Restless - Boyd William - Страница 50

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As the evening drew in she listened to some music on the radio and in her mind went back over the events in Las Cruces. 'The Events in Las Cruces' – the euphemism was rather comforting: as if her hotel room had been double-booked or her car had broken down on Highway 80. She felt no guilt, no compunction about what she had done to de Baca. If she hadn't killed him she knew he would have killed her in the next minute or two. Her plan had been only to stab him in the eye and run. She only had a sharpened pencil, after all – one of his eyes was the only possible target if he was to be immobilised. But thinking back over those few seconds in the car, remembering de Baca's reactions, his total, shocking incapacity followed by his immediate death, she realised that the force of her blow must have driven the pencil point through the eyeball and the eye-hole in his skull, deep into his brain puncturing, in the process, the carotid artery – or perhaps hit the brain-stem, causing instant cardiac arrest. There could be no other explanation for his almost instant death. Even if she had missed the artery and the pencil had penetrated his brain de Baca might not have died. But she would have been able to make her escape, though. However, her luck – her luck – her aim and the sharpness of the pencil point had killed him as swiftly and as surely as if he had taken prussic acid or had been strapped to an electric chair. She went to bed early and dreamt that Raul was trying to sell her a small speedy red coupe.

She called Sylvia's number at BSC exactly at 4.01 p.m. She was standing at a pay phone outside the entrance of the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue with a good view of the main doors. Sylvia's phone rang three times and then was picked up.

'Hello, Eva,' Romer said, his voice level, unsurprised. 'We want you to come in.'

'Listen carefully,' she said. 'Leave the building now and walk south down Fifth. I'll give you two minutes, otherwise there won't be any meeting.'

She hung up and waited. After about three and a half minutes, Romer emerged – fast enough, she thought: he would have had no time to set up any team. He turned right down Fifth Avenue. She shadowed him from across the street and behind, watching his back, watching his manner, letting him walk some six blocks before she was sure there was no one on his tail. She was wearing a headscarf and spectacles, flat shoes and a camel coat she'd bought in a thrift shop that morning. She crossed the street at an intersection and began to follow him closely herself for another block or two. He was wearing a trench coat, an old one with a few repaired tears, and a navy-blue scarf. He was bareheaded. He seemed very at ease, strolling southwards, not looking around, waiting for contact to be made. They had reached 39th Street before she walked up beside him and said, 'Follow me.'

She turned east and on Park Avenue turned north again, heading towards 42nd Street and Grand Central Station, going in by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance and walking up the ramp to the main concourse. Thousands of commuters criss-crossed the vast space, swarming, jostling, hurrying: it was rush hour – probably as secure a place to meet as any in the city, Eva reasoned: hard to jump her, easy to cause confusion and escape. She didn't look behind her but made for the central information booth. When she reached it only then did she turn, taking off her spectacles.

He was right behind her, face expressionless.

'Relax,' he said. 'I'm alone. I'm not that stupid.' He paused, moving closer to her, lowering his voice. 'How are you, Eva?'

To her intense irritation the genuine concern in his voice made her suddenly want to cry. She had only to think of Luis de Baca to go hard and resilient again. She took off her headscarf, shook her hair loose.

'I was sold,' she said. 'Somebody sold me.'

'Not any one of us. I don't know what went wrong but Transoceanic is tight.'

'I think you're wrong.'

'Of course you think that. I would think that. But I would know, Eva. I'd figure it out. We're tight.'

'What about BSC?'

'BSC would give you a medal if they could,' he said. 'You did a brilliant job.'

This threw her and she looked around at the hundreds of people hurrying by and then, as if for inspiration, up at the immense vaulted ceiling with its constellations winking out of the blue. She felt weak: the pressure of the last days overcoming her now, all of a sudden. She wanted nothing more than for Romer to put his arms around her.

'Let's go downstairs,' he said. 'We can't talk properly here. I've got a lot to tell you.'

They went down a ramp to the lower concourse and found a place at the counter of a milk bar. She ordered a cherry milkshake with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream, suddenly craving sweetness. She checked the room as the order was prepared.

'There's no need to look around,' Romer said. 'I'm on my own. You've got to come in, Eva – not now, not today, or tomorrow. Take your time. You deserve it.' He reached over and took her hand. 'What you managed to do was astonishing,' he said. 'Tell me what happened. Start from when you left New York.' He let her hand go.

So she told him: she talked him through every hour of the entire trip from New York to Las Cruces and Romer listened, still, without saying a word, only asking her when she had finished to repeat the period of time from her saying farewell to Raul to the encounter with de Baca.

'What's happened in the days you've been out is this,' he told her when she had finished. 'The sheriff of Dona Ana County was called to the crash after you reported it. They found the corner of the map and the money and called in the local FBI agent from Santa Fe. The map went to Hoover in Washington and Hoover himself put it on the President's desk.' He paused. 'Nobody can quite figure it out – so they called us in, naturally enough, as it seemed to have a connection with the Brazilian map. How do you explain it? The death of a Mexican detective in a road crash near the border. There's a sizeable amount of cash and what appears to be a portion of a map, in German, detailing potential air routes within Mexico and the United States. Foul play? Or an unlucky accident? Did he buy the map? Was he selling it and the sale went wrong? Did someone try to steal it from him and was spooked and ran?' He spread his hands. 'Who knows? The investigation continues. The key thing from our point of view – BSC's – is that it confirms the validity of the Brazilian map. Unequivocally.' He chuckled. 'You could never have foreseen this, Eva, but the sheer exceptional beauty of this episode is that the map reached Roosevelt and Hopkins without a trace, without a hint of a smell, of BSC on it. From county sheriff to FBI operative to Hoover to the White House. What's going on south of the border? What are these Nazis planning with their airlines and their Gaus? Couldn't have worked out better.'

Eva thought. 'But the material was inferior.'

'They thought it was good enough. Raul was simply going to plant it, send it to a local newspaper. That was the plan. Until your plan superseded.'

'But I didn't have a plan.'

'All right. Your… improvisation. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.' He paused, looked at her, almost checking her out, she felt, to see if she had changed, somehow. 'The key thing,' he continued, 'the amazing thing, is that it's all worked out about a hundred times better than anyone could have hoped. They can't point a finger at the British and BSC and say: look, another of your dirty tricks to hoodwink us into your European war. They turned this up themselves in a forgotten corner of their own backyard. What can the Bund say? Or America First? It's as clear as day: the Nazis are planning flights from Mexico City to San Antonio and Miami. They're already on your doorstep, USA, it's not something happening across the Atlantic Ocean – wake up.' He didn't need to say anything more: Eva could see how it fitted only one interpretation.

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