William Boyd - Restless

'I think you have the wrong number.'

'So sorry.'

She hung up and ran to fetch her coat. In the street she found a taxi quickly and told it to go to Murray Hill. Morris lived there in a tall block of anonymous service apartments, as they all did. She made the taxi stop a couple of streets away and walked the rest of the distance. Two police patrol cars were parked outside the lobby entrance. She walked past and saw the doorman sitting behind his lectern, reading a newspaper. She hovered for five minutes, waiting for someone to go in and eventually a couple appeared who had their own key and she followed them quickly through the door, chatting – 'Hi. Excuse me, you don't happen to know if Linda and Mary Weiss are on the sixteenth or the seventeenth floor? I just left them and left my purse there. Five A – sixteen or seventeen. Just running out to a club. Can you believe it?' – the man waved at the doorman, who looked up from his newspaper at the animated trio and looked down again. The couple didn't happen to know the Weiss sisters but Eva rode up to the tenth floor with her new friends – where they exited – and then went on up to thirteen and came down the fire stairs to twelve, where Morris lived.

She saw two policemen and Angus Woolf standing outside the door to Morris's apartment. Angus Woolf? What's he doing here, she thought? And a nausea hit her stomach as she realised, almost immediately, that Morris must be dead.

'Angus,' she called quietly, walking down the corridor towards him, 'what's happened?'

Angus signalled to the cops that she was admissible and swung quickly toward her on his sticks.

'You'd better get out, Eve,' he said, his face pale, 'this is System Blue, here.'

System Blue was as bad as it could get.

'Where's Morris?' she asked, trying to keep her head, trying to seem calm and normal, knowing the answer.

'Morris is dead,' Angus said. 'He killed himself.' He was shocked and upset, she could tell: she remembered they had been colleagues, friends, for a long time, long before she'd arrived at AAS.

Eva felt her mouth go dry as if some small vacuum inside her was siphoning off all her saliva. 'Oh my God,' she said.

'You'd better go, Eve,' Angus repeated. 'All kinds of shit are hitting the fan.'

And then Romer came out of Morris's apartment to have a word with the policemen, turned, glanced down the passageway, and saw her. He strode towards her.

'What're you doing here?'

'I'd arranged to meet Morris for a drink,' she said. 'He was late so I came over.'

Romer's face was immobile, almost vacant, as if he were still taking in and computing the fact of Eva's presence.

'What happened?' Eva said.

'Pills and whisky. Doors locked, windows locked. A note that makes no sense. Something about some boy.'

'Why?' Eva said, unthinkingly, spontaneously.

'Who knows? How well do we know anyone?' Romer turned to Angus. 'Call head office again. We need a big-wig on this one.' Angus limped off and Romer turned back to her. Somehow she felt his whole attention was on her now.

'How did you get in here?' he asked her, his voice unfriendly. 'Why didn't the doorman ring up?'

Eva realised she had made a mistake: she should have gone to the doorman, not used her little subterfuge. That would have been normal: the normal, innocent thing a friend would do if another friend was late for a drink.

'He was busy. I just came up.'

'Or maybe you were looking for Elizabeth Wesley.'

'Who?'

Romer chuckled. Eva realised he was too clever – and he knew her too well, anyway.

Romer looked at her, his eyes were cold: 'Never underestimate the scrupulous resourcefulness of our Miss Dalton, eh?'

And she knew.

She felt a shrilling in her ears, a keening note of hysterical alarm. She put her hand on his arm.

'Lucas,' she said softly. 'I want to see you tonight. I want to be with you.'

It was all she could do – it was pure instinct. She needed to buy a few seconds of time before he realised everything.

He looked over his shoulder at the policemen.

'It's impossible,' he said. 'Not tonight.'

In those seconds she was thinking: he knows Morris and I have talked. He knows Morris told me something, which is why I came covertly into the building. He thinks I have the crucial information and he's trying to calculate how dangerous I am. She saw his expression change as he turned back to her again. She could almost hear their two brains – supercharged – churning. Two turbines going in their separate directions.

'Please,' she said, 'I miss you.' It might just throw him, she was thinking, this lover's plea. Just over twenty-four hours ago we were making love – it might just throw him for five minutes.

'Look – maybe,' he said. He reached for her hand and squeezed it then let it go. 'Stephenson wants to meet you. It seems Roosevelt's going to mention your map in a speech next week – on the tenth. Stephenson wants to congratulate you himself.'

This is so far-fetched it might almost be true, she thought.

'Stephenson wants to meet me?' she repeated, dumbly. It seemed inconceivable. William Stephenson was BSC: it was his party, every nut and bolt – every cracker, cookie and slice of cake.

'You're our shining star,' he said insincerely and looked at his watch. 'Let me sort out this mess. I'll pick you up outside your apartment at ten.' He smiled. 'And don't tell Sylvia. All right?'

'See you at ten,' she said. 'And then, afterwards, maybe we can…'

'I'll think of something. Listen, you'd better go before one of these cops takes your name.'

He turned and walked away towards the policemen.

As Eva rode down to the street in the elevator she began to calculate. She checked her watch: 8.45. Romer would be waiting for her outside her apartment at ten. When she didn't show after five minutes he would know she was flying. She had just over an hour to disappear.

She decided she had no time to go back to the apartment – everything had to be left behind in the interests of immediate safety and flight. As she waited for a subway she checked what she had in her handbag: her Eve Dalton passport, some thirty dollars, a packet of cigarettes, lipstick, a compact. Was this enough, she wondered, smiling ruefully to herself, to start a new life?

On the train to Brooklyn she began to go back over that last encounter with Romer and slowly, methodically, examine all its implications. Why was she so suddenly, immediately convinced that Romer was somehow behind the events in Las Cruces and Morris Devereux's death? Maybe she was wrong?… Maybe it was Angus Woolf. Maybe it had been Morris playing an elaborate game of entrapment with her, acting the innocent party? But she knew Morris hadn't committed suicide: you don't make a vitally important appointment and then decide to cancel it by ending your life. Romer had given nothing away, though, she had to admit – so why this unshakeable certainty? Why did she feel she had to fly now, at once, as though her life depended on it? The commonplace phrase disturbed her, made her come out in goose bumps – her life did depend on it, she realised. For Morris it was the fact that she hadn't given the map to Raul that was the key indication, the essential clue. Why hadn't she given the map to Raul? Because she had inspected it and found it wanting. Who told her to check the merchandise? No one.

She heard Romer's voice, her lover's voice, as if he were standing beside her: 'Never underestimate the scrupulous resourcefulness of our Miss Dalton, eh?'

That was what had clinched it for her. That was what had made her understand what Morris had seen. She couldn't see the whole picture, how the game was meant to end, but she had realised, standing talking to Romer outside poor dead Morris's flat, that Romer had sent her on the Las Cruces mission, knowing one thing for sure: he knew – absolutely, confidently – that she would never hand over merchandise without examining it. He knew her, he knew completely what she would do in that situation. She felt a blush of shame glow on her face as she came to terms with the fact that she could be so easily read, so perfectly programmed and positioned. But why feel shame, she said to herself, with a little flare of anger? Romer knew she would never be an automatic, press-all-the-buttons, courier – that was why he had volunteered her for the job. It had been the same at Prenslo – she used her initiative, took spontaneous decisions, made hard judgements. And the same with Mason Harding. Her head began to reel: it was as if he had been testing her, evaluating how she behaved in these circumstances. She suddenly thought: had Romer put the FBI crows on to her as well, knowing, confident, that she would lose them – and thereby rouse suspicions? She began to feel outmanoeuvred, as if she were playing chess with a grandmaster who was always working ten, twenty, thirty moves ahead. But why would Lucas Romer want her dead?