“If I call Boston and I tell them I need to see the overnights, and they say why, and I—” He breathes, trying to keep it together, I’m just staring at him. “I say, gee, I’ve got missing files, I’ve got—I’ve got dead employees.” He looks up at me, his eyes wet and wide, pleading like a child. “Just let me sit here. Just let me sit here until it ends. Please just let me sit here.”
He’s weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It’s exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it’s an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy’s skirts.
“Mr. Gompers, I am sorry.” I rise. “But you’re going to get those files. I want to know everything that’s missing, and I want you to tell me, specifically, if any of the missing files were Peter Zell’s. Do you understand?”
“I will—” He gets himself together, sits up a little and honks into a handkerchief. “I’ll try.”
“Don’t try,” I say, standing, turning. “You have till tomorrow morning. Do it.”
I take the steps slowly back down to the first floor, trembling, shot, my energy expended, and while I was upstairs hassling Gompers the sky has decided to send down a miserable frozen drizzle, which slants into my face while I cross Eagle Square on the way back to my car.
The man with the sandwich board is still stalking the plaza, parka and fur hat, and again he hollers, “Do you know what time it is?” and I ignore him, but then he’s planted himself in my path. He’s holding up his sandwich board, DO THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID, raising it between us like a centurion’s shield, and I mutter, “Excuse me, sir,” but he doesn’t move, and then I realize it’s the guy from last night, from the Somerset, out of his Harley jacket now but still the heavy untrimmed mustache, red cheeks, doleful eyes.
And he goes, “You are Palace, right?”
“Yeah,” and I realize what’s happening too late, I reach for my shoulder holster but he’s already dropped the sign and he’s got something jammed up into my ribs. I glance down—a pistol, short and black and ugly.
“Do not move.”
“Okay,” I say.
The rain splatters steadily down over both of us, frozen in the center of Eagle Square. People are walking down the sidewalk, a couple dozen feet away, but it’s cold and it’s raining hard and everybody’s looking at their feet. Nobody notices. Who cares?
“Do not say a word.”
“I won’t.”
“Okay.”
He breathes heavily. His mustache and beard are stained in patches, dirty cigarette-yellow. His breath is stale with old smoke.
“Where is she?” he hisses. The gun is pressed painfully into my ribs, angled upward, and I know the path that the bullet will take, gouging through the soft flesh, severing muscles, slamming to a stop in my heart.
“Who?” I ask.
I’m thinking about Toussaint’s desperation move, with the ashtray. To make a move like that, Alison said, he would have had to be desperate. And now here is this man with his sandwich board: assaulting a police officer, use of a sidearm in the commission of a felony. Desperate. The gun twists into my side.
“Where is she?” he asks again.
“Where is who?”
“Nico.”
Oh, God. Nico. It’s raining harder and harder while we’re standing here. I’m not even wearing a raincoat, just my gray blazer and blue tie. A rat darts by, out from behind a Dumpster, bounds across the square and out toward Main Street. I track it with my eyes while my assailant licks his lips.
“I don’t know where Nico is,” I tell him.
“Yes, you do, you do know.”
He jams the pistol in harder, digs it deeper into the thin cotton of my dress shirt, and I can feel him itching to fire it, his anxious energy warming the coldness of the barrel. I picture the hole that had been left in Naomi, just above and to the right of her left eye. I miss her. It’s so cold out here, my face is soaked. I left my hat in the car, with the dog.
“Please listen to me, sir,” I say, raising my voice over the drumbeat of the rain. “I do not know where she is. I’ve been trying to find her myself.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
“Bullshit.”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t worry about who I am.”
“Okay.”
“I’m a friend of hers, okay?” he says anyway. “I’m a friend of Derek’s.”
“Okay,” I say, and I’m trying to remember everything Alison told me about Skeve and his ridiculous organization: the Catchman report, secret bases on the Moon. All nonsense and desperation, and yet here we are, and if this man twitches just one finger just a little bit, I’ll be dead.
“Where’s Derek?” I ask, and he snorts, angrily, says, “You asshole,” and heaves back with his other hand, the one not holding the gun, and punches me closed-fist on the side of my head. Instantly, the world loses focus, blurs, and I double over and he hits me again, an undercut rushing up into my mouth, and I bounce backward against the wall of the plaza, my head banging against the bricks. The gun is immediately back in place, grinding into my ribcage, and now the world is spinning, swimming, rain overflowing around my eye patch and flooding my face, blood oozing from my upper lip into my mouth, my pulse roaring in my head.
He comes in close, hisses into my ear. “Derek Skeve is dead, and you know that he’s dead because you killed him.”
“I didn’t—” my mouth fills with blood, I spit it out. “No.”
“Oh, okay, so you had him killed. That is a pretty cutthroat technicality.”
“I promise you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It’s funny, though, I’m thinking, as the world slowly stops rotating, the furious face of the mustache man comes back into focus with the cold desolation of the plaza behind him, I sort of did know. I probably would have said that Skeve was dead, if you’d asked. But I haven’t really had time to think about it. God, you wake up one day and everybody is dead. I turn my head, spit out another black stream of blood.
“Listen, friend,” I say, bringing my voice to an easy place. “I promise you—no, wait, look at me, sir. Will you look at me?” He jerks his head up, his eyes are wide and scared, his lips twitching under the heavy mustache, and for a second we’re like grotesque lovers, gazing into each other’s eyes in this cold wet public square, a gun barrel between us.
“I do not know where Nico is. I do not know where Skeve is. But I might be able to help you, if you tell me what you know.”
He thinks it over, his fearful inner debate playing out in his big, dolorous eyes, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily. And then, suddenly and too loudly he says, “You’re lying. You do know. Nico said her brother had this plan, some secret policeman plan—”
“What?”
“To get Derek out of there—”
“What?”
“Nico says her brother has this plan, he gets her a car—”
“Slow down—wait—”
The rain is pounding.
“And then Derek gets shot dead, and I barely get out of there, and when I get out she’s nowhere.”
“I don’t know about any of this.”
“Yes, you do.”
A cold metal snap as he clicks off the safety. I yelp twice and clap my hands, and Mustache Man says, “Hey—” and then there’s a ferocious bark from the street side of the square, and he turns his head toward it, and I raise my hands and shove him hard in the face, and he stumbles backward and lands on his rear end. “Shit,” he says from the ground, and I draw my sidearm and aim, right down at his thick torso, but the sudden motion has thrown off my balance, and it’s dark and my face is soaked, I’m seeing double again, and I must be pointing the gun at the wrong man, because the kick comes out of nowhere—he swipes out with his feet and catches me in the heel, and I topple like a statue being pulled down with ropes. I roll over, look wildly around the plaza. Nothing. Silence. Rain.