"The wife got a bundle. The child isn't mine."
"I didn't know that at the time. No one did. No, I don't think you were admired around here."
"What about my pals at the firm?"
"No one saw them for months. They got sued by Aricia. Other litigation followed. They had grossly overspent, so bankruptcy got them. Divorces, booze, it was awful. They self-destructed in textbook fashion."
Patrick crawled onto his bed and gently folded his legs. He savored this with a nasty smile. Huskey stood and walked to the window. "How long did you stay in New York?" he asked, peeking through the shades.
"About a week. I didn't want any of the money coming back into the States, so I arranged to have it wired to a bank in Toronto. The bank hi Panama was a branch of the Bank of Ontario, so it was easy to wire in as much as I needed."
"You started spending?"
"Not much. I was a Canadian now, with good papers, a transplant from Vancouver, and the money allowed me to purchase a small apartment and obtain credit cards. I found a Portuguese instructor and studied the language six hours a day. I went to Europe several times so my passport would get used and scrutinized. Everything worked perfectly. After three months, I put the apartment on the market and went to Lisbon, where I studied the language for a couple of months. Then, on August 5, 1992, I flew to Sao Paulo."
"Your independence day."
"Absolute freedom, Karl. I landed in that city with two small bags. I got in a cab and I was soon lost in a sea of twenty million people. It was dark and raining, traffic was standing still, and I was in the back of a cab thinking to myself that no one in the world knew where I was. And no one would ever find me. I almost cried, Karl. It was sheer, unbridled freedom. I looked at the faces of the people racing down the sidewalks, and I thought to myself, I'm now one of them. I'm a Brazilian named Danilo, and I'll never be anybody else."
Chapter 29
SANDY SLEPT THREE HOURS on a hard mattress in a loft somewhere above the den, far away from her, and awoke with the early sun beaming through slits beneath the blinds. It was six-thirty. They had said good night at three, after seven hours of intensely scouring documents and listening to dozens of surreptitious talks Patrick had amazingly captured.
He showered and dressed, and found his way down to the kitchen, where Leah sat in the breakfast nook with fresh coffee and a surprisingly alert face. She fixed him wheat toast with jam as he glanced at the newspapers. Sandy was ready to leave, to return to his office with the Aricia mess and sort it out on his own turf.
"Any word from your father?" he asked. The early voices were quiet, the words scarce.
"No. But I can't call from here. I'll go to the market later and use a pay phone."
"I'll say a prayer for him."
"Thanks."
They loaded the entire Aricia file into the trunk of his car, and said good-bye. She promised to call him within twenty-four hours. She would not be leaving anytime soon. Their client's problems had gone from serious to urgent.
The early air was cool. It was October after all, and even the Coast felt a hint of autumn. She put on a parka and went for a walk on the beach, barefoot and bare-legged, with one hand in a pocket and the other holding her coffee. She hid behind sunglasses, which annoyed her. The beach was deserted. Why was she compelled to hide her face?
Like all Cariocas, she had spent a great deal of her life on the beach, the center of culture. Her childhood home had been her father's apartment in Ipanema, the poshest of Rio's neighborhoods, where every kid grew up on the beach.
She was unaccustomed to long walks near the water without being surrounded by a million people happily sunning and playing. Her father had been one of the first to organize efforts against the unbridled development of Ipanema. He despised the increase of population and haphazard construction, and worked^ tirelessly with neighborhood groups. Such actions went against the typical Carioca attitude of live and let live, but with time came to be admired and even welcomed. As a lawyer, Eva still donated time to preservation groups in the neighborhoods of Ipanema and Leblon.
The sun crept behind clouds, and the breeze picked up. She returned to the house as the seagulls followed and squawked overhead. She locked every door and window, and drove two miles to a supermarket, where she planned to buy shampoo and fruit, and to find the nearest possible pay phone.
She didn't see the man at first, and when she finally noticed him he seemed to have been standing beside her forever. She was holding a bottle of hair conditioner when he sniffed, as if he had a cold. She turned, glanced from behind the sunglasses, and was startled by his sustained eye contact. He was thirty or forty, white, unshaven, but she didn't have time to notice anything else.
He was staring at her, with rabid green eyes that glowed in the middle of a beach-bronzed face. She coolly walked away, down the aisle with the conditioner. Maybe he was just a local character, a harmless pervert who lurked in the grocery and scared pretty vacationers. Perhaps everyone in the store knew his name and made excuses for him because he wouldn't harm an insect.
Minutes later, she saw him again, this time hiding near the bakery with his face behind a pizza crust but his metallic eyes watching every move she made. Why was he hiding, covering his face? He wore shorts and sandals, she noticed.
Panic hit hard through her chest and sent waves down her legs. Her first thought was to run, but she kept her cool long enough to find a small shopping basket. She had been spotted by whoever he was, and it was to her advantage to watch him as much as he was watching her. Who knew when she might see him again? She loitered in the produce department, next picked her way through the cheeses, and didn't see him for a long time. Then she saw him with his back to her, holding a gallon of milk.
A few minutes later, she caught sight of him through the large front windows, walking through the parking lot, his head cocked to one side, talking into a cell phone, carrying nothing. What happened to the milk? She would've raced through a back door, but her car was parked in the front. She paid for the items as calmly as possible, but her hands shook as she took her change.
There were thirty cars, including her rental, in the parking lot, and she knew she couldn't inspect them all. Not that she wanted to. He was in one of them. She simply wanted to leave without being followed. She quickly got in her car, left the lot, and turned in the direction of the beach house, though she knew she could never go back there. She drove a half a mile, then made an abrupt U-turn, just in time to see him behind her, three cars back, driving a new Toyota. His green eyes glanced away at the last second. Odd, she thought, that he wasn't covering them.
Everything seemed odd, at the moment. How odd that she was driving along a foreign highway in a foreign country with a fake passport proclaiming her to be someone she never wanted to be, and going to a place that she had yet to determine. Yes, everything was odd and blurred and frightening as hell, and what Eva needed and desperately wanted was to see Patrick so she could scream at him for an hour, and throw rocks as well. This was not part of the deal. It was one thing for Patrick to be hunted for his past, but she had done nothing wrong. Not to mention Paulo.
Being Brazilian, she normally drove with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, and the traffic along the beach badly needed a good dose of her native driving. But she had to be calm. You don't panic when you're on the run, Patrick had said many times. You think, you watch, you plan.
She watched the cars behind her. She obeyed all highway rules.