“That’s all I have. What else do you need? A place?”
“I do. But not from you. It’s something else I’ll have to think about.”
“I understand.”
“I want you to do one thing. I’m leaving out of the back of the café.”
“Are there watchers?”
“A team of five, as far as I know. They’re probably all out at the front. I want you to stay for fifteen minutes after I’ve gone, then leave exactly as you would have done.”
“Okay.”
“We need a place of contact.”
“There’s a café on Ninth and Broadway,” he said at once. “The Ganymede. It has a library. On the third shelf from the top there’s a copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Page two sixty-seven.”
She registered the information, and her mind immediately translated it into the Rule of Three, the Rule of Eleven.
“That’s it, then.” She smiled at him. “And you can let me know too if you accept the invitation. Who knows, it may be more important than I thought.”
He didn’t smile back. “Be careful, Anna.”
She pushed her hat into a bag and got up from her seat. She left her coat on the back of the seat and walked into the interior of the café, towards the kitchen and bathrooms.
There was a small kitchen with three or four chefs and washers, where grease hung on the walls like translucent skin. Someone eventually noticed her, a small Chinese man in a stained white chef’s coat.
“Bathroom there,” he barked at her.
She didn’t move but leaned on and simultaneously held the doorjamb as if she were feeling unwell.
“Bathroom there!” the Chinese man snapped again.
An older white man looked round from a skillet on the stove.
“What’s up?” he said.
“I’m feeling unwell,” she said. “Is there somewhere I could lie down for a few minutes?”
He wasn’t going to refuse her.
“Take her to the back room,” he said to the Chinese. “I’ll look in later.”
“Thank you.”
“You okay?”
“I’m all right. Just a bit faint.”
The Chinese man led her through to a room at the rear of the café, with a bare cement floor, a desk and chair, and a couple of old, stained armchairs.
“Here,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied, but he had gone.
She quickly took in a metal door that led to the outside. She opened it and stepped out into a tiny concrete courtyard, covered with snow that had iced over on the surface. She surveyed the mildewed walls and saw a fire escape that led down from a building abutting the rear of the yard. But for her it led upwards.
She waited. Finally, the older chef opened the door, looking for her when he hadn’t found her in the room.
“I just need some air, I think. I’ll only be a few minutes. Please.”
He looked at her and seemed easily to overcome his suspicion. “Mind how you go,” he said. “I gotta get back.”
He shut the door behind him, and she waited a couple more minutes until she knew he’d gone. Then she climbed the iron fire escape, which zigzagged several floors until, on the third floor, she saw an open-plan office that had maps of the world on the walls—maybe some kind of trading company, she thought.
There was no one sitting at the nearest desk, which had a view of the fire escape door. Outside the door, cigarette butts were scattered in the snow. It was a door in use. She opened it, stepped inside, and walked briskly into the centre of the room. A secretary looked up abruptly.
“I thought I’d left my coat,” Anna said, “but it isn’t here.”
It wasn’t much of a reason, but saying it got her past the secretary, and she sailed through to a far door that led onto a corridor with an elevator and stairs that ran beside it. She took the stairs. In a few minutes she found herself in a dead-end street, with the noise of traffic on Broadway at the far end. She guessed it was a block, maybe more, from the entrance to the gym she had entered earlier.
She looked left, down towards the entrance. Burt would have someone outside the gym, no doubt. The crowd on the sidewalk was sparse in the icy weather as she turned out onto Broadway and away from the gym to the right. She began to walk steadily, without a coat but with her hat now pulled over her ears.
Larry watched from the inside of a clothing store directly across the street from the café. His point men were, variously, in one of Burt’s yellow cabs, another stamping his feet and blowing on his hands at a bus stop, a third on the other side of the café just inside the doorway of a stationery shop and apparently making a phone call.
There were two others out there at a greater distance, who he couldn’t see from this angle.
He looked back at the café and watched as Vladimir exited, hands thrust deep in the pockets of a herringbone coat, just as he’d arrived nearly an hour before.
“We’re almost through,” he breathed into a mike on his coat. “Solomon is leaving,” he explained, using the code name for Vladimir.
She’s decided to let him leave first, he thought, and after trying to find any significance attached to that, dismissed it as one of those unnecessary complexities that plague an operative and fog an otherwise transparent situation.
He put his weight on the other foot and waited.
After nearly ten minutes he began to be agitated and radioed to the point man at the bus stop to get himself inside the café.
There was another wait.
Finally the words came through. “She must be in the bathroom,” the point man said. “Her coat’s here.”
But it was the words “must be” that alerted Larry’s senses to a complexity that, this time, might be worth taking notice of.
“I’m coming over.”
He entered the café, saw the coat, and immediately sensed something missing other than her.
“Where’s her hat?” he said.
“Her hat?”
“Yes, where’s her fucking hat?” He checked the pockets of her coat and found nothing. Without waiting for an answer, he pushed his way past and into the corridor towards the kitchen and bathrooms. He found the ladies’ bathroom and roughly pushed open the door, to find it empty. He immediately radioed the operative outside the gym.
“Get up north on Broadway. Fast. She’ll be on the sidewalk. No coat, just a hat and whatever she was wearing underneath.” He realised he couldn’t remember.
He then radioed the man in the taxi, ordered him to get out four streets up and come back down Broadway in the other direction, and gave the same description.
Larry went past the bathrooms, opened a door into a back room, and saw the metal door on the far side. He yanked it open and saw footsteps in the crystalline snow, leading to a fire escape.
He ignored the man who seemed to be asking what the hell he thought he was doing and ran across the yard and up the stairs two at a time until he found where the steps entered an office.
Chapter 29
BURT SAT AT A desk in one of the anterooms at the apartment. He was mystified and—for the first time—troubled now by Anna’s behaviour. There seemed no reason for her disappearance. He’d given her everything she asked for.
He was surrounded by activity, but deep in thought. Electronic surveillance monitors were up and running within half an hour of her disappearance. Young men in T-shirts and with headphones over long, unkempt, and in some cases dirty hair pored over data that crept in multicoloured lines, like cracks in a rock, across half a dozen screens.
Burt himself was a river of apparent calm among the choppiness of his many tributaries. He sat puffing on a cigar that choked up his immediate surroundings, and if anyone objected, you couldn’t tell. Working for Burt Miller was an honour his employees equated with working for one of the more public legends of the American dream. He didn’t demand anything from these men and women except an almost holy dedication, but for them, it was also a secret pleasure to belong to Burt.