Full Circle (30 page)

For an hour after they’d gone to bed, they’d talked about it: about what could happen tomorrow. Even though they lay close together, Paula in the nightgown she’d packed, he in his shorts, there had somehow been no question of sex. Instead, they’d talked about what might happen with a kind of hushed innocence, as two children might talk on the night before Christmas, visions of sugar plums, of streets paved with gold, of sidewalks in childhood dreams scattered with coins.

A million dollars … two million dollars…

Drowsily, the sleep-blurred words were combining with visions of scattered coins, images from childhood, fading into the forgetfulness of past innocence: he and his mother, living in the partitioned-off rear half of the huge Greenwich Village loft. In the front half, his mother had taught modern dance and held left-wing political meetings. When there were no dance classes, or meetings, he’d flown model airplanes in the front half of the loft.

It was at times like this, with sleep beckoning, remembering how his mother had helped him build his model planes, that he missed her so much.

Paula felt him stir, heard him draw a fitful breath.

Tomorrow…

Certainly he was thinking about tomorrow, planning, calculating the odds, thinking and rethinking. Was he apprehensive about tomorrow? Was he scared? Had she ever seen him scared? C.B.—had C.B. ever been scared?

The three of them—had there ever been a more improbable combination? Alan, the Jewish intellectual. C.B., with a heart of gold, born in the ghetto. And her, the pampered daughter of two college professors.

The three of them and Raymond DuBois, his body emaciated, hardly more than sallow flesh sagging on an inert skeleton, his face a death’s head. Raymond DuBois, one of the world’s richest men.

And the others: James, the impassive bodyguard who could be a killer. Grace Campbell, the enigmatic presence who might have been a Daphne DuMaurier creation. Powers, the frightened financier. And John Graham, that urbane manipulator.

Only hours ago, with the tip of her forefinger, delicately, she’d actually touched a Picasso painting. Decades ago, the master had put brush to palette, put paint to canvas—the same paint she’d touched today. The sensation had been indescribable, as if she were in psychic contact with the great stream of human aspiration that ran through both Picasso and her.

As she felt her eyes close, let sleep take her, she realized that what she felt, that magic, must surely have possessed Raymond DuBois, perhaps consumed him.

As if he were blind, DuBois ran the tips of his fingers over the buttons of the electronic pad that was always placed close beside his right hand, easily within reach. With his forefinger he depressed the correct button, heard the silky voice say, “The time is two twenty-one a.m.”

Meaning that, in thirty-nine minutes, the nurse would tap on his door. Carrying a glass of water and three pills, she would switch on the bedside lamp and help him with the pills. Then, murmuring amiable encouragement, she would attend to the elementals: his bodily waste that had fallen through the circular cutout in his mattress to dribble into the chemical vat below. Then she would clean him, reposition him, say a few words. Finally she would switch out the light and bid him a peaceful rest.

Now I lay me down to sleep…

Yes, he could clearly remember reciting the words to his mother as she knelt beside his bed. And yes, he could clearly remember his mother in her coffin, her narrow, wasted head pillowed on white satin, her hands crossed at her breast.

The hands that had cleaned him and diapered him…

… the breasts that had nurtured him.

He’d been four when she died. After her death, his most vivid recollections had been the gloom of drawn window shades that turned the brightness of sunshine into oblongs of ochre. His father had worked in a tailor shop, sewing piecework. The shop had been in the Bronx, on the ground floor of a tall redbrick building. Every day, his father took him to the shop, and told him to play in the small yard behind the building. There was no grass, only dirt. His only toys had been discarded saucepans and broken cooking utensils that he used to dig in the hard ground.

His mother had died in 1910. By 1920 he’d saved enough money delivering newspapers to buy a wagon with high stake sides, enabling him to deliver substantially more newspapers. At age fifteen, with more than a hundred customers, he was earning more money than his father. A year later, wearing a suit his father had sewn, he’d gotten the job as a Wall Street messenger. Four years later, on his twentieth birthday, he was worth more than a million dollars. He’d seen the 1929 crash coming for more than a year, time enough to convert paper profits into cash. By 1930, at age twenty-four, worth more than ten million, he’d begun buying real estate for pennies on the dollar, and the rest had been play, no longer work: a one-winner game.

But the prize for winning had only been more winnings: merely numbers, nothing more. So, like Faust, like Candide, he’d begun his search. He’d found sybarites who fawned over him and his checkbook, women who would reward his attentions by welcoming him inside their bodies. The women, and eventually the wives. To be followed, nature decreed, by offspring. But a secret visit to a doctor had confirmed his suspicion that, for him, children were impossible.

Leaving him, finally, with his paintings.

In school, he’d once been required to write a composition titled “Tomorrow.” For days he’d thought about the subject, almost for the first time intrigued, stimulated by an abstract concept. Finally, the night before the composition was due, he’d written:
Without tomorrow, there is nothing. Today is only the preparation for tomorrow. The successful see only tomorrow. The unsuccessful see only yesterday.

For him, after tomorrow, there could only be yesterday. Until, finally, the clock ran down.

“H
ERE.” BERNHARDT GAVE ONE
of the three walkie-talkies to Tate, another to Paula. “Let’s use channel two.” He set his channel selector, ordered Tate and Paula to go into the house at opposite ends and test the radios. That done, they reassembled in the garage. The two men wore jackets that concealed their weapons: Bernhardt’s .357 Magnum, holstered at his belt on the left side, Tate’s two nine-millimeter Browning automatics, one in a shoulder holster, one thrust into his belt. Paula carried her Colt .38 Chief’s Special in the saddle leather shoulder bag that Bernhardt had given her after she’d completed her first stakeout assignment. They stood beside the big Dodge van with its two front doors open. The van was windowless; the seats had been removed. Tate had put the sawed-off on the floor of the van, along with a plastic Baggie containing six twelve-gauge shotgun shells. As always, the two dogs were close to Paula. Reacting to the heightened activity, the dogs stood with their heads high, eyes sharp-focused, alert.

“I think,” Paula said, “that the dogs should go with me in the Taurus.”

Bernhardt looked at Tate, who shrugged, saying, “Why not?” When Bernhardt agreed, Paula stepped to the Taurus, opened the rear door, snapped her fingers. Eagerly the two dogs leaped into the car’s back seat.

“They love to ride,” Paula explained. Then she smiled at Bernhardt. It was a complex smile, almost whimsical. Recognizing it as a sign of encouragement, Bernhardt realized that his answering smile was rueful. He’d suddenly understood that he was an innocent abroad, a neophyte playing a no-limit game he’d never before played and didn’t fully understand.

They stood together between the Taurus and the van, a final moment of shared irresolution, a mute acknowledgment that, really, they’d suddenly realized that they’d rather not be there. Until finally Tate flipped his hand, gave them a broad, what-the-hell smile. “Come on,” he said. “A couple of Egg McMuffins and it’ll all fall into place.” He reached into the van, used the remote control wand to open the big double garage door.

Riding in the van’s passenger seat, Bernhardt keyed the walkie-talkie, saying, “Slow down, Paula. This is a thirty-five-mile zone. We’re doing forty.”

“Sorry.”

“Rodeo Drive’s next. Then it’s left on Benedict Canyon.”

“I know, Alan.” Even though her voice was static-blurred, Bernhardt could hear her impatience. This would be their third trip over the route.

A moment later the Taurus’s left-turn signal came on. Tate checked the mirrors, eased the van into the inside lane on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“We should’ve had more breakfast,” Tate said. “This could be a long day.”

“I always taste plastic in McDonald’s food.”

“Then how come we didn’t go to Jack in the Box?”

“Because I taste plastic in their food, too.”

“Hmmm.”

“Slow down,” Bernhardt ordered. “Let a car get between us.”

Allowing the van to slow, Tate said, “What we should’ve done, you should’ve drawn me a map of the DuBois layout. I always like to know the lay of the land.”

“You’re right,” Bernhardt admitted. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Tate made no reply, asking instead: “So we get inside the DuBois place. I get into the Taurus, and Paula gets in here. I wait outside while the two of you drive into the garage. Is that it?”

“That’s it. Then, when we’re inside, you block the garage with the Taurus. You stay in the car, with your walkie-talkie.”

“How long’ll it take you to load the stuff?”

“At least an hour. First Grace Campbell clears the house of servants. Then we start moving the paintings. There’re fourteen of them in the secret gallery. We’ve got to take them in the elevator from the fourth level up to the first level, then into the garage.”

“What about James? Where’s he while you’re doing that?”

“He’ll be outside, with you. He’ll be in his own car.”

“Waiting and watching, is that it?”

Bernhardt smiled. “That’s it, I think. We’re riding shotgun on the paintings, and James is riding shotgun on us.”

“With an Uzi.”

“I think so, but I’m not sure.” And into the walkie-talkie: “Benedict Canyon’s about a mile ahead, on the left.”

“Right.”

“How’re you doing?”

“I’m doing fine,” Paula answered. And, yes, he could hear the assurance in her voice. Paula was up for this job.

“Look at this,” Tate said, his gesture sweeping the shops they were passing as he shook his head appreciatively. “Rodeo Drive. This job works out, maybe I’ll come back this way. A lady I know, she’s got a thing about Rodeo Drive. She collects charms for her bracelet. Fish. She has a thing about fish. Solid gold, of course.”

Bernhardt made no reply.

“Paula,” Tate said, “she sounds fine.”

“I know.”

“She’s all right.”

“I know.”

“The two of you, you should get married, have a couple of kids.”

“I know.”

She switched on the scanner, waited for the crystals to warm up, read the digital bearing: 320 degrees magnetic. A check of the compass verified that the angle would be right for the Hilton’s parking lot.

“Is it okay?” Harry asked.

“Yes. You’d better get back to your car. It’s almost eight o’clock. Give me a call on your walkie-talkie, to check.”

“Graham—will he be alone?”

“I’ve no idea.” She spoke calmly yet impatiently.

Harry smiled derisively. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Andrea. You’re cool. You’re a cool customer.” He watched her face for some hint of a reaction, but saw nothing. In profile, her features were perfectly formed, a Hollywood beauty.

When they were finished with the job, with his share stuffed in the black nylon athletic satchel he’d bought just yesterday, when they were about to split, get out of town, he would take her by surprise. He would slap her so hard, so often, that she would fall to her knees, semiconscious. He would throw her to the floor, and rip off the safari pants she was wearing, and he would have her. Again and again, he would have her, cruel, merciless thrusts, tearing into her until she whimpered, begged for mercy. Then he would—

“
Come on,
Harry. Let’s
do
it.”

“Ah, yeah.” The derisive smile widened meaningfully. “Yeah, we got to do it, Andrea. We’ve really got to do it…”

Graham clipped the holstered Beretta to his belt, verified that his golfing jacket covered the pistol. In the bathroom, with the door open, Helen was spraying her short, dark hair. She wore designer blue jeans that clung provocatively to her buttocks and thighs. But here, now, on this make-or-break morning, with a fortune so close, the erotic images were a distraction.

“Helen. Please. You’re beautiful. But we’ve got to eat something. And I’ve got to make some calls.”

“So make some calls,” she retorted impatiently. “Ten minutes, I’ll be. No more.”

As he stifled an impatient response, he realized that she’d never before spoken to him so sharply. Neither had he heard so clearly the abrasive twang of New Yorkese in her speech.

Bernhardt spoke into the walkie-talkie: “You’d better slow down. It’s just around the next curve.”

“I know.”

As, two cars ahead, he saw the Taurus’s stop lights blink.

“You can drive right up to the gate,” he said. “It opens inward. There’s a light beam that’ll tell them we’re here.”

“Right.”

Bernhardt clicked off the radio. Tate let the van slow as the Taurus turned into the short driveway leading to the massive iron gates. The pickup that had been between the van and the Taurus continued up Benedict Canyon. Tate braked the van, then turned into the driveway close behind the Taurus. As Tate nudged the gearshift into neutral, Bernhardt saw the gate begin to swing inward. Twenty-five feet beyond the gates, James was standing in the driveway. Recognizing Paula behind the wheel of the Taurus, he stepped aside, gestured for her to drive past him.

“You’ll turn right, into the circular drive,” Bernhardt said, speaking into the walkie-talkie. “Then stop, like we did yesterday. Get out of the car. Take the keys with you.” As he spoke, the van began moving slowly forward; James stepped back into the center of the graveled driveway to stand facing them. He wore a loose-fitting blue blazer, gray flannel slacks, and black shoes. His shirt was white, but he wore no tie.