Requiem For a Glass Heart (6 page)

“Oooh, well, it’ll be my pleasure, won’t it,” he said. He counted out the twenty thousand pounds and put it in two piles on the glass table.

“They want to know if you can help them another time,” she said.

“My pleasure again.” He picked up his glass once more and took a mouthful of rum. “When?”

She laughed. “Well, they don’t want you to rush into anything. You should relax a little first.” She turned slightly on the sofa and her dress fell open, revealing a good length of her thigh.

“Relax?” he asked. “I could do some relaxing … How about you?”

“Oh, yes. I could relax.” It was incredible how little body language was required to set an imagination like his going.

He reached over and put a hand on her bare leg. She let it stay there.

“I have something that could help us relax,” she said. She reached into her purse again and tossed the two packets of cocaine casually onto the table. She smiled. “One for you, and one for me.” She shifted her legs and let him have a glimpse of what he wanted.

“I’m all for this,” he said. “I’m bloody well all for this.”

In her briefing she had been told that he was reckless and that he would not turn it down. There was a fifty-fifty chance he would pick up the right packet. She had to do it this way so he wouldn’t be suspicious; she had to let him pick his own packet. If he got the red one, she would have to devise an opportunity to switch. He picked up the green.

Within moments they were on their knees laying lines on the glass top of the coffee table. She went first, taking one of the British notes from the pile on the table, rolling it deftly into a cylinder. But first she tested one of her lines, licking her finger, putting it in the powder, and rubbing it on her gums with a relishing smile. Just to make sure. Then she leaned over and sucked up a line of baking powder, throwing back her head and sniffing. Then a second line. He was rolling his own bill from the pile. Quickly inhaling and snorting like a bull, he sucked up one, two, three lines in rapid succession.

She had no idea what they had mixed for him or if the drug was simply uncut, but it didn’t happen immediately. He sat up straight, smiling. He wiped his nose, he closed his eyes. His smile turned to a grin, a big broad grin that grew wider and wider, grotesquely wider, until she realized it had become a grimace. His eyes squeezed shut as his body began to tense, stiffen, and then jitter. Saliva began seeping through his gritted teeth, drooling down his expensive silk shirt. Then it began flowing, his locked teeth slowly becoming obscured as the saliva turned to froth. His eyes opened slightly; the irises had rolled upward, exposing slivers of white. He began convulsing as the saliva gushing from his mouth commingled with something lumpy and fatty yellow. She watched as he slowly slid over onto the floor, choking, groaning, shuddering.

It would take a few minutes.

Ignoring his mewling and worming at her feet, she opened her purse and pulled on the surgical gloves. Picking up her glass, she took it into the kitchen and washed it and returned
it to the cabinet. She dampened a paper towel and went into the living room and wiped up the baking powder and dried the place where her glass had been sitting. She picked up the money, leaving the one bill he had used still loosely rolled next to his remaining lines of cocaine—or whatever the hell it was—and put it back into her purse.

One of his feet was rhythmically kicking a chrome leg of the coffee table, but she didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to look again until she had to feel his pulse.

She took the damp paper towel and went into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet along with the red-lined bag. Coming out of the bathroom, she looked down the hallway. Three more doors, one closed. One…… closed?

Her heart fluttered in her throat. It was the last door on the right, at the very end of the hallway. She had no weapon, but she had been lucky. She hadn’t been seen. Taking several steps toward the closed door, she paused and held her breath. Now, faintly, she could hear a television. He probably had told whoever was in there to stay until he was finished with his meeting. Which made his apparent interest in a sexual encounter right there in the living room a surprising bit of audacity. That is, if there really was someone in there. Perhaps there wasn’t. He might have been watching the television by himself.

She backed away from the door, turned sideways, and went back down the hallway. After stepping into the kitchen to get her purse, she headed to the living room to make sure he was dead.

She couldn’t see him in the dimly lighted room where the bank of high-tech sound equipment iridesced in silence, its beady coruscation throwing nervous reflections against the darkness. When she got to him, he had coiled into a fetal ball, leaving life much as he had entered it. The room was heavy with the reek of vomit and feces. He was dead. She looked out the windows again, admiring London, and then she turned and walked out of the apartment, making sure the door was locked behind her.

C
ATE LAY AWAKE IN BED, HER MIND DARTING BACK AND FORTH
between the two new events, one a great weight that angered and grieved her as only betrayal can, the other an enticing question mark that she realized was as attractive to her as a means of escape, a counterbalance to the other weight, as it was a unique opportunity. All of it together put her in a state of heightened emotion that was not easily defined. There was a haunting giddiness about her situation, a feeling of unreality she could not bring under control.

But it was Tavio’s infidelities that dominated the night, penetrating her sleep with unbidden images of his trysts with other women, women whose faces she could never see but whose naked bodies were all too clearly visible in her mind’s eye, olive-skinned women whose limbs and loins were dusky rather than pale like hers, whose breasts were lusty shades of cinnamon and almond rather than the dusty rose of her own. She dreamed of his familiar tenderness and how he used those same ways of touching to undress the dark women of her imagination. She woke crying, drifted back into exhaustion only to awake again, her eyes matted with tears.

When the alarm woke her in the morning, she found herself lying crosswise at the foot of her bed, her spine resting against a pillow that probably had kept her from actually
rolling off. For a moment she was completely disoriented, the window across the room unrecognizable and even ominous in its lack of association.

With her heart pounding, she wrenched herself off the sheets and stood, unsteady, her wiry hair disheveled, and tried to clear her head and put herself into a familiar context. Finally she fixed her eyes on her overturned shoes at the foot of the bed, and after a moment everything shifted slightly and fell into place. The same old place.

She showered and brushed her teeth standing naked in front of the mirror, left hand on her hip, studying her turbaned reflection. She looked like hell. She rinsed out her mouth and put away the toothbrush. Turning from the sink, she bent over, unwrapped the towel, and began drying her hair, her head down, staring at her own naked thighs … her own naked thighs. Suddenly she sobbed unexpectedly, once, then twice. She held her breath and closed her eyes, the third sob lodged deep in her throat, waiting there for her to make up her mind.

She straightened up quickly, slinging her wet hair back with a fierce snap of her head, and turned back to the sink, putting the towel aside on a stand. She opened the door of the medicine cabinet and took out Tavio’s razor, which she kept on the glass shelf beside his last bottle of cologne. Without thinking, she suddenly began banging it against the edge of the sink, furiously banging it and banging it and banging it, until the handle snapped and the head went flying and skittering across the tile floor, and without looking or thinking she flung the handle too, bouncing it off the wall.

She braced herself, putting her hands on the edge of the sink, arms locked straight out, head down, fighting back the feeling that she was just a few heartbeats away from hyperventilation. She took a deep breath and then another, and then another. After a moment she reached for the towel, turned away from the sink, and bent over again and finished drying her hair. With her eyes closed.

She dressed and ate breakfast and waited. She drank too much coffee and read the paper through twice. This was the very thing she wanted to avoid—time on her hands, time that tempted her mind to fall back on itself. She loaded the dishwasher
and turned it on, and while it steamed and clacked she cleaned out the refrigerator. That got her past mid-morning.

She checked the telephone to make sure she hadn’t left the receiver crooked in its cradle, but it was all right. Twice she rejected the temptation to call Strey. That would be a mistake.

At noon she decided to make a sandwich, but she had been overzealous in cleaning out the refrigerator, and there wasn’t much there. She made a cheese sandwich: whole wheat, mayonnaise, hastily cut chunks of cheddar and lettuce. It wasn’t much good, but she washed it down with gulps of ginger ale that she had forgotten she had. It was a lousy meal, and she had no appetite, which made it worse. She felt as if she were recovering from a hangover.

At twelve fifty-five the front gate buzzer sounded, and she scrambled to the intercom button.

“Hello?”

“Catherine Cuevas?” It was a woman’s voice.

“Yeah.”

“Special Agent Loder.”

In a few minutes Cate opened the door to a leggy, dark-haired woman a few years older than herself, smiling a crooked smile and holding up her FBI badge with her left hand to verify her identity. She stuck out her right hand. “Ann,” she said.

“It’s good to meet you,” Cate said, shaking hands. “Just let me grab my purse.”

“Uh …”Loder stepped forward hesitantly. “I think it’d be best if you packed some things. You know, for a few days—a week, maybe a week.”

Cate looked at her.

“Sorry, there was really no way to let you know this ahead of time.”

Cate caught herself. “Oh, no, it’s okay. Just regular … clothes?”

“Yeah, sure.” Loder shrugged. “Whatever you’d wear to the office.” She smiled her crooked smile, and this time Cate saw her beautiful straight teeth.

“Okay,” Cate said. She was determined not to show her surprise, determined to be resilient. “Give me a few minutes,” and she turned and headed for her bedroom.

Loder followed her. “Catherine. They call you Catherine?”

“Cate.”

“This is the way it is, Gate, with these undercover deals,” Loder said, as if they were talking about shopping. She was looking around. “And with the special ops stuff, too. Most of the time they don’t tell you anything until the last minute. You just gotta say ‘whoa’ and hang on to your socks. And then some of these guys are need-to-know freaks. They like to keep you in the dark as much as possible, as long as possible. It’s a power thing.”

Cate dragged a suitcase out of her closet and began pulling clothes off the hangers. Her mind was only half on the task, but she managed to remember to match colors.

“But this guy we’re working with is a great guy,” Loder continued. “You’ll like him. I’ve met him once before. He doesn’t play those kinds of games, which takes a load off your mind. You don’t always have to be wondering and worrying about hidden agendas.”

“Can you tell me what this is all about?” Cate asked, grabbing shoes from the bottom of the closet.

“Not my place, Cate,” Loder said, shaking her head matter-of-factly, watching Cate pack. “We’ll be doing all that in just a little while. Look, get some casual things, some pants maybe. We’ll be sitting around a lot.”

Cate grabbed a couple of casual dresses and a few hangers with slacks. She snatched another pair of shoes from the closet floor, then headed to the bathroom. Loder wandered after her and watched a moment.

“You know, you’d better throw in a hair dryer,” Loder suggested. “This is not a hotel or anything. I forgot mine and had to buy one at a drugstore, which was too bad. I’d just
bought
a new one back at home.”

Home, Cate could tell, had to be somewhere in New York. Despite her name, Loder was obviously Italian. She had high cheekbones, big black eyes, and the crooked smile that she used a lot and that somehow made you want to smile back. Ann Loder was infectiously likable;

The Loder came from an ex-husband, she explained as they pulled out of the condominium’s driveway and headed toward the West Loop. She had kept his name because it didn’t give her away before she arrived. Ann Loder didn’t tell you anything. Anna Mazzini, her maiden name, told you too much. She was thirty-four, had grown up in Secaucus, New
Jersey, had finished the academy eight years ago, and her first assignment had sent her right across the Hudson to the city where she had remained ever since. Lately of Brooklyn.

She had a dry, world-weary sense of humor, which she didn’t mind using on herself in a self-deprecating manner that conveyed the fact that she was an Italian girl with a very level head and a healthy skepticism about nearly everything.

By the time Loder had turned off the freeway and headed downtown, she had succeeded in putting Gate at ease, or at least close to it. They quickly entered a neighborhood thickly forested with pines and oaks, a quiet street in a surprisingly tony part of the city near the center. Loder pulled into the driveway, or, more accurately, the courtyard, of a one-story Mediterranean-style house that appeared to have been built in a shallow U shape, with the drive and courtyard in the open end. She parked behind the second of the two cars already there, the three vehicles forming a half-circle around a cluster of three palms in the center of the brick courtyard. The house was surrounded with thick, brambly woods that completely obscured neighboring homes, which seemed to be a considerable distance away.

“How’s this for off-site?” Loder grinned, turning off the ignition and motioning toward the front of the house. “Can you beat it? God, I love asset forfeiture.” She shook her head. “These butt-head drug dealers. I couldn’t believe this. You should see the kind of places we operate out of in Brooklyn. Jesus.”

They got out of the car, and Cate pulled her suitcase from the back seat and followed Loder into the front entry, where she put her bag down beside six or eight others that were already there.

Though the house was beautiful and spacious, her immediate impression was of vacancy. The place was bare. The entry opened directly into a generous living room a step or two below the level of the entry itself, and Gate now saw that the house was actually H-shaped, the living room being in the horizontal bar between the two parallel sides. The far wall was glass and opened out onto a lush tropical courtyard, which created a jungle backdrop for the sprawling room. The dearth of furnishings in the living room made it seem even larger, and the three people waiting for them seemed dwarfed by their surroundings.

“Okay, people,” Loder said cheerfully, tossing her shoulder bag into a chair. “Special Agent Cate Cuevas.”

The two men and one woman were already standings, holding notebooks and manila folders that they obviously had been consulting. Other documents were scattered around on a folding card table and in half a dozen metal folding chairs sitting in the middle of the room. The nearest of the two men stepped up to Cate and introduced himself.

“I’m Curtis Hain,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m the case agent on this. It’s good to meet you.”

Hain was in his early fifties, tall, maybe six-three, with a barrel chest that made him an imposing figure. His thick light brown hair was heavily flecked with gray and a little unruly. He wore a blue dress shirt with the cuffs turned back and no tie, dark blue dress pants that were incredibly wrinkled, and oxblood loafers. He seemed entirely comfortable with his sparse and temporary surroundings, and for some reason that Cate couldn’t quite pin down, he had the air of a man who had spent a lot of hours off-site in sensitive operations. With a perfunctory gesture he tossed his arm in the direction of the person nearest him.

“Leo Ometov.” Ometov’s age was difficult to guess. He was a dark blond and had the kind of untroubled skin that didn’t show its age. The suit he was wearing was off-the-rack European, and his shoes, which were noticeably clunky, had not seen polish in a good while. He wore no tie; his shirt was open at the collar. With a handsome long face, a precise mouth, and a nose slightly askew, he had the polite manner of a guest in a foreign country. He inclined his head as they shook hands, and his smile could only be described as one of amusement. Cate liked him instantly.

Hain swung his arm again.

“And Erika Jaeger.” Jaeger was a trim young woman with an athletic manner, short yellow hair, and a healthy suntan. She was dressed in tailored chocolate slacks and a tight-fitting sleeveless blouse that hugged her small breasts in a neat, tidy package. There wasn’t an ounce of anything extra anywhere on the woman, and Cate knew by looking at her that she would prove to be efficient, focused, and serious. Her handshake was firmer than Ometov’s.

“Here,” Hain said, motioning to one of the metal chairs. “Make yourself comfortable.” He grinned at the obvious impossibility
of following that suggestion. “Our accommodations are courtesy of a recently incarcerated drug dealer who had pretty good taste in Houston real estate but no luck with Miami women—didn’t know an FBI agent when he saw one.” Everyone sat down again. “Unfortunately, whoever’s in charge of asset forfeiture sold every damn stick of furniture in the place.” He motioned to the chairs and the card table. “This stuff’s from the storage room in your field office here.” He extended his legs in front of him, moving stiffly, and crossed his feet at the ankle, his chair creaking. “But we’ve got rental authorization finally. We’ll be getting some stuff in here later in the day.”

He looked at Cate. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jaeger flipping through papers in her folder. Ometov, with a kindly smile, kept his eyes on her.

“Okay,” Hain said. “I know you’re wondering what in the hell’s going on here. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve all just met, literally this morning. Well, Ann and I met in New York a year ago.” He scratched between his eyebrows with his thumb. “Erika’s an agent with the BKA, the Bundeskriminalamt—Germany’s equivalent of the FBI. Leo’s sort of on loan to us from Moscow’s Interior Ministry, directorate for organized crime.”