Daniel nodded to bald, fit Sam Easton, behind the wheel, and Sam lifted his foot off the brake and sped down the street.
“Heard it went good. Andrew called.”
“Fine. And no tail,” Daniel said. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”
Sam nodded, though — as Daniel would have done — he continued to check the rearview mirror more frequently than a prudent driver might.
Before the Ford turned onto the street that would take them into Manhattan, Daniel glanced back and noted two young men slow as they walked past the Prius, looking around, then easing closer, like coyotes sniffing out wounded prey.
Daniel read a text. The cash had been drained from the Aruba account and was already laundered.
“You want to go home?” Sam asked. “Or drop you at the usual place?”
“Downtown. The club.”
Daniel invariably spent Friday afternoons swimming at his health club in Battery Park, then would have a drink or two at Limoncello’s and take his boat out for a sunset ride in New York Harbor.
After that some Indian or Thai food and back home, where he’d summon one of the girls from the outcall service he used. Whom to pick? he wondered. Daniel was in a particular mood after the shooting — he found himself picturing the outstretched bloody body of the target’s daughter. This memory was persistent and alluring.
He decided he’d ask for one of the girls who allowed her customers to practice rough trade. Still, he reminded himself that he’d have to exercise a bit more restraint than several weeks ago when Alice — or was it Alina? — ended up in the emergency room.
Chapter 5
Where Her Victims Lie
5:00 P.M., FRIDAY
1 HOUR, 30 MINUTES EARLIER
Limoncello’s was not busy.
Perhaps it would be, probably would, since the restaurant was in the heart of Wall Street and it was Friday. And the place overlooked picturesque New York Harbor, offering a view of boats and endless waves, rising and falling like a metronome. This was just the spot for traders and brokers, who’d toyed with millions of other people’s dollars in the last eight hours, to celebrate their good decisions, to forget the bad.
But now, late afternoon, the bar was half empty. Those business folks who’d arrive later were still at their desks or writing up tickets on the floors of the closed exchanges or at health clubs and on jogs through Battery Park.
Here particularly, near the water, you could smell autumn in the air.
Gabriela wove through the brass- and oak-accented room, returning from the toilet to the tall chair at the bar, which she’d occupied for the past half hour. She slipped her black-and-white-checked jacket off, hung it over the back of the stool. A white silk blouse was tucked primly into a knee-length pleated gray skirt. She wore black hose and mottled burgundy-and-black high heels; she would change into her black flats — her walking-to-work shoes — later; that comfy pair were on the floor, in the faded Tiffany bag she used for footwear transport.
She resumed editing the documents she’d been poring over since she’d arrived. The top one was headed Open Items for Accountant. Several entries she crossed through completely. Others she marked with precise asterisks, each line of the sunburst an equal length. Beneath these were a half-dozen sheets headed with the names of companies and below that Balance Sheet and P & L. There wasn’t a single sheet that listed assets below $250 million. Another said, CP Personal Accounts.
She then turned to another contract, headed Short-term Commercial Lease. But there was nothing brief about the contents. Twenty pages of dense type. She sighed and started through it once more, pausing once to note herself in the mirror. Her hair was pulled back severely and pinned, which made the auburn shade lighter, for some reason.
She edited some then looked out the tall windows, sipped wine and caught a glimpse of City Pier A. The structure wasn’t as large as other piers farther north, in Greenwich Village and in Midtown, but this one had more history. The Professor had been particularly interested in the sagas of Downtown Manhattan and would spend hours reeling off stories to her. Built in the 1880s for the Department of Docks and the Harbor Police, Pier A had been witness to the relentless expansion of the city. She noted the seven-story clock tower, which had been built in 1919. The elaborate timepiece was a memorial to the U.S. soldiers killed in the First World War. This was particularly poignant considering that the original pier had been built by the son of a famous Union general in the Civil War.
She could listen to the Professor for hours.
As Gabriela returned to the lease, the man beside her set his drink down and continued to speak into his mobile phone.
Gabriela stiffened and blurted, “Oh. Hey.” When he didn’t respond she spoke more forcefully. “Excuse me.”
He finally realized that he was the object of the comment. He turned, frowning.
She was displaying her sleeve, which was stained brown. “Look.”
His square handsome face, eerily resembling that of a well-known actor, beneath close-cropped black hair, studied the sleeve and then her face. His eyes followed hers to his glass of scotch. His brows rose. “Oh, hell.” Into the phone, “I’ll call you back, Andrew.” He disconnected. “Did I do that? I’m sorry.”
Gabriela said, “When you put your glass down, yeah. Just now. On the phone, you were talking, and you turned. It spilled.”
“Sorry,” he repeated. It sounded genuine, not defensive.
His eyes migrated from the stain to her white blouse, all of the blouse, beneath which a trace of bra was visible. It was pale blue. Then his gaze settled back on the stain. “Silk?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I know what to do,” he explained. And took charge, summoning the bartender, a young man who seemed to be covering tats on his neck with makeup; this was a Wall Street, not an East Village, bar.
“Soda water and a towel, no, not the green one. The white one. The white towel. And salt.”
“Salt?”
“Salt.”
The remedies arrived. He didn’t apply the water and seasoning himself but let her do it. She’d heard the trick too — from her mother, as he had from his grandmother, he told her.
“Careful with the salt,” he said. “I don’t know how well it works on silk. You might hurt the cloth if you rub too hard.”
The magic trick did a pretty good job. Just the faintest discoloration remained.
She examined him with eyes beneath furrowed brows, then: “Why don’t you drink Martinis like everybody else here?”
“I don’t like Martinis. I’d probably have a strawberry Cosmo, and if that was the case, the stain would never come out. I’ll pay for the cleaning.”
“If I were a man would you make that offer?”
“I don’t make any offers to a man wearing a silk blouse.”
She kept a straight face for a moment then laughed. “No, thanks. It’d have to go to the laundry anyway.”
“Well, I apologize again.”
She lifted her palms. “Accepted.”
With détente achieved, she returned to the lease and he to his mobile. But when the last page of the document was marked up and when his call disconnected, the silence prodded them to glance toward each other — in the mirror at first — and conversation resumed.