made her feel confident about his skill or Iris’ chances.
She was surprised at how little she wanted to know about what was happening to Iris on the operating table. She didn’t want to imagine her beautiful blonde hair shaved in a large shape around the wound. She didn’t want to picture any of it, the cleaning of fractured bone and debris, the drilling of burr-holes, maybe two centimetres in diameter, to locate the damage. The procedure was too frightening to consider when the brain inside that skull was Iris’.
All she could think of was the lovely blonde hair gone. She pushed from her mind all the various possibilities of brain damage. All the many ways things could go wrong. She sank further into the skin-warm vinyl chair and wondered if it was worth trying to sleep, considering the dreams she would have.
By 12:40 she wandered out of the room to stretch her legs. The kitchen staff, their hair in spidery nets, were collecting patients’ trays after lunch and stacking them in high-wheeled metal stands. They looked as if they wanted to be doing anything else.
The young resident, still in green gown, found her down the hall. “We’ve done everything we can for her. All we can do now is wait. She’ll be in recovery for a while before you can see her.”
“How much damage is there?” she asked.
“Hard to tell. We stopped the bleeding. Blood pressure’s still low, but I’m hoping she’ll stabilize.”
Rebecca used the phone at the nurses’ station to call her answering service. Two patients had called with pressing medical problems. Nesha had left several messages with a number where he could be reached. Her heart lifted a little.
She called the mother of a feverish little patient, told her to sponge her daughter with lukewarm water, give her Tylenol, and call Dr. Romanov. The second patient was suffering menstrual cramps and needed a renewal of a prescription for painkillers. Then she called Nesha.
He arrived at the nurses’ station in twenty minutes, wearing his antique leather jacket, a gym bag on his shoulder. His eyes softened when he caught sight of her. He presented such a mask to strangers but she had seen beneath it. “I’m so sorry about your friend,” he said, embracing her. He smelled of soap and leather.
He told her he had gone to Feldberg’s early in the morning in an attempt to catch him, but the door had been open just as they had left it and no one appeared to have visited in between. Then he’d gone to the hotel to shower and change and tried in vain to reach her.
“I’ve got something to show you,” he said lifting the bag. “Is there anywhere we can talk?”
The waiting-room was occupied by a family whose grandfather was being operated on. She led him down the hall to the doctor’s lounge. It was empty.
After they sat down on one of the brown leather couches, Nesha pulled Feldberg’s books from the gym bag. “The ledger seems straightforward, based on my limited knowledge,” he said. “But the bankbooks. I took these two, but he had at least four others with similar figures in them. Look at the numbers. He’s constantly depositing and withdrawing large sums of money, but each under $10,000. That’s the magic number the banks have to report. As long as he keeps moving sums of money under $10,000 — that’s why he’s got so many bank accounts — he won’t be investigated.”
“I don’t get it.”
“He’s got illicit money that he’s probably brought from out of the country.”
“Argentina,” she said. “It’s an Argentine club.”
“He’s operating some shady business. It could be anything.”
“Art,” she said, surprising herself.
“Art?”
“Those paintings we saw at his place. The photos of paintings in the catalogue. They’re real. They have to be. It’s the only explanation. I don’t know quite how, but I think Feldberg is dealing in stolen art.”
Nesha stared at her a moment, thinking, then continued. “They have to bring in the money without reporting it, maybe get it wired to different banks in relatively small amounts. But they can’t bring in a huge sum into any one bank, so Feldberg distributes it among six. Or eight. Then it’s invested in a legitimate business.”
“Let me see that ledger,” she said.
In an upper corner of the first page were written the initials E.D. El Dorado. Expenses starting January, 1979, listed tickets of admission, liquor receipts, and restaurant receipts. She flipped to the end for the latest entry, Thursday, April 5; two days before. The business had taken in one hundred and eighty tickets of admission, grossing $1,800, $3,800 worth of liquor from the bar, and $6,500 from the restaurant. Did Feldberg have another club? Thursday was the evening she had stopped in. There were maybe forty people there, in a generous estimate. By no stretch of the imagination could another hundred and forty have stampeded in after she’d left. And when she’d arrived downstairs, the restaurant had been nearly empty.
“This is all wrong,” she said. “I was there just on Thursday and the numbers here don’t add up.”
“You were there?”
“Feldberg’s inflating his numbers, inventing customers he doesn’t have.”
“It’s a front,” he said. “Classic money laundering operation.”
“Where does Goldie fit into all this?” She glanced down the list of businesses that supplied the club. Suddenly her eye was caught by a familiar name. Blue Danube Fish. Another connection to Vogel. He was the one who’d sent her to the club. It seemed he was selling El Dorado enough fish to start their own school, lots more than they could ever hope to fry up. She had a lot of questions to ask him.
They heard sudden male voices outside in the hall. Rebecca opened the door and saw two men in trench coats speaking to a nurse at the station. One of them was Wanless. She turned back to Nesha.
“The police are here.”
He jumped up and shut the door in her face, but quietly. “Don’t tell them anything!”
She hung back, flabbergasted. “But they can help. I was on their backs before to stay on the case.”
“If they start, we’ll lose control. If they find him first — it’ll be in the courts for years. Canada doesn’t punish war criminals. He’ll have three meals a day, TV, he’ll be laughing at us. At them. I won’t let that happen.”
“But if he killed Goldie, surely....”
“The system doesn’t work. How many times have you seen evil rewarded? There is no justice.”
She had nothing to counter with. She could call Wanless later.
He listened at the door. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
She opened the door a crack and saw the nurse lead the two men to the door of the recovery room. The nurse was strict and did not allow them in, but let them examine Iris from the distance. Then the nurse said something to them and turned to guide them toward the surgical waiting-room. Probably in search of her.
As soon as their backs were turned she pulled
