Behind him a woman started to wail, as if she were a mourner at a Middle-Eastern funeral. There was nothing else that anybody could do. Frank looked around for the old man, but he had gone. All he could see was his dog, trotting off around the corner, and then it, too, disappeared from sight.
Frank dumped all his suitcases on to the bed at the Franklin Plaza and closed the door behind him. A message was already waiting for him on his answering machine. He pressed the on button then rummaged in the brown paper sack he had brought back from the supermarket, trying to find a beer.
‘Mr Bell, this is Lieutenant Chessman. I tried your cellphone but you were busy. I thought you’d like to know that I talked to Charles Lasser this morning. I have to tell you that he was very co-operative, but he totally denied any knowledge of any woman called Astrid. In fact he denied mistreating any woman of any name.’ (Cough, shuffle of paper.) ‘He’s . . . ah . . . he’s prepared to accept that he might have called you “vermin,” but he says that he is constantly pestered by the media and by people attempting to extort money or favors from him, and that he was . . . er . . . under the impression that you were one of these. After all, you did push your way into his office uninvited, true?
‘Mr Lasser has been unfailingly helpful in our efforts to put an end to this bombing. I told him of the valuable part you played in finding Dar Tariki Tariqat’s cache of explosives and he seemed to be very gratified. If we succeed in getting convictions for the people we’ve arrested, you could be looking at a very substantial reward.
‘I’ll call you later, Mr Bell. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t concern yourself with Mr Lasser any further. Believe me, he’s one of the good guys.’
The call was timed at eleven forty-eight A.M., only thirteen minutes before the last bomb had exploded. The old man had been right: they had targeted CBS Television City. The death toll was seventeen adults and five children. Over thirty more had been critically injured.
Frank unlocked the sliding door and took his beer out on to the balcony. In the distance he could hear dozens of sirens warbling, and there was still a genie-like smudge of smoke hanging over Beverly Boulevard. Apart from the sirens, however, Hollywood was unnaturally quiet, as if people were afraid to go out, or even to speak. But then the phone rang.
‘Mr Bell? It’s Marcia, from reception. There’s a woman down here, asking for you. She’s in pretty bad shape.’
Frank hurried down to the lobby. A woman was sitting on one of the chairs by the front door, her head in her hands. The receptionist was bending over her, dabbing at her forehead with a bloodied tissue. A Mexican cab driver with a droopy moustache was standing close by, looking fretful.
‘What’s happened?’ Frank asked.
The woman looked up. It was Astrid. Her hair was spiky with blood and it looked as if her nose had been broken. She was wearing a pale-green blouse that was drenched in blood, and her cream-colored Dockers were spattered, too.
‘I picked her up outside Star-TV,’ said the cabbie. ‘I wanted to take her straight to a hospital but she said she had to come here to see you.’
Frank said, ‘That’s OK. That’s fine. You did the right thing. Astrid, tell me what happened? For Christ’s sake, Astrid, did Lasser do this?’
‘I wanted to take her to the hospital,’ the cabbie repeated. ‘She just wouldn’t let me. She said, “Franklin Plaza, take me to the Franklin Plaza.”’
‘That’s OK,’ Frank told him, and gave him two twenties and a ten.
‘I’m not asking for no money,’ said the cabbie. ‘I was trying to act like the good Samaritan, that’s all. None of the other cabs wanted to pick her up. She look like Friday the Thirteenth, you know what I mean?’
‘Do you want me to call for an ambulance?’ asked the receptionist.
‘No, not yet,’ Frank told her. ‘Let me take her up to my room and get her cleaned up. Thanks for helping her out.’
‘Looks like she picked a fight with Godzilla, and lost.’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Astrid blinked up at him. ‘Frank?’ she said, thickly. ‘Is that you?’
‘Come on, sweetheart, let’s get you upstairs. Do you think you can walk?’
Frank put his arm around her and helped her to her feet. She lost her balance, and almost fell, but the receptionist grabbed her sleeve. Frank coaxed her to walk two or three steps, but her knees gave way, and in the end he had to pick her up. She was surprisingly light, not much heavier than a child, and he had no trouble in carrying her into the elevator.
‘Please call me if you need anything, sir,’ said the receptionist.
‘You bet. And thanks again.’
Astrid snuffled against his shirt. ‘Never thought I’d find you,’ she mumbled.
‘Well, you’ve found me now. Everything’s going to be fine.’
‘He’s such a bastard,’ she said, and coughed, and couldn’t stop coughing.
He carried her into his apartment and laid her down on the tree-patterned couch, propping her head up with cushions. Then he went into the bathroom and came back with a cold, wet facecloth. He cleaned the blood from her face, dabbing the facecloth very gently around her nostrils. Then he rinsed it out, folded it up, and laid it across the bridge of her nose.
She stared at him with those washed-out eyes, not blinking.
‘Give me one good reason why you keep on going back to him,’ he demanded. ‘One.’
‘I don’t have to explain myself to anybody, Frank. Even you.’
‘He’s broken your fucking nose, Astrid.’
‘I know. I think he’s broken my ribs, too.’
‘Why the hell did you go to see him? I just can’t get my head around it. You’re beautiful, you’re intelligent, you’ve got everything in the whole world going for you. And yet you allow a middle-aged scumbag like Charles Lasser to beat you to a pulp. I mean, what are you, some kind of masochist?’
Astrid kept on staring at him. ‘If I am, that’s my own business, don’t you think?’
‘No, it isn’t. You came back here because you needed my help. That makes it my business, too. I promised Charles Lasser that if he ever laid hands on you again, I’d make him pay for it, and I’m going to.’
She took the facecloth away from her nose. ‘Frank . . . you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.’
‘Then tell me. Come on, tell me! What am I getting myself into? It seems like ever since we met you’ve been trying to get me involved in something or other, but I’m damned if I can work out what it is.’
Astrid said nothing, but he thought he detected something in her expression that could have been regret, or sorrow. For some reason he remembered a phrase he had read in The Process: ‘One lifetime isn’t enough. Give me more.’
‘I’m taking you to the emergency room,’ he said. ‘You have to have your nose looked at. It just looks swollen at the moment, but it could need setting.’
‘Frank, I’m OK. I just need to rest.’
‘No way. I’m taking you to hospital and then I’m going to Star-TV and I’m personally going to rip Charles Lasser’s head off.’
‘Frank . . .’
‘No arguments, OK? For once we’re going to do things my way.’
He helped her into his car and then he drove her to the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital. He guessed that Mount Sinai would probably be overwhelmed with casualties from the CBS bombing. Even at the Sisters of Jerusalem, the parking lot was chaotic and the ER waiting room was crowded with people suffering from minor injuries and shock. There were twenty or thirty dazed and blood-spattered people waiting to register and everybody was shouting at once.