Mystery

“If Glen had been born a generation earlier, he might have seen what would wash and what wouldn’t, and imitated a respectable citizen all his life. He wouldn’t have had any principles, of course, but he might have seen that he had to keep his vices private. If he’d been born a generation later, he would have been too young to have any influence over Maxwell Redwing. Maxwell was just an opportunistic crook who was lucky enough to be born into a helpful family. He wasn’t as smart as Glen—by the time they were in their mid-twenties, Glen was operating almost like an independent wing of the Redwing family. And by the time Ralph came of age, Glen had so much power that he was sort of a permanent junior partner. He had the records and paperwork on every secret deal and illegal operation. If Ralph tried anything, all Glen had to do was leak some of those records to the press to make a stink big enough to drive the Redwings off Mill Walk. People here want to believe that David Redwing’s legacy is intact, and they’ll go on thinking that something like the Hasselgard scandal is an aberration and Fulton Bishop is a dedicated policeman until they’re shown different.”

“So what can we do?”

“I told you. We’re going to rattle Glendenning Upshaw’s cage. He’s bothered already—Glen didn’t know that Ralph’s bodyguards were dumb enough to go around breaking into houses. He isn’t going to want to face an extradition order, once Tim Truehart finds the man Jerry hired to kill you. There’s already been too much trouble on Mill Walk. Ralph Redwing is waiting things out in Venezuela, and if I were Glen I’d think about going there too.”

Von Heilitz dipped his chin in a nod like the period at the end of a sentence, and pushed his empty plate to the side of the table.

Tom shook his head. “I’d like to really hurt him.”

“Hurting him is what we’re talking about.”

Tom looked down at the cold eggs on his plate and said, “You don’t mean it the way I do.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I want to take everything away from Glendenning Upshaw—his peace of mind, his reputation, his freedom—eventually, his life. I want to see him hang in Long Bay prison. I’d be happy to put the rope around his neck myself.”

Tom looked up and met the old man’s eyes with a shock of shared feeling.

“We have to get him out of the Founders Club,” Tom said. “We have to scare him out.”

Von Heilitz nodded vehemently, his eyes still locked with Tom’s.

“Give me a pen,” Tom said. “I’ll show you what I’d do.” The old man took a fountain pen from his inside pocket and pushed it across the table.

Tom took the paper napkin off his lap and smoothed it out on the table. He unscrewed the cap from the pen and in block letters printed I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE on the rough surface of the napkin. Then he turned the napkin around and showed it to von Heilitz.

“Exactly,” the old man said. “He’ll think he’s being stung by a thousand bees at once.”

“A thousand?” Tom grinned back, imagining his grandfather’s living room overflowing with letters repeating the words Jeanine Thielman had written to him.

“Two thousand,” von Heilitz said.

They went past the policemen drinking Pusser’s at the end of the bar out to the Street of Widows. The rolled-up windows of a black and white police car in a no parking zone just outside the entrance reflected a red neon scimitar flashing on and off in the restaurant’s window. To their left, cars, bicycles, and horse-drawn carriages rolled up and down Calle Drosselmayer. The St. Alwyn side of the street was in deep shadow; on the other, the shadow ended in a firm black line that touched the opposite sidewalk, and blazing sunlight fell on a shoeless native dozing on the pavement before a display of hats and baskets on a red blanket. On one side of the vendor was an open market with ranks of swollen vegetables and slabs of fish protected from the sun by a long awning. Melting ice and purple fish guts drizzled on the pavement. On the other side of the vendor, two wide young women in bathrobes sat smoking on the front steps of a tall narrow building called the Traveller’s Hotel. They were watching the entrance of Sinbad’s Cavern, and when Tom and von Heilitz came out, they looked at them for only seconds before focusing on the door again.

Von Heilitz strode diagonally across the street, came up on the curb just past the steps where the women sat, and turned beneath a gilt sign reading ELLINGTON’S ALLSORTS AND NOTIONS into the entrance of a dark little shop. Tom caught the door behind him, and a bell tinkled as he walked in.

Von Heilitz was already moving quickly down an aisle stocked with bottles of hot sauce, canned salmon, cat food, and boxes of cereal with names Tom had never seen in his life—Delilah’s Own and Mother Sugar—to a shelf with ballpoint pens, pads of paper, and boxes of envelopes. Von Heilitz picked up a pad of yellow paper and six boxes of variously colored envelopes, swung around and passed them to Tom, and whirled away into another aisle.

“I thought you said two thousand,” Tom said.