“And you had never seen him before?”
She paused, looked away from him for a second. “I had seen him. I lied before about that. He was the bodyguard who had been waiting at the table in the club when we were with Kit.”
Till had to keep himself from showing either his excitement at her admission or the fact that he had known from the first description that the bodyguard might be her attacker. Finally she was beginning to tell the truth. “Did he speak?”
“I spoke. I said, ‘What do you want?’ He said nothing.”
“And then?”
“He started beating me, and then got scared off. Eric arrived, and right behind him there was another car. The fact that it was two cars was what saved me, I think. It seemed like a lot of cars, maybe a lot of people.”
“Who was in the other car?”
“That’s the best part of the joke, I guess. Just Eric’s latest girlfriend. She had arrived at the restaurant to go home with him for the night, but she needed to have her own car available in the morning. She saved my life. I had been hit a few times, and I was down. I knew I couldn’t run or fight anymore. Then all of a sudden there were all these headlights, and he ran.”
She walked ahead toward the rock, and now they were near the foot of it, but she stayed ahead a couple of paces, and Till couldn’t talk to her with all of the other tourists so close. Their conversation had not ended, only paused for an indeterminate period, and they both knew it. She had already made the first crucial admission: that she had lied when she said she knew nothing about the attacker. Now it was essential for Till to keep her confidence and find a way to make her tell him the rest.
He continued with their walk, and then spent the afternoon walking through the shops with her. He watched her closely all day, waiting for her to resume their conversation, but she did not do it. Once, as they were walking on the street far from other pedestrians, he said, “Ann?”
“I’m not Ann anymore.”
“Who are you?”
“I have no choice right now. I have to be Wendy.”
While she pretended to shop to keep him from interrogating her, Till used the time to think about the other part of the problem. He had to keep her alive. When they came back to their rooms in the hotel, he waited until she was in the other room and then used his cell phone. He dialed a number he knew very well, then said, “Sergeant Poliakoff, please.”
30
PAUL INCHED the rental car along the freeway in the heavy traffic toward the cluster of tall buildings downtown. It was only four o’clock, but it seemed that rush hour started earlier and earlier. Paul turned his head away from the road in front of him and looked at Sylvie. She was quiet today. He wished that the reason she was not giving him an argument was that she understood the uncomfortable situation he was in, and not because she was thinking of all the ways he had disappointed her. He was almost sure that she was saving up the complete list of his offenses and trying out in her mind different ways of saying them so they would inflict the maximum pain. It was possible—even easy—for Paul to ignore the opinions of most people, but he was vulnerable to Sylvie. After being on the most intimate terms with a woman for fifteen years, it was difficult for a man to tell himself she didn’t know much about him.
He tried to distract her, to get her to think about the present, the things they had to accomplish. “At least we’ve had a chance to stop at home and get some sleep. We’re coming rested and prepared. This could even turn out to be easy.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not blaming you for this. You’ll still get laid.”
He laughed, more relieved than amused. She could be uncomfortably perceptive about the ridiculousness of the relationship between men and women. He tried to make the feeling of affection grow. “Well, I’m sorry anyway. It’s not what I would have chosen to do. I’d like to be taking you to the airport to get on the plane to Madrid—that Air France/Delta flight that leaves around dinnertime.”
She stared at him in silence for a couple of seconds. “I know.”
“Maybe we can do it as soon as this is over.”
“Maybe we’ll have to.”
“Don’t worry. The situation may not be good, but we’re good.”
She said carefully, “I’ll do my best to make this whole thing end the way it’s supposed to. But after this, we’ll have to be more careful what we agree to do, and for whom.”
“We will. This is a special case. Densmore—”
“Is what I’m worried about,” she said sharply. “I understand how we got into the position of having to finish this job for him. But the thing to remember is that he didn’t tell us the truth.”
“He’s paying us twice the original price.”
“He’s making us do something we don’t want to do.” She stared at Paul again, her eyes not moving from his face. “Isn’t he?”
Paul saw the trap and was almost grateful to her for placing it in the open where he could see it. “Well, yeah.”
“I’m not going to be Densmore’s underling.”
“When this job is done and we collect our pay, it will be the last thing we do for Densmore.”
“I hope so.”
“It will be.” He knew from her tone that she would remember and hold him to it. He didn’t like losing Densmore, who had been the perfect middleman for eight years. Densmore had kept the clients at a distance from Paul and Sylvie, collected their money, and kept them frightened so that none of them had ever talked to the police. It was a shame to have to lose Densmore, but Sylvie had a point. Densmore had begun to presume too much. This time he had told the client who Paul and Sylvie were. His excuse was that this was a client who would never talk to the police under any circumstances. But the long-standing arrangement was not that the client wouldn’t talk, it was that the client couldn’t, because he didn’t know anything.
Paul drove along Temple Street past the fortresslike structure of Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral and then the Superior Court building. He could see the gleaming stainless-steel curves of the Disney Concert Hall. “All right. Here it comes,” he said. “That building coming up is 210 West Temple. The offices of the Assistant DAs working on this case are upstairs, but what we want to study are the approaches and openings.”
“I am.” Sylvie looked carefully at everything she could see from the car. It was difficult to assess the security of a building like this one, because the whole neighborhood was part of the court complex. The court buildings were full of bailiffs and marshals and deputy sheriffs. There were guards in all the lobbies to be sure nobody came in armed, but there were probably other security people who weren’t visible. The biggest danger would be that there were so many armed cops coming and going on various kinds of legal business in a normal day, a lot of them in plainclothes. The building slid by her window, and Paul turned at the next corner.
She could see the twenty-story white rectangle of the New Otani Hotel a block away. It was a feature of the downtown skyline. Downtown was a difficult place to do the kind of business that Paul and Sylvie did. During the day it was lively, and there were lots of pedestrians around the courthouse complex, the cathedral, the Museum of Modern Art, the Disney Concert Hall, the plaza outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But an hour after the evening’s events, very few people remained. The big hotels—the Biltmore, the Bonaventure, the Otani—were full, but no life spilled out into the surrounding blocks. People parked underground or in structures, so there weren’t even many cars on the streets. Few people lived down here. There were a few new condominiums and a lot of talk about building lofts in old buildings, but she had not seen any change yet.