Monday, October 3
Valentin Renard pulled the white CLS-Class Mercedes into the parking garage on 9th Street in Greenwich Village, mindful of the side of his hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle; the entrance was quite narrow. The building had been constructed in the ’70s, when small cars were the rage — that oil shortage thing.
The garage was in the basement of an apartment building and it featured an attendant, so that when he left he could pay cash. Many of the garage and parking facilities in New York accepted only debit and credit cards. Not a sign of the high-tech times, a measure to avoid stickups at gunpoint.
He climbed from the car. The thirty-three-year-old was blond and trim and appeared trimmer yet by the sleek, dark gray Ferragamo suit he wore. The narrow black tie, contrasting with the off-white high-thread-count shirt, added to his linear image. He removed a duffel bag from the trunk, slung it over his shoulder and beeped the car to sleep. He climbed the ramp to the street, past the security camera that was there for show only; he knew the model. This was another reason he’d selected this garage.
He began walking east.
When he was in Alphabet City — where the north-south avenues began with letters — he noted the conditions deteriorated as the letters progressed. Finally he came to a two-story building, 522 East St. Marks. It was red brick and dark with soot and whatever other particulates settled on buildings in Manhattan.
He climbed to the front and, using a knuckle, not fingertip, rang a buzzer. A large man, hairy everywhere, opened the door. He wore a white T-shirt over baggy — and gamy — gray slacks. The scent of cigarette smoke orbited.
“I’m Davis,” Renard said. “I called about that basement room.”
“Well,” the man offered hesitantly in an accented voice, “you were going to call back with the credit card.” The soft pronunciation of the g told Renard the man was Ukrainian, not Russian.
“It’s still available?”
“Yeah.” He pulled out his iPhone and fished in his pocket, pulling out a credit card reader.
“I’ll pay cash.”
“We don’t take cash. It’s not, you know, part of system, how it works.”
The man was in a network like Airbnb.
“You have it listed for five hundred for the week.”
“Yeah.”
Renard reached into his inner jacket pocket and extracted a letter-size envelope. He opened it. The man looked at the twenty hundred-dollar bills, which had been handled in such a way by Renard that there were no fingerprints on them.
“Here. And I don’t want any paperwork.”
The man continued to stare. He then lifted his head and looked his potential tenant over carefully.
A handsome man with a thick coif of hair in a politician’s trim cut, Renard offered a smile. “Nothing to be suspicious of. I’m a journalist writing a story about the dangers of credit cards and debit cards. I’m going to live the entire week in New York paying cash only.”
“Yeah? Like for newspaper?”
“It’s a podcast. Do you want to be interviewed for it?”
“No” was the fast response. The owner of the building took the bills and handed over a key. “I show you the place.”
“Not necessary.”
When the man returned to his living quarters, Renard stepped down the stairs, pulled on clear latex gloves then unlocked first the wrought-iron outer door and then the inner wooden one.
The rooms — with separate bathroom and kitchenette — were as he expected: they smelled of mold and damp concrete, and the walls displayed slapdash paint jobs (in ugly salmon). There was an uncomfortable bed, a small kitchen featuring battered, stained and chipped appliances. Limp towels, Target house brand soap and shampoo. A TV that had to be one of the smallest flat screens on the market.
Renard doffed his jacket and slacks, hanging them in the closet. He grimaced at the hangers: they were wire and they would leave horizontal creases in the trousers. He stripped off his dress shirt, revealing taut muscles; he worked out daily, using free weights and a pull-up bar in the doorway of his bedroom closet. He then opened the duffel bag and set out some of the contents: personal items, clothing, papers, a computer, several burner phones.
He dressed in jeans, an undershirt and a black sweatshirt. He exchanged his twelve-hundred-dollar brown leather dress Kitons for running shoes.
Taking a notebook from the bag, he sat at the desk and turned on a wobbly light, which cast a pale circle in front of him. He opened the book, on the first page of which was taped a map of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Circled, in the center, was one particular address, on Central Park West.
The residence of Lincoln Rhyme.
“Nada, nothing, nup.”
Fred Dellray was once again in Rhyme’s town house. “They tried but, fact is, ran smack into a dead end.”
“Our best forever friends.”
“Best friends forever,” Dellray corrected.
Rhyme grunted.
“Nothin’ on any Russians peeking out from that case of yours, the expat. Friend I got in MI5 was wondrin’ you ever run a case here that might’ve wandered into Brit organized crime or politics? With the brogue, they were thinking, you know, the Troubles. Unionists versus nationalists.”
Rhyme thought back over his long, long tally of cases. He supposed there might’ve been one or two that had a connection to the British underworld. But it would be tangential at best. As for the Irish-English issue, he knew with certainty he’d run no investigations touching on that conflict. He told Dellray this.
“And all my snitches and CIs, anything with a lick of connection to the UK, not a single word. I know Lon was corralling some of the departments’ folks. But...”
His arrested sentence and shrug were meant to convey that NYPD had far fewer international connections than the FBI did.
Thom Reston had been enlisted to help too. He now reported to Dellray, “I’ve been through about four hundred emails Lincoln received — Amelia too, some — and there’s plenty of threats. But I couldn’t find anything credible or specific. And none of them had any connection to the UK.”
Lon Sellitto stepped into the parlor. He had been supervising the installation of extra security cameras covering the front and the back doors of the town house — as well as some complicated contraptions in the front halclass="underline" sensors that were the size and shape of file cabinets with analyzing chambers in the center. They were an X-ray unit and an explosives detector. The technicians, who’d been vetted, explained to Dellray, Rhyme, Thom and Sellitto how they worked. The controls were simple.
“All deliveries to the town house,” Sellitto was saying to Rhyme, “and all the evidence Amelia brings back from the scenes? It all goes through them. And I’ve told the precinct, no parking in front of your building. Worried about car bombs. Any vehicles there, other than Amelia’s, they call the Six House.”
That precinct was the site of the NYPD Bomb Squad.
He nodded to Thom and Rhyme. “When’ll Amelia be back?”
“Shouldn’t be long. An hour?”
She had gone to Spanish Harlem on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to run a crime scene.
“K. I’ll text her to check out her car for explosives, if it’s been out of sight.”
Dellray said, “You know, Lincoln, I was having a thought. Remembering this slugfest I got myself into the other day.”
Sellitto frowned. “A fight?”
“Oh, you betcha. Nasty. Was all about Fyodor Shcherbatskoy.”
Rhyme, who was perhaps more used to Dellray-speak than his former partner, smiled. “I think Fred is talking metaphorically. No fisticuffs were involved.”
Dellray nodded. “Exactly. Was a debate is what I’m talking about.”