Peter Pan Must Die (32 page)

Wandering through these thoughts, Gurney found himself staring out the east window of the den as the first gray wash of dawn outlined
the crest of the far ridge. The latest sound effects coming from the phone suggested that Hardwick had left the bathroom and was shuffling through a pile of papers.

Gurney pressed the speakerphone button on his own phone, laid it on his desk, and leaned back in his chair. His eyelids were heavy from lack of sleep, and he let them drift pleasantly shut. His brain went into free fall and for a few moments he felt blessedly relaxed, almost anesthetized. The brief intermission was ended by Hardwick’s voice, made harsher by the phone’s cheap speaker. “I’m back! Nothing like a good leak to clear the mind and free the soul. Hey, ace, you still among the living?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, here’s what he gave me. Petros Panikos. Also known as Peter Pan. Also known as the Magician. Also known by other names we don’t know about. He must have at least one passport in a name other than Panikos. He gets around. Never arrested, never detained—at least not under the Panikos name. Bottom line, he’s a free agent, and an odd one. Has gun, will travel, for a price—upwards of a hundred grand per pop, plus expenses. Reachable only through a small handful of people who know how to reach him.”

“Hundred grand minimum definitely puts him at the high end of the hit world.”

“Well, the little man is kind of a celebrity in his world. He also—”

Gurney interrupted. “The
little
man? How little?”

“He’s supposedly like four-foot-ten. Maybe five-two at the most.”

“Like the Flowers by Florence delivery guy in the Emmerling Oaks video?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“Favors .22 caliber rounds in all cartridge shapes and sizes. But he’ll use anything that’s right for the job, anything from a knife to a bomb. Actually, he’s very fond of bombs. Might have connections with Russian arms and explosives dealers. Might have connections with the Russian mob down in Brooklyn. Might have been involved in a series of car explosions that wiped out a prosecutor and his staff in Serbia. Lot of
mights
. By the way, those slugs in the side of my house? They were .35 caliber—a much better choice for wire cutting
than a .22—so I guess he really is flexible, assuming we’re dealing with one guy. Problem with flexibility is that there’s no consistent MO across all his hits. Interpol thinks Panikos, or whatever his name is, could have been involved in over fifty murders in the past ten or fifteen years. But that’s based on underworld rumors, prison talk, shit like that.”

“Anything else?”

“I’m waiting on that. There seems to be some weird stuff in his background, might originally have come from some kind of traveling freak show circus family, then some ugly Eastern European orphanage stuff, all hearsay, but … we’ll see. My guy had to get off the phone, had some urgent shit on his plate. Supposed to be getting back to me as soon as he can. Meantime, I’m heading for Bincher’s house in Cooperstown. Probably a complete waste of time, but the fucker isn’t answering my calls or Abby’s calls, and he’s got to be somewhere. I’ll get back to you when the Ankara data arrives—if it ever does.”

“One last question, Jack. ‘The Magician’—what’s that all about?”

“Simple. The little fucker likes to show off—prove that he can do the impossible. Probably made up the name himself. Just the kind of psycho opponent you live for, right, Sherlock?” Hardwick didn’t say goodbye—no surprise in that—just broke the connection.

More information, in Gurney’s opinion, was always a good thing—objectively. But it was also possible to lose one’s bearings in it. Right then he had the feeling that the more he was discovering, the deeper the puzzle was becoming.

Carl Spalter apparently had been the victim not only of a professional gun-for-hire but also of an unusual one—and an unusual investment had been made to secure the outcome. However, considering what was at stake for the three people closest to him—his wife, his daughter, his brother—the high hit fee would have been a reasonable investment for any of them. At first glance, Jonah would seem to be the one with easiest access to that kind of cash, but Kay and Alyssa could have their own hidden sources, or allies willing to invest in a major payday. Then another possibility occurred to him—the possibility that
more than one
of them was involved. Why not all three? Or all three, plus Mick Klemper?

The sound of Madeleine’s slippered feet padding toward the den
door brought Gurney back from his speculations to his immediate surroundings.

“Good morning,” she said sleepily. “How long have you been up?”

“Since five.”

She rubbed her eyes and yawned. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure. How come
you’re
up?”

“Early clinic shift. Seems unnecessary, really. Early mornings are dead there.”

“Jesus, it’s barely dawn. How early do they open?”

“Not until eight. I’m not going there right away. I want time to let the chickens out for a while before I leave. I love watching them. Have you noticed they do everything together?”

“Like what?”

“Everything. If one goes a few feet away to peck at something in the grass, as soon as the others notice, they all scurry over and join her. And Horace keeps an eye on them. If one walks a little too far away, he starts crowing. Or he’ll run over and try to bring her back. Horace is the guard. Always on the alert. While the hens all have their heads down pecking, he keeps looking around. That’s his job.”

Gurney thought about this for a minute.

“Interesting how evolution arrives at a variety of survival strategies. Apparently the gene that supports high vigilance in the rooster produces behavior that results in a higher rate of hen survival, which in turn results in the rooster with that gene mating with more hens, which in turn propagates the vigilance gene more broadly into successive generations.”

“I suppose,” said Madeleine, yawning again and heading for the kitchen.

Half believing that he would eventually get around to canceling with Malcolm Claret, Gurney kept deferring the call, until the time came—8:15 a.m.—when he was forced to make a decision: either set out on the long drive to his eleven o’clock appointment or pick up the phone and let the man know he wasn’t coming.

For reasons not entirely clear to him, he decided at the final moment to keep the appointment after all.

The day was starting to warm up, with a promise of typical August heat and humidity to come. He took off the long-sleeved work shirt he’d been wearing around the house in the coolness of the mountain morning, put on a light polo shirt and a pair of chinos, shaved, combed his hair, picked up his car keys and wallet, and, barely ten minutes after making his decision, he was on his way.

Claret’s office was in his home on City Island, a small appendage of the Bronx in Long Island Sound. The drive from Walnut Crossing to the Bronx, the northernmost borough of New York City, took about two and a half hours. Once there, getting to City Island meant traversing the width of the borough, west to east—a journey Gurney had never been able to complete without feeling the negative emotional residues of his childhood there.

The Bronx was fixed in his mind as a place where the essential grunginess had little redeeming charm or character. The faded urban topography was universally uninspiring. In his old neighborhood, the most constricted paycheck-to-paycheck lives and the most prosperous ones were not far apart. The spectrum of achievement was narrow.

The neighborhood of his childhood was by no means a slum, but that absence of a negative was as positive as it got. Whatever civic pride existed arose from successfully keeping undesirable minorities at bay. The shabby but safe status quo was tenaciously maintained.

In the mix of small apartment buildings, two-family houses, and modest private homes—crowded together with little sense of order or provision for open spaces—there were only two homes he remembered as standing out among the drab multitude, only two that seemed pleasant or inviting. The owner of one was a Catholic doctor. The owner of the other was a Catholic funeral director. Both were successful. It was a predominantly Catholic neighborhood, a place where religion still mattered—as an emblem of respectability, a structure of allegiance, and a criterion for choosing providers of professional services.

That constricted way of thinking, of feeling, of making decisions, seemed to grow out of the tense, cramped, colorless environment itself—and it had created in him a powerful urge to escape. It was an urge he’d felt as soon as he was old enough to realize that the Bronx and the world were not synonymous.

Escape
. The word brought back an image, a sensation, an emotion from his early teens. The rare joy he would feel, pedaling as fast as he could on his ten-speed English racer, the wind in his face, the soft hiss of the tires on the asphalt—the subtle sense of freedom.

And now he was driving back across the Bronx to see Malcolm Claret.

He’d allowed himself to be talked into it. Curiously, his two previous experiences with Claret had been brought about in a similar way.

When he was twenty-four and his first marriage was dissolving, when Kyle was barely more than an infant, his wife had suggested they see a therapist. It wasn’t to save the marriage. She’d already given up on that, seeing that he was determined to stick with the lowly police career that she considered a terrible waste of his intelligence and—perhaps more to the point, Gurney suspected—a waste of his potential for making more money in another field. No, the purpose of therapy from Karen’s point of view was to smooth out the separation, to make the process more manageable. And, in a way, it had done just that. Claret had proved to be a rational, insightful, calming influence on the dissolution of a marriage that had been fatally flawed from the start.

Gurney’s second exposure to the man came six years later, after the death of Danny, his and Madeleine’s four-year-old son. Gurney’s reaction to that terrible event in the months following it—sometimes quietly agonized, sometimes numb, never verbal—prompted Madeleine, whose dreadful grief had been more openly expressed, to coax him into therapy.

With neither hope nor resistance, he’d agreed to see Claret, and he met with him three times. He didn’t feel that their meetings were resolving anything, and after those three he stopped going. But some of the observations Claret had made stayed with him over the years. One of the things about the man that Gurney appreciated was that he actually answered questions, spoke his mind openly, didn’t play therapy games. He didn’t belong to that maddening tribe of clinicians whose favorite response to a client’s problem is “How do you feel about that?”

Now, as he crossed the little bridge that led out to the separate world of City Island, with its marinas and dry docks and seafood restaurants, as he was thinking of Claret and imagining how the passing years might have changed his appearance, a long-buried memory came vividly to mind.

The memory was of walking across this same bridge with his father on a summer Saturday long ago—in fact, more than forty years ago. There were men standing at the bridge railing at intervals along the pedestrian walkway, casting lines out into the tidal current—shirtless men, tanned and sweating in the August sun. He could hear their reels whining as the lines flew out, big baited hooks and sinkers drawing them out in long arcs over the water. The sun was glinting here and there—on the water, on the stainless-steel reels, on the chrome bumpers of passing cars. The men were serious, intent on their activity, adjusting their rods, taking the slack out of their lines, watching the currents. They had seemed to Gurney like creatures from another world, utterly mysterious and out of reach. His father wasn’t ever shirtless or tanned, never stood in a row with other men, never engaged in any group activity. His father wasn’t an outdoorsman in that sense, certainly not a fisherman.

Although Gurney could not have articulated it at the age of six or seven when they took those three-mile Saturday walks from their Bronx apartment out over the City Island Bridge, the problem was that
he didn’t feel that his father was
anything
. His father, even on those walks together, was an enigma—a quiet, secretive man with no overt interests—a man who never spoke of the past or revealed any interest in the future.

Parking in the narrow, shaded side street in front of Malcolm Claret’s weathered clapboard house, Gurney felt the way he always felt when he’d been thinking about his father—empty and alone. He tried to shake the feeling as he approached the front door.

He naturally expected Claret to look older, perhaps a bit grayer or balder, than the image, nearly two decades out of date, that he carried in his memory. But he wasn’t prepared for the shrunken physique of the man who greeted him in the unfurnished foyer. Only the eyes at first seemed the same—soft blue eyes with an even, unblinking gaze. And the gentle smile—that was the same too. In fact, if anything, those two defining elements of Claret’s wise and peaceful presence seemed to have become more pronounced, more concentrated, with the passing of time.

“Come in, David.” The frail man gestured toward the same office Gurney had visited years earlier—a space that gave the impression of having once been, along with the foyer, an enclosed sun porch.

Gurney went in and looked around, struck by the instant familiarity of the little room. Claret’s brown leather chair, showing fewer signs of aging than the man himself, was in the same position Gurney remembered, facing two other small armchairs, both of which appeared to have been reupholstered in the intervening years. A short-legged table sat at the center of the rough triangle formed by the chairs.

They took the same seats they’d occupied for their conversations following Danny’s death, Claret easing himself down with evident difficulty.

“Let’s get to the point,” he said in his direct but soft voice, bypassing any preamble or small talk. “I’ll tell you what Madeleine told me. Then you can tell me whether you think it’s true. Is that all right with you?”