano—you're brittle as a bullfighter.”

“When I'm thirty.” Quickly turning, Noelle flashed a smile over one shoulder; it was the first portrait she had left him …

Carey had been giving an interview for the
Times Book Review
, answering questions about his father and uncle, and what he recalled of Black Jack Carey. He could already see the lead sentence—“Twenty-two years after the deaths of his legendary grandfather and dashing father, the latter in an automobile accident which he miraculously survived, John Peter Carey II stands poised to take control of the firm which bears their name”—and so was saying less than he remembered: what memories he had were his own, and the interviewer, a sleek Princetonian in tortoise-shell glasses, asked too much.

“As I recall,” Carey told him, “my grandfather was a kindly man who liked children's books and never raised his voice.”

The man blinked, irritated. Carey didn't give a damn: that morning he had been jarred awake early, in the West End apartment of a woman he hardly knew, by the metallic clatter of garbage trucks. Glad not to have dreamed, Carey took that as his cue to leave; the woman—a young commercial artist new to the joys of Manhattan—had wanted to make love again. Carey had obliged; now he felt tired, with an odd tinge of melancholy.

“Mr. Carey,” the man was saying, “I sense these questions annoy you.”

Carey shrugged. “You're asking me to remember what my memory has chosen to forget.”

“And you have no idea of how you survived the accident.”

“None.” Carey hesitated. “My uncle rescued me—perhaps you should ask him.”

“Yes, your uncle. Will that be difficult, taking over when he's run the firm so long?”

“We've both had twenty years to get used to it. My grandfather left it to me.”

The man gave him a sidelong glance. “Still, it's an interesting arrangement. I wonder why he set it up that way.”

“Because we talked about books.” Carey smiled faintly. “When I was five.”

Giving up, the man shepherded Carey to the conference room to wait for the photographer, who was a half hour late. They were trading lame chitchat when a dark young woman burst through the door and shook Carey's hand before he even got her name. All energy and movement, she looked around the book-lined conference room. “This is boring,” she told Carey. “Let's try the sidewalk.”

“Why?”

She waved at the shelves. “You're too young to sit here pretending you've read all this, much less understood it. Come on.”