Safe House

“You could, you know.”

“Could what?”

“Get into my business. You’re already in my . . . life. Don’t you want to know about . . . me and Vyra?”

“No.”

“It was my . . . idea, I guess,” she said, as though I’d answered the other way. “She’s not gay. Well, I guess I’m not either. She’s not bi—I was the first time she ever . . .”

“It doesn’t—”

“I love Vyra. She’s not what you think. What you might think, anyway—I don’t know what you think. She’s . . . lost. I wanted to help her find . . . herself, I guess. It’s a natural thing.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because you didn’t ask, I guess. That’s the way I am. I don’t like secrets between . . . friends. But if anyone tries to make me tell . . .”

“I wouldn’t try and make you do anything,” I said. No, little girl, I thought, you can’t be muscled into stuff. You have to be tricked.

“Vyra’s fun. You’d think I’d know more about fun than she would, the way we were raised. So different. But that’s not true. Maybe because I have a purpose . . . I don’t know. I have a pair of shoes like hers. She made me buy them. I mean, she paid for them, but she made me go with her and get them. You want to see them?”

“Sure.”

Crystal Beth walked barefoot to her closet and came out with a pair of hot-pink spikes with a little round black dot inset on each toe. “Four-and-a-half-inch heels,” she said, grinning. “They make me really tall.”

“They’re, uh . . . remarkable,” I said, struggling for the right word and missing it.

“I can’t imagine where I’d wear them. Or what I’d wear them with. Vyra says I’m lucky. That I have such small feet.”

“Is that genetic too?”

“I think so. My mother had tiny feet. Not my father, though. You want to see how they look?”

“Sure.”

She slipped the shoes on her feet and paraded around a bit, pulling up her slacks at the ankles so the shoes could be displayed. “Do you think they look silly?” she asked me.

“It’s hard to tell this way,” I said, scratching my chin, deep in thought. “Try it with the pants off,” I advised her solemnly.

It was almost four when the phone rang. This time it was an address on West Fifty-sixth. An office building, if I remembered the block right. I scooped Herk out of the basement and we hiked west to Eighth Street near NYU. Then we grabbed the N train to Fifty-seventh, and walked over to the address Pryce had given me.

There was an attendant in the lobby, but he didn’t pay any attention to us as we walked toward the elevator. I quickly scanned the tenant directory, but I couldn’t see anything next to 1401. We rode up anyway.

The hall carpet had been fresh when you could still buy a De Soto in a showroom. The walls were a dingy shade of layered nicotine. The overhead lighting alternated between pus-yellow and missing as we moved along the corridor. The office doors were a uniform dull brown, identified by the remnants of gilt decals displaying the numbers. We found 1401 just past a right-angle turn in the corridor, standing alone next to a window overlooking an air shaft. The window was the kind of stained glass you don’t see in churches.

I rapped lightly on the door. The man who opened it was a little taller than me, with thinning light-brown hair and watery blue eyes. He raised his eyebrows like he expected me to say something. I didn’t.

“You’re—?”

“Yeah,” I told him, moving past him into the office. Herk was right on my shoulder. I heard the door close behind us.

We were in what once had been a waiting room. The back wall was a receptionist’s booth, complete with a sliding-glass window cut into the wall. Both empty. I opened the door beside the receptionist’s window. Pryce was in the next room, seated behind a wood desk in one of those green vinyl swivel chairs they gave typists in the Fifties. He stood up when we walked in.

“Let’s get started,” he said.

We followed him to another room. It was small and square, with a nausea-colored linoleum floor and a single window that had been painted over with that silver stuff they use on bathroom glass. The only furniture was a knock-down card table with a clear glass ashtray on it and four black metal folding chairs. The walls were bare, painted an off-white that years of neglect had degenerated into just “off.”

Pryce gestured for me to pick a chair. I took the one with its back to the window, nodding at Herk to sit on my right. Pryce sat with his back to the door, leaving Lothar to face Herk.

I handed him photocopies of the printouts I’d gotten from Wolfe. He scanned through them, eyebrows going up slightly when he came to the substituted pages. He handed the dead man’s photo to Lothar without a word.

Lothar looked at the photo and nodded in recognition. Then he said the dead man’s name.

Damn.

“Did you know him well?” I asked Lothar quickly, keeping my face calm.

“Only met him a couple, three times,” Lothar said smoothly, looking at Pryce for approval. “That was the way we worked it.”

“And when do you get the word?”

He looked at Pryce, who said: “Tuesday, there’ll be a message at the drop. From Hercules. You’ll turn it over—not the physical message, you’ll destroy that—to the others. Offer to meet with Hercules yourself. They’ll tell you to bring him someplace. Or they’ll tell you to go there alone, but they’ll be there too.”

“They might—”

“No they won’t,” Pryce cut him off. “They’ll have to find out. It’s too close. Now, what you need to do is spend the next couple of hours together. Get familiar with each other, like I told you. This will be the last chance you get.”

“How about a beer?” Lothar said to Herk, standing up.

“Okay, brother,” Herk replied, following him out of the room.

We sat in silence until I heard the sound of a door close somewhere to my right. Then I leaned forward and dropped my best card on the table, my one shot at getting Crystal Beth out of the line of fire.

“We don’t have to do this anymore,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The threat to you is Lothar getting busted when he comes in on the divorce thing, right?” I asked, keeping my voice so low Pryce had to twist his head to turn his ear toward me—no chance they could hear us in the next room. “But if we just wait,” I told him, “it all fixes itself. And I can get that done now.”

“Explain,” he said, voice even lower than mine.

“The woman doesn’t go in. I don’t care if it’s all set up or not. She just doesn’t go in. Not now. Her lawyer gets an adjournment, whatever. How long is this gonna take, anyway? Another two weeks, three weeks?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t know the date that they intend to—”

“Whatever. It won’t be long, you know that much. All we have to do is wait. Why do we need all this undercover stuff now? I can guarantee you the woman will wait. And that’s all she has to do. When this thing they’re planning goes down, then she makes her move. And Lothar, he just defaults—doesn’t show up at all. They can issue all the warrants they want for him—he’ll be underground, right? Gone for good. And that’ll get her everything she wants. Once he disappears, she’s free.”

“How can you make that guarantee? You don’t even know the woman’s name,” he said, watching my face. “Or, even if you do, you don’t know where she is. You may control that . . . other woman, but not the one that