Bullard felt the rage grow inside him like a heat, so intense it seemed to powder the very marrow of his bones. “You son of a bitch, what did I just tell you?”
Martinetti fell silent. Chait’s eyes flickered this way and that, nervously. He was wondering if maybe his boss wasn’t going crazy. It seemed a fair enough question.
“I am the company,” Bullard went on. “I know what’s for the good of the company and what isn’t. You mention this again and ti faccio fuori, bastardo. I’ll kill you, you bastard.”
He knew no self-respecting Italian would stand for such an insult. He was right. “Sir, I hereby tender my resignation—”
“Resign, motherfucker, resign! And good riddance!” Bullard brought his fist down on the keyboard, again and again. On the fifth blow, the screen finally winked off.
Bullard sat for a long time in the darkened room. So the feds had been expecting them in Paterson. That meant they knew about the planned transfer of missile technology. Once, that would have been a di-saster, but now it seemed almost irrelevant. At the last minute, the crime had been abandoned. The feds had jack and it would stay that way. BAI was clean. Not that Bullard gave a shit; he had bigger fish to fry at the moment.
Fact was, the feds knew nothing about what was really going on. He had gotten away just in time. Grove and Cutforth—Grove and Cutforth, and maybe Beckmann, too. They had to die; it was inevitable. But he was still alive and that’s what counted.
Bullard realized he was hyperventilating. Christ, he needed air. He stumbled up from the console, unlocked the door, mounted the stairs. In a moment he was back on the flying bridge, staring eastward into blue nothingness.
If only he could just sail off the edge of the world.
{ 40 }
D’Agosta heard the faint squawking of a radio and looked up through the dense undergrowth. At first, nothing could be seen through the riot of vegetation. But within a few minutes, he began to catch distant flashes of silver, glimpses of blue. Finally a cop came into view—just a head and shoulders above the dense brush—forcing his way through the bracken. The cop spied him, turned. Behind him were two medics carrying a blue plastic remains locker. They were followed by two other men in jumpsuits, lugging a variety of heavy tools. A photographer came last.
The cop shouldered his way through the last of the brush—a local Yonkers sergeant, small and no-nonsense—and stopped before them.
“You Pendergast?”
“Yes. Pleased to meet you, Sergeant Baskin.”
“Right. This the grave?”
“It is.” Pendergast removed some papers from his jacket. The cop scrutinized them, initialed them, stripped off the copies, and handed the originals back. “Sorry, I need to see ID.”
Pendergast and D’Agosta showed their badges.
“Fine.” The policeman turned to the two workers in jumpsuits, who were busily unshouldering their equipment. “He’s all yours, guys.”
The diggers attacked the tombstone with vigor, crowbarring it up and rolling it aside. They cleared an area around the grave with brush hooks, then laid several big, dirty tarps across the clearing. Next they began cutting out the weedy turf with turf cutters, popping out squares and stacking them like bricks on one of the tarps.
D’Agosta turned to Pendergast. “So how did you find him?”
“I knew right away he had to be dead, and I assumed before his death he must have been either homeless or mentally ill: there could be no other reason why he’d prove so elusive in these days of the Internet. But learning more than that was a very difficult task, even for my associate, Mime, who as I mentioned has a rare talent for ferreting out obscure information. Ultimately, we learned Beckmann spent the last years of his life on the street, sometimes under assumed names, cycling through various flophouses and homeless shelters in and around Yonkers.”
The turf was now stacked and the two workers began digging, their shovels biting alternately into the soil. The medics stood to one side, talking and smoking. There was another faint roll of thunder and light rain began to fall, pattering onto the thick vegetation around them.
“It appears our Mr. Beckmann had a promising start in life,” Pendergast continued. “Father a dentist, mother a homemaker. He was apparently quite brilliant in college. But both parents died during his junior year. After graduation, Beckmann couldn’t seem to find out what it was he wanted out of life. He knocked around Europe for a while, then came back to the U.S. and sold artifacts on the flea market circuit. He was a drinker who slid into alcoholism, but his problems were more mental than physical—a lost soul who just couldn’t find his way. That tenement was his last place of residence.” Pendergast pointed toward one of the decaying tenements ringing the graveyard.
Chuff, chuff, went the shovels. The diggers knew exactly what they were doing. Every movement was economical, almost machinelike in its precision. The brown hole deepened.