Брайан Гарфилд - Recoil

But then he took the cap off and rubbed his pale scalp. “Those four gentlemen made me into a bald-headed old man, Ezio. They took eight of my best years. That’s something a man can’t ever get back.”

“I know that, Frank.”

“No. You don’t. You’ve never been inside. Eight years with those stinking black animals. If I hadn’t been who I am, I’d have got raped in there twice a day. Two thousand black junkie fags locked inside those walls. That’s what I lived with those eight years.”

“You look damn good, though.”

“I kept fit. I made a point of it. You go too soft in there, it doesn’t matter who you are or who your friends are. You have to keep command. Nobody respects a flabby leader.”

“Well you’ve never been flabby, Frank, that’s for sure.”

Gillespie said, “Personally I never trust a fat man.”

It made Ezio look at him angrily. Ezio wasn’t fat — he was thick but it was all solid — but she hadn’t missed the insinuation in Gillespie’s remark and she was surprised he had the nerve to utter it.

It hadn’t escaped Frank but he decided to ignore it; he had other things on his mind. He gestured toward his wife with his drink; she smiled; Frank took a healthy swallow and turned toward Ezio. “What’s in motion?”

“Hell, Frank, we’re looking for them. What else can I tell you until we start hearing back? The word only went out a few hours ago. We’ve got photographs going out to every city and town where we’ve got contacts. Some of the cops here and there, the organizations, you know how it goes. It’s the biggest manhunt we’ve ever started. We’ll find them.”

“Particularly Merle. Edward Merle.”

“Particularly him, Frank.”

“I want all four of them. But the other three are just window dressing compared to him.”

“We know that.”

Frank turned his head. He was eyeing C. K. Gillespie. The younger man met his glance. She saw the flicker of a smile at the corner of Gillespie’s thin mouth.

Frank said, “What about you? What are you doing about it?”

“Well I have an idea, Mr. Pastor.”

“You do? Let’s hear it.”

“Sir, I wouldn’t want you to take this the wrong way. Right now it’s just kind of a wild idea I’m trying out. I’d just as soon not go into the whole thing before I find out whether it pans out.”

Ezio said, “Mr. Pastor doesn’t like smartass young lawyers, Charlie.”

Gillespie spread his neat small hands openly. “Look at it this way, Ezio. If the idea works we’ll all benefit from it. But if it’s a dud, then I just raise Mr. Pastor’s false hopes and I make a fool out of myself by bragging about it at this point. All I can say is I’m working on something and I think it’s got a pretty good chance of producing results.”

“You coy little—”

“Let it go,” Frank said. “C.K. may have a point. In the meantime you get on the phone to Los Angeles and build some fires under those people.”

They walked together along the shore; she held Frank’s hand. With the toes of her canvas shoes she kicked at seashells. Out on the Sound little sailboats wheeled like butterflies. Frank said, “You’ve done a job with the kids. I mean a fabulous job, Anna.”

“Forty lashes a day keeps them in line.”

“I’m serious about this. I married you — let’s face it, I married you because you had good brains and good looks and a body that just won’t quit. I wasn’t looking for a mother for my kids; I wasn’t even thinking that straight in those days. Nobody around me wanted this marriage. They all hated it. They put you through hell, I guess. And then those four gentlemen sending me away for eight years. But you’re still here and you’re the one that got me out of there, you more than anybody else—”

“Now that was Ezio, Frank; he’s the one who reached the board.”

“Just between us and the seashells, little Anna, I get a feeling Ezio wouldn’t have minded having a free hand to go on running the organization by himself for a while longer. You were the one who kept sticking the prod to him. What I’m saying, you turned out to be a lot more wife than I figured I was bargaining for and I’m not forgetting it.”

But then it went both ways and he knew that. All she’d had before she’d met him was her wits and her looks. She was a coal-dust brat from a rancid miner’s shack thirty miles from Hazleton, Pennsylvania. She’d won a high-school beauty contest and quit school to go to New York and be a high-priced model, and she’d ended up getting two TV commercials because the director liked sleeping with young brunettes, and that was the extent of her life — that and a fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village that she shared with another girl and a hundred cockroaches and the occasional influx of freaked-out junkies with Beatle haircuts; and the promise of maybe eight or ten good years as a hooker before her looks got battered away and she disappeared from the world.

She didn’t remind him; he became annoyed whenever she brought up her past. What she said was, “I love you, Frank.”

For an hour she and Nora played badminton against Sandy: Sandy was the athlete and won more games than she lost to the two of them. They were going inside to clean up when Gillespie drove down the driveway from the road. Anna saw George Ramiro go back into the gatehouse after closing the big gates. There was electric wire along the top of the wall all the way around the three landward sides of the six-acre estate.

The girls raced inside; Anna waited at the door while Gillespie parked the rented Cadillac and came up the slate walk with his briefcase, his sharkskin suit and his gentle friendly smile. “Been getting your exercise, I see.”

“The girls keep me hopping.”

“They’re a great pair of kids,” he said. “I’ve got some good news for Frank.”

“In that case let’s not keep him waiting.” She led him through the parlor and knocked on the door of the office. When she heard Frank’s voice she opened it and stepped back and Gillespie went past her into the office.

Ezio and Frank were at the table leaning over a litter of blueprints. Gillespie stopped two paces inside the room. “That idea paid off.”

Over the back of Gillespie’s shoulder she watched Frank’s face. One eyebrow went up inquisitively. Ezio glanced at her disapprovingly but she stayed where she was.

Gillespie said, “I think it’ll lead us to Edward Merle.”

Ezio said, “Shouldn’t this be private, Frank?”

“Anna has a right to hear this. Come on in.”

She stepped into the room and pushed the door shut behind her.

Gillespie was opening his briefcase on the arm of a chair. The room had been built for a nineteenth-century millionaire; it was all deep rich woodwork — glass-enclosed bookcases, wainscoting, Dutch doors onto the garden, an Italian Renaissance chandelier. It was huge for a study; Frank was not a large man but he dominated it, and very few men had that quality.

Gillespie drew a single sheet of paper from the briefcase. “Name, vital statistics, fingerprints. Photograph in here as well.”

“On Edward Merle?”

“No, sir,” Gillespie said. “They’ll probably be changing his name again, giving him a new identity, relocating him, all that. It would take quite a while to get that information. I think this is faster.”

Ezio said, “Then spill it.”

“The government knows the four witnesses are targets. They’ve put all four of them under wraps.”

Ezio’s voice became sharp. “We know that, Charlie.”

Gillespie smiled. “Sure. The government assigns caseworkers to look after these witnesses, shepherd them along, get them resettled. You know how it is. Now I managed to get this information from our contact in the Witness Security office because I asked for it. She wouldn’t have volunteered it — I don’t imagine it would have occurred to her.”