The Angel Tapes (14 page)

“Okay,” was all he said, stroking Elaine's hand.

*   *   *

Macken had lost count—as a clock struck midnight somewhere in the city of Dublin—of the number of large whiskeys he'd consumed at Gregory's. Seven? More? And the bould Elaine had downed an equal number of double vodkas. He'd known she was into horses in a big way but had never imagined she'd the constitution of one.

He rose unsteadily from the table, put an arm around her waist, nodded his thanks to the maître d'—and nearly tripped down the stairs.

As soon as they were settled in the back of the cab, Elaine flung her arms around his neck, cocked a bare leg over his, and kissed him passionately. Her tongue teased his tonsils. He felt a hand slide down the front of his trousers and wrap itself around his erection. She didn't squeeze, just ran her fingers and thumb lightly up and down the shaft. Jesus, but he wanted her.

They half walked, half fell into his apartment, Blade slamming the door behind them with a foot.
Fuck
the neighbors. He began to undo his tie.

“What are you doing?”

“Undressing. Hurry up and get them things off you or I swear I'll take you as you are on the kitchen table.”

“Gosh, what's the mad rush?” She stood with folded arms. “We've all
night,
darling.”

She stalked into the living room, found the light switch, and made straight for Macken's drinks cabinet. He followed her sheepishly into the room, as she sought among the depleted bottles for a relatively full one. While her back was turned, he kicked various discarded items of clothing and other jetsam behind the sofa and arranged its cushions. The rest of the room she'd have to take as she found it.

“Ah, gin!” Elaine said, studying a label. “That'll do me nicely.
And
there's a half-f bottle of whiskey as well. We're in luck.”

She poured their drinks and sat down on the sofa. He joined her and put an arm around her shoulder, cupping a breast in his hand. Elaine leaned her head against his cheek.

“Who's that?” she asked lazily, pointing with a now-bare foot to a framed photograph on the wall. “Your mother?”

“Er, no; it's Joan, my wife. Well,
ex
-wife, I suppose. We're separated.”

She giggled. “Sorry. It's the hair.”

“I know. And you needn't say you're sorry. It's all right.”

“She has an interesting face.”

“Look, can we
not
talk about her?”

He squeezed her breast harder and leaned across to kiss her. She pushed him away, gently but firmly.

“Gosh, you're like a kid in some ways, do you know that, Blade? Just drink your drink.”

She placed a hand on his groin and kept it there. “Plenty of time to show me again how good you are.” She caressed his crotch slowly. “Now, tell me
all
about yourself.”

*   *   *

Two hours later, Elaine extricated herself from Blade's limp arm and stood up.

“Where's the bathroom? I want to freshen myself up.”

Blade saw two Elaine de Rossas.

“
S
-second on the right … no, I mean
left.
”

“Thanks. Here, let me top you up.”

She filled his whiskey glass again.

Elaine returned fifteen minutes later, to find him sprawled full out on the sofa, snoring noisily.

“Blade!” she called. And again, more loudly. He didn't stir.

Elaine had no idea what she was looking for, so it was going to be a haphazard search. Yet she'd time on her side: Blade, she was certain, wouldn't wake for hours.

There was nothing of importance in his kitchen. Most people have a habit of “filing” things in kitchen drawers, with the intention of sorting them out at a later date. Blade was no exception: Elaine found invoices, old letters, bank statements; a final demand from an installment-plan company, long out of date. There was a lot of junk, and photographs of Macken's three children at various ages. Elaine lingered over a black-and-white shot of a younger and trimmer Blade wearing a United Nations uniform.

Nor did the rest of the apartment yield anything of value to her in her quest. She was about to give up and call a cab, when her eye was caught by the cellular phone Blade had tossed carelessly on the coffee table. It was lying face down, and there was something about it that set it outside of the ordinary. Elaine picked it up.

She'd never seen a phone like it before. A complete, built-in tape recorder. Unbelievable; what would they think of next? Throwing a quick, cautious glance at the comatose Blade, she pressed the
PLAY
button.

“—
DAYS TO GO. WHAT'S HAPPENING, BLADE? WHAT'S THE STORY ON MY MONEY
?”

“It's coming.”

“
I MEANT EVERYTHING I SAID ON FRIDAY, BLADE. I DON'T GIVE A SHITE WHO COMES UP WITH THE MONEY, BUT IF IT ISN'T THERE ON THE FOURTEENTH, THEN IT'S BOOM TIME
.”

Elaine shut it off. She stood there quietly in the small living room for perhaps two minutes, musing and bemused. Then she wound the tape back to the beginning, took a notebook from her purse, and switched on a standing lamp.

She hesitated. No, it was too risky. Elaine turned off the lamp again and went back to Blade's minuscule bathroom, bringing telephone and notebook with her. She sat down on the side of the bath, laid the instrument on the toilet-seat cover and hit the playback button again. As the sound began to emerge from the phone speaker, she kept pace with the words in fluent, Pitman shorthand.

In the kitchen of a restaurant in the center of town, a chubby little man named Gregory picked up a half-empty Stolichnaya vodka bottle, and poured the water it contained down the sink.

Fifteen

Elaine de Rossa took a cab to work on the sixth day of Angel. Her head was reasonably clear, yet she never trusted herself to drive well enough after a late night.

Her secretary looked up from her terminal when Elaine entered the big, open-plan office.

“Coffee?”

“A gallon please, Margaret. And two fried Alka-Seltzers.”

There were three E-mails for her: one from her father's trainer, informing her of the forthcoming sale of two thoroughbreds that “the old man” would probably be interested in. He himself could not be reached; he didn't wish to be. The other messages were junk.

Elaine opened a fresh file and called it simply BLADE. Then she pulled her notebook from her purse and consulted the lines of hieroglyphs she'd jotted down in haste the night before. It took her no more than two minutes to translate the shorthand into words on the screen. When that was done, she read them over and over, sipping from her mug of coffee, scrolling up and down through the document, trying to make some sense of it.

She printed the file.

*   *   *

The editor of the
Sunday Courier
didn't suffer fools gladly; he was also a snob of the worst kind. You might think that a tabloid newspaper would draw its reporters from the same demographic sector as its readership. Not Brian Cusack's. What he liked to call his “stable” was recruited from Ireland's ruling classes and elite: the sons and daughters of bankers, lawyers, politicians, businessman, academics, and gentlemen of leisure.

Elaine's father combined all the qualities of the last three. Intensely rich, he owned a considerable swath of County Kildare—some of the finest horse country in Europe. Elaine had grown up in the saddle; knew her mounts, knew her racing, and knew her racing men. With such credentials, she was an asset to a paper that boasted the country's best-informed steeplechase pages. Yet it wasn't the horses themselves Elaine reported on, but the sleaze that attached itself with newsworthy regularity to the racing fraternity, and to their wealthy friends and business partners. It was fodder that appealed to a broad cross section of Irish society.

Cusack frowned when Elaine swept into his inner office and dropped the sheet of paper on his desk with a flourish.

“What's this?” he growled.

“You tell
me,
Brian.”

Cusack scanned the lines and scratched his red goatee. A name had caught his eye.

“Blade? Blade Macken?”

“The same.”

“I don't understand, Elaine. Who's the other character? This ‘Anon' chap.”

She went and shut the door.

“I won't stake my career on it but I'm almost certain it's Friday's bomber.”

“Fuck
me.
”

“No thank you.”

Cusack was deadly serious now.

“Get him, Elaine,” he said. “I want him.” He studied her intently. “How well do you know Macken?”

“Well enough to have been able to get that transcript. There may be more, Brian; I don't know. Are we on then?”

One of Cusack's desk phones rang.

“Who?!” he roared into the mouthpiece. “Not
now,
Sammy, for Chrissake; I'll call you back!” He replaced the receiver.

“Bloody sure we're on,” he told Elaine. “I want you to stick to Blade Macken like a poultice to a boil. Damn it, I
knew
Duffy was having us on—fuck him. A gas main: Did you ever hear the likes of it?”

He pointed. “You stick to Macken, my girl. I don't care what it takes, but whatever he has, I want it. And when you get it, we'll talk about reviewing your salary.”

“I'll need expenses.”

“You have a bloody expense account already.”

“I mean,” she said coolly, “a more expensive one.”

*   *   *

While cycling past Leopardstown race track on Wednesday afternoon, Peter Macken had considered the worth of the tape recording he'd made two nights before. He'd blushed a second time when recalling the intimate things his mother had said in the heat of passion; he couldn't imagine what his father would think of them. Again and again Peter had to convince himself that his eavesdropping was justified, that it was to the benefit of his father and him—and maybe even to Joan herself in the long run.

Yet Roche had let little slip that offered concrete evidence that Joan Macken and he were doing more than sharing a bed. There'd been talk of Roche's cleaning out the garage “one of these days” and he'd given Joan permission to open a letter from London, which was due to arrive the following day (he needed to know its contents before he got back from the office). There was something, too, about “the deal-to-end-all-deals,” and vague talk of early retirement. But that was all. Peter doubted if it were enough.

He had, however, bought a small Jiffy bag for the purpose of mailing the tape to his father. He hadn't sealed it. Peter had yet to hear what last night's recording had yielded; perhaps it would be better. If so, he could send both tapes in the one pack.

Joan was out when he got home. A thudding bass line and the soaring voice of Dolores O'Riordan told him that Sandra was in her room. That was good: The Cranberries at full volume would drown out any sounds from Peter's bedroom.

The audiocassette was full. They must have been going at it hammer and tongs, he thought grimly. He didn't regret having spent the night at his friend Stephen's house; his absence had spared him the real-time noises of Joan and Roche's coupling. And wasn't that the beauty of the setup? Peter didn't even have to be in the house.

He rewound the tape and hit the
PLAY
button.

“No, leave the light on.”

“Are you sure now? Supposing someone sees it.…”

“Well, so what? Sure they'll think it's Joan.”

“Mm, yeah. I hadn't thought of that. Hey listen, you're sure now she'll be away till three? I'd be afraid she'd—”

“That's what she said, but you can take it from me it'll be five at the earliest. The last hen party she was at, she stayed out till seven the next morning.”

“Even so, I'd be—”

“Listen, Finola and her were best mates at school. Finola won't let her go before the hotel throws the whole shower of them out on their ear.”

“Maybe you're right.”

“'Course I am. Now, take my little titties in your mouth, Daddy, and suck them till they hurt!”

Peter listened despite himself. He'd wanted to turn the damn thing off after thirty seconds. But a masochistic—or was it a voyeuristic?—side of his personality induced him to sit through the entire sordid recording.

And hear his sister commit what constituted the ultimate sin in Peter's eyes: that of sleeping with the enemy.

He'd completely forgotten about the party, even though his mother had reminded them of it only days before. Of
course
Joan would have stayed away until the small hours. Sandra was right about that: Finola wouldn't hear of Joan's leaving before she and the other women had overstayed their welcome. Divorcées, Peter reflected, were ten times worse than the young brides-to-be.

The recording ended with a barely audible click. Peter ejected the audiocassette and stared at it long and hard. There were tears in his eyes, tears of hurt and anger. Roche was, in his opinion, capable of anything. But
Sandra.
Good Christ. Had the fucker seduced her or had it been her idea? He desperately wanted to believe the former, yet some part of him guessed that his sister had made the first, tentative move. Peter was no psychologist—but you didn't need to be to notice how Sandra looked to Roche as a father: the abstemious, hardworking, caring father she'd never had.

He didn't know what to do with the tape. Allowing Blade or Joan to hear it was out of the question; he couldn't do it to Sandra, betray her like that. One betrayal was enough. And he didn't want to
think
about what Blade would do to Cock Roche if he were to find out.