Minute Forty-One

The 6:00 p.m. ferry out of St. George was a squat orange boat with a diesel stink and a deck full of tired commuters, and the man who waited for it at the rail wore a dark coat that didn't belong in October.

Stahl told her about it afterward, in pieces, with his glasses off. How he had come aboard at the last moment with an umbrella and a folded newspaper and gone up to the open stern deck, where the wind blew the smell of the harbor in great cold gusts and the lights of Manhattan stood up out of the dusk like a row of lit matches. How the big man at the rail had not turned round. How he'd said, in a hoarse flat voice, without looking: You came alone.

I thought it best.

You've a wire.

I have not. You may search me, Cormac.

I don't want to. A long breath. I don't want to do any of it.

He had given Stahl a telephone. A cheap one, black, the kind that comes in blister packs. It held four years of messages: dates, places, sums, in a code so simple that a child could have read it. He had given him a second thing, too: a white envelope, much creased, with a doctor's name on the flap. The letter from the hospital. Fully underwritten. No acknowledgment desired.

He'd held it out between two enormous fingers. Who?

I think you know.

I do know. The big shoulders had shaken, once. He wouldn't. A man doesn't. Not after—

He did.

I've sold him. It was almost a whisper. Every day. For four years.

You have.

And he paid for my girl.

Stahl had said nothing to that. There was, he told Linnea, nothing to be said.

Tell him, Cormac Ruddick had said at last, I'll drive for Mr. Brannock tonight. He asked. I said yes. He'll want me at the wheel. He'd turned, then, and for the first time looked at the older man with his wet, red, bewildered, honest eyes. Tell Mrs. Varga: not the green door. He's had it wired. A detector, for the radio. He's got a fellow with a scanner who'll sweep her at the threshold.

Thank you.

And Mr. Stahl. The ferry had been nosing into the slip, and the deck shuddered under their feet. When it starts. I'll do what I can.

What can you do?

But Ruddick had only shaken his head, and gone down the companionway, and been lost in the crowd.

…

Berth Twelve in the dark was a field of black glass.

It lay at the end of a mile of access road, behind a chain-link gate, under a sky of low orange cloud that glowed with the lights of the refinery across the channel. The Newark yards at night are a place without scale. Stacks of containers in rust and blue and green rose on every side like the walls of a canyon, and between them ran lanes of wet asphalt wide enough for a truck, and everywhere there was the sound of the sea: a soft, ceaseless, metallic lapping from the pilings, and the faraway moan of a freighter's horn.

She walked.

She had been told to. She had been told that the car would be left at the gate, that she would come on foot down Lane Nine, that she would carry the book herself in a canvas bag, and that she would be met. She walked in the navy suit under a charcoal overcoat, with the bag against her ribs and her breath smoking, and a button in her collar the size of a pea that would, if the man with the scanner did his job, be found and removed within the minute.

It was a decoy. Tolliver had been very clear.

Let him find it. Let him take it. He'll think he's won.

And the real one?

Is in your pen.

She felt the weight of it in her breast pocket, a plain green fountain pen, ridiculous, with a gold nib and a crack in the cap. She had named it Gladys II, in July, in memory of the first. A miniature solid-state recorder, set into the barrel, with an on-switch in the clip and no transmitter at all. It couldn't be detected by radio because it didn't broadcast. It couldn't be heard in real time, either. It would simply sit, and listen, and keep.

A memory with no mouth, Tolliver had called it, with relish. It's the best sort.

It was eleven minutes to eleven.

She came out of the lane into a wide apron of concrete, and the warehouse rose before her: a long low steel shed, sixty feet high, with a corrugated roof streaked orange by the light. A loading dock ran along its flank. At the far end, on the east side, a little door stood in a pool of light, painted a sour, mossy green.

It was ajar.

Not the green door, she thought. Not the green door.

She turned along the dock.

…

They were waiting at the bay.

There were four of them. They stood in a half-circle under a hanging sodium lamp: three men in dark coats, and between them, a little to the fore, a thin sallow one with a black plastic box in his hand and an earpiece in his ear. The box had a small gray antenna. It was making a thin dry crackle like a sheet of paper being torn.

"Mrs. Varga," said the man with the box. "Arms out, please."

She put the bag down. She raised her arms.

He came forward, and ran the box over her slowly from collar to hem. It was a cold, businesslike, oddly respectful gesture. The crackle rose to a whine at her throat. He frowned. He put two fingers to her lapel and drew out the button, the little pea-sized disk, and held it up to the lamp.

"Well, well," he said, softly.

"What is it?"

"A friend of yours is listening." He crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. It gave a faint dry crack. "They'll be disappointed. Come."

She picked up the bag. She followed him through the door.

The pen lay in her pocket against her heart, silent, warm, and alive.

…

11:00 p.m.

The office was on the mezzanine, reached by an iron stair, and it was warm.

That was the first thing. After the cold of the yard the warmth went through her like a draught of brandy, and she stood in the door for a moment, blinking. It was a plain square room with a steel desk, a filing cabinet, a bare bulb, and a window of dirty glass looking down onto the empty warehouse floor. A little electric heater glowed at the foot of the desk. And on the desk, on a square of white linen, stood a Brown Betty teapot and two cups.

Hollis Brannock rose from behind it.

He was exactly as she remembered: silver hair, gray cardigan, rimless spectacles, a long kind face. A man of fifty-two who might have been a country doctor or a bishop. He held out one hand. "Mrs. Varga. How good of you. Do sit."

"I'll stand."

"As you like." He sat himself, with the care of a man lowering a cup. "Tea?"

"No."

"A pity. It's Darjeeling." He poured one cup, only. "I confess I've been rather looking forward to this. We were so dreadfully interrupted last time."

She said nothing.

She stood in the door with the bag in her hand and let the silence lengthen, as she had learned to do. He sipped. He set down the cup. A faint smile creased his face.

"You've brought it."

"I have."

"May I?"

"In a moment."

"Ah." The gray eyes sharpened. "You wish to dictate terms."

"I wish to discuss them." She stepped forward and set the bag on the desk, but kept her hand on the strap. "My husband tells me you're an admirer of procedure. I thought we might observe a little. A memorandum of understanding."

"Delightful."

"What are you buying, Mr. Brannock?"

"A notebook."

"Describe it."

He laughed. It was low, warm, and genuinely pleased. "I see. You'd like me to do the work. Very well." He folded his hands. "It's a black purser's notebook, cloth-bound, with a band of elastic. It's twenty-four years in the keeping of a dockworker named Calder. It records, I'm told, a good many of my former acquaintances' business affairs. It also records an entry, early in the first volume, concerning a certain Thursday in October and a certain gentleman in a coat."

"And why do you want it?"

"Because I'm a collector."

"Of watches."

"Of everything, my dear. Of people." The voice dropped, tender and amused. "You've seen the drawer. I show it to very few. A man in my position acquires a taste for the little keepsakes of those he's helped on their way. A watch. A cuff-link. A volume of Rilke. They are all reminders, you see. That we're mortal. And that I was there."

…

11:19 p.m.

He talked.

She had known he would. She'd been told it by Tolliver, and by Stahl, and by the file, and she had seen it in the box in May. But she hadn't understood the scale. It was like opening a sluice. He sat in his cardigan with his teacup and his gentle smile and talked, in an easy, civilized, wandering stream, of the docks as they used to be, and the men, and the small private decencies of a long career. He talked of Istvan Varga. He talked of a handshake in the rain.

"He was a stubborn man," said Hollis Brannock. "I liked him. We'd been boys together. He had a mouth like a clam and a conscience like a church. I said: Istvan, the Port wants forty percent. He said: I don't pay. I said: it's only a tax. He said: it's a bribe, Hollis, and I don't pay." He chuckled. "So I shook his hand and said I understood. And the next morning I sent men to take his cranes."

"And that night?"

"That night he went down to the pier to guard them. I'd have thought it rather touching." He sipped. "A man alone at four in the morning, on a gantry, with a thermos. Poor Warren Calder had been very good. He'd passed the cable. I'd told him it was only a certificate. He was so relieved."

Her fingers closed on the strap.

Say it, she thought. Say it.

"The cable parted at four," she said.

"At eleven minutes past." The warm voice softened. "It was a very clean fall. I don't think he suffered. I remember the boy. Fourteen, I think. Standing in the corridor with an umbrella. I'd come to the morgue to pay my respects. He looked at me, straight at me, and he said: Thank you for coming, sir."

The room was very still.

"I put my hand on his head," said Brannock. "I said: be a good boy. Look after your mother."

She could hear the heater ticking. She could hear her own heart. She thought of a man in a stone house with a brass machine in his fist, and a boy's voice saying, in a corridor smelling of formalin: Thank you for coming, sir.

"And Dennis Hale?"

"Ah." He set down his cup. "Poor Dennis."

"He found the audit."

"He found the error. A man of that sort always does. He sent a memo to his superior. It was a perfectly polite memo. It said that the Port Authority's insurance had been paid for eleven years on a vessel that was not in service." A faint sigh. "I asked Tobias to go and have a word. Tobias is so very good at a word. He is rather less good at the aftermath."

"He walked him to the creek."

"Dennis had a weakness for the water. Wick found him at the Terminal Four gate, in the rain, taking a constitutional. He was so unsuspecting. He turned his back." A pause. "I'm told it was very quick."

Got it, she thought. Her throat was tight. Got it, got it, got it. Hale. Istvan. Wick. In his own voice.

She glanced, once, at the clock on the wall.

It said eleven forty-one.

…

11:41 p.m.

Somewhere in the yard, a dog barked.

It was a small sound, flat and sudden in the frozen air, and it was cut short. She thought nothing of it. Brannock was still talking, rolling a sentence round his tongue with relish, something about the Port Authority's regrettable fondness for bureaucratic indemnities. And then, under his voice, so faint she thought she'd imagined it, she heard the pen.

It was a tiny sound. A click.

It came from her breast pocket.

The recorder had a light on the barrel. A pinprick of green, the size of a sesame seed, hidden under the clip, that told her it was working. She had checked it at ten fifty-nine. She glanced down.

It was out.

Her heart missed a beat. Brannock was still talking. She slid her hand into her pocket, and ran her thumb over the clip, the barrel, the cap. She pressed the switch. The light didn't come on.

No.

No, no.

"Mrs. Varga?"

She looked up.

He had stopped talking. He was looking at her across the desk with his kind gray eyes and his long gentle face, and he was smiling a small, patient, regretful smile. In his left hand was his teacup. In his right, resting on the white linen, was a thing she had not seen him pick up.

It was a small black box with a single steady red light.

"A jammer," said Hollis Brannock. "Quite a little one. It's rather clever. It shuts down everything in the vicinity that isn't wired to the wall." He tapped the lid. "I switched it on at eleven forty. I hadn't wished to interrupt the narrative."

She stood absolutely still.

"I'm sure you thought the button in your collar was the whole of it. It was so very obvious. A lamb to the slaughter." He sighed. "And the pen, of course. The pen. One does admire the workmanship. But I'm afraid that I've known about the pen since July."

"How?"

"Dear lady. A man in this business has friends." His mild eyes were sorry. "Cormac Ruddick told me."

The floor dropped.

"I don't mean tonight. He'd never have said tonight. He was so very good about tonight." He took off his glasses and polished them on the corner of his cardigan. "But four years is a long time, Mrs. Varga. A man talks in his sleep. He tells his employer's secrets over the fourth glass of a dull evening. He is very, very tired." He put the glasses on. "He has told me everything but the one thing I wished to know. Which is whether he would betray me."

"He hasn't."

"He has." A fond sigh. "I'm afraid he has. I had the car brought round at ten. He'd been told to wait at the gate. He is not at the gate."

…

11:44 p.m.

The shot came through the window.

She didn't hear it. She felt it, as a concussion in the glass, a spray of white fragments, a sudden bright cold wind. She was on the floor before she knew she'd moved. Brannock was on his feet, the teapot in pieces at his feet, the jammer rolling across the boards, and from the warehouse below came a great metallic crash and the hammering roar of automatic fire.

They're coming.

Tolliver. Tolliver's in.

She crawled for the desk. She dragged the canvas bag with her. Her hands were bleeding where the glass had caught them. She got behind the steel, back to the wall, and heard from below the shouts of men, "FBI! Drop it! Federal agents!" And over it, quite near, hoarse with fury, a voice she knew.

"Linnea!"

She heard the stairs.

She heard them take it three at a time, an iron clangor, a man's boots ringing. The door slammed back. And there in the doorway, in the red light of the jammer, with his coat flapping and his dark face like a flame, stood Anselm.

He had a pistol in his hand.

He had been told to stay in the truck. He'd been told by Lindqvist, by Tolliver, by Stahl, by her. He had said yes. He stood in the door of a steel office in Port Newark with a gun in his fist and blood on his sleeve, and his eyes went round the room, once, taking it in: the wreck of the desk, the broken glass, the woman crouched on the floor.

And the thin silver-haired man in the gray cardigan, standing by the window with a small chrome revolver in his hand.

"Anselm," said Hollis Brannock, quite gently. "How good of you to come."

"Put it down."

"I think not."

"Hollis."

"You have your father's face. Did anyone ever tell you? It's the jaw. It's the way you hold it, as if the world were a weight you'd consented to bear." The revolver came up, steadily, toward Linnea. "I've always found it so tedious in a man."

"Don't."

"I'm afraid it's the only thing that's left." The gray eyes were kind. "She has the book. She has the pen. She has every word that I said. I don't know how much of it went on the tape, but I should rather not find out." The hammer clicked back. "I'm sorry, my dear. It's nothing personal. It's only that I was there."

She saw his finger tighten.

She saw it with the strange, slow, brilliant clarity of the very frightened, as one sees a thing at the bottom of a pool. She saw the muzzle. She saw the light on the chrome. She saw Anselm's face, white, and the whole length of his body bunching to spring.

Ask me, she thought.

Ask me, and I'll—

She did not wait to be asked.

She flung the canvas bag with both hands.

…

It was a good throw.

It was not a graceful one. It was the throw of a woman who had once played third base for a Catholic girls' softball team in Bay Ridge, and who had been told by her coach that she had a fine arm and no sense of direction. The bag struck Brannock's wrist. The revolver went off.

The sound was enormous.

The bullet went somewhere into the ceiling. She heard it hit steel, a whining ricochet, and felt plaster rain down on her hair. Brannock stumbled. The revolver spun from his fingers. And Anselm was across the room in three strides, with his own gun forgotten, and had him by the lapels of the cardigan and slammed him against the wall so hard that the glass of the window cracked from corner to corner.

"Don't," said Linnea.

He didn't move.

"Anselm. Don't. He's a witness."

The room was full of smoke. Below, the roar of gunfire had fallen to a ragged crackle, and then to shouts, and then to a single flat voice calling, "Clear! East side, clear!" There was a smell of cordite and spilled tea. The bulb swung gently overhead, throwing its light back and forth across the faces of the three people in the room.

Anselm held Hollis Brannock against the wall by his collar.

His whole body was shaking. His right arm trembled with the effort of not moving. And the old man, against the plaster, with his glasses askew and a thin red line on his cheek where the glass had cut him, looked into his face with an expression of infinite, sorrowful, almost fatherly affection.

"Go on," said Brannock softly. "You've waited long enough."

"I'd like to."

"I know."

"I'd like it more than anything." The dark voice cracked. "I thought about it for twenty-four years."

"And?"

"And then she asked me to stand next to her." Anselm drew a long, shuddering breath. "And I found I wanted that more."

He let go.

Brannock slid slowly down the wall and sat on the floor. And in that moment the second shot rang out, and she did not at first understand what it was, because it came from nowhere: from the iron stair at the head of the landing, from the dark, from a figure she had not seen.

It was Wick's lieutenant, the thin sallow man with the scanner. He stood on the top step with a flat black pistol held in both hands, white-faced, eyes enormous, shaking like a leaf.

The bullet struck Anselm in the right shoulder.

He spun. He went down on one knee. He put out a hand to catch himself, and found the edge of the desk, and clung to it, and looked up at her with a wondering, rueful, almost sheepish expression, the face of a man who has been struck by a falling branch.

"Ah," he said.

"Anselm!"

"I'm all right. It's the other one. I've a matched pair now."

The thin man screamed.

A shot cracked from the stair, flat and neat, and the pistol flew out of his hand, and Special Agent Maren Tolliver came up the last three steps with her weapon leveled and her blazer torn at the shoulder and put him against the wall in one smooth, furious movement.

"Hands," she said. "Hands. Now."

…

They took him out through the bay.

She saw it from the dock, wrapped in a gray blanket, with a paramedic pressing gauze to her palms and Greer's voice coming in a hysterical stream from somewhere behind her. The yard was full of light. Blue and red and white, a dozen vehicles, a ring of agents in raid jackets, and the long black van where Lindqvist stood with his hand over his mouth. Floodlights lit the face of the warehouse like a stage.

Hollis Brannock came out between two agents, handcuffed, with his gray cardigan buttoned and his spectacles repaired with a loop of tape.

He looked, for a moment, straight at her.

He did not seem angry. He looked tired, and a little puzzled, and rather old. He bent his head, with the courtesy of a man leaving a party, and he said, quite distinctly, across the yard:

"The recording was in your other pocket, wasn't it?"

She stared.

"The jammer. It shuts down the radio. It doesn't touch a tape." The faint smile returned. "I should have known. A woman who names her pens never trusts just the one."

He was led away.

She put her hand in the pocket of her overcoat. In the lining, under a seam she had unpicked and resewn at four that morning, she felt a flat hard rectangle the size of a matchbook. She drew it out.

It was a second recorder, a slab of black plastic no bigger than a matchbook, with a card inside it and no radio at all. She had sewn it there herself, in a small hour of the morning, from a little envelope marked Backup, and then, in the dread of the last hour, had forgotten she had done so. She had switched it on in the car.

The light on it was green.

Everything, she thought. Every word.

She sat on the edge of the dock in the blue strobing light with her bleeding hands in her lap, and began to laugh, helplessly, and then to cry, and Greer fell on her neck, and in the confusion no one noticed the big man in the dark coat who had been standing by the black sedan at the gate.

He stood there for a long moment, watching them.

Then he turned, and walked quietly away into the dark of the container stacks, and was gone.