“Is this in the spirit of your understanding with Trans Vision Inc.?”
Grelsch stands up and folds his newspaper. “They never said I couldn’t share my contacts.”
58
Jerry Nussbaum returns the car keys to Luisa. “Dear God in Heaven, let me be reincarnated as your mother’s sports car. I don’t care which one. That’s the last of the boxes?”
“Yep,” says Luisa, “and thanks.”
Nussbaum shrugs like a modest maestro. “The place’ll sure feel empty without a real woman to crack chauvinist jokes on. Nance is actually a man after so many decades in a newsroom.”
Nancy O’Hagan thumps her jammed typewriter and gives Nussbaum the finger.
“Yeah, like”—Roland Jakes surveys Luisa’s empty desk, glumly—“I still don’t believe how, y’ know, the new guys’d give you the high jump but keep on a mollusk like Nussbaum.”
Nancy O’Hagan hisses, cobralike, “How can Grelsch”—she jabs her cigar at his office—“just roll over waving his feet in the air and let KPO stiff you like that?”
“Wish me luck.”
“Luck?” Jakes scoffs. “You don’t need luck. Don’t know why you stayed with this dead shark for so long. The seventies is gonna see satire’s dying gasp. It’s true what Lehrer said. A world that’ll award Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize throws us all out of a job.”
“Oh,” Nussbaum remembers, “I came back via the mailroom. Something for you.” He hands Luisa a padded khaki envelope. She doesn’t recognize the crabbed, looping script. She slits open the envelope. Inside is a safety-deposit key, wrapped in a short note. Luisa’s expression intensifies as her eyes move down the note. She double-checks the label on the key. “Third Bank of California, Ninth Street. Where’s that?”
“Downtown,” answers O’Hagan, “where Ninth crosses Flanders Boulevard.”
“Catch you all next time.” Luisa is going. “It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.”
59
Waiting for the lights to change, Luisa glances once more at Sixsmith’s letter to triple-check she hasn’t missed anything. It was written in a hurried script.
B.Y. International Airport,
3rd—ix—1975
Dear Miss Rey,
Forgive this scribbled note. I have been warned by a well-wisher at Seaboard I am in imminent danger of my life. Exposing the HYDRA-Zero’s defects calls for excellent health, so I will act on this tip-off. I will be in touch with you as soon as I can from Cambridge or via the IAEA. In the meantime, I have taken the liberty of depositing my report on Swannekke B in a strongbox at the Third Bank of California on Ninth Street. You will need it should anything happen to me.
Be careful.
In haste,
R.S.
Angry horns blast as Luisa fumbles with the unfamiliar transmission. After Thirteenth Street the city loses its moneyed Pacific character. Carob trees, watered by the city, give way to buckled streetlights. Joggers do not pant down these side streets. The neighborhood could be from any manufacturing zone in any industrial belt. Bums doze on benches, weeds crack the sidewalk, skins get darker block by block, flyers cover barricaded doors, graffiti spreads across every surface below the height of a teenager holding a spray can. The garbage collectors are on strike, again, and mounds of rubbish putrefy in the sun. Pawnshops, nameless laundromats, and grocers scratch a lean living from threadbare pockets. After more blocks and streetlights, the shops give way to anonymous manufacturing firms and housing projects. Luisa has never even driven through this district and feels unsettled by the unknowability of cities. Was Sixsmith’s logic to hide his report and then hide the hiding place? She comes to Flanders Boulevard and sees the Third Bank of California dead ahead, with a customers’ parking lot around the side. Luisa doesn’t notice the battered black Chevy parked across the street.
60
Fay Li, in visor sunglasses and a sunhat, checks her watch against the bank’s clock. The air-conditioning is losing its battle against the midmorning heat. She dabs perspiration from her face and forearms with a handkerchief, fans herself, and assesses recent developments. Joe Napier, you look dumb but you’re deep-down smart, smart enough to know when to bow out. Luisa Rey should be here any time now, if Bill Smoke was on the money. Bill Smoke, you look smart but you’re deep-down dumb, and your men aren’t as loyal as you think. Because you don’t do it for the money, you forgot how easily lesser mortals can be bought.
Two well-dressed Chinese men walk in. A look from one tells her Luisa Rey is coming. The three converge at a desk guarding a side corridor: SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES. This facility has had very little traffic all morning. Fay Li considered getting a plant in place, but a minimum-wage rent-a-guard’s natural laxness is safer than giving Triad men a sniff of the prize.
“Hi”—Fay Li fires off her most intolerable Chinese accent at the guard—“brothers and I want get from strongbox.” She dangles a deposit-box key. “Looky, we got key.”
The bored youth has a bad skin problem. “ID?”
“ID here, you looky, ID you looky.”
The Chinese ideograms repel white scrutiny with their ancient tribal magic. The guard nods down the corridor and returns to his Aliens! magazine. “Door’s not locked.” I’d fire your ass on the spot, kid, thinks Fay Li.
The corridor ends at a reinforced door, left ajar. Beyond is the deposit-box room, shaped like a three-pronged fork. One associate joins her up the left prong, and she orders the other down the right. About six hundred boxes in here. One of them hides a five-million-dollar, ten-thousand-bucks-per-page report.
Footsteps approach down the corridor. Clipping, female heels.
The vault door swings open. “Anyone here?” calls Luisa Rey.
Silence.
As the door clangs shut, the two men rush the woman. Luisa is gripped with a hand over her mouth. “Thank you.” Fay Li prizes the key from the reporter’s fingers. Its engraved number is 36/64. She wastes no words. “Bad news. This room is soundproof, unmonitored, and my friends and I are armed. The Sixsmith Report isn’t destined for your hands. Good news. I’m acting for clients who want the HYDRA strangled at birth and Seaboard discredited. Sixsmith’s findings will hit the news networks within two or three days. Whether they want to pursue the corporate executions is their business. Don’t look at me like that, Luisa. Truth doesn’t care who discovers it, so why should you? Even better news. Nothing bad will happen to you. My associate will escort you to a holding location in B.Y. By evening, you’ll be a free woman. You won’t cause us any trouble”—Fay Li produces a photo of Javier from Luisa’s bulletin board and waves it an inch from her face—“because we’d reciprocate in kind.”
Submission replaces defiance in Luisa’s eyes.
“I knew you had a fine head on your shoulders.” Fay Li addresses the man holding Luisa in Cantonese. “Take her to the lockup. Nothing dirty before you shoot her. She may be a reporter, but that doesn’t make her a total whore. Dispose of the body in the usual way.”