Jigsaw (42 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

VENICE

M
ESSAGES CAME IN BY FAX AND MODEM,
A FLURRY OF THEM FROM
different parts of the world. One originated in Berlin; Barron had already seen the TV pictures. A second relayed news from the Czech Republic. A bomb had exploded in Prague Castle, killing President Svobodin and four of his ministers. Barron had been in the castle in the days of the old regime, before Svobodin's reformers had come to power. He'd been given the whole tour, the picture gallery, the cathedral of St Vitus, the tomb of Wenceslas, the Bohemian Crown Jewels.

There were messages from Belfast, from Somalia, one from Kuwait, where military representatives of the royal family, struggling with the unexpected depletion of currency reserves, were seeking to renegotiate terms. Another came from Mindanao: insurgents were busily accumulating arms in the interminable fight against the government in Manila.

The last message had been sent from Lyon. It simply said:
The Weed has been removed
. He was more relieved to read this than he might have expected. He'd known, of course, that Streik would be eliminated sooner or later, but something of the General's anxieties had clearly entered his system. He rose from his desk, studied the wall maps. The world, he thought, was burning like so much kindling.

He was about to leave the room when the telephone rang. This was his private line, a number known only to a very few. He picked up the receiver, spoke his name. The voice at the other end of the line echoed. Each word was repeated in a whispered way, creating a bizarre husky effect.

‘I've heard something that disturbs me greatly, Tobias. Frank Pagan is looking for Carlotta. You didn't say a goddam thing about Carlotta being involved. You didn't tell me how the business was going to be handled. I don't understand what's going on.'

Barron didn't speak for a time. He had a small jarring sensation. He twisted the phone cord in his fingers. ‘How the hell did Pagan get that information?' he asked.

‘I have no idea.'

‘Can you find out?'

‘I think I can cope with Pagan. But I'm not happy with the way this whole goddam thing has been done. You never said anything about Carlotta—'

‘Things happen.' It was an inadequate response but the only one that came to mind. Barron put the receiver down. He left the room, locked the door, walked into the kitchen. Carlotta stood against the refrigerator, drinking a glass of the dark blood-orange juice she favoured.

Barron looked at her. He had an uneasy sense of a fuse burning in his head, a spark attached to a cylinder of gelignite, a dangerous smouldering. He sat down at the long kitchen table. He clasped his hands in front of himself. He sought some inner calm, but it wouldn't come. He heard again the message on the phone, which seemed to repeat itself in his head.

Carlotta said, ‘Something troubling you, Barron?'

Barron stood up. How to approach this, how to raise the subject: he wasn't sure. He was walking on broken glass. It was best to come straight out with it, and if she flew into a defensive rage he'd have to cope. He walked toward her. He placed his hands on either side of her face and looked into her eyes.

‘Tell me, Carlotta. What did you do in London?'

‘Is this weird question time or something? You know what I did. You sent me, after all.'

There was a thickness at the back of his throat. ‘
What did you do in London, Carlotta?
'

‘You've got on your serious expression, Barron. The heavy one I don't like.' She broke away from him, walked to the kitchen window, pulled the blind back. A gondolier with the small crabbed face of a gargoyle smoked a cigarette on the quay.

‘I just had a phone call, Carlotta. From London.'

‘How nice,' she said.

‘No. It wasn't nice. It wasn't even close to nice. Will I tell you what I just heard? They have your name, Carlotta.'

‘Who has my name?'

‘The cops. How did that happen? How do you suppose that happened?' He tracked her round the kitchen table.

‘How would I know?' she asked.

‘They're looking for you.' He caught her wrists.

‘Don't touch me, Barron.'

‘Somehow you've fucked up,' he said, releasing her.

She looked challengingly at him. ‘Fucked up?'

‘You must have been careless. You left something behind, didn't you? Something, some kind of clue, a hint, Christ knows what.'

‘Don't shout at me,' and she covered her ears. ‘I didn't leave anything behind in London. I did the job. In and out. Nobody saw me. You know what this is? It's rumour, gossip, nothing.'

‘They just plucked your name from a hat? Is that what you're telling me?' He faced her, irritated with himself for losing control, but on a deeper level angry that he'd set her loose in London in the first place without knowing her plans. But she'd told him emphatically that if he wanted her to do the job then he'd have to entrust it to her, the method, the details, everything – and he'd gone along with that, turning a blind eye.

‘I don't know how you come by your information, Toby,' she said. She edged toward him, dragging one foot behind her, play-acting. He knew this performance: this was the scolded child routine, the plunge into sulking, a funk she affected when things were getting away from her.

‘The source is impeccable,' Barron said.

He watched her as she turned her feet inward, toes touching in a childlike way, hands clasped behind her back. Even the fact that she was wearing one of his white linen shirts, which was too long for her, contributed to an effect of smallness. But he wasn't buying into this performance. He said, ‘They're looking for you. Understand what I'm saying?'

‘They're not going to find me, Toby. They don't know where I am.' She was changing in front of his eyes. The chastised little girl had gone, replaced by someone cold and hard and contentious. She was defiant, shoving aside the world, forging her own reality.

‘Your security must be screwed up,' she said. ‘You can't blame me for your failings, Barron. Somewhere along the line you've got a leak.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘No? What makes you imagine your set-up is perfect? Somebody spoke. Somebody said something in the wrong place. I won't be blamed for that.'

Barron considered this. But it was impossible. Nobody had known of Carlotta's involvement. Not Kinsella, not Rhodes, not the General. And Willie Caan – Caan certainly hadn't been told in advance. Only Schialli had met the woman, but Schialli – even if he recognized her – would never have spoken. Nobody knew. Nobody had been told about Carlotta. You didn't just bandy about your association with somebody like her. You didn't want to hear the arguments against her – she was unstable, wayward, her mental state ballistic. You didn't want to listen to criticism of her.

‘I don't think there's anything wrong with my security,' he said quietly.

‘God. You sound so fucking sure of yourself, Barron. You think you've got the perfect cover, don't you? You hide behind famous friends. You conceal yourself behind good deeds. You like to see your name in the gossip columns. But it doesn't work that way. Somewhere along the way your worlds overlap. And you're caught. You're exposed.'

He was going to counter with something abrasive. He was about to say that she had no right to talk when it came to disguises and concealments and the alteration of identities – but he checked himself. He rarely won arguments with her in any event.

He went toward her, took her hands, held them against his chest. When he spoke he did so very quietly. ‘Carlotta. A lot of planning has gone into all this. All over Europe, in the United States, a great deal of money and time and thought has gone into this whole business. Understand me? Now the British police have your name.'

She gazed at him wide-eyed. ‘I already told you. They don't know what I look like. They don't know I'm in Italy. I disappeared in France. I covered myself.'

He shook his head. There was no way of getting his message across to her. There was no way of explaining the clockwork of a police inquiry, cogs turning, the availability of a large network of information. She just didn't want to listen. She was plugged into the moon.

‘This cop Pagan,' he said. ‘He has your name. That in itself doesn't worry me. It's all the rest of it that does. Sooner or later, probably sooner, wires will be buzzing across Europe, requests will go to Interpol, bulletins will be issued. It doesn't stop there, Carlotta. The FBI will be alerted, and God knows who else. Do you see?'

He gazed at her. It was futile to berate her. Instead, he had a sudden urge to protect her, as if she were some tiny vulnerable creature he'd found in a hedgerow. He wondered at the mysteries of the heart, the excesses and the surprises.

‘Something must have happened in London,' he said very quietly. ‘Think. Try to think. Talk to me.'

She closed her eyes. She spoke in a strange monotone. ‘I watched him for a week in the beginning,' she said.

‘He didn't notice you?'

‘Nobody notices me unless I want them to, Barron.' She opened her eyes, looked at him with contempt. ‘He had a habit of varying his routine. The variations were strictly limited. Harcourt wasn't the most imaginative human being I've ever had to deal with. He usually left the Embassy between five and six o'clock. Sometimes he went home by Tube. Sometimes he drove. Sometimes he caught a taxi. Once, he took a bus.'

She paused. She sipped her orange juice. Barron watched her face, the odd lack of expression.

‘He spent his evenings in the company of women usually. One night he went to a house in St John's Wood with a woman. I was parked outside, waiting. A man is sometimes vulnerable and not too attentive when he's just made love, Barron, as you're probably aware. His thoughts are elsewhere, he's just been laid and he's feeling exuberant, maybe he's even feeling omnipotent. When he left the house, he walked to his car. I watched him come out of the house. When he was about twenty feet from his car, I took my gun from the glove-compartment and I approached him. At the last moment he turned his face, saw me coming under a street-lamp, he smiled at me – I was a mere woman, how could I possibly be a danger to him? I shot him twice in the heart. When he fell, I shot him a third time in the skull. I walked back to my car and drove away.'

‘And that was it?'

‘The whole story, Barron.'

‘And nobody saw you.'

‘Give me some goddam credit,' she said.

‘Are you absolutely sure Harcourt was dead?'

‘For Christ's sake,' she said.

Barron strolled the room, thinking that something in the woman's story didn't add up for him, an element was missing, out of place. He stopped moving, turned, faced her. It came to him suddenly: why hadn't he heard the news of Bryce Harcourt's murder from one or other sources of his information? Why hadn't there been a message, a report, even an item in a newspaper? Why hadn't Harcourt's name been mentioned in
anything
that came across the wires? It was a mystifying blank, which could only be explained if the woman's story were a lie – but why would she lie? Why would she fabricate a tale of murder?

Before he could say anything, he heard a sound from beyond the kitchen door. He raised a finger to his lips for silence, moved to the door, pulled it open.

The General stood there, dapper in his vicuña coat, his face red from the afternoon air.

‘Your manservant let me in,' he said quietly. ‘I'm sorry if I'm intruding.' He looked at Carlotta and inclined his head very slightly in a gesture of greeting. But his expression was a cold one and the light in his eye hard as iron.

There was a moment of sheer awkwardness, fragility. Barron didn't move; he smiled in a flustered way. He wondered how long the General had been on the other side of the door, how much he'd heard.

‘Have I come at a bad time?' the General asked.

‘Of course not, Erich.' Barron stirred into action, stepped out of the kitchen, put a hand on the General's elbow and steered him across the sitting-room. He hoped Carlotta would stay behind in the kitchen, but she had other ideas; in a contrary way she followed him, tracking him as he escorted the General to the sofa.

‘No introductions, Tobias?' she asked.

‘Introductions, of course, sure.' Barron nodded at the old man. ‘Carla. Meet General Schwarzenbach.'

‘Carla?' the General asked.

‘Sometimes,' Carlotta said.

The General looked puzzled. ‘Only sometimes?'

‘What she means,' Barron began to say.

‘What I mean is that I change my name when it suits me,' she said and sat alongside the General, touched the back of his hand flirtatiously. Barron was tense, coiled.

‘A chameleon of sorts,' the General said.

‘You got it at the first try.'

‘How convenient to change one's name when one has the urge. But many people use different names for a variety of reasons, I'm sure. If they wish to disappear, if they have good reason to run from the law.' The General looked at Barron. ‘Wouldn't you say so, Barron?'

Barron nodded. He needed to step in here, to stop the process of decay; he was convinced the old man had been lingering outside the door for many minutes. He must have heard it all, the argument, the mention of the London police, the talk about a leak in security. He wasn't a stupid man. If he'd been listening all along, he would have heard the name Carlotta. And, given the old man's attentiveness, he'd make assumptions, draw conclusions.

‘A drink, General?' Barron asked.

‘I think not.'

‘You don't imbibe?' Carlotta asked.

‘I have my moments. This is not one of them.' The General focused on her, narrowing his eyes. He smiled insincerely. ‘You know, you seem familiar to me. Have we perhaps met someplace before now?'