“Mr. Tolliver, I’m very sorry if I’ve woken you.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Good. We’ve had a situation. I’ll need you to take Maya away from the estate just for a few days until Mattias and I can settle this.”
“What’s happened?” I say, trying to keep the concern out of my voice.
“A situation, as I’ve said.” Theo sounds tired, like a man who has spent the whole day making sure his orders have been fulfilled.
“Is Maya in danger?”
“Good Heavens, no. This has nothing to do with Maya. I’d simply prefer for her not to see this.”
A few muffled voices say something about a mess.
“Only for a few days, maybe a week. We’re not expecting any danger in the slightest. How soon can you be here?”
I take the highway thirty miles over the speed limit—it’d taken me a week of experimenting to realize that on the road, Theo’s Mercedes was virtually invisible— and get to the mansion in ten minutes, just a little after midnight. The butler shows me in, looking appropriately grave, and directs me straight to Theo’s room. There are no guards around.
Theo is behind his desk, which looks as though it’d been clubbed several times with an ax. He’s got a phone balanced between neck and shoulder. He looks just as tired as I’d imagined him looking on the phone, maybe even more. He’s still wearing an evening shirt and tie but the tie has been loosened near the throat, and the shirt is crumpled. His eyes are bloodshot, and the wrinkles beneath them are etched and steely—he wears them like some kind of uniform. The cuffs of his shirt are covered in blood.
He waves me inside but makes no motion for me to sit, so I don’t. “Whatever you wish to say to him you may say,” Theo says into the receiver. “It doesn’t change what we both know must be done. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve long since said everything we need to say.”
I look away from Theo and try to form an idea of whatever the hell’s happened in the room. Someone has clearly gone to work on the place. Theo’s desk is split almost in half, and there are bright chunks of missing mahogany like bits of flesh from where the ax or whatever weapon was used, ripped out stray pieces. There are the same notches in the walls too. The two velvet chairs on either end of the door have been done in completely, but what I notice most are the cages, lying in crumpled shards on the floor. Like a giant smashed them together between his hands. Bright feathers peek out from between the crushed bars. There’s blood everywhere on the carpet.
“As long as we understand one another,” Theo says. “Tomorrow morning then. Get some rest.” He hangs up the phone. “Mr. Tolliver. You’re certainly timely.”
“Thank you,” I say and shake the old man’s hand. “I’m sorry about your birds.”
“Yes. Me too.”
He stares at the wreckage, and I can see the twitch in his eye as he looks on. “A great loss,” he finishes, “though I regret what’s to come more than what’s happened. You can’t at all imagine how much it pains me to do what I have to do.”
“So you know who it was?”
“Yes,” he says, biting the inside of his cheek in the way people do when they know something but don’t want to say it. “Might have seen this coming, too. That’s the real tragedy of it. We’ve all lacked foresight, and now we must pay for our mistakes, young Kit in particular.”
“Kit Holcomb?”
“You know him? But I introduced you two, that’s right.” Theo picks up a busted picture on his desk and tries to distract himself. Then he seems to remember something. “I’m sorry—I’ve been very rude. Would you care for a Scotch?”
“It would choke me.”
“Not much of a drinker, eh?” Theo smiles conspiratorially and orders two anyway, saying nothing until the butler brings them in.
“Kirill’t refuse a mobster’s generosity, young man,” Theo urges when he sees me hesitate. I take the glass with absolutely no intention of doing anything with it apart from holding it there in my hand. Theo sucks at his greedily.
“Kit Holcomb, I’m afraid. He seemed a shaky one to you when you met him, didn’t he?”
“I just thought he was nervous.”
“We thought the same. Some of the men even took to calling him ‘Kitty’ because they wanted him to loosen up. Even Michelangelo took up the call. My parrot, you know.”
He sucks the Scotch dry like a man in the desert. I’ve never seen someone go through a hard drink so quickly.
“We were wrong as things turn out.”
“What do you mean ‘wrong’?”
“Kit Holcomb’s a manic-depressive. He has been seeing a shrink since he was eighteen and never breathed a word about it to Mattias. About four hours ago I was out with my driver, we don’t keep guards here at night, but all of my associates have keys to the place in case of emergencies. Kit must have just snapped. Maybe it was a long time coming or a sudden break. Maybe just got tired of being called Kitty. We don’t know. Anyway, he broke into my office with the hatchet and went to town on the place. Best as we can figure out his target was my parrot.”
“Jesus.”
“If you’re not going to drink that,” he adds. I hand him the Scotch. “It’s been a long day,” he says after another drink. “Long story short one of my guards came back for a missing wallet or something and found the room in the state you see now. Kit was hiding out in the greenhouse out back, two barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun in his mouth. Kirill’t know how long he was sitting out there before someone found him.”
“He didn’t kill himself then?”
“No. The gun wasn’t even loaded. Can’t tell what the man was thinking, but he’d have saved us an awful lot of trouble if he’d just gone through with it.”
“I don’t follow.”
“He’s made more trouble for me than I’d care to have to deal with. If he’d gone ahead and blown his brains out in the greenhouse, we might all have dismissed him as a tragic lunatic beyond help. Now I have to be the bad guy.” He drained the second scotch as easy as the first.
“Where is he now?”
“At Mattias’s estate. He’s one of his men after all. You know, we don’t trespass on each other’s ground. Not even when the men we’re dealing with are straight criminals.”
“That sounds very noble.”
“No, not noble. It keeps things easy. The simple fact of the matter, Mr. Tolliver, is that I’m a bad man who is about to do a very bad thing to a man with a serious chemical deficiency in his brain. And because it is business, I mustn’t feel any remorse about doing it because I know the alternative will put not just my life, but also my daughter and my associates’ lives in jeopardy. That’s the position I’ve been put in.”
“Has Maya seen any of this?” I ask.
“No. Thank God. She loved those birds, and she cared deeply for Mr. Holcomb. It would destroy her having to see all of this, which is why you’ll be taking her out of town for a few days.”
He reaches into his crumpled suit pocket and takes out a sheet of paper with a phone number written on it.
“I’ve called an old friend at the Four Seasons near Westtown. You’ll have two rooms for the week. Do whatever you want—galleries, film. Drive to New York if you want and take her to a show. Just make sure she doesn’t come back here. A week should be plenty for us to take care of this whole matter. Maya will be out by the car to wait for you.”
“Okay.” I slip the paper into my pocket.
“Good man. Trust me when I say, Mr. Tolliver, I wish it wasn’t the case. I was really beginning to sympathize with poor Mr. Holcomb. But you see these are the duties required of a man in my position. And a damned shame it is.”
“I understand.”
“Yes,” Theo sighs. For a moment he doesn’t look like the proud mob boss and single most powerful figure in town. He looks like a very old, very sad man facing a duty he would do anything in the world to avoid.
I wait for something more, but there is none. Theo lapses into contemplating whatever unpleasant thoughts he’s contemplating, and I leave the room quietly, crumpling and uncrumpling the paper in my pocket.