The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [159]
“Joanna, I understand you must be tired. Maybe I have rushed you too much personally. I care for you, you know that. I’m afraid it is my nature to follow my feelings. Please, Joanna, bear up just a little longer. Friday will be here before you know it, and Saturday you can fly home, directly from Berlin if you like.”
“Home? To Taos?” He could hear the rush of excitement.
“Does that make you happy?”
“Yes, it does.” Designer clothes and castles aside, she was, she’d decided finally, just a plain country girl who liked the simplicity of her life in Taos. And that’s where she wanted to go, more than anything.
“I can count on you then, seeing this through?” Von Holden’s voice was warm and soothing.
“Yes, Pascal. You can count on me being there.”
“Thank you, Joanna. I’m sorry for any discomfort, it wasn’t meant that way. If you wish, I will look forward to one last night together in Berlin. Alone, perhaps to dance and say goodbye. Goodnight, Joanna.”
“Goodnight, Pascal.”
Von Holden could see her smile as she hung up. What he’d said had been enough.
80
* * *
CHIMES WOKE Benny Grossman from a sound sleep. It was 3:15 in the afternoon. Why the hell was the doorbell ringing? Estelle was still at work. Matt would be at Hebrew school, and David would be at football practice. He was in no mood for solicitations; let whoever it was knock on somebody else’s door. He was starting to doze off when the chimes rang again.
“Christ,” he said. Getting up, he looked out the window. No one was in the yard and the front door was out of sight directly beneath him.
“All right!” he said as the chimes sounded again. Pulling on a pair of sweatpants, he went down the stairs to the front door and looked out through the peephole. Two Hasidic rabbis stood there, one young and smooth shaven, the other old, with a long graying beard.
“Oh, my God,” he thought. “What the hell’s happened?”
Heart pounding, he yanked the door.
“Yes?” he said.
“Detective Grossman?” the older rabbi asked.
“Yeah. That’s me.” For all his years as a cop, for everything he’d seen, when it came to his own family, Benny was as fragile as a child. “What’s wrong? What happened? Is it Estelle? Matt? Not David—”
“I’m afraid it’s you, Detective,” the older rabbi said.
Benny didn’t have time to react. The younger rabbi lifted his hand and shot him between the eyes. Benny fell back inside like a stone. The young rabbi went in after htm and shot him again, just to make sure.
At the same time, the older rabbi went through the house. Upstairs, on Benny’s dresser, he found the notes Benny had used when he phoned Scotland Yard. Folding them carefully, the rabbi put them in his pocket and went back downstairs.
Next door, Mrs. Greenfield thought it odd to see two rabbis coming out of the Grossman house, closing the door behind them, especially in the middle of the afternoon.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked as they opened Benny’s front gate and started past her down the sidewalk.
“Not at all. Shalom,” the younger rabbi said pleasantly as they passed.
“Shalom,” Mrs. Greenfield said, and watched as the younger rabbi opened a car door for the older man. Then, smiling at her once more, he got behind the wheel and, a moment later, drove off.
The six-seat Cessna dropped through a heavy cloud deck and settled down over the French farmland.
Pilot Clark Clarkson, a handsome, brown-haired former RAF bomber pilot with huge hands and a broad smile, held the small craft steady through the variable turbulence as they dropped even lower. Ian Noble was harnessed into the copilot’s seat beside him, head pressed against the window looking toward the ground. Directly behind Clarkson, dressed in civilian clothes, was Major Geoffrey Avnel, a field surgeon and British Special Forces commando fluent in French. Neither British military intelligence nor Captain Cadoux’s woman in the field, Avril Rocard, had been successful in obtaining any information on the fate of McVey or Paul Osborn. If they had been on