Forever (9 page)

He studied her a while longer. There was
something about her sweet youth and otherworldly beauty that
hammered home what the phone call had been all about. Would you be
able to dream so peacefully, my darling, if you knew what I was
involved in? Would you still love me and trust me as blindly if
everything came crashing down around us?

To all outward appearances, Thomas Andrew
Chesterfield III was one of Manhattan's chosen few. In every aspect
of his life, he seemed to have it made.

He had looks, power, money, and, as though
to round off his perfect life, beautiful Katinka, his highly
visible social wife (his third), and four attractive grown children
(two from each previous marriage).

From looking at him, it didn't seem possible
that he could have any pressing problems.

How appearances could deceive.

Thomas Andrew Chesterfield III had two very
pressing problems, neither of which would go away.

The first was Dennis, the younger of his two
sons.

The second had come about as a direct result
of the first.

Four years previously, handsome young
Dennis, then eighteen, had run with a racy, cocaine-tooting crowd.
Rough sex had resulted in the death of a beautiful girl, and Dennis
had fled the scene, not knowing that one of his acquaintances had
set up a video camera in a closet. What was supposed to have been a
sex movie made as a prank had turned into a snuff film - starring
Dennis.

It was then that the blackmail had
begun.

And Thomas Andrew Chesterfield III,
sophisticated legal eagle, had actually believed he could avoid
scandal and social ruin by agreeing to pay the blackmailers fifteen
thousand dollars a month in perpetuity.

The lawyer who knew all the moves was, for
once, absolutely stymied. For if word of Dennis's involvement in a
sex murder got out, the family would be ruined - and all because of
one rough- and-tumble sex scene gone wrong.

And so he paid. And paid. And kept on
paying.

And then one day, the demands for cash
suddenly ceased. Instead, a new and even more ominous demand had
been made - that as a lawyer he represent a mystery client whose
identity he would never try to discover.

One evening, not quite a month ago, just
when Chesterfield least expected it, a call had come.

'Mr Chesterfield?'' It hadn't been so much a
voice as a genderless whisper.'Do you know who this is?'

'No-no,' he'd said shakily.

But of course he knew. Why else did his
intestines suddenly twist themselves into strangling knots?

7 think you do, Mr Chesterfield,' the voice
had continued smoothly. 'Now. It's about time you started earning
your retainer, wouldn 't you say?'

'Y-yes,' he'd said in a trembly voice that
was completely foreign to him.

'Mr Chesterfield. Have you ever heard of a
man named Carleton Merlin?'

'The biographer?'

'The very one.'

'Yes, of course.'

'Good. Now here's what you have to do. Mr
Merlin has been poking his nose into things best left
untouched.'

Chesterfield's guts loosened a little. This
was more familiar territory. 'You want to sue him?' he asked.

The whisperer laughed softly. 'Oh no, Mr
Chesterfield. We want him eliminated.'

The pain which shot through his abdomen was
like a shock. 'I beg your pardon?'

'You are to see that he is killed -'

He'd slammed the phone down then and there,
and refused to answer its incessant rings. Finally he'd unplugged
it. Snuff tape or not, he wasn't about to get involved in
murder.

The next day, one copy of the videotape had
been messengered to his home, a second to his office, and a third
to one of his clubs.

Luckily, neither his wife, secretary, nor
anyone at the club had intercepted them.

That evening, the caller telephoned again.
'Did you change your mind, Mr Chesterfield?'' the genderless
whisper asked.

Chesterfield's voice had been bitter. 'Do 1
have a choice?'

'Of course, Mr Chesterfield! We all make our
own choices. The question is, have you decided which is yours?'

'I am not a killer and I don't know any
killers,' he'd whispered wretchedly.

'That doesn't matter. There is a freelance
assassin in New York who specialises in "accidental" deaths. No one
knows what he looks like or what his real name is. He is known only
as The Ghost:

'The Ghost?'

'It seems he is called that because he is
invisible. You see, Mr Chesterfield, no one has ever seen him. At
least,' the caller added ominously, lno one has lived to talk about
him.'

Chesterfield's hands were shaking. 'H-how do
I get hold of him?'

'Rumour has it he's friends with some of the
hookers and porno girls on the West Side. You have merely to cruise
around and ask.'

And the caller had hung up.

That was when his forays into the underbelly
of the city had begun.

It was a descent into a sewer inhabited by
hustlers and hookers, pimps and johns, thieves and con men. He hit
all the haunts of the hard-core perverts - the peep shows, porno
circuses, topless bars, X-rated movie houses, massage parlours, and
dim street corners. Always asking the same question: 'Do you know a
man by the name of The Ghost?'

Strip joints and clip joints and
condom-littered side streets - suddenly he saw a city he'd never
before seen, or, at least, had managed to shut his eyes to. A city
of vultures and prey, where it was difficult to tell one from the
other.

It had taken him two weeks to find the
hooker on the south-west corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Ninth
Avenue. The one who'd leaned into his Jaguar's open window and
said, 'Yeah. I think I might've heard of The Ghost. He's bad.'

Her name was Shanel and she was short and
black, with dark shiny eyes, hard little breasts, and tight round
buttocks packaged into a nude-looking body stocking fitted with
strategically placed zippers.

'Can you tell me how I can get hold of him?'
he asked.

She'd looked pointedly up and down the
avenue. 'Let's you and me go for a ride,' she'd said, pulling the
passenger door open and swinging her hip onto the front seat. 'It's
gonna cost you fifty bucks, though. Okay?'

The hooker had been a conduit. And, through
a convoluted method by which the assassin couldn't be traced. The
Ghost had got in touch with him.

Now Carleton Merlin was history. According
to the newspapers, it had been suicide.

Chesterfield breathed a little easier.
Naively, he'd dared hope that this was it - that all the copies of
the tapes would be returned to him, and the past forgotten.

Wishful thinking.

Tonight another call had come.

'Mr Chesterfield? It seems Mr Merlin was
working on a book at the time of his ... ah .. . suicide. My
clients want to see all the research material destroyed.'

'But... I don't know any burglars!' he'd
begun to protest.

I'm sure The Ghost can be of help to
you.'

Then the connection was broken.

Resignedly, Chesterfield hung up and began
to get dressed.

Oh, Christ.' He'd have to make another foray
into that slime-filled netherworld.

He wondered: How long will I have to keep on
paying? And paying? And paying?

Thomas Andrew Chesterfield III only had to
circle the block twice before he saw Shanel on the corner.
Repairing her lipstick. With the aid of the side mirror of a parked
hatchback.

He guided the big car into the space right
behind it. In the wash of his headlights, she finished painting her
mouth in apparent boredom before sashaying nonchalantly back and
sticking her head through the open passenger window. 'I thought it
was you,' she said when she saw Chesterfield.

He smiled bleakly and kept checking his
rearview mirror for patrol cars.

'Chill out and stop being so jumpy,' she
said, trying the passenger door. It was unlocked, and she scooted
in and pulled it shut. 'Drive,' she instructed.

He waited for a flotilla of empty cabs to
sail by and then pulled smoothly away from the kerb.

'Pull in over there,' Shanel said, after
they had been driving for a minute. She pointed to the right.
Chesterfield nodded and aimed the hood of the Jaguar into the same
big empty parking lot she'd directed him to the last time. It was
right on top of one of the Lincoln Tunnel ramps, and was open to
both Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Streets. During the day, it
was filled with exhaust-belching commuter buses from New Jersey;
nights, it was a favourite pitstop for midtown hookers and their
clients.

He left the engine idling and turned to
Shanel. She was looking at him in the faint glow of the dash.
'Well? What you want this time, man?'

'I need your help, Shanel.'

She gave a low laugh. 'Everyone need my
help.'

They sat there in silence for a minute. She
fiddled in her bag for a cigarette and lit it with a lighter. He
pushed a button so all the windows whirred down a little way.
Headlights from behind rose and fell as another car pulled into the
lot. He kept his eyes on the rearview mirror.

Shanel fixed him with her dark shiny gaze.
'You need to contact The Ghost again, or you change your mind and
want a blow job?'

'I need to get in touch with The Ghost. What
I need him to do this time -'

'Unh-unh!' she said quickly, shaking her
head. 'I'm just the go-between. I don't wanna know nothingV She
looked suddenly scared. 'Nothing! You understand?'

He nodded.

'The Ghost, he a baaaad-ass dude, man. He be
real pissed off with me if I know any of his business. It's safer I
don't know nothing. Catch my drift?'

He nodded. 'Then just let him know that I .
. . ah . . . require his services again.'

'All right. But that'll cost you.'

Sighing, he dug out his wallet, slid out a
crisp fifty without letting her see how much he was carrying on
him, and held it out

to her. She just sat there and shook her
head. 'A hundred,' she said.

He stared at her. 'Last time it was only
fifty.' 'Yeah, I know.' Her lips slid up into a tough kind of
smile. 'But ain't you heard? Inflation, it hit everybody!'

Washington, D. C.

These were mean streets, even for a black
ghetto dweller.

Especially a lone black female ghetto
dweller.

Vinette Jones walked briskly through the
public housing project as if she couldn't wait to escape. Her
nut-brown fingers clutched her tan vinyl handbag, a reminder that
it might be snatched out of her hands at any moment. She had lived
here nine years - nine years too long - and had found out the hard
way that anything was possible.

Vinette Jones was only twenty-three years
old, but she looked thirty-five. Her skin was as cocoa brown as
that of her African forebears, her tightly kinked hair was
close-cropped, and her bearing was straight and proud. Tall, she
was almost gaunt, and just missed being handsome. Nevertheless, she
radiated a steely strength and a quiet, don't-fuck-with-me
resolve.

Walking with her shoulders squared, she kept
her eyes straight ahead, careful to look neither to the left nor
the right, determined to witness nothing that might be dangerous to
her health and well-being. Not that she needed to look around to
see what was going on. The same things as always. Crack dealing,
crack buying, and crack smoking - that and stolen property changing
hands and wolfpacks of teens roaming, keeping their deceptively
lazy eyes peeled for easy prey.

The ugly project of dirty apartment blocks
was one vast supermarket.

In place of groceries there were drugs. And
in place of checkout clerks there was an army of pushers and
dealers. The customers they served were of all ages: anywhere
between seven and seventy.

Random killings had become commonplace;
stray bullets nothing out of the ordinary.

It was no place to live, this project, at
least not for human beings. This ugly sprawling blight was more
militarised war zone than home. There was nothing to nourish the
soul in these filthy grey blocks devoid of grass and trees, where
windows were either gaping black holes, squares of plywood, or had
glass cracked like cobwebs; where the facing on the buildings was
crumbling, and cracks scarred both the inside and outside walls.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! That was the message the
project conveyed; that was the way it would be until the day this
festering pile of rubble was razed.

Vinette heard crack vials crunch underfoot;
in her peripheral vision, she saw hundreds . . . thousands ... of
the empty, scattered containers glittering in the gutters and on
the hard-packed, grassless ground.

She felt a knot tighten in her stomach. This
was no place to raise a child. Especially not a child like her own
Jowanda.

Jowanda.

Tiny, mahogany-skinned, innocent Jowanda.
Premature child of her womb, flesh of her flesh.

Thinking about her brought an automatic
smile to Vinette's lips. And, as always when she thought about
Jowanda, the smile faded just as quickly as it had come.

Her black eyes misted over. Jowanda. Born
when she herself had been strung out on shit. When she'd lived with
Vernon, the no-good bum who'd turned her on to drugs, had got her
pregnant, and then run off when she'd been in her eighth month.

Jowanda, born in the delivery room of the
CRY Hospital for Unwed Mothers. Where, right before giving birth,
Vinette had had a visit from that nice grandmotherly lady who
worked at the D.C. affiliate of the CRY Orphanage - and where, for
fifty dollars cash, she'd signed yet-to-be-born Jowanda over.

'We'll take very good care of her, and once
you've straightened your life out and want her back, you only have
to come in,' the nice lady had told her gently. 'You can have her
back any time.'