The Consignment (6 page)

Finally I hauled the secretary’s chair over, got up, and peered into the upper lock. I could see right through into Rossiter’s dark office. I rested my forehead against the door, closed my eyes, and felt my gut churn. There was no way in. And I still had the stolen paperwork with me on the wrong side of the goddamn door.

The elevator motors suddenly kicked into life. I jumped off the chair, slid it into place beneath the desk, then retreated with the paperwork to my office. I looked down to the parking lot, but there was no sign of Rossiter’s Lotus. Then the elevator doors opened, there were voices, and next thing Stan Kolotsky, the super, passed my doorway with a team of cleaners. Seeing me, he backpedaled and looked in.

“Carpet wash. These guys gonna make some noise. The stuff they use, it stinks bad too.”

I frowned. Stan shrugged apologetically, then left. A minute later, one of the cleaners fired up a machine. Someone turned on a radio. It sounded like they were settling in for the night.

I rested my forehead on the desk. Rossiter’s door, I decided, wasn’t going to open until Rossiter reopened it. In the meantime, the stolen paperwork simply couldn’t remain in my desk. It couldn’t remain in my office. It couldn’t, in fact, remain anywhere at the plant, unless I was willing to risk it being found and traced back to me. Finally I lifted my head. Then with more misgivings than I can name, I put the originals and copies into a folder, slipped the folder into my briefcase, turned out the lights, and went home.

CHAPTER 7

My study was a place of refuge throughout Hawkeye, the one private corner to which I could retreat and feel largely unburdened. I had my own phone, fax, and PC in there, but what I mostly did in the room was skip rope and listen to music.

But that night after returning from the Haplon plant, I walked straight by my stereo to my desk and laid out the stolen paperwork and read it. It was a sobering experience. The order from Trevanian’s client, as outlined in the correspondence and documentation, had been under consideration by Rossiter for months. And not just consideration, Rossiter had gone ahead and applied for export licenses from Commerce as though the order had already been placed. Some of this, of course, I’d learned from Rita Durranti. What she hadn’t told me, almost certainly because she didn’t know it herself, was how much earlier, and over what range of materiel, Rossiter had set the paperwork in motion. It wasn’t only the night-sights. There were mortars and miniguns. Ammo. Every single item Trevanian and Lagundi had inspected out at Springfield was there in Rossiter’s paperwork. And the paperwork predated the Springfield fair by months.

I chewed on my lip. Then I took out the note I’d made from Micky Baker’s list, the reference number he’d been chasing at Commerce. I dug around in Rossiter’s correspondence and found the matching number. It was the Commerce Department’s reference for the Haplon night-sights. But the final two pages were the real kicker, a draft of the headline contract to be signed when Trevanian paid his deposit on the order. I was the Haplon representative who normally signed these things, but here there were two blank spaces for signatures, and beside the spaces two names in bold type. J. Trevanian, on behalf of the Nigerian Ministry of Defense. M. Rossiter, on behalf of Haplon Systems.

“Dinner’s in the microwave,” said Fiona, making the desultory announcement as she passed in the hall. I heard her enter her own study.

A minute later I’d finished reading, and I gathered together the paperwork, returned it to the folder, then wrapped the folder in a carrier bag. I climbed onto my desk, reached up, and pressed my fingertips against a ceiling tile. I lifted the tile into the roof cavity, inserted the carrier bag through the opening, and pushed it over by the rear wall. Then I eased the displaced ceiling tile back into position.

Climbing down, I wiped my footprints off the desk, took a final glance at the ceiling, then left my study. The moment Fiona heard me approaching along the hall, she closed her study door.

Down in the kitchen I found a frozen casserole in the microwave. On a plate on the bench nearby, a slice of cherry pie. I stood there and considered the dismal scene a moment, then I opened the cutlery drawer. Then I changed my mind and went back upstairs and knocked on her door.

“Your dinner’s in the microwave,” she said.

I went in. She didn’t look up from her reading. When I said her name she still didn’t look up, so I asked her, “Are we adults or kids?”

She closed the book, swiveled in her chair, and looked up at me. “Okay,” she said.

Okay. It was, as she meant it to be, provoking.

“I’m not lying to you,” I told her.

She flicked up her hand, dismissing the whole issue. She seemed too battle-weary to face another argument over my supposed infidelity right then. “Brad’s gone out for dinner with Barchevsky,” she said.

It took me a moment. “The Congo guy?”

Rising, Fiona switched off her desk lamp. “He wants to run through the itinerary. Give Brad a better idea of what he’s expected to do at the mines.”

“Brad hasn’t even got a visa yet.”

“As of lunchtime today he has.” She averted her eyes and stepped by me. But if she could read me, I could read her too, and what I read in that moment was concern. Concern and doubt. I followed her into the bedroom.

“You’re having second thoughts now? Now, when he’s got his visa, when he’s all set to go? It’s only just occurred to you sending him over there’s not such a great idea?”

“Nobody’s sending him.”

“Have you mentioned this to Brad?”

Kicking off her shoes, Fiona unbuttoned her skirt. “I asked him if he was really sure he wanted to go.”

“Oh, you asked him. And I guess he said, ’No, I’ve just changed my mind.’ ”

Stepping out of her skirt, she reminded me of my remark about adults and kids. Then she went to her dressing table and slipped off her blouse and started swiping a ball of cotton wool over her face. I sat down on the bed.

After twenty-something years of marriage, I can’t claim the romantic fires still burned as brightly between us as they once had. But they hadn’t died out either. Sex, until Fiona’s suspicions about me reared up so suddenly, had never been a chore. Watching her at the dressing table now, it crossed my mind that if the problem was just Brad, and if this had happened a year earlier, I would have wandered across and rubbed her shoulders. We would have talked, at least halfway sorted something out, before moving on to bed. As it was, we sat in grim silence as she finished wiping off her makeup with harsh, short strokes. Finally she dropped the last used cotton-wool ball in the trash.

“If the mines were in dangerous areas,” she said, “Barchevsky wouldn’t be employing a geo without any experience like Brad.”

“You’re rationalizing.”

“Oh please. Psychoanalysis?”

“That could be why he’s employing Brad. Maybe no one with any experience wants to go.”

“There’s a peace agreement.”

“Made in Africa.”

“It’s lasted since Christmas.”

“Fiona. In the Congo, there is no such thing as peace. Occasionally you get a temporary cessation of hostilities while everyone regroups. But that’s it. As soon as one lot gets tired of talking, it’s over. Any so-called peace agreement is dead.”

She craned around. “You sell arms, for chrissake. You’re not a military strategist. You’re not even a soldier anymore. Get over it. Stop lecturing me.”

“Okay,” I said. “The Congo’s fine. Safer than Seattle. That what you want to hear?”

She got up and went to our bathroom. When she turned in the doorway, her eyes shone. “Thanks for all your support, Ned.”

I spread my hands, helpless. I had nothing left to say.

When I slept, I dreamed about my father and me fishing up at the shack, and in the middle of the dream I woke suddenly and opened my eyes and lay still. Fiona was in the bed beside me, her shoulder rising and falling, cradled in sleep. I listened for a moment, then quietly and slowly rolled onto my back and looked over to the bedroom window. The gauze curtains billowed gently against the pane, pressing against the narrow opening. As I watched, the curtains ballooned, made a whispering noise against the glass, then a cool draft of air brushed my face.

I sat up and swung my feet to the floor. Then I checked my watch on the side table. It was three
A.M.
When I looked at the curtains again, they were still.

Someone, somewhere in the house, had just opened a window or an external door.

I padded across to the window and parted the curtains. Brad’s car was parked in the drive alongside mine, I’d heard him return home around twelve, before I’d fallen asleep. But Brad, I knew, was not in the habit of wandering the house at all hours. Once he put his head on his pillow, he generally slept through until breakfast. A stray cat was passing beneath the street lamp out front, but otherwise Ellis Street was quiet.

Returning to the bed, I pulled on some boxers, then I reached under the bed and got my Beretta. Fiona never stirred. I edged my way out into the hall, flicking the pistol off safety.

It was possible that I’d misread the signs, that I was wrong. Fluke winds do blow. Curtains sometimes move in unexpected ways. But I’d woken so suddenly, so immediately alert, it was a sign I couldn’t ignore. It was a lesson that had been pounded into me during special training at Fort Bragg. What your senses tell you in sleep is real. And what my senses told me that night was, wake up and adrenalize.

Padding down the carpeted hall, I checked in the bathroom, the two studies, and in Brad’s long-abandoned bedroom. All the windows were closed.

Near the head of the stairs, I stopped and peered over the banisters. Then I reached and hit the light for the downstairs hall. The light blazed on. I blinked, my eyes adjusting fast, and listened and waited for someone down there to make a break for the door. Seconds passed. There was no sound from anywhere. I set myself moving again, going down the stairs, covering the hall.

I repeated the same drill I’d been through upstairs. I checked the windows in the kitchen and the living room. I looked in the dining room too, then I went to the end of the hall and checked in the garage below Brad’s room. There was no sign of anything awry. By now I’d started wondering if maybe I wasn’t stalking my own shadow, if maybe the previous few days hadn’t set my trigger too fine.

I entered the laundry room and reached across the basin and gave the window a cursory pull. It slid smoothly open.

For a moment I stood rigid, the air around me chill. That window was always, but always, kept locked.

Then cutting through the early morning quiet, a car started up, perhaps a block away. The noise started faint and got fainter, quickly fading into silence as I strained to listen and locate it. When it was gone, I waited a few seconds, then I flicked on the light and returned my attention to the window. Some paint on the wood frame was scraped, a blade clearly had been inserted to force the lock. It was neatly done, the work, if I had to guess, of a professional. Unlocking the laundry door, I went outside. The laundry light shone onto the grass, illuminating the footprints in the dew. They looked like stepping stones. One set came from the path behind the garage over to the laundry window. The other set, parallel to the first, went back the other way. The second set, farther out from the wall, were more widely spaced, as if the guy had been running.

I turned south in the direction of the car I’d heard, and listened, but it was long gone.

Returning inside, I relocked the laundry door. The chance of lifting prints from the window, or even of the guy having left any, was somewhere around zero, and I had no intention of calling the police in anyway. So after a moment’s fruitless reflection, I simply slid the window shut, relocked it, and went back upstairs.

This time when I entered my study, I switched on the light and made a careful inspection, looking for any sign of disturbance. My chair. The trash can. Desk drawers. Nothing seemed out of place. Finally I put my Beretta on the desk and climbed up and pushed aside the ceiling tile. The carrier bag was still there. I hauled it out and checked inside. Everything was there, untouched. I rebundled it and returned the bag to the hiding place.

Then I got down and dropped into my chair. The adrenaline rush was dying. I was perspiring now, I felt queasily light-headed, a familiar sensation from my Army days. It wasn’t pleasant. I closed my eyes and waited for it to pass. Every bit of military training I’d ever had, of course, told me that that was the most dangerous moment, the point at which I was most vulnerable. I should have been thinking, staying alert and energized, but instead I just sat there like your average middle-aged sap, congratulating myself on not having lost the Haplon paperwork.

“What are you doing?” My head swung around. Fiona, eyes heavy with sleep, was studying me from the doorway. She stepped in, cinching the bathrobe cord at her waist. “Why’s the light on downstairs?” she said.

“I got some water.”

Her eyes went to my desk. She noticed my hand resting by the phone. “It’s a bit late to be calling the office.”

“I wasn’t.”

She looked at me. “You don’t have to creep around in the middle of the night. Why don’t you be a man and just call her?”

“I wasn’t calling anyone.”

“So what are you doing?”

“I thought I heard something. I came out to take a look.”

“Where’s your water?”

“I drank it downstairs.”

She tilted her head. “You went downstairs, had a glass of water, then came up to your study to do what? Write a memo?”

“This was here.” I showed her the Beretta. “I just came in to get it.”

She knew I was lying. I sat there, feeling stupid, like the worst kind of heel. It wasn’t a big lie, not even very important, but somehow the timing couldn’t have been worse. It seemed, at that moment, to stand for all the other lies I’d told her. Lies she knew were lies, and tried to nail, but couldn’t.

“Funny,” she said. “It was under the bed when I turned in.”

“Fiona—”

“Don’t even try.” There was real scorn in her voice now. “Get some linen from the closet. You can use the spare room.” Gesturing phoneward, she made her exit, saying, “You might as well do it now. Go on. Make your goddamn call.”