Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Pallifer smiled his mean little smile. Those small white teeth weren’t his own, but they gave him the right carnivore look. He said, “How will I know when you’re finished?”

Curtis laughed. He was so full of his secret that it kept bubbling out of him, he couldn’t help it. “You’ll know,” he promised, and patted Pallifer’s rock-hard shoulder. “Don’t worry, Morgan, you’ll know.”

“If you say so,” Pallifer agreed.

Curtis looked at the main house again. Manville was in there somewhere. Fixed in place? Time would tell. “About the girl,” he said.

“No change, I take it.”

“No change. Monday or Tuesday, you should know where she is. As far as the world’s concerned, she’s already dead, somewhere else, so you shouldn’t leave any bodies lying around, to confuse things.”

“I got that.”

Curtis nodded at the main house. “And he shouldn’t know,” he said. “It could make the agreement come unstuck.”

“I’ll play Manville like a guitar,” Pallifer promised. “The way those old rock stars used to. Play it and play it, and at the end you smash it up.”

The shower connected to the master bedroom was almost a room in itself, a large square space with two tiled walls and two clear lucite walls. Washing off the trail dust from his ride with Albert, Curtis felt good, better than he’d felt in months, maybe years. Revenge was coming, and profit was coming. When he was finished, he’d be the richest man he knew, one of the richest men in the world. And safe as houses. Even if there were people who suspected he’d had something to do with the disaster, nobody would be able to prove it. The evidence would be gone, destroyed, buried like the Japanese barracks on Kanowit Island. Washed clean away, like the orangey-tan dust of Kennison, swirling away down the shower drain.

Cindy was in the main room, packing her overnight bag when he came out. “Call one of the boys to take our things to the chopper,” he told her, crossing the room to the closets. “I just have to say a word to George, and we’re off.”

He found Manville in the library, reading a history of the early days in Australia, when it was being settled by convicts from Britain. Brisbane, Curtis remembered, was settled exclusively by convicts who’d committed fresh crimes after arriving in Australia; what a beginning.

“We’re off, George.”

Manville closed his book and rose from his low leather chair. “I guess you’ll be phoning me,” he said.

Curtis noticed that, from where Manville had been sitting, he’d had a clear view out a window to the spare barracks and the verandah. Had he watched Curtis and Morgan talk together over there? Did he guess any of what they’d been saying to one another? Curtis said, “If you need anything while you’re here, ask Morgan, he’ll be traveling back and forth.”

“And keeping an eye on me,” Manville said.

Curtis’s smile was easy, relaxed. “I trust you, George,” he said. “You’re a man of your word, and so am I.”

“It does take two,” Manville agreed.

Curtis stuck out his hand. “We’ll talk.”

Why did Manville always seem so surprised, every time Curtis offered to shake hands? I’m accepting you as an equal, you damn fool, Curtis said inside his head, be grateful for it.

Manville did consent to the handshake, grasping Curtis’s hand briefly, then letting go. “Have a good trip,” he said.

Curtis was almost out of the house, following Cindy, when Helen Farrelly called to him from down the hall. “You go ahead,” he told the girl, “I’ll catch up.”

Helen bustled up to him, but not, as he’d expected, merely to say goodbye. “We’ve had a phone call just a few minutes ago,” she said. “Some sad news.”

“Oh?”

“The captain of your yacht. Captain Zhang?”

What now? Curtis thought, and knew at once that this was fresh trouble. “Yes? Captain Zhang?”

“He’s killed himself, Mr. Curtis,” she said. “And no one knows why.”

The flight from Brisbane to Sydney was full, and delayed, so that they sat on the ground for twenty minutes before takeoff. Kim didn’t care. She was too full of everything else that was happening to worry about simple problems like travel delays. She was both eager and apprehensive, eager to see her parents, and apprehensive about George Manville.

Could George really have caved in to Richard Curtis, the way everybody else thought, even that police inspector, Fairchild? She couldn’t believe it, and yet what other explanation was there? Why would Curtis clear George’s name — as casually as he’d smeared it — if George hadn’t agreed to come over to his side, to help him in whatever it was he was scheming?

But how could she have been so wrong about him?

They’d given Kim the window seat, with Jerry in the middle seat to her left, and Luther on the aisle. She sat and looked out at other planes landing and taking off, little trucks scurrying busily this way and that, and her brain scurried like the little trucks around the problem of George Manville, while beside her Luther and Jerry talked. Until something Luther said attracted her attention, and she turned away from the dreary sight of Brisbane International Airport to say, “What was that? Where are you going from Sydney?”

“Singapore,” Jerry repeated.

“But why?”

“Curtis, of course,” Jerry said, surprised at her. “If what he’s up to next is so damn important, if he was actually willing to commit murder just to keep me from finding out what he’s doing — and I must say I didn’t know I was that important in his life, the bastard, and I’m glad I am — well, I have to find out what he’s doing, don’t I?”

“I suppose,” Kim said. She hadn’t been thinking about Richard Curtis at all.

Jerry said, “And his headquarters is in Singapore, and I just happen to have a friend in his offices there, he’ll know what’s going on, or he’ll be able to find out.”

“This is the man,” Kim said, “that told you things before, about what Curtis was doing.”

“Like Kanowit Island, for instance,” Jerry said. “Yes. So we’ll go to Singapore, Luther and I, and we’ll find out what Curtis is up to, and we’ll stop him cold .”

“I’ll come with you,” Kim said, so quickly that the words were out of her mouth almost before the thought was in her head.

Jerry frowned at her. “Why? Kim, haven’t you been kicked around enough?”

“I want to know what George is up to,” she said. “If Richard Curtis is based in Singapore, and if that’s where he’s planning whatever it is he’s going to do, then that’s where George will be.”

Luther, leaning forward to speak past Jerry, said, “Kim, if you’ll take advice from an old campaigner in the wars of love, forget the name George Manville. Go home to Chicago with your mother and father.”

Kim knew that Luther meant well, and that he felt kindly toward her, but every time he tried to say something sympathetic, it came out sounding like an order that you were almost honor-bound to disobey. “Thank you, Luther,” she said. “You may be right, but I just can’t walk away from all this until I know what’s going on. If you and Jerry don’t want me along, I’ll go to Singapore on my own.”

“It’s not that at all,” Jerry said. He put a hand on Luther’s arm.

Luther shook his head. “If you’re that determined to go into the lion’s den, Kim,” he said, “and Jerry’s determined to let you, better you stick with us.”

“Thank you,” she said, and the plane jerked forward, on its way at last.

Tired, cranky passengers pressed against one another like cattle in a chute, getting off the plane. Kim just let the movement take her, not really caring anymore, but then she saw her dad’s face back there among the people waiting, and next to him Mom, and she waved her arm high above her head and saw them start when they spotted her, and she began pushing and shoving along with everybody else.