Филип Керр - A Five Year Plan

‘Did you sleep OK?’

Dave stretched on his king-sized bed and rolled toward her.

‘Weird,’ he said. ‘I dreamed I had Alzheimer’s disease. Only trouble is I’ve forgotten what happened.’

Kate glanced at her watch.

‘Still joking at six o’clock in the morning, I see.’

Dave grinned and rolled on top of her.

‘Can you think of anything else to do?’

‘I could make you breakfast,’ she offered. ‘I feel kind of guilty about making you sacrifice that sandwich.’

‘I’ve forgotten about that too. Breakfast sounds good, though. I could eat a horse.’

As he slipped out of bed, Kate said, ‘I already did.’

Dave grinned again. ‘You haven’t forgotten about my proposition, have you?’ he asked.

‘What proposition is that, lover?’

‘You know? Living with the famous Phantom, in the South of France?’

‘Oh yeah, that. The Pink Panther thing. No, I hadn’t forgotten about it. I’m like an elephant. I never forget a name or a face.’

Dave nodded. A good memory for names and faces was probably a job requirement for a Fed.

‘And?’

‘This is some kind of test, right? Like the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. Gold, silver and lead.’ Kate searched Dave’s face for some sign that he recognized she knew what he was up to. ‘All that glisters is not gold?’

‘So which is it to be?’

She rolled across the crumpled sheets toward him and sat up. ‘With you? I don’t know. If I said I chose lead, you’d probably shoot me.’ Kate wagged her finger at him. ‘Come on, Dave. I’m not interested in the money.’

Dave flinched. ‘What money?’

‘Your money. The Dulanotov family fortune.’

‘Oh, that.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. But it’s like I told you. The money’s based on crime. There’s no family fortune. I’m a thief, Kate. I steal for a living. Like old Cary Grant.’

She shrugged. ‘OK. If you say so. Well then I haven’t ruled out becoming Grace. Not yet.’

Like hell she hasn’t, thought Dave, and went to take a shower.

Kate frowned. He really was serious about this test of his. Couldn’t he see she wasn’t remotely interested in his money? As soon as she heard the water running Kate started to search the room. It wasn’t that she shared Kent Bowen’s suspicions of him. That was just stupid jealousy. But Dave volunteered so little about himself and she wanted to know more than the crumbs she had gleaned from the few questions he had honored with straight answers. She didn’t think for a moment he was a thief. How many thieves knew Shakespeare and Pushkin? But there was something he wasn’t telling her, of that she was sure. Something that she needed to find out. At the FBI training academy she had learned to recognize when someone was hiding something. For a brief period in her early career she had entertained notions of joining the Behavioral Science Unit. But after The Silence of the Lambs came along it seemed that everyone wanted to be Jack Crawford or Clarice Starling, and she had ended up in General Investigations and Narcotics. Now, looking over the room, she had no idea what she was searching for. The large number of books only seemed to underline what she already knew — that Dave was widely read. Most of the clothes in his closet were predictably new and came from expensive shops, as she had expected. There was no cash lying around. Nor any travellers’ cheques, credit cards; not even a driver’s license. Most infuriating of all, she could not find Dave’s passport. The explanation was inside Dave’s walk-in closet. A combination wall safe. Just what any self-respecting millionaire would have had. You didn’t stay rich by leaving money lying around.

Kate came out of the closet and sat on the edge of the bed. If only she had taken the safe-cracking course instead of psychology. Absently she stared at Dave’s bookshelf. It was like a reading list for a summer school. Many of the titles were classics. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Nabokov. Even a few published movie scripts. A nod to post modernism. Some philosophy too: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Gilbert Ryle and George Steiner. But the more she stared at the books the more it started to seem that for all its apparent inclusiveness, there was something missing, like a piece from a cutlery set. Yes, that was it. And not just one piece. Maybe one whole item. Like a set of fish knives. Gradually she perceived what it was. There were no books on business. Not one. And this struck her as curious. Millionaires were interested in money, weren’t they? Especially if they worked in Miami’s Financial Center. Howard had been forever reading books about making money. Beating the Dow. One Up on Wall Street. The Midas Touch. The Three Minute Manager. He must have bought that one just around the time he was reading The Two Minute Lover.

Kate picked out Dave’s well-thumbed paperback edition of Crime and Punishment. She hadn’t read the novel since she’d been in Law School, when it really had seemed like one of those books that might change your life. Or, at the very least, the way you thought about criminals. Idly she was turning back the cover when something caught her eye. Something was printed there, on the inside cover, in bright blue ink.

Something was stamped on it.

She stared at it incredulously, as if she had been admiring some clever bookplate, reading the words printed inside the simple roundel with more care than if they had been a visa on the passport for which she had been searching.

But this was something much more revealing.

She whispered the words out loud, as if she needed to hear them spoken in order to absorb what was implied.

‘Property of the Miami Correctional Center at Homestead?’

Could it be that Dave really was a thief? And not just a thief, but an ex-con?

Hearing his shower end, she closed the book and returned it quickly to the shelf. Then, slipping into the spare dressing gown, she left the stateroom and went up to the galley. Maybe she could rustle up a relaxed, loving and laid-back sort of face along with some breakfast.

In the galley Kate put on the kettle to boil, and started to fry some ham and eggs, all the while considering the evidence that was before her: the new clothes; the bookshelf more typical of some jailhouse autodidact than a millionaire; and the five aces Cary Grant-style proposition he had made her. There seemed to be no other conclusion that she could form. Dave really was a thief, and a convicted one too. She realized that he had been perfectly serious, as indeed he had said he was.

Al, summoned upstairs to the galley by the smell of fresh coffee and frying sausage and ham, brought home to her this wasn’t a Cary Grant movie. Al was Luca Brazzi, Tony Montana and Jimmy Conway all squeezed into the one short-barrelled pump-action shotgun. Right down to the rifle sight, the hardwood stock attitude, and the blue metal jaw.

‘Time is it?’ he growled.

‘Just after six,’ she said, perky as an airline stewardess responding to a first-class passenger. You got all sorts going first class these days.

‘Six o’clock? Jesus, what are we doing, abandoning ship or something? Six o’clock.’

‘You want some breakfast?’

Al sighed uncomfortably and stooped to look out of the galley window, checking on the weather. He sniffed loudly, like he was hunched over a couple of lines of coke, and said, ‘I can’t make up my mind if it’s better to eat so that I got something to throw up or if it’s better not to eat so that I don’t throw up at all.’

Kate smiled sweetly, trying to overcome her nerves. Who were these guys? And what were they doing on the ship? Was it possible they had anything to do with Rocky Envigado?