The Informant

10

AS SCHAEFFER DROVE through the night back on the Canadian highway again, he thought about the life he had lived in England, and about the Honourable Meg. The Honourable Margaret Holroyd was the only child of Lord David Holroyd, Marquis of Axeborough, and Lady Anne Holroyd of Harrelsford, and she had been brought up in a house that looked like a castle and had secret rooms and a passageway that emerged outside the walls across a pond. Nonetheless, she claimed to have been a poor, sad, runny-nosed creature through most of her childhood. It was apparently true that she and her social set, all of whom seemed to share the coloring and facial characteristics of near relatives, had been ignored by their parents most of the time and sent early to cruel stone boarding schools where the rules involved being hit with sticks and bathing in cold water.

She had told Schaeffer about a friend's hideous Aunt Gwendolyn who caught Meg telling a ghost story at a party and stood her up as an example to the other children while she told them that liars went to hell. Meg told him, "But I wasn't sure I was on the Devil's side until I heard he'd invented sex. It seemed he had invented it just for me, to conform to my temperament and taste."

Even though the Holroyds and their complicated network of relations had large amounts of money that seemed to appear in their bank accounts magically from rents and royalties and interest, he was fairly certain that in being raised by Eddie Mastrewski, he had been the privileged child.

Eddie was a very tough man, and he never hid from the boy that the world they lived in was an unforgiving place. He raised the boy with foul language but no harsh words, and they spent most of their time together. He wasn't against schools, and knew that not going would lead to trouble, but he wasn't about to enforce anything the school said the boy had to do.

Eddie was born in a small Pennsylvania coal mining town, and he had started out working in the mines. He was not a genius, but at eighteen he knew that life in the mines was harder than anything he was likely to find elsewhere. He was drafted into the army, and when they let him out a couple of years later, he had learned a skill. He could kill people. He moved to a big city where there were men who would pay him well for killing people, and with practice, he got better at it. He also needed to have some profession that was legal, so he got a job working in a butcher's shop and learned to be an expert butcher. Later he passed both skills on to the boy.

Schaeffer didn't meet the Honourable Margaret Holroyd until he'd already had a fairly long career in killing. After a bad experience involving the Balacontano family, he had flown to England and retired to the picturesque and ancient city of Bath. He bought a comfortable old house and remodeled it in ways that would have horrified the architectural preservationists. He replaced perfectly functional old windows with arrays of glass bricks high on the walls that let in light but would frustrate snipers. He had unobtrusive, locked cabinets installed at various points in the house and stocked them with loaded firearms of several types. He had closed-circuit television cameras mounted on all sides of the exterior, and had impermeable steel doors on the entrances and on the room where he slept. When he had satisfied his sense of security, he settled in and began to live a quiet, solitary existence.

At the time Meg Holroyd was a bored, aristocratic young woman who spent all of her time going to parties and outings with a shifting group of highborn young men and women who appeared to have known her since birth. The moment he first saw her he was captivated. She was not merely pretty. She had something far rarer. She was perfect. Her skin was like a baby's, but the shape of her face was a sculpture in polished ivory with delicate, straight features and brilliant, knowing eyes. She was well educated, witty, and clever. But as she freely admitted to him, she was a liar. She invented fanciful scandalous stories about her friends, neighbors, even national and historical figures.

On the day she met him at an educational lecture in Bath, she made him take her to tea and told him she had been thrown out of the local antiquarian society. She had gone to the last meeting, where she'd announced that she had put a powerful Peruvian aphrodisiac in the punch, and set off an orgy. She said the power of suggestion had caused a mass shedding of clothes as the members helped one another to disrobe and became a tangle of limbs. The respectable ladies and gentlemen, believing themselves compelled by the exotic South American drug, had lost all inhibition. Later, they had voted her out of the scholarly society on charges of mass sexual assault and adultery-by-proxy.

Her stories were always too outrageous for even a naive stranger from America to believe, but always amusingly recounted in the most vivid detail, with the names of the most unlikely people attached. He liked her stories for the same reason she told them—they should have happened. He became her favorite audience because he always listened patiently to the whole story before he laughed.

It had been a pleasant existence for him until the day, on an outing with her friends to the races at Brighton, he had been recognized. It had been an unlikely accident. He had never been to Brighton before, and he was seen by a person who fit in there as badly as he did, young Mario Talarese from New York City. The Talarese family had a connection with the Cappadocia brothers, a pair of Sicilians who ran some gambling enterprises in London, and the Cappadocias had taken on New York underboss Tony Talarese's nephew as an apprentice. When Mario Talarese saw the man who was once called the Butcher's Boy, he made a terrible error. Instead of placing an international call to his uncle, or even talking to the Cappadocias, he had gone after the Butcher's Boy with only one of the Cappadocias' waiters, who carried a straight razor, and a British bookie named Baldwin who secretly had no interest in getting into a fight with anyone who had once killed for a living. Baldwin had been right to worry, because in an hour he and the others were dead.

Afterward, Schaeffer had told Meg a lie of his own, that the men he'd just killed in front of her eyes had been Bulgarian secret agents who had recognized him as a CIA agent in deep cover. He said he needed to rush back to the United States for a few weeks to complete the mission the Bulgarians had been sent to thwart.

It wasn't until he returned to England a few weeks later that she had told him she'd never believed a word of his lie. But she had also informed him that while he'd been gone, she had realized she was so unbreakably attached to him that she had no choice but to ignore his unsuitability and marry him.

When he had left England, he'd assumed that his relationship with her was over, and he had never imagined she would ever consider marrying him. He was ten years older and of an incalculably lower social class. While he had enough money to remain idle and keep the old house he had remodeled, he didn't have enough to make him a plausible husband to the last direct descendant of a bloodline that people seemed to consider a part of the national patrimony. But when he found himself once again in the presence of the only woman who had ever fascinated him, and she seemed to be determined to marry him, he couldn't think of a reason to resist.

When people asked him what he did for a living, he had always replied that he'd retired from a business that was so spectacularly boring that he couldn't bear to ruin a pleasant evening by talking about it. After he returned from the United States, he resumed that policy, and it continued to work.

He and Meg had married as quietly as possible, with the Anglican priest who often figured in Meg's most ribald slanders presiding, and the pretty, plump Hartleby sisters, who were also prominent in the stories, playing their harps.

Since their wedding ten years ago, they had lived a quiet, unobtrusive life in Bath. He kept up a few precautions. He could never allow himself to be photographed, so they had always stayed as far as possible from anyone who appeared to be a celebrity. They gave money to charities through a trust, but never attended any of the receptions, balls, or dinners that were intended to prime the donors for the next year. On the rare occasions when pictures needed to be taken, Meg would be in them alone. Photographers didn't seem to mind because, although she was approaching forty, she was still perfect.

Tonight he drove the fast, crowded highway toward Toronto, feeling the traffic mounting every second. As he went from Hamilton to Mississauga, he thought about Meg. He had no more business being married to her than to the Queen. She had simply been so willful and contrary that she had fallen in love with the worst man she had ever met and stuck with him without delving any further into the truth about him than to tell him his lies weren't fooling her. He could see her without closing his eyes. In the silence of the closed car, he could hear her voice.

He could tell already that the way home to her was not going to be as easy or direct as it had been the last time. The ones who had come for him this time had not just stumbled on him. They had been searching. They had found him in Brighton, where Tony Talarese's nephew had found him the first time. That felt like a bad bit of luck; he and Meg seldom went down to Brighton because of the bad memory.

He knew exactly what he had to do to make his way home. It wasn't hoping they'd forget. He had to make them think about him every day and every night until they hated Frank Tosca for bringing him into their lives again.