She shrugged. “This reminds me that you only get a certain number of days. If you spend any of them without paying attention, it’s as though you weren’t alive at all. Not just the pleasant parts either.”
He opened the passports of the three Americans and was puzzled. They appeared to be genuine, but they said the men’s names were Koslowski, O’Rourke, and Benson. The names of the people who had reasons to kill him were all Italian. These men must all have been hired shooters. He opened the glove box of the Bentley. The registration papers said the owner was a place called Luxury Rentals, with an address in London, but no name of a human being. Time was passing, and he had to move. He looked up at Meg. “Let’s go talk.”
2
They went upstairs to the master bedroom. Michael took some of the clothes he had brought to Yorkshire off the hangers and out of the drawers and laid them on the bed, then folded them quickly in neat stacks.
“What are you doing?”
He said, “I’ve got to drive their car away from here as soon as possible. We can’t have four bodies lying around.”
“I’ll follow you in the Jaguar so you can park them somewhere, and then we’ll go away.”
He looked at her, her bright green eyes still astonishing to him after all the years. Her hair, a dark reddish brown when he met her, was still that color, kept that way by a visit to a salon once a month for years. She had begun noting the arrival of each wrinkle on her face when she was thirty, but had stopped talking about them because she believed the worst kind of narcissism was a person whining about time and her body’s offenses against her.
He still loved to look at her, and he had every day. She’d told him she didn’t mind. “You saw me when I was in my twenties, gorgeous and athletic, and partly for that reason I can bear to have you see me now. I know that who you see includes both then and now.” It was true, like thousands of surprising things she’d said over the years.
He said, “We can’t just go away together and hope this is over.”
“This isn’t the first time they’ve found you.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“The first time it happened we were still young. You lied to me about it.”
“Well.”
“When you came home I didn’t know any of the details, but I knew the gist of it. You made up a story that you thought would make me feel better, and I loved you even more for it. I still don’t know what you actually did to make it stop.”
“The truth wouldn’t have made you like me any better.”
“Don’t be too sure.” She paused. “And then we were happy for years and years, until the night when they came for you again. And that time the men were dead in fifteen minutes, and in twenty you had left me alone again.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never been somebody who was worth your attention, or your company, much less your love. The attempts to kill me were things I brought on myself that I earned before we met. You never had a reason to stay once the first time happened.”
“The point being not to elicit a tardy apology but to note that tonight it happened—is happening—a third time. Twice in our lives you left me at home and went off to find enemies you had not anticipated would be coming for you. I will only remind you that I have lived with you and loved you for thirty years, thinking of you as Michael Schaeffer, even though I’ve known for at least that long that it was never your name. Now I want you to do me the favor of considering a suggestion.”
“What?”
“I know that right now part of your mind is ranging ahead, thinking about how you get to America and leave me in some kind of storage so I’ll be safe while you go off down some hole to kill whoever is after you. I’m begging you not to.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to take me on a trip, but not to America.”
“Where, then?”
“I don’t know or care. Not to kill somebody. Maybe Australia, where nobody knows you or the people who hate you.”
He took his watch from the nightstand, slipped it on, and looked at it. Time was passing, and he needed to be on the road. He said, “I can’t take you with me. I know that seems debatable, but it isn’t. You have a million friends in England who will be delighted if you would visit them for a month or so. You’ll be as safe as a person can be. I want you to pack up, put a suitcase in the Jaguar, drive yourself to one of their homes, and later, if necessary, another, and another. Stay out of sight for as long as this takes.”
“Then please, just make me a deal. If we can’t go to Australia together, you can go alone. It will buy you time, at least. You can use computers and phones to learn what you can from there. Just don’t rush off to America. Since their first try failed, they’ll be waiting for you there, expecting you.” She hugged him. “Please, Michael. Just give me that much. I’ll know you’re safe for a while. If Australia is safe, I could even join you there.”
He looked at her, then said reluctantly, “I’ll try it.”
She hugged him harder. “Thank you, Michael. I know you’ve got to get going now. Do it. I’ll be packed and off in the Jaguar in ten minutes or so.”
3
He put his leather carry-on bag in the trunk of the car on top of the blue tarp that was spread over the body of the driver, got into the Bentley, and began to drive. He drifted slowly as far as the front gate, watching for a glow of headlights, and then turned south onto the high road and accelerated. He looked at his phone and saw that the distance from York to Manchester Airport was 144 kilometers. He opened the case of the phone, took out the battery, and put the phone in his sport coat.
He could drive now with the three corpses strapped into the seats of the Bentley, but he knew he would have to get rid of the car before there was enough light to see that his passengers were dead. He had to put as much distance as he could behind him each minute of the next hour and a half.
As he drove south, he couldn’t help thinking about how his life had narrowed down to this. He and Meg hadn’t said it, but they both knew that it was unlikely he’d live to return home one more time. He’d had a long life for a man in his line of work. He had begun working at age fifteen and quit at age thirty-one, the week he had met Meg Holroyd. Yes, as she’d reminded him, a few years later he’d had to go back to the United States to kill some people, but not for money. Years after that, Frank Tosca’s men had found him. He had survived his trip to solve that problem too. It had been a long haul. As of tonight, when he’d made the four corpses he had strapped in the seats and placed in the trunk, he had been killing people as needed for about forty-five years, the last thirty just to keep breathing.