'Taiwanese,' Freeman corrected. Anderson had a point. If Walter was going to be the bank's man on the board, it'd be tantamount to a return to the status quo. For a while anyway.
'Chinese, Taiwanese, who gives a shit? It means we can get on with running our business, our way.' Anderson punched the air.
'A queer. Who would have thought it, huh?'
The intercom bleeped on Freeman's desk. 'It's Walter Carey calling for you, Tony,' Jo said.
Anderson made a gun with his fingers and fired it at Freeman.
He blew imaginary smoke from the tip of his finger and headed out as Freeman picked up the phone.
Freeman put down the menu as the waiter finished scribbling on his notepad. 'Anything to drink?' the waiter asked.
Freeman smiled at Katherine. 'Champagne?' he said.
'Definitely,' she agreed.
'Do you think champagne goes with Thai food?'
'I think champagne goes with everything,' Katherine said.
Freeman looked at Mersiha. 'Pumpkin?'
Mersiha's mouth dropped. 'You mean I can drink now that I'm sixteen?'
'No, what I mean is that you can have one glass of champagne now that you're sixteen.' Freeman nodded at the waiter. 'A bottle of champagne, the best you have,' he said. The waiter scribbled in his notepad again and scurried off. Freeman reached across and held Mersiha's hand. 'I can't get over how pretty you look,' he said.
'And the dress is fabulous,' Katherine agreed.
'Stop it,' Mersiha begged.
'I mean it,' Freeman went on. 'You should dress up more often.'
Mersiha shook her head. 'Once a year is enough,' she said.
Freeman had given Mersiha the choice of where she wanted to go for her birthday dinner and she'd chosen Thai Landing in Charles Street. He suspected that she'd chosen the Thai restaurant because she knew how much he liked it. He'd become a big fan of the fiery South-East Asian cuisine during a sales trip to Thailand, and the food at Thai Landing was every bit as delicious as any he'd had there.
'Sixteen years old,' he said. 'I can hardly believe it.'
'I know, I know. Soon it'll be college, then marriage, then children,' Mersiha sighed melodramatically. 'Then it's off to the old folks' home and I know the kids'll never visit.'
'You know what I mean,' Freeman said. 'It doesn't seem like three years since…' His voice tailed off as the memories flooded back. The basement. The killer with cold blue eyes. The bullets ripping into his legs. The concentration camp.
He looked down. Mersiha's hand was on top of his. It looked so small, like a child's. 'Thank you,' she said, quietly. 'Thank you for everything.'
Freeman's eyes began to sting and he blinked back the tears.
He wasn't sure why he suddenly felt so sad. It was partly because he'd realised how close he'd come to losing Mersiha. If she'd been a little further away, if the gunman had fired a second earlier, if they hadn't found her in the camp… There were so many ifs. So many ways he could have lost her for ever. Fate had been on his side in Mersiha's case, but her presence also made him realise how unfair it was that he'd lost Luke. 'Tony?'
Katherine said.
'I'm okay,' he said. He looked up and smiled. 'Just a bit emotional, that's all.'
Katherine reached over and took his other hand. She smiled at him sympathetically, as if she knew what he'd been thinking.
The waiter returned carrying a bottle of champagne. He made a show of presenting the label to Freeman, then popped the cork professionally. When he'd filled their glasses he put the bottle in an ice bucket and went back into the kitchen.
Freeman picked up his glass and raised it in salute to his daughter. Katherine did the same.
'Happy birthday,' he said.
Katherine nodded. 'Happy birthday, Mersiha,' she echoed.
Mersiha blushed and picked up her glass. She waited expectantly, her eyes on her father. Freeman smiled at her. She knew what was coming and she was obviously relishing the anticipation. Katherine looked at him too, knowing that this was a special moment between father and daughter.
Freeman took a deep breath, then began to sing quietly, his voice only slightly more than a murmur because there were other people in the restaurant and he didn't want anyone else intruding into their celebration. 'Happy birthday to you,' he sang, his voice thick with emotion. 'Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Mersiha, happy birthday to you.'
Mersiha beamed. Freeman clinked glasses with her, then with Katherine. 'To my two favourite girls,' he said.
Maury Anderson pounded his palms on his steering wheel as he powered the Corvette along the highway. He had the volume of the car stereo turned up as high as his ears could bear. He sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand across his nose, checking his driving mirror for the highway police.
His wife was down in Florida taking care of her sick mother and wasn't due back for another few days, so he'd picked up a large takeaway pizza which sat in a cardboard box on the passenger seat. In the glove compartment of his car was a small glass vial containing five grammes of cocaine. He was looking forward to a quiet night in. There was only one thing that would make the forthcoming evening perfect and that would be if Katherine Freeman were to pay him a visit, but he knew that was out of the question. He'd phoned her that morning and she'd explained that she was having dinner with Tony and Mersiha.
There was no way she could get away.
Anderson ran a hand through his hair. A truck appeared to his right and for a second he almost lost control of the speeding Corvette. He gripped the wheel with both hands and accelerated away from the huge vehicle. Katherine Freeman was one hell of a woman, he thought. Tony was a lucky man. He snorted and shook his head. No, he wasn't lucky at all. Katherine might be Tony's wife, but she didn't belong to him. Anderson had been having an affair with Katherine for more than three years, meeting her in motels at regular intervals for just about the best sex he'd ever had. He smiled as he remembered that it wasn't only motels where they'd met. Twice they'd made love in the Corvette, and while it was cramped and uncomfortable it had given the act an excitement that brought back memories of his high-school days.
Anderson knew that he wasn't the only lover Katherine had taken, and she clearly saw nothing wrong in having affairs behind her husband's back. More often than not it was Katherine who initiated sex. She'd call him at the office and tell him which motel to go to, and she'd be waiting for him with a bottle of champagne on ice. In bed, there wasn't anything she wouldn't do for him, and she seemed to take as much pleasure from the act as he did. But she was always the first to go, often showering while he lay exhausted on the rumpled bed and leaving him to drop off the key. Once she was out of bed she wouldn't even kiss him. There was a coldness about her after they'd made love, a distance that he was never able to bridge. In a way that suited Anderson. His wife was the total opposite. After lovemaking she wanted to lie in his arms and talk, when all he wanted to do was to close his eyes and sleep. He liked the fact that he didn't have to sweet-talk Katherine, that she appreciated that their relationship would never go beyond recreational sex. But it worried his ego somewhat that she seemed so happy with the arrangement. At times he almost felt that it was him who was being taken advantage of.
He turned off the main highway and on to the road that led to his home, a comfortable ranch-house in Towson. The sky was starting to darken and several cars heading in the opposite direction had their headlights on. Anderson yawned and rubbed the back of his neck. It had been a long day in the office and his last hit of cocaine had worn off several hours earlier. He reached absent-mindedly towards the glove compartment and its vial of white powder, but pulled back when he realised what he was doing. Snorting at the wheel wasn't a smart move. Besides, he could wait. He wasn't an addict. A user, yes, but he could go for days without a hit if he wanted to. Well, hours, for sure. He didn't see the point of depriving himself of the high if he didn't have to.
Cocaine helped him work, it made him more sociable, it lifted his thought processes to a higher level. The drug was a problem only if you let it get out of hand. Used sensibly it was safer than cigarettes or alcohol, and as far as Anderson was concerned, the sooner it was legalised the better.
He drummed on the steering wheel, nodding his head in time with the driving beat. He rubbed the bridge of his nose but found it hard to control the Corvette with one hand. He wondered if there was something wrong with the steering. Lately it had seemed that the car tended to drift at high speed, and he made a mental note to get it checked.
The light was on in the porch as Anderson stopped the car in front of the single-storey building. It came on automatically at dusk. His wife had insisted on having the light installed after a spate of burglaries in the area. The upmarket homes of Towson provided rich pickings for the intravenous drug users and sneak thieves of the inner city, and burglar alarm systems and bedside handguns were the norm rather than the exception. Anderson's wife kept a loaded Colt automatic in a cabinet by the bed; there was a shotgun in the closet and a very expensive alarm system.
He took the cocaine from the glove compartment and the pizza from the passenger seat and locked the car before stepping up on to the porch. A red light blinked on the Corvette's dashboard, another necessary security precaution. Car insurance costs were soaring in the suburbs as car thieves realised that the most expensive models were now to be found well outside the city centre. Middle-class professionals like Anderson had fled the city as it had fallen into decay, but by clustering together in suburban havens they'd only served to make themselves easier targets.
He unlocked the front door and walked quickly to the hall closet. Inside was the circuit panel into which he had to tap a four-digit code to deactivate the alarm system within twenty seconds. He fumbled with the pizza, trying not to tilt it as he opened the closet door, but he frowned as he realised that the system had already been switched off. He stood staring at the white-metal wall-mounted box, trying to recall if he'd left the house that morning without turning it on. It wasn't like him.
His wife had drilled it into him how important it was always to have the security system on when they were out. She scoured the local papers for details of robberies and muggings in their area and pinned them to the refrigerator with small fruit-shaped magnets, and even though she was out of town her conditioning meant that Anderson would no more think of leaving the house without activating the system than he would of going out without his trousers. Still, the evidence was there before him. His frown deepened. Maybe there'd been a power failure. No, that wasn't possible because the porch light was on. He shrugged. Maybe it had just slipped his mind.
He closed the closet door with his shoulder and carried the pizza through to the kitchen. He dropped it down on the kitchen table and took the vial of cocaine out of his shirt pocket. Pizza or cocaine? It took less than a second to make up his mind. He could always reheat the pizza.
He headed for the guest bedroom. That was where he normally snorted the drug, away from his wife's prying eyes.