'Next left,' says Lu, pointing through the windshield. 'See the electronics store on the corner?'
'Yes, yes, I see it,' he says, leaning forward and squinting.
'Left there, then the next ATM's'bout a hundred yards down on the right.'
Ebanat! she says to herself as he indicates way too early, slows almost to a stop in order to round the corner and then takes an eternity to park at the kerb. She's seen grandmas drive faster than this jerk.
'I'll only be a minute,' he tells her, flapping the door shut as he heads to the cash machine.
Within seconds, Lu has the glove locker open and is scanning it for anything stealable. Shit, man, the guy doesn't even have a CD worth taking! Just car documents and a squeegee for the windows. Lu clicks the compartment shut as she watches him turn around from the machine, put his wallet away in his jacket and return to the car. 'Thank you,' he says, politely. Very boringly, he puts his seat belt on again, checks the handbrake and starts the engine.
'Okay, mister,' says Lu, her patience about to snap. 'Now you're all cashed-up, let's go some place and spend some of it on me. You got a hotel nearby?'
'N-no,' he says, his nerves showing again. 'I've got a rental, off Fillmore, other side of the Marine Park. Maybe you c-could come back there?'
'Maybe I c-could,' she says cheekily. 'You know the way?' she adds, not certain this guy knows the route to his own shoelaces, let alone how to get home.
'I th-think so,' he stutters.
'Good, then let's get rollin'!' she says, trying to whip up some urgency. 'It's not too late to give you a night you'll never forget.' She shoots him her sexiest smile, the one that melts even Oleg, but she doesn't detect even a flicker of warmth on his face as he coldly clunks the column gear-shift into Drive and pulls away.
Lu stares out of the side window and neither of them speaks much as the bright lights of the Beach fade behind them. After about ten minutes she sees signs for Fillmore and Gerritsen and in the yellow headlight beams she spots houseboats tottering on stilts and dozens of shabby moorings in need of paint and varnish. Somewhere between Gerritsen and East 38th her last punter of the night turns the car into a rundown driveway cut through overgrown bushes and overhanging trees and comes to a stop.
'We here?' Lu says, surprised that he's completed the task without any further checks, delays or complications.
'Yes, please wait a minute,' says the driver, pressing some automatic key fob that opens a big up-and-over metal door to a double garage. He slips the car into Drive again, nudges it slowly in and automatically lowers the door.
Lu's out of her seat and out of the car before the garage door's even come down. She wants to get this over with as quickly as possible and then catch a cab out of here. More than anything though, right now she wants the washroom. He flicks on a light and she blinks at the brightness.
'I have a key, I just have to find it,' he says, slowly inspecting several brass and steel keys on some kind of ring.
'Here it is,' he finally announces, then negotiates a route around the front of the car to a connecting door from the garage to the kitchen of the old house.
More lights come on and Lu looks around. Not much to the place: a tacky old kitchen dog-legs into a crummy living area with an old three-piece suite, a fireplace and dirty white rug but no TV. Lu has never been in a house that doesn't have a TV; in fact, she didn't think such places existed. 'Hey, can I use your john?' she shouts to him as he locks the back door linking to the garage.
'By the front entrance, or there's one upstairs,' he says, nodding to the open wooden stairs that climb from the far corner of the lounge.
Lu goes for the downstairs john. While she's in there, she tries to work out how much he's good for. The house is a disappointment, there's no sign of a wife around, and that means no jewellery. The guy had to stop for cash, so there's probably nothing more than loose change on his bedside table; maybe, if she's lucky, a watch or some gold ring or neck chain, though he didn't look like the type to wear anything that expensive. She makes up her mind that the best bet is to sting him for a special 'overnight' rate, on account that she agreed to come back to his place. Five hundred bucks for the rest of the night, that's what she is going to ask him for. Or at least that will be her starting price. She guesses that if he's an accountant, then probably the only thing he's good at is figures, and that means he may want to bargain her down a bit. Yep, start around five hundred dollars, Lu; if you're smart, you might end up with two fifty to three hundred.
She finishes off, flushes the toilet and runs water in the sink. Staring into a mirror over a dirty glass shelf, she sees her eye-shadow and liner are smudged and the whites of her eyes are starting to look bloodshot. Hardly a picture of beauty, but what the fuck, this ain't no Hollywood audition, and the weak-spined mudak out there with a hard on ain't goin' to be saying no to what she's offering. Maybe, if all goes well here, then tomorrow she'll give herself some time off, rest up a bit and cut Oleg a slice of tonight's extra cash as though she'd been out on her early shift as usual.
Lu powders some shine off the bridge of her nose, kisses her newly lipsticked lips together and opens the door, ready to demand her five hundred bucks and put up with anything the useless little creep wants in return. 'Okay, mister, it's playtime!' she shouts, heading back into the lounge.
From behind her, a rope noose is slipped over her head and jerked viciously back. Ludmila Zagalsky is swept from her feet and crashes head first to the ground, her fingers clawing as the rope bites and burns into her neck, choking off all air from her lungs.
'Welcome to Spider's web,' says a cold and stutter-free voice from above her.
20
Florence, Tuscany The railway station in Florence was a cauldron of heat, cooking a human minestrone of travellers from all over Europe. Tempers boiled as tourists bumped and banged into each other, searching for directions to their trains. Finally, streams of people surged, spilled and dribbled down their chosen platforms, squeezing into the baking-hot carriages.
Jack was fortunate enough to find an empty one at the far end of the Siena train but it was still unpleasantly hot and stank of a thousand strangers' bodies. He chugged back half a bottle of lukewarm water he'd taken from the fridge at the Sofitel and shook his shirt from his sticky body.
He tried to open a window but it was jammed. As he sat back on the broken springs of the dusty seat, he could see that outside a couple of members of the transport police, the Polizia Stradale, were sharing a cigarette in the shade after making what had currently become a routine check for terrorist bombs. Above their heads robot CCTV cameras scanned the tracks. Jack recognized them as state-of-the-art IMAS cameras. Even here, in historic Florence, Bill Gates was present. The Microsoft-based Integrated Multimedia Archive System powered more than three thousand cameras on Italian tracks and had become the global standard-setter for video capture and information analysis.
On the sticky table in front of Jack was the still unopened envelope given to him by Orsetta, on behalf of Massimo Albonetti. He and Mass had become friends a long time ago, during an Interpol exchange held in Rome. A year later, Massimo had helped Jack crack a paedophile ring in Little Italy when New York's Italian underworld had closed its doors to local cops and sought to settle the problem the traditional Mafia way using torture and murder. Albonetti was a no-nonsense cop, who, like Jack, had a degree in psychology and saw profiling merely as a powerful tool to help investigators focus on behavioural clues, not as a crystal ball that would magically produce the name of a killer.