Four hours later he had finished. Nothing.
Now for the shoes. He had saved the most likely hiding place for last.
Noon. He hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, a sandwich up in the mountains, and now the only substance inside his stomach was a dozen espressos. It felt like he’d drunk a pint of battery acid. No matter: he picked up the phone and ordered a triple espresso from room service, hot, hot.
He took the shoes out of a paper bag and set them on the coffee table. They were Chinese-made knockoffs of John Lobbs. Both were caked with hardened blood — Wu’s legs had been crushed. One shoe was horribly mangled and had been cut off the foot; the other was merely caked in gore. In the summer heat, they had already begun to smell.
Clearing a space, he examined the right shoe with the sweep kit. Nothing. A knock came on the door and he went outside — keeping the door mostly shut — took the coffee, tipped the bellhop, and drank it down with a single gulp.
Ignoring the boiling feeling in the pit of his stomach, he went back to work, taking the shoe apart, methodically, piece by piece, and labeling each with a felt-tipped pen. First the heel came off; then he unstitched the sole and detached it, laying the pegs and stitches in neat rows to one side. With the X-Acto blade, he unstitched all the leather pieces and laid them out. The heel was of leather, built up in layers, and he carefully separated each layer and laid them side by side. A second sweep revealed nothing. Still using the X-Acto knife, he split every piece of leather, examining both sides and sweeping them all again. Yet again, nothing.
He repeated the process on the other shoe without success.
Gideon packed everything away in ziplock bags, labeling each one, and then sorted and stacked it all into a large Pelican case he had bought for the purpose, locking it up tight. He leaned back in the chair. “Sink me,” he muttered exasperatedly. This was getting tedious. The thought of all the money Glinn had promised revived him a little.
Now for the inside work. It seemed unlikely, but he had to be thorough. But first: Music to Search Entrails By. Something a little more stretched out. He decided on Cecil Taylor’s Air.
He picked up a thick manila folder from the bedside table — the complete suite of ER X-rays, head to toe, to which he was entitled as Wu’s “life partner.” Pulling the shade off the lamp, he held up the first X-ray to the bulb and examined it with the loupe, inch by careful inch. The head, upper chest, and arms were clean, but when he came to the lower midsection his heart just about stopped: there was a small white spot indicating metal. He grabbed the loupe and examined it, and was immediately disappointed. It was indeed a fragment of metal, but nothing more than a twisted piece that had obviously gotten embedded in the car accident. It was not a microchip, or a tiny metal canister, or secret spy gizmo.
There was nothing in the stomach or intestinal tract indicating any sort of container, balloon, or storage device. Nothing in the rectum, either.
It horrified him to look at the X-rays of the legs. Embedded in them were more than a dozen bits of metal—all showing as irregular white spots, along with grayer pieces that he guessed were fragments of glass and plastic. The X-rays had been taken from several directions, and he was able to get a crude idea of the shape of each piece—and none of them even remotely resembled a computer chip, a tiny canister or capsule, or a magnetic or laser storage device.
He had a vision of the owlish man descending the escalators, frightened and peering about, small, serious — and courageous. For the first time Gideon considered the risk the man had taken. Why had he done it? It would be a miracle if the man ever walked again. If he even survived. At the hospital, Wu had remained in a coma; they’d had to cut a hole in his cranium to relieve the pressure. Gideon reminded himself that this hadn’t been an accident. It was attempted murder. No, with the death of the innocent cabdriver and half a dozen bystanders it was actual murder—mass murder.
Shaking off these thoughts, he slid the X-rays back into their manila folder and rose, going to the window. It was late afternoon — he’d been at it all day. The sun was already setting, the long yellow light spilling down 51st Street, the pedestrians casting gaunt shadows.
He’d hit a dead end — or so it seemed. What now?
His growling stomach reminded him it was high time to put something in there besides coffee. Something good. He picked up the phone, dialed room service, and put in an order for two dozen raw oysters on the half shell.
19
The police junkyard was located on the Harlem River in the South Bronx, in the shadow of the Willis Avenue Bridge. Gideon stepped out of the cab to find himself in a bleak zone of warehouses, and industrial lots stacked with old railroad cars, abandoned school buses, and rusting containers. A smell of muck and dead clams came drifting off the river, and the white-noise of evening rush-hour traffic on the Major Deegan Expressway hummed in the air like a hive of bees. He’d lived in a neighborhood not much different from this — the last in a succession of increasingly squalid homes he’d shared with his mother. Even the smell was familiar. It was an intensely depressing thought.
A chain-link fence topped with concertina wire surrounded the facility, fronted by a rolling gate on wheels next to a guardhouse. Beyond the fence sat an almost empty parking lot fringed by dying sumacs, behind which squatted a long warehouse. Beyond that and to the right lay an open-air junkyard of stacked and pancaked cars.
Gideon strolled up to the guardhouse. A swarthy-looking cop sat behind the plastic windows, reading a book. As Gideon approached, he slid open the street-side window with a hammy arm covered with gorilla hair. “Yeah?”
“Hi,” said Gideon. “I was wondering if you could help me?”
“What?” The cop still had his nose in the book. Gideon shifted to see the cover: he was surprised to see it was City of Godby Saint Augustine.
“Well,” said Gideon, putting on his most fawning, obsequious tone, “I’m so sorry to bother you.”
“No bother,” said the cop, finally putting down the book.
Gideon was relieved to see that, despite the beetling Neanderthal brows and heavy five o’clock shadow, the man had a friendly, open face. “My brother-in-law,” Gideon began, “Tony Martinelli, he’s the cabbie that was killed in that accident last night. The one where a guy ran him off the road on a Hundred Sixteenth Street—you read about that?”
Now the cop was interested. “Of course. Worst traffic accident in years — it was all over the news. He was your brother-in-law? I’m sorry.”
“My sister’s really broken up about it. It’s just terrible — got two babies at home, one and three, no money, big mortgage on the house.”
“That’s really tough,” said the cop, laying the book aside and appearing genuinely concerned.
Gideon took a handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his brow. “Well,” he said, “here’s the thing. He had a religious medallion hanging from the rearview mirror. It was a beautiful one, sterling silver, owned it forever. Saint Christopher.”
The cop nodded in understanding.
“Tony went to Italy, the Jubilee Year in 2000—and the pope blessed that medallion. Blessed it personally. I don’t know if you’re Catholic, but Saint Christopher’s the patron saint of travelers, and he being a cabbie and all — well, that medallion was the most precious thing he owned. That moment with the pope was the high point of his life.”
“I’m Catholic,” said the cop. “I know all about it.”
“That’s good, I’m glad you understand. I don’t know if you can do this or not, and I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble—but it would mean so much to his widow if she could have that medallion back. To, you know, put in the casket and bury it with her husband. It would give her such comfort to be able to do that…” His voice cracked. “Excuse me,” he said, fumbling out a kerchief he had bought for that purpose, blowing his nose.