The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Read online

  Then he heard it—the unmistakable crack of a tendon as a leg was stretched or crossed, plus the heavy yawn of somebody bored and making an effort to stay awake. There was no other sound, no spoken exchange, no grunted acknowledgment by one man of another’s presence. He concluded there was only one of them.

  Charlie turned the corner with a movement so swift and balanced that it was almost balletic. The big man who had just rearranged himself on his tubular steel and leather chair had barely time to realize what was happening before the edge of Charlie’s hand slashed against his throat—so hard that his windpipe was snapped, the shock causing an instantaneous cardiac arrest.

  The moment had been almost soundless, nothing but a dull gasp of air escaping the dead man’s lips. Charlie grabbed him so that he didn’t fall sideways and hit the floor with a warning thud; there was an anteroom between the corridor and the boss man’s stateroom, and Charlie knew there was a chance that some other goon might be on guard in there.

  He lowered the dead man gently to the floor, and was still bending when the door behind him opened. The man who emerged opened his mouth to shout a warning as he reached for the weapon under his arm. But Charlie sprang, covering the space between them before the big gun was out of its holster. By the time the two men connected there was a thin-blade knife in Charlie’s hand that plunged, as part of an unbroken movement, into the man’s heart. Charlie’s other hand was over the man’s mouth to stifle the cry that had not yet quite reached his lips.

  Before doing anything else, he pulled both bodies into the anteroom and locked the outer door. Then he approached the second door and listened. Music played softly, a piano concerto—Mozart perhaps. Charlie thought he recognized it, but wasn’t sure.

  He grasped the doorknob, turned, and pushed a fraction of an inch. It was unlocked. He waited, but there was no reaction from the other side. He pushed the door farther open, gun in hand, its miraculously compact silencer adding no more than a slight bulge to the barrel.

  The man in bed looked up from the papers he was studying. He was obese but solid-looking, with thick dark hair and hooded eyes. There was an expression of annoyance on his face; he was unaccustomed to having people enter his presence except on his orders. But when he saw the black-clad figure standing there, annoyance turned abruptly to alarm. His hand shot out for the panic button at his side, but it was barely halfway there before a bullet split his skull between the eyes.

  Charlie moved closer to make absolutely sure that the man was dead. Part of his job was to make sure, to leave no room for doubt. There was none. All he had to do now was finish up. It wouldn’t take long.

  Five minutes later he was back on the water, slowly circling the Lady Alexandra until he heard the muffled detonation of the explosives he had planted in the hull. He waited until she sank, turning in the water like a wounded turtle before spiral-ing out of sight. Then he pressed the signaling device that would bring the chopper to collect him.

  Flying back to base, he looked down at the sea and remembered the phrase he’d thought of earlier to describe it. “Like a slab of cold gray steel beneath a moonless sky.” Where had he got that from? That wasn’t the kind of thing that usually came into his head.

  Still, he thought, wherever it came from, it was true.

  Chapter 2

  VIRGIL FRY WAS an ingratiating little man whom Charlie would have despised if he’d bothered to have an opinion of him at all. His ratlike features and pencil-thin mustache were forever composed into an artificial smile. In his cheap and flashy clothes, he seemed forever about to break into some awful song and dance routine.

  “So what’s this one, Charlie?” he asked, picking up one of the canvases propped against the wall. “Got a name, has it?”

  Fry’s accent, which Charlie had been unable to place when they first met, was, he now knew, Australian.

  “It’s a river scene,” Charlie said. “Mountains in the background—there, you see? Wild.”

  “Oh, yes… yes, I see. Very nice.”

  The little man scribbled “River scene” on his pad, then tore off the leaf and stuck it on a corner of the painting.

  “And this one?” he said, moving on to the next.

  “Clouds,” Charlie said. “Clouds and sky, and the play of light over the sea. You can’t see the sea, but it’s the kind of sky you get over the sea.”

  Virgil Fry nodded, made another note, and stuck it on a corner of the canvas. In all, there were fourteen paintings, all done since Fry’s last visit one month earlier. For the last couple of years he’d come by every month and bought the whole of Charlie’s output. That was a lot of paintings. Charlie didn’t care what Fry did with them, just that he took them away. Otherwise Charlie would have thrown them out with the trash. That was how he and the little man had met. He’d come knocking at Charlie’s door one day, saying he’d seen these paintings in a pile of junk outside, and he’d asked about them. Eventually he’d found that Charlie was the artist.

  “It’s a business proposition, Mr. Monk,” he’d said. “I don’t pretend to be a connoisseur, but I’m a dealer and I know what sells. Your work will find a niche in a popular market. You see, you’re partly abstract, but only partly, not quite entirely, if you see what I mean.”

  Charlie didn’t see what he meant, and didn’t care, so he didn’t interrupt as Fry droned on.

  “There are definitely people, not collectors, ordinary buyers, out there looking for just this caliber of product. At the right price, you could do very nicely. I take forty percent. Naturally all my accounts will be open to your inspection. You can if you so wish initiate your own audit at any time…”

  Charlie had agreed in order to shut the little man up as much as anything else. The idea that people would pay money to hang his paintings on their walls struck him as so improbable that he didn’t give it much thought. But Fry had been as good as his word, and a regular trickle of money had been appearing in Charlie’s bank account since that day. Not that he needed the money; his needs were more than adequately taken care of by the people he worked for. Painting for him was a diversion, a way, though not the only one, of killing time between jobs.

  He couldn’t remember how it had all started. He remembered drawing and scribbling when he was a kid, the way all kids do. There had been art classes when he got older, but he’d only attended because they were compulsory, and, more important, they didn’t involve any real work. Beyond that he’d shown no interest in painting—until “the Farm,” which was what they called the place he’d eventually been sent to when everybody else had given up on him. But he still couldn’t recall what had got him started, though he remembered how much, to his surprise, he found he enjoyed it.

  From the outset he’d painted landscapes mostly, but with, as Fry had pointed out, a strangely abstract quality to them. He didn’t analyze the process, though he was vaguely conscious of painting not what he saw so much as his response to what he saw, something from within; though what the hell that meant was anybody’s guess.

  If he had to define what painting meant for him, he’d have to say it calmed him and at the same time kept boredom at bay. Restlessness and boredom were his twin demons. They’d got him into a lot of trouble in his life, especially his early life. But that was a period he tried not to think about anymore.

  “Till next time then, Mr. Monk.”

  Charlie waved a perfunctory farewell as the door closed behind the departing dealer. Glad to be alone again, he turned back to the easel on his balcony and the painting he’d been working on before Fry’s arrival. He sat on the low wooden stool and picked up his palette of paints and a brush. Although he looked out over the anchored ranks of some of the most expensive private yachts and motor cruisers on the West Coast, the landscape on his canvas was a desert, the image plucked partly from memory, partly from imagination. At least, to him it was a desert. To others it might be just a pattern of line and color, an abstract design; or partly abstract, not quite entirely, as Fry would sa
y. Whatever that meant.

  He switched on the radio he’d been listening to earlier. Sometimes in the afternoons when he was home he tuned in to the various talk shows. He was fascinated by the things some people were willing to discuss in public. Much of the time it was just background chatter, but occasionally a story so extraordinary came up that he found himself pausing in his work to listen more closely, aghast at the lives some people led.

  Today, for example, they had an ex-soldier in the studio. He was obviously deeply disturbed and claimed to have been the victim of mind-control experiments in the army. Charlie found himself fascinated by his story, although he didn’t really believe that such things happened. But there was a patent sincerity in the way the man spoke that made his story strangely compelling. When the show ended, Charlie found to his surpise that he had been doing nothing but listening for the better part of an hour. His brush lay on his palette, the paint dried hard on its bristles.

  Chapter 3

  IT WAS A Saturday afternoon, and Christopher, Susan’s six-year-old son, was playing noisily with Buzz, his spaniel puppy, outside in the garden. Susan was in the bedroom, getting out of her old jeans and into something a little more fetching before picking up John at the airport. She always made an effort to look good for him, and he always told her she’d look good no matter what she wore. They were, in other words, still as romantically in love after eight years of marriage as they’d ever been. The separations that their different careers imposed on them were borne reluctantly and with a sense that such things only made their time together more precious.

  On that particular afternoon John was returning from a trip to Russia. Like her, he was a doctor, though he’d never gone into research and had spent only a couple of years in regular practice. He’d been told in medical school that he had the makings of a fine surgeon; it was as much a matter of temperament as cutting-edge knowledge, and John qualified for success in both departments. He had shown a particular curiosity about disorders of the pancreas, and his professor had assured him that as a specialist in a relatively small and complex field, fame and fortune could be his for the asking.

  But fame and fortune had never been part of John Flemyng’s plans for the future. Even before college he had known that self-interest was not a priority for him. He wasn’t any kind of radical or even very politically aware; he didn’t criticize others who dedicated their lives to success and the pursuit of money; nor was he religious in the sense of embracing any particular faith, dogma, or even philosophical view. He just believed that the difference between right and wrong was usually self-evident, and that a failure to observe it was unnatural and as harmful to oneself as it was to others.

  Some of his college friends, when Susan first knew him, used to laugh and call him Dudley Do-Right behind his back. But those friendships had lasted, and over the years the respect in which John was held had grown into admiration. Nobody had been surprised when he had forsaken private medicine and taken his skills to an international aid organization, volunteering to work for a subsistence wage in some of the most troubled spots on earth. He’d been through famine, natural disasters, and epidemics of every imaginable kind. Now, after ten years, he was number two in the agency, although he didn’t let this stop him from going out in the field and being a hands-on boss henever possible. He was a remarkable man. From the first day she had met him, Susan had known that this was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

  The trip to Russia had come up unexpectedly ten days ago. A mysterious strain of flu, or what seemed to be flu, had broken out in a small town called Ostyakhon in the upper central part of Siberia, about ninety miles south of Norilsk. It attacked only the very young and the very old, causing twenty-five deaths in the space of a few days. The risk that it might spread and become an epidemic was something that could not be ignored. John had responded at once to the Russian call for help and had flown out with a team of four assistants.

  Susan knew he was pleased with how the trip had gone. They’d spoken on the phone almost every day, and although he’d been depressed by much of what he’d found, he told her they had traced the problem to a bacteria frozen in the permafrost but released after an unusually warm summer, whereupon it had mutated after contact with industrial waste from a fish cannery on the shore of Lake Khantayskoye.

  The last time they’d spoken had been late the previous afternoon. He’d sounded dog-tired and a little distracted. He told her that he couldn’t say much on the phone, but something interesting had come up that he would discuss with her when he got back. She’d put Christopher on for a few minutes. He loved talking long distance to his father while finding on a globe of the world exactly where his father was speaking from, and roughly where the satellite would be that was connecting them.

  She wasn’t taking Christopher with her to collect John; a crowded airport, with its waits and delays and general confusion, was no place for a six-year-old. He would be tired and cranky before his father even stepped off the plane. Much better to save their reunion for home. Besides, his friend Ben was having a birthday party, so she planned to drop him off on the way. She was about to go downstairs and call Christopher in from the garden when the phone rang. She was tempted to let the machine take it, then she glanced at her watch and saw she had plenty of time. It was Frank Henty, one of the people who worked for John at the agency.

  “Susan,” he said, “I was afraid you might have left. It’s good I caught you.”

  There was something in his voice that she sensed at once, something she didn’t like.

  “I was just leaving,” she said. “What is it? Something about John?”

  He hesitated. “I think it’s better if you wait there until I come over.”

  She felt herself go cold.

  “Tell me now,” she said. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  He remained evasive. “Look,” he said, “I think you should have someone with you. Do you have anyone there?”

  “For pity’s sake, Frank, just tell me what you have to say.” She’d meant to sound authoritative and firm, but her voice was trembling. She seemed suddenly to have no air in her lungs. She realized, too, that she was sitting on the edge of the bed, although she’d been standing when she reached for the phone and didn’t remember changing position.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said. He sounded as though his mouth was dry and he was having trouble getting the words out. “Not the flight from Norilsk—they never got on it. The connecting flight. It was a small plane, single-engined. John and the other four in his team were on it, along with a pilot. It seems it disappeared somewhere between Ostyakhon and Norilsk. They have people out looking for it now. We only discovered something was wrong an hour ago. Our travel people called me at home.”

  He stopped. She could hear only silence. Or, rather, she could hear Christopher and the barking of the dog outside, and traffic and people in the distance. She could hear her own heart beating. But beyond these things was a silence she had never heard until now. It sounded like the underlying silence of a universe that was both infinite and empty. Empty, that is, of anything that made sense of loving or caring for people, or maybe just any kind of feelings at all. None of it meant anything if things like this could happen. None of it meant anything; so what she was feeling couldn’t be real.

  “Susan?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I’m in the office. I can be over in ten minutes.”

  “No, I… I’m all right, I… when will you have more information?”

  It was a stupid question to which she realized he could not have an answer. But at least she had said something. It was important to say something.

  “That’s difficult to say,” he said. “That’s why I’m here. It’s the best way to stay in touch.”

  “Yes, it’s best.…I’ll wait here.…You’ll call me as soon as you have any news?”

  “Of course.”

  She had learned the symptoms of shock in first-y
ear medical school: withdrawal of blood supply from outer tissue, creating a coldy, clammy feel to the skin; an abrupt drop in blood pressure; a weak but rapid pulse rate. They had also told her that emotional shock was as potent a cause of this condition as the loss of a limb. Now she understood how it was that the mind could deliver such a body blow. The most important thing, she knew, was not to give way to panic and the paralysis that came with it. That was cowardly, and she had to think about Christopher.

  When he saw her coming from the house, he called Buzz, ready to put him in the glassed-in patio, where he didn’t mind staying alone with his playthings for a while. But Susan told him to leave the little dog where he was. Buzz could stay in the garden for the few minutes it would take for her to run Christopher over to Ben’s house. She would be coming right back and not going to the airport.

  “Isn’t Daddy coming home?” he asked, disappointed.

  She dropped down to bring her eyes on a level with his. “Daddy isn’t coming home today,” she said. “Something’s happened, and he’s been delayed.”

  “When is he coming?”

  “I can’t say right now. But I want you to go over to Ben’s house like we planned, then I have to come back here and do some things—for Daddy. Come on, now, let’s go.”

  The ten-minute drive with Christopher at her side was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. She knew that he sensed something was wrong, but he couldn’t define it. Luckily he was distracted by the excitement of the party. She left him with a kiss and a promise that she’d either pick him up around seven or call and arrange something with Ben’s mom. As she drove home, her hands began to shake. She hit the steering wheel to steady them. She wasn’t going to lose control. That was a self-indulgence she would not permit.