Филип Керр - A Five Year Plan

‘Everyone got that?’ said Bowen. ‘OK Kate, you made your point. What is it that you were going to tell us about Peter van der Velden before you were interrupted?’

‘Just this,’ she said, pleased no one in the room had cottoned onto the occasional relationship she was actually having with the British liaison officer, Nick Hemmings. ‘Peter’s sources tell him that they’re expecting a big shipment from Rocky Envigado. And get this. It’s coming up from Mallorca, same as before.’

‘Meaning?’ Bowen was frowning now.

Kate took a deep breath.

‘Meaning last time we must have missed it.’

‘Yeah, well, if we missed it, so did the Spanish police and so did the Dutch,’ said Ochao. ‘We searched that boat from top to bottom. There was nothing.’

‘Could be that Rocky has discovered a new way of transporting the stuff,’ said Bowen. ‘A way we don’t yet know about.’

‘Maybe he’s doing it on the Internet,’ suggested another agent. ‘Seems like that’s all that’s obsessing people these days.’

‘I want us to get scientific here,’ said Bowen. ‘Quantico. National Crime Information Center. The Smithsonian. Back issues of the Law Enforcement Bulletin if you have to. With all the resources at our command we ought to be able to come up with some ideas.’

Bowen stood up and tried to look inspiring to his people. It seemed easy enough until he met Kate’s doubtful stare.

‘Problem, Kate?’

‘It might be that there really was nothing last time. That he used that first trip as a way of embarrassing us. After that little debacle maybe he thinks now we’ll leave him alone. But either way we ought to try and find the boat before we do anything, don’t you think?’

‘Well sure, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?’ He placed a carefully avuncular hand on Kate’s shoulder. ‘Take charge of the landing party, Mister Spock. I want some answers.’

Kate drove home in her white Sebring, fixed herself a rum punch, drank it while running her bath, and then fixed herself another before soaking in the hot water. The bathroom gave onto the wrap-around terrace and she left the blinds up so she could see across the intercoastal waterway to the winking lights of the Miami Riviera beyond. It was a big sunken tub with a Jacuzzi and just about her favorite spot in the whole apartment. A couple of times after she and Howard had taken the place they had shared a tub together. But mostly he preferred a shower and if he did take a bath he liked to have it to himself. After a while she got used to the idea that he generally took advantage of her extended sessions in the tub to lie in bed and watch the Playboy Channel on cable. He pretended he didn’t of course and would switch onto Letterman or Leno the minute she came back into the bedroom. Not that she had minded him watching it very much. But what really did surprise and irritate her was that he must have believed he could take out a subscription to any new channel, let alone Playboy, and that somehow she wouldn’t notice. She worked for the FBI, for Christ’s sake. Noticing things was her job. Naturally she had known that he was having affairs almost as soon as it started happening. She had hoped that he might get whatever it was out of his system. Just as long as none of it got into hers. But what finally prompted her to take action was not jealousy, nor even her love for Howard but, like the Playboy Channel subscription, the irritation she experienced at being considered too stupid to see through his lies and evasions. She was the bright one, not him. Second in her class in law at the University of Florida in Gainsville, graduating with honors, this was the same class in which her future husband had struggled to make the top fifty, and still the bastard figured he could outsmart her, like she was the dumbest short-order waitress in Oklahoma.

Kate had borrowed some surveillance equipment from the Bureau to obtain aural and pictorial evidence of Howard’s infidelity and caught him banging the ladies’ golf pro from the nearby Turnberry Isle Country Club. That was bad enough. Golf was such a stupid game. But it’s the small things that really bother you and she had been even more appalled to discover that Howard’s golfing partner was using the contraceptive gel from Kate’s own bathroom cupboard for their stroke play. So with the help of a girlfriend in the Bureau’s laboratory, and following extensive trial and experimentation, she had substituted the gel inside a tube of Gynogel for an identically clear and similarly scented brand of exercise balm — an alcohol and menthol-based deep heat muscle rub that was definitely not recommended for use on sensitive areas. Especially the two sensitive areas that Kate had in mind. Even now, months after the event, just the thought of the tape she had made of her husband and his lover screaming through their hottest ever session of lovemaking could still make her laugh out loud. Whoever said that revenge was a dish best served cold had obviously never listened to two generous servings of overheated genitals.

Somehow Kate had never thought of herself as the vengeful wife. With her beautiful face, her keen appreciation of art, literature and music, not to mention a strong imagination, she had always seen herself as a more romantic type. It seemed odd to think about it now, but that was the reason she had joined the Bureau in the first place, and not some sawgrass-dull firm of downtown attorneys. She had wanted action and excitement, even the occasional danger. But of late the most hazardous thing she had done had been forgetting the safety catch on her Lady Smith & Wesson; and for all that she needed a weapon she might as well have been packing a hatpin. In the hope of getting a foreign posting, like Bogota, Caracas, Lima or Mexico City, Kate had started to learn Spanish. Meanwhile she stared out to sea and dreamed of adventure.

Everyone agreed that Al Cornaro’s wife, Madonna, was an extraordinary woman. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, just that everyone thought it extraordinary that Al should have married her at all. Most of the guys who worked for Tony Nudelli were married to beauty-parlor blondes with brassiere-sized IQs and Condé Nast educations. Not so much trophy wives as tin cup ones, these were the kind of women who could manipulate an eyebrow pencil with more skill than they could use a pen, and for whom oral skills meant giving a good blow-job. What made Madonna different was her intelligence, her sharp tongue, her total disregard for self-image, and the size of her tits. The tits were genuine, you just had to look at the rest of Madonna to work that out. They hung around her waist like something that had been sculpted there as a dry run for Washington and Jefferson on Mount Rushmore — a monumental effect that was enhanced by Madonna’s dislike of brassieres — or for that matter any underwear at all — and the recent birth of her fourth son, Al junior. Al senior loved his wife, but it didn’t stop him making jokes about her for Tony Nudelli’s amusement. Keeping Tony amused was an important part of Al’s job as Tony’s business manager. Keeping him amused and taking care of business. Colonel Tom Parker with guns and jokes. Today the business included Dave Delano, but first Al wanted to make sure Tony was in a more forgiving mood than the day before when Al had had to tell him that Willy Four Breakfasts had fucked up and was now laid up in the Miami Beach Community Hospital with a serious eye injury, courtesy of his planned victim.

It was not quite ten o’clock when Al arrived at Nudelli’s luxurious villa in the heart of Key Biscayne. He recognized the red Porsche convertible that was parked in the driveway and instinctively made his way to the 6,000 square foot pool-house. He knew his boss, a keen swimmer, would be in the sixty-foot pool under the personal supervision of his coach, Sindy, a former lifeguard from Wet’n’Wild in Orlando. Al liked to see Sindy, not least because she was usually naked and there was always a lot to see. He was a non-swimmer himself, but it might have been worth getting into the water just to have Sindy encourage him to learn in her own special way. From time to time she would dive gracefully off the granite deck, chase the naked Tony underwater like some fabulous dark dolphin, and then get underneath him to lick and nibble his penis. Most people thought Nudelli was called Naked Tony because of his surname, but Al knew different. Al knew that it was mostly because of what Tony and Sindy got up to in the pool. Sindy told Al that she got the idea from reading a book about the Roman Emperors, and in particular the life of Tiberius. Al wasn’t much of a reader, but that was one book he just had to take a look at, and they were every bit as depraved as she had said. Sindy was tall, black and beautiful and merely looking at her gave Al a hard-on. Tony called her his Angel-fish.