Or had Neal decided that one double-cross deserved another? Taken the girl somewhere to cut a deal on his own. Or had the little fuckhead gone soft and fallen in love with her? Jesus Christ.
“We’ve got, what, ten days?” Levine asked.
“Eleven,” Lombardi said. “You think you’re going to hear from him? Maybe he has Allie and is working on some deal of his own.”
“Maybe,” said Graham.
Levine looked at him real strange: angry.
“Neal Carey is a snotty little bastard, but he’s not a double-crosser. Not with us.” Ed said it firmly and to both of them. Ed was pissed, thought Graham.
“Hey, you sent a head case to get a head case,” Lombardi said. “They’re probably shooting up together.”
“Shoot this,” said Graham with an appropriate gesture.
“Hey…”
“Are you boys finished?” Ed asked. “Because we have a problem to work out here.”
Lombardi stood up. “No. You have a problem to work out here, I have a problem to work out in Newport. One very angry senator.”
Graham handed Lombardi his seersucker sport coat.
“So go to Newport,” he said. “Let us know if Allie’s home. Have you looked under the bed?”
“That’s enough,” Levine said.
Lombardi gave Graham a look that was meant to be tough.
“Maybe when this is all over,” he said, “you can get a job in a casino. People can put quarters in your mouth-”
“And pull my arm. Is that the best you can do?”
“Hey, you’re the clown.”
Lombardi picked up his briefcase and made his exit.
“I should have gone to law school,” said Levine,
“It’s not too late.”
Ed plopped himself down on his desk and looked through the Chase file for the thousandth time. Or pretended to. Then he said, “What are you not telling me, Joe?”
“Nothing.”
“Where’s the kid?”
“Do I know?”
“Do you?”
“No!” Graham said with righteous indignation. “Hey, look out the window, would you?”
“What, Neal and Allie are out there?”
“No, see if that fuck Lombardi has left the building. Stupid shit forgot his wallet.”
“Good.”
“Come on.”
Ed looked. “He must still be in the elevator.”
“I’ll catch him. Yell at him when he comes out.”
“It’s seven floors.”
“You got lungs. Give him one of those kung-fooey yells.”
“I’d like to,” Ed muttered as Graham headed out the door.
Graham pressed the elevator button and went right to work when it came. A seven-floor ride was ample to memorize the credit-card numbers, but he wasn’t as young as he used to be.
Colin couldn’t stop sweating, and it wasn’t the heat.
As he maneuvered his motorbike through the outskirts of the city, he could feel a hundred pairs of slanted eyes on him, his mind creating gruesome pictures of flashing knives and cleavers. It wasn’t logical, he knew that. He had lost them when he’d gone under in the East End, but he was spooked nevertheless. So he made triply sure that nobody was hanging about Regent’s Park Road at three in the morning as he pulled his bike up to the sidewalk.
He waited outside for half an hour to see whether any lights came on in the darkened flat, then decided that either heigh-ho nobody home or the inhabitants were asleep. He crept up the stairs, stealthy and silent as an ox, and paused in front of the door. Unpleasant memories of his humiliating defeat here checked him briefly, and then he let himself in.
He let his eyes get used to the darkness and then pulled the window shades down. He listened for the sound of breathing anywhere and then turned on a lamp. He noticed instantly what he hadn’t observed on his last visit here: books, everywhere. The clue light was lit.
He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew that this flat was his only link with Neal. He didn’t dare go to the hotel, because Dickie Huan would hear about it twenty seconds later, cozy as he was with that whoreson house pig Hatcher. Besides, he wasn’t all that interested in the spot Neal had run from, this is where he had run to, and hadn’t planned on being found out, either.
It didn’t take long for Colin to discern that the flat belonged to some bloke named Simon Keyes, and that Squire Keyes was positively bonks about books. Could Keyes be the mystery buyer? The flat didn’t look the home of a man who could plunk down twenty thousand quid for a book, though.
Or did it? Think about it, Colin. If you was buying stolen goods, would you have them delivered to your home? Say hello to the missus and set the hot stuff in the parlor, there’s a good man? That might start a bit of a huff over brandy and cigars, eh? Not bloody likely. No, you’d have a little hidey-hole somewhere. Like some gents have a piece of fluff stored away, this chappie’s got himself a little library love nest. A place to come in the afternoon and cuddle up with his books, run his fingers through the pages, rub the rich leather covers. You’ve a filthy mind, Collie lad, but a brilliant one at that.
But that wasn’t helping to find the soon-to-be-late Neal Carey. Where did you run to, Neal, with your fancy motor and my fancy lady? Let’s just have a look-see.
He pried open Simon’s desk drawer and looked around: letters mostly. Christ, but this one liked to write letters. Looks like he had carbon copies of every letter he ever wrote. No mention of Neal, though, just lots of chatter about this writer and that publisher and please do come for the weekend sometime up to the moor, and didn’t that sound like a lot of fun? He gave up on the desk drawer and started in on the card table. This was even more boring. Catalogue on catalogue of books and pictures, and bids put in writing to Sotheby’s, and the bloke did shit a ton of nicker on his books, don’t he, and hold on, Collie you idiot. Something flashed in his brain. Up to the moor? Up?
He dove back into the desk drawer and found the letter.
“Dear Larry,” it started, and then lots of polite toff chatter, right, get to the good part. “Please do come up to the moor weekend next.” Followed by a lot of crap about how nice it would be to have some time with you and some chippie named Mary and then: bingo, directions. Up the M-11 as far as… sound a bit familiar, does it, ring any bells? Ding-dong? Big Ben?
Maybe, Colin thought, I’ll have to invite myself up to the moor for a little weekend party of my own. He grabbed the copy of the letter giving directions to the cottage and headed down the stairs and out the door. He was thinking that maybe life wasn’t such a kick in the balls, after all, when a swift one right in the old yobs dropped him to his knees. Through watery eyes, he could make out the smiling face of one of Dickie Huan’s boys, and, behind him, a rather relieved-looking Crisp.
“Thanks,” colin muttered to Crisp, “a whole bloody lot, chum.”
They dragged him into the backseat of a car. One of the Chinese drove and another held his revolver on the two prisoners.
“You might have mentioned something, Colin. Like, ‘By the by, Crisp, old friend. If this thing goes down the crapper, Dickie Huan’s boys might be looking for us.’ You left me holding the bag. What was I supposed to do?”
“How did you find me?”
“Well it wasn’t too fookin’ clever, hiding at your grandda’s now, was it? You only have two fookin’ relations.”
“They didn’t know that, though, did they? Only my dear chum Crisp knew that.”
“I’d be bathing facedown in the river if I didn’t know that.”
“Next traffic signal, I’m jumping out.”
“They speak English, you bloody moron.”
“That’s right, you bloody moron,” said the one with the pistol, “so don’t do anything stupid.”
He shoved the gun in Colin’s face for emphasis and fun. Trailing Colin had been ridiculously easy, much easier than following someone through the twisted maze of Kowloon.
The car weaved up through Soho and into the back streets of Chinatown. The driver hauled Colin out of the back and pushed him toward the back door of the restaurant. He gestured to Crisp. “You go.”