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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Title: Barcelona Skyline
copyright © 2013 by David C. Hall
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2363-3
This 2013 ebook published by:
Barcelona Digital Editions, S.L.
Av. Marquès de l’Argentera, 17 pral.
08003 Barcelona
www.barcelonaebooks.com
This 2013 edition distributed by:
Open Road Integrated Media
345 Hudson Street, Suite 6C
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
About the Author
Back Ads
When the knock on the door came, Nicholas Southgate was sitting on a not very comfortable chair in a suite on the seventh floor of the Hotel Majestic in Barcelona listening to Così fan tutte on his iPod. He glanced at his watch, breathed a sigh, and pulled out the earphones. He stood, took a quick glance at his reflection in the mirror, smoothed his jacket and tie, and then, satisfied, walked unhurriedly out of the auxiliary bedroom and across the entryway to the door.
The woman had long, wavy, ash blonde hair—probably dyed, Southgate thought—and rather striking blue-green eyes. She wore a gray, belted cashmere coat, black medium heels, light gray nylons with a bluish tint, and a black dress that came down to mid-calf and clung to her figure without being obvious. She had on a good deal of makeup, as was to be expected, but Southgate thought she would do. Mr. McAllan didn’t like it when they looked too tarty.
“So can I come in?”
Southgate stepped aside, catching a whiff of expensive perfume as she brushed past him, and then closed the door. Southgate hated the smell of perfume.
“You’re American, if I’m not mistaken,” he said.
“Is that a problem?”
“I was not aware that they were going to send an American.”
“You wanted someone that speaks English,” the woman said. “For what I’m going to do, do you really think it makes any difference?”
“Only that you might be expected to provide Mr. Smith with a certain amount of intelligent conversation,” Southgate replied, with a nasty hint of a smile.
“He’ll want me to talk to him about Lacan?” she suggested.
Southgate cleared his throat. “Lacan …”
“French psychoanalyst,” she told him, “disciple of Freud.”
“Oh yes,” Southgate said, faking it. They were still in the entryway, just inside the door. The wallpaper was a fleur-de-lis pattern, light blue on a cream-colored background. There was one Victorian style chair with faux silk upholstery against the wall, a murky landscape in oils above it in an elaborate gilt frame.
“No doubt the agency has briefed you on what you’re to do,” Southgate went on, “but if you will bear with me for just a moment, I’d rather like to go over it just once again. First of all, Mr. Smith does not, as a rule, like being touched.”
“Oh, really?”
“They didn’t tell you that?” Southgate snapped.
“Maybe I forgot.”
“It would be advisable for you not to forget these things, Miss …”
“Tracy.”
“That’s your given name?”
“You really think it’s my name?”
“No, I suppose not,” Southgate muttered. “You will be expected to follow Mr. Smith’s instructions to the letter. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear.”
“I trust they’ve advised you,” Southgate said, “that there may be some pain involved. I believe that was specified.”
“I don’t want any marks,” she said.
“Nothing that can’t be taken care of with a hot bath and a bit of body cream,” Southgate assured her, with a faintly unctuous smile.
“Marvelous.”
“You can scream if you like—I believe he rather likes that as a matter of fact—but not too loudly. This is a hotel, after all.”
“Sure.”
“If you have any problem with this,” Southgate insisted, “it would be best if you tell me now.”
“Listen, Mr. …”
“My name is irrelevant.”
“Listen, Mr. Irrelevant, I make my living doing this. I’ve met all kinds, and I know how to give them what they want. Just wait and see the happy smile on your boss’s face.”
“I can assure you, miss, that in all my years of working for Mr. … Smith I have yet to see what you would call a happy smile on his face. Now if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’ll advise him of your arrival.”
Without bothering to wait for her reply, Southgate took a cell phone out of his jacket pocket and pushed a few buttons.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said into the phone, “the lady is here. She’s American, I’m afraid, but she does not, however, seem to have that Midwestern twang that can set one’s teeth on edge … Yes, sir, very good, sir. Thank you, sir, thank you so much.”
* * *
The sitting room had a big picture window with a postcard view of the city of Barcelona by night, the ragged outlines of the roofs of the Gothic Quarter, the massive hill of Montjuïc looming up off to the right, the Mapfre Tower with its gleaming, colored lights, then the dark curtain of the sea. The man sat slouched in an armchair with his back to the view, a white towel draped over his lap. His body was white and hairy, narrow-shouldered with a soft, round stomach, skinny arms with practically no bicep at all. His head was small and bird-like, with a long nose and negligible chin. His bright, eager eyes flicked over her body as he thrust out the remote control and turned off whatever he had been watching on the flat-screen television set.
“You can start taking your clothes off,” he told her, in a surprisingly soft voice. “Put them on that chair there. Fold your things neatly, if you don’t mind, I don’t like mess.”
“All right,” she said, giving him a smile, sliding the coat off her shoulders. She put it on the chair, reached behind her to pull down the zipper on her dress.
“I assume that in America people masturbate in the shower, do they not?” the man said.
“Some people do, I imagine,” she admitted, pulling the dress over her head, smoothing back her hair before folding the dress and placing it on top of her coat.
“You would do, wouldn’t you? Obsessed as you are by cleanliness over there. Scrub, scrub, scrub, till the skin is raw. Must be quite stimulating in the end, I should think.”
“Hmm,” she murmured, slipping off her stockings.
“Don’t look at me for God’s sake!” he snapped, then switching at once to a tone that was almost amused. “You can look at the view. It costs enough. Though I don’t happen to be paying for it, of course. Not paying for you either, for that matter. But that doesn’t mean you won’t have to behave. And if you don’t, you will be punished. Though, of course, you may be punished anyway.”
The man in the armchair laughed dryly, licking his lips as he watched her put her panties on top of the pile of clothes. She turned, naked, one hand on her hip and her right knee bent just a little, gazing over the top of his bald head at the city lights out beyond the window.
“You don’t trim your pubic hair, do you?”
“Not very often.”
“Perhaps we shall have to do something about that,” the man said, grinning. “I believe there’ll be scissors in the bathroom. But first our little shower. You’ll leave the door open, of course. I trust you understand what you’re to do?”
She smiled at him over her bare shoulder, heading for the bathroom. “Sure,” she said.
* * *
Southgate sat in the entryway just where she had left him, eyes closed, engrossed in the music, but even with his earphones in place he heard the sound of the sitting room door opening. The woman wore a terrycloth hotel bathrobe that fell to a little above the ankles, her hair still wet from the shower. She looked a bit older without makeup, he thought.
“He’s had an accident,” she said.
Southgate removed the earphones and turned off the music. “I beg your pardon?” he said, not bothering to conceal his irritation.
“He hit his head in the shower,” she told him. “There’s a lot of blood. I’m out of here.”
“Oh, my God!” Southgate said, standing up. He pushed past her, strode swiftly across the sitting room and through the open door.
The bathroom was still full of steam, the mottled glass door on the shower stall open and the old man’s naked body sprawled across the white tiles, his forehead on the lip of the shower stall, a splurge of blood going pink on the wet porcelain.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Southgate said in a feeble voice, standing in the doorway, not wanting to get any closer.
“How should I know?” the woman said. “That’s your problem anyway. Like I said, I’m out of here.”
“Yes, of course,” Southgate murmured. He was aware that he should probably do something, one of those things that people in television films do under such circumstances without even thinking about it, put his hand to the old man’s neck and feel for a pulse, do a heart massage or mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But he could not bring himself to touch the old man’s body, did not in fact even want to look at it, though it was fascinating, in a sickening sort of way. He was reminded of an exhibition of paintings by Lucian Freud at the Tate that he had gone to with a friend, those far too naked bodies like great chunks of meat hanging in a butcher shop.
“I’m going to have to make a telephone call,” he said, stepping out of the bathroom and taking out his cell phone.
“Yeah, you do that,” the woman said, “but first you better give me my money.”
“Just a moment.”
“I don’t want to be here,” she said. “I don’t think you want me to be here either, do you?”
“No,” Southgate admitted. He had the telephone in his hand but was still not sure who exactly he was going to call.
“All right then,” she said, holding out her hand and snapping her fingers. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Very good,” Southgate murmured, and for a moment he could not remember where he had left the envelope.
“I’m going to get dressed in there,” she said when he had given her the money, pointing at the bedroom door. “Please make sure no one gets here before I’m out of the hotel. You do understand what I mean, don’t you?”
“Bitch!” Southgate muttered, when she was out of hearing.
It was late when Elso Bari walked into the restaurant, a few melting snowflakes still glistening on the shoulders of his dark blue overcoat. After a week of sunshine that had everyone believing that spring had finally arrived, Chicago had turned cold again. Coming in from outside, Elso felt a pleasant sensation of warmth as he breathed in the rich medley of smells: lamb, seafood, wine, sauces, garlic, basil. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a three-story red-brick building on the city’s Near North Side. It was a good area for restaurants, but this was a weeknight and most people had already left. There were just a couple of groups at the big tables in the back, a couple lingering over coffee and after-dinner drinks.
The hostess walked over to him with a couple of menus in her hand and the usual welcoming smile on her face. She was wearing an orange, ankle-length dress with a slit up the side to just above the knee. She stopped in front of him and cocked her head to one side, her long auburn hair trailing over her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re full up.”
“What about all those tables?” Elso said, pointing.
“They’re all reserved. For gangsters and their molls.”
“Do you serve those kind of people here?”
“As long as they don’t spit on the floor.”
Elso chuckled and took off his overcoat.
“So how’re we doing, Sandy?”
“If you want me to run this place for you,” she said, “maybe you’d better start thinking about paying me more money.”
Elso shrugged. He was about thirty-five, with dark hair and blue eyes. He gave her a smile that was meant to be disarming. Sandy was familiar with that smile and still liked it, but she was not going to let it fool her.
“It seems like things are going fine,” she said. “At lunchtime, like always. Evenings, we’re full almost every night. Weekends, we’ve got reservations until the kitchen closes. But guess what? The numbers don’t add up. And I’m wondering, now, how can that be?”
“Okay,” Elso nodded, not smiling any more.
“What do you want me to do?” Sandy went on. “Tell him I’m going to break his balls? Look, the last time I weighed myself I was around one twenty. Oscar is like two hundred pounds, I’d guess, and he’s still growing.”
“Maybe I’d better talk to him.”
“I think that’d be a good idea.”
Elso took a look at his watch.
“There’s a guy supposed to be coming to see me. Let me know when he gets here. Put him in the bar and give him whatever he wants to drink.”
“Sure, boss.”
When Elso walked into the kitchen, he noticed the moist, earthy reek of marijuana over the smell of food and the scent of soap from the dishwasher and caught a glimpse of the skinny second cook whipping his hand behind his back. They were serving the last desserts, putting food away, and wiping down the surfaces. Oscar, the chief cook, was stirring something in a saucepan.
“Hey, Elso, how you doin’?” the cook said, raising his head. “Hey, try this.”
Elso took the spoon Oscar offered him, dipped it into the sauce, blew on it to cool it off, and took a sip.
“That’s brilliant, Oscar. What is it?”
“King prawns and Iberian ham,” the cook said, picking up a big wine glass and taking a sip of white wine. “That’s the concept. There’s more stuff, of course. It’ll be a warm salad, served on a bed of fresh spinach and basil leaves.”
“Beautiful. You’re an artist, Oscar. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I think so,” Oscar said, trying to stifle a smile.
“You got a minute? Have a drink?”
“Sure,” the cook said, taking off his cap and an incredibly filthy apron smeared with blood and black grease stains. “You want something to eat?”
“Not really,” Elso said.
“I got some beautiful clams. Spanish style. Garlic and white wine and lemon with a little sprinkle of parsley. Just a tapa?”
“Yeah, okay. A small one.”
“Carlitos,” Oscar told the other cook in Spanish, “dish up some clams for the boss. What’re we drinkin’?”
“The Grenache Blanc, Topanga. If we’ve got any that’s cold.”
“Yeah, we got it.”
They sat down at a little table next to the kitchen. The waitress brought out the wine, opened the bottle, and filled their glasses. Then she came back with a little plate of clams in sauce. Elso picked up a clam, sucked the juice off the shell, and bit off the clam.
“Very nice,” he said, wiping his hands on the napkin. The napkin was made of soft cloth, but with a nice weight to it. One of the things Elso had noticed years before about good restaurants was that they always had nice heavy napkins.
“Like I was telling you, Oscar,” he said, “you’re an artist. And I really appreciate what you’ve done for this restaurant. Because in a way this restaurant is you. I mean, I’m the boss, I pay the bills, the salaries, the fucking taxes, but what really makes this restaurant work is you. Your ideas. Your creativity. Am I right or not?”
Oscar shrugged, embarrassed by his boss’s praise. He weighed more than two hundred pounds and had long, permanently greasy dark hair that he only remembered to cut three or four times a year, but he still had the face of a little fat kid from a not very nice neighborhood.
“What I wanted to tell you,” Elso went on, picking up another clam, “is that talent’s not enough.”
The waitress brought out an ice bucket, set it on the table at Elso’s elbow, and poured each of them a little more wine before putting the bottle in the bucket. Elso raised his glass, Oscar did the same, and they clinked glasses and took a drink.
“It’s good, this one,” Elso said.
“Sure is.”
“Of course, a white wine can never reach the level of a great red.”
“No.”
“The red will always have that depth, all those nuances. A good red is … like autumn, don’t you think?”
Oscar smiled. “I never thought of that.”
“Cooks steal, Oscar. You know that?”
“I don’t know,” Oscar said without looking at him. “Could be.”
Oscar picked up his glass and slurped some of the white wine. Elso had often been puzzled by how a man who could make such exquisite food could be such a slob in his personal habits.
“The way you do it,” Elso went on after eating another clam, “is, say you order two boxes of prawns. You take one to use, the other you sell to the place down the street. I pay for two boxes, you pocket the money for one. And that’s just one way, isn’t it?”
Oscar, with his chubby child’s face, stared at him, shaking his head without much conviction.
“Who’s gonna know? I’m gonna count the fuckin’ prawns you put on each order, add up how many prawn dishes you serve every day, match it up with the receipts …? I haven’t got time to do that. Nobody does. Well, you can do that at fuckin’ McDonald’s—they do do that at fuckin’ McDonald’s—but this is a quality restaurant. That’s the price you pay for quality. You see what I mean?”
Oscar nodded vaguely, not bothering to answer. Elso leaned over to fill his glass, ate another clam, and then scooped up some sauce with the empty shell.
“What I’m tryin’ to say, Oscar,” he said, wiping his fingers again, “is that there are limits, there’s gotta be limits.”
He lifted his glass and took a sip.
“This white is really good,” he said. “Look, lemme tell you a story. There was this guy in New York, he was a great cook, brilliant guy, a real original. I’m not saying he was better than you, but he was good, he was very, very good. Well he was working at this place, and he got … kind of full of himself, you know what I mean? People told him to take it easy, but he didn’t listen. Eventually, he got an offer from another restaurant. A big name, one of the best in the city, and this is New York, which means one of the best in the world. So he goes to his boss, he says, hey, I’m leaving. His boss looks at him, he says that’s great, Petey—the cook’s name was Petey—I’m really glad for you. Of course, you’re going to pay me for everything you stole before you leave, aren’t you? Now his boss is this kind of little, bald guy, he looks like a salesman in a men’s clothing store or something. The cook looks at the guy, he just sort of giggles. When he gets through giggling he says he doesn’t owe him anything, as a matter of fact his boss owes him, because he’s been working for shit wages while the boss has been getting rich on his talent. Then he walks out the door.
“So what happens,” Elso went on, “his first day goin’ to work at the new place, this cook, Petey, he’s coming out of the subway, and this van pulls up next to him. Big van with tinted windows, you know, and a bunch of big black guys, look like basketball players, they jump out and they throw him in the back. This is in broad daylight, huh. They do it so fast, nobody even realizes what’s happening.”
Elso picked up the last clam and bit it off the shell.
“So he didn’t make it to work that day. Or any day after that. I don’t know what they did to him. Nobody does. Except him, of course, and as far as I know he never told anybody. But the thing is … he never cooked again. Word was somebody thought they saw him in a crack house one time. He’s probably dead by now. Nobody knows. And nobody cares either. Nobody remembers what he was. Or what he could have been. A terrific talent. Right down the tube.”
Elso broke off a piece of bread and rubbed it around on the plate.
“Great sauce too,” he said.
Oscar just looked at him, his big head between hunched shoulders, long greasy hair hanging down the side of his face, eyes half closed.
“What I’m trying to say here, Oscar,” Elso said softly, wiping his mouth with his napkin, “is I’d hate to see a guy with a talent like yours ruin his career by doing something stupid.”
Southgate ended up calling a man with the unlikely name of Hartford Birkenhead, vice-president of the board of management of Visor Trading Ltd., where the dead man on the bathroom floor had been president until a few moments before. There was a lot of background noise when Birkenhead answered, a mixture of chatter, insipid music, and insincere laughter, and Southgate got the impression that Birkenhead was probably drunk. He asked Southgate to wait, then two or three minutes later came back to the phone and told him to hang up and wait some more. Southgate stood there for a while with the phone in his hand. Eventually he sat down, and then the phone rang.
“Southgate?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t touch anything. Don’t talk to anyone. We’re on our way.”
They took a little more than half an hour to get there. The first man had on a worn, brown leather sport jacket and flannel trousers. He was tall, with brown hair shot with gray and a long, thin face that gave him the look of a rather unhappy dog. The second one was shorter, bald, and running to fat. He had a small backpack hanging from his shoulder and wore a hip-length jacket with lots of pockets, in a color that was somewhere between green, gray, and brown without quite managing to be any of the three.
“Mr. Birkenhead sent you, I assume,” Southgate said when he opened the door.
“Birkenhead?” the short man, whose name was Healy, said. “I never heard of any Birkenhead. You ever heard of a Birkenhead, Sharp?”
“We’re Cyrus Security,” Sharp said.
“How did you get here so quickly?” Southgate asked. He had, after all, called London only half an hour before and this was Barcelona.
“Just happened to be passing by,” the fat man answered with a grin, glancing around. “Nice place, eh?”
Southgate gave him a skeptical look.
“Nah,” Healy admitted, shaking his head, still grinning. “Fact is we were already here …”
“Mr. Southgate doesn’t care what we were doing here, George,” Sharp cut him off.
“Of course not,” Healy replied. “He’s got more important things to worry about, haven’t you, Mr. Southgate?”
Southgate looked from one to the other and came to the conclusion that they were equally unpleasant, each in his own way. The short, fat one, Healy, seemed to find everything amusing, while the other one, Sharp, with his thin, doggy face, seemed tense, irritable, and potentially nasty. They both had the look of men someone might send around to collect a bad debt.
“Now do you think you could be so kind as to let us have a peek at the deceased?” Healy asked him, with a greasy smile. “If he’s still available, that is?”
They walked through the sitting room, with its elegant furniture and view of Barcelona by night, into the main bedroom, where the king-size bed was still untouched, and stopped at the doorway to the bathroom. The dead body of the old man was sprawled across the tiles, the floor still wet with blood and the water from the shower.
“Who turned off the tap?” Sharp asked.
“She did, I suppose,” Southgate answered.
“Certainly wasn’t him,” Healy said cheerily, pulling on a pair of plastic surgical gloves. Leaning over, he used his left hand as a support so as not to leave a footprint on the wet floor, and put two fingers on the old man’s neck.
“Precisely,” he said, getting to his feet. “This gent’s passed on to a better world. I’ll take a look around the premises, eh?”
“Right,” answered Sharp, without lifting his eyes from the corpse. “I’ll talk to this one.”
Sharp’s phone rang. He took it out of his jacket pocket and squinted at the screen.
“It’s Harry again,” he told the fat man. “Mr. Southgate, would you mind taking a chair in the sitting room? I’ll be with you in a minute.”
* * *
Anwar Amir, known as Harry to everyone except his parents and one ancient aunt, had been up for about an hour by then. After calling Sharp and Healy the first time, he had taken a shower and then gone downstairs to the kitchen, where he had managed to find a bottle of Bordeaux that was already open and poured himself a generous glass. He put two slices of brown bread in the toaster and opened a tin of foie gras. Then he sat down on a kitchen stool and called Sharp again.
“How’s it going?” he said when he got an answer.
“Don’t know,” Sharp said. “We just got here.”
“What about the … the valet or whatever he is? What the fuck do they call ’em anyway? A gentleman’s gentleman? A … He can’t be a butler. A butler must have a house, so he can answer the door. So …?”
“I got no fuckin’ idea, Harry, and neither do you. Flunky maybe.”
“That sounds good,” Amir said. “A flunky. So, what’s your impression? Of the flunky, I mean.”
“Five minutes with the coppers, he’ll be giving ’em intimate details of his mother’s private life.”
“Get him out of there,” Amir said, taking the toast from the toaster and spreading it with foie gras. “Find him a hotel, nearby if possible. Explain to him very clearly that he left McAllan at … seven, let’s say. Pay whoever you have to to say he had a room booked and arrived at the hotel then—at half seven or so, in other words. Whatever’s reasonable. We don’t want any further complications. Clear?”
“Clear.”
“How about the old man? What does it look like?”
“Seems he fell down in the bathroom and hit his head.”
“Seems?” Amir repeated, tasting the wine.
“Old people fall in the bathroom every day,” Sharp went on. “He gets dizzy, he falls. And bangs his head on the lip of the shower stall. Bad luck he hits his head just there, but … there you are. Accidental death. End of story.”
“Is it?” Amir said. He knew Sharp well enough to catch the reservation in his tone. Even on a long-distance telephone call.
“Most people,” Sharp continued, “fall while they’re in the shower. Or when they’re getting out. Not when they’re getting in.”
“And this one fell when he was getting in.”
“That’s right.”
“So what does that mean?” Amir asked, taking a bite of toast. “In practical terms?”
“Maybe nothing. It could happen. It could undoubtedly happen.”
“So?” Amir asked with his mouth full.
“If someone were to pay attention, someone who knows what they’re doing … it could be nothing, but it doesn’t quite fit. And, if you’re a copper, that makes you think.”
“Of course,” Amir said, putting what was left of the piece of toast back on the plate. He took another sip of his wine and started looking for cigarettes. “I have the impression, Sharp, that when this gets out, there are going to be … repercussions, let’s say.”
“A copper,” Sharp went on, “if he’s good and they give him the chance, something like that is enough to get him started. And if there’s something there, he’ll end up finding it. If there is something there—which I’m not saying there is.”
“I see,” Amir said. He opened a drawer in the kitchen cabinet and found a pack of his wife’s Benson & Hedges, took it out and set it on the bar next to his wine and climbed back up onto his stool.
“Why didn’t he have his own security?” Sharp asked him.
“Good question,” Amir said. “It seems he was a bit of a skinflint. Hated spending his own money when there was any chance of getting someone else to spend theirs. So he’d use the security services of the companies he worked with. Such as our esteemed client, for instance. Which is why you two are over there in Spain, enjoying the sun and sandy beach. Is it true what they say, that the women all sunbathe topless over there?”
“It’s ten degrees here at the moment,” Sharp corrected him, “and it’s raining. Or it was.”
“You realize, of course,” Amir said, lighting his cigarette with a kitchen match, “that someone might suggest you should have been watching him a bit more closely.”
“We kept to the drill.”
“Someone might suggest we should have seen this coming,” Amir went on, vaguely.
“Well, we didn’t, did we?” Sharp said.
“Evidently not,” Amir said, philosophically. “One does one’s best. Sometimes that’s not enough. No point wasting time on regrets. You clean up as best you can, move on to something else.”
“What do they want, our lords and masters?”
“Intelligence,” Amir replied, “information they can use. Whatever the coppers might know or might be able to find out. Before they know it. That’s why you’re there. That’s why you got there first.”
“All right.”
“And one other thing.”
“Marvelous,” Sharp said. “What?”
“They want a little time.”
“What’s a little?”
“They’ve given me to understand that if we give them until tomorrow mid-morning, they will be extremely grateful. Because they’ll have time enough to do whatever it is they’ve got to do.”
“Which is?”
Amir shrugged his shoulders.
“If I knew that, Sharp,” he said, “I would not be talking to you. I would be calling some stock market trader in Tokyo or Sydney or Singapore, where I believe the Market is already open—or hasn’t closed yet. But, much as it pains me to admit it, I do not know what they are going to do, which is why I am up at this ungodly hour, talking to you, instead of enjoying the comfort of my warm bed and my wife’s comely buttocks. We are not the General Staff, Sharp, we’re just the infantry.”
“Is that right? I thought we were the fucking rubbish men.”
“That’s another way of putting it,” Amir admitted. “What about the tart?”
“She took her money and left. Bit of a hurry, I gather.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to find her,” Amir said with a sigh, as if it tired him just thinking about it, “convince her that discretion is the better part of valor.”
“Right,” Sharp said. “I’ve got to get started here, Harry, got to go talk to the flunky.”
“Yes, I suppose you had better do that,” Amir admitted, stubbing out his cigarette and dumping what was left of the toast into the garbage. “Call me when you’ve finished there. Before, if there are further developments.”
Amir pressed the red button on his phone and dropped it into the pocket of his dressing gown. There was no point in going back to bed. He finished what was left in his wine glass and checked the bottle to confirm that it was empty, then walked through the dining room with its long oak table and into the living room. He turned on the lamp next to his leather-covered armchair, leaned over, and took a bottle of Courvoisier and a snifter out of the liquor cabinet, flopped into the armchair in front of the 42-inch flat-screen television, and pressed the button on the remote control, flipping through the channels to see what was on.
* * *
Sharp found Southgate in the sitting room with his hands folded on his lap and a blank look on his face. He reminded him of the usher that he used to see every Sunday when he was a child, in the pew at the back of the church waiting to pass the collection plate. Sharp pulled a chair over in front of him, took out a notebook and a ballpoint pen, and leaned toward him with his elbows on his knees. Just then Healy came out of the bedroom, pulling the plastic gloves off.
“What have you got?” Sharp asked him.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“There’s some very nice prints on a water glass next to the bed. I would bet they belong to the old man. Apart from that, nothing at all.”
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” Sharp said.
“Let’s leave it at curious,” Healy suggested, dropping into another armchair. “Beautiful view, isn’t it? City laid out at your feet and all that. Must be lovely in the morning when you eat your breakfast off the silver service. Must come very dear all this, eh?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you, sir,” Southgate replied.
“There’s a briefcase in the bedroom,” Healy went on, “pigskin, I believe it is, very nice, initials in gold letters and all. Do you know what he had inside it?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“He was carrying it himself though?”
“I really don’t know. I imagine so. What possible difference could it make?”
“Well, nothing,” Healy said with a comfortable smile, “only that if a man of means like your Mr. McAllan is carrying a briefcase, one might suppose, he being so important and all, that it might contain things of a certain importance as well. Things he might not want exposed to the prying eyes of the whole fucking world, so to speak. And not just today’s Times, a packet of breath mints, and some little chocolates like the kind they give you with your coffee in certain of the finer establishments in airports these days. Which is what there was. Struck me as odd is all. Course, a bloke like me, what would I know about it?”
“I don’t quite understand …,” Southgate began.
“What we’d like to know,” Sharp explained, “is what the fuck was in the briefcase …”
“… that isn’t there now,” Healy continued.
“I’ve no idea,” Southgate said, glancing nervously from one to the other.
“But you must have a certain familiarity with Mr. McAllan’s business affairs, am I right?” Sharp said.
“Mr. McAllan,” Southgate replied, “runs a very tight ship, as they say. Information on a strictly need-to-know basis. My work has to do with day-to-day, personal matters …”
“Like finding him whores?” Healy suggested, pleasantly.
Southgate shrugged irritably.
“How did you find him this one?” Sharp asked.
“Through an agency. I was told they were quite reliable.”
“Told by whom?”
“Your Mr. Whitebread.”
“He’s not ours,” Sharp corrected him.
“An American woman, as it turned out,” Southgate went on. “Which came as a bit of a surprise. Cheeky, of course.”
“Can you imagine that?” Healy said. “A cheeky whore. What’s the world coming to, I wonder? What was her name?”
“Tracy, she said.”
“Tracy.”
“But it was a false name.”
“Really?” Healy said with feigned amazement. “You surprise me, Mr. Southgate, the class of people you deal with.”
“You’ve got their number, I suppose,” Sharp said. “The agency’s, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Call ’em.”
“It’s a bit late, isn’t it?”
“Their line of work,” Healy said cheerily, “I expect they do a lot of it at night. I’d wager there’ll be someone at home.”
Southgate took the cell phone out of his pocket, started searching the memory.