White Collar: An unofficial novel - part 9

Arresting Neal Caffrey

"You went to Copenhagen without her," Peter said, watching Neal's life with Kate crumble.

"Yeah. The box was there. But it was a three-person job. Without Kate, it fell apart. Alex ended up in a French hospital, and I barely escaped."

"But someone at the palace pointed the finger at you." Peter remembered the information. "Everyone thought you had the box."

The kid smiled.

"I didn't correct them."

"Sure. It gave you great street cred." This was so much Neal Caffrey.

"I came back to New York," the kid continued with a sigh.

"Kate was gone," Peter filled in and saw grief in those blue eyes of his.

"Well, she learned something from me, 'cause she disappeared," he said, a matter of fact. "I started running big cons. Guess I was trying to get her attention. "

"Well, you certainly got ours, Steve Tabernacle."

"You knew about Steve?"

"We knew a lot of things."

"But you couldn't catch me." It could have been a question, but since they had not caught him then, it was a statement.

"You said before that you did yet not think you would get caught," Peter remembered. "When did you realize that I would eventually catch you?"

"About then, I guess." Neal followed some pattern only he could see on the tabletop with the tip of his finger. "This will probably sound strange, but it was too fun to see how long I could stay away from you, rather than just disappear."

Peter watched the young con-man on the other side of the table.

"And you wanted to find Kate."

"Yeah... You know I went to the port every day for almost a month to celebrate that I was still a free man, with one more day to find her?"

Peter knew about it.

"Drinking wine," he nodded. "You left the corks."

"How come you never caught me there?"

Peter stared.

"Because we thought of it as a bait for you to trick us and make us feel like fools." Of course, they had kept an eye on the place, but they knew Neal well enough to know that the day they thought they would catch him there, they would find a basket of cheese and wine instead.

"Partly true, I suppose," Neal chuckled. "But I was hoping that if I was getting caught you would arrest me there. Once I even brought your favorite beer, just in case."

The man was serious, Peter realized. Neal had been arrested with five guns pointing at him, from people wearing bullet-proof vests. That was the way it worked.

"Life isn't as in the movies, Neal. You were a suspect known to delude us. Did you think I was about to just join your drinking, watching the sunset together, and then cuff you?"

Neal made his little combo of shrug and smile.

"I would have surrendered."

Peter felt a pang of bad consciousness, arresting Neal so brutally, even if it was nothing remarkable of the way he had handled it. He remembered that Neal had asked once about the armed vanguard.

"That is easy to say afterward, after working with me for a year and a half."

"I was just twenty-one, Peter," Neal said as if that explained anything. "How did you find Kate?"