Pacific beyond.
And then he realized what was bugging him about being in San Francisco. When he used to come here as a kid, the visits were always fun and exciting, full of enthusiasm and innocence and stupid optimism. He had grown up down the Peninsula, where Alex still lived, and being back there hadn't strummed any contrasting emotional chords, maybe because he was somehow hardened to it. San Francisco, it seemed, was different. He knew he'd changed since he'd left the Bay Area; that had been almost twenty years earlier, and who doesn't change in twenty years? And with the shit he'd seen and done, he knew he'd changed more than most. But being back here made him realize the person he used to be hadn't just changed, he was actually gone, and this was the first time he had paused to consider whether that long-ago person's disappearance might be grounds for sadness, maybe even for grief.
He cleared his throat and spat. It was stupid to come back here. Well, Alex hadn't left him much choice, had he?
He headed back down Kearny and then over to Molinari's, an Italian deli he used to like at the corner of Columbus and Vallejo. He bought sandwiches and headed back to the hotel, checking in at the front desk on the way. Still no calls. But that didn't prove anything. The girl was smart, he could see that, and she might even have figured he would check at the desk to see if she'd used the room phone. If she wanted to contact someone, she'd use the computer.
Alex let him in. He saw the bag and said, “That smells great. We were just talking about lunch-can't believe it's already almost three.”
Ben handed out the sandwiches. Sarah asked, “Molinari's?” When Ben nodded, she said, “Good place.”
He didn't like that she knew the city. It gave her an advantage. “Any progress?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Alex said.
They ate sitting on the floor. When they were done, Ben said, “Sarah, do you mind if I lie down in your room? I need to shut my eyes for a while, and the two of you will be talking in here.”
“It's fine,” she told him.
He grabbed his bag and walked through the common doorway, closing and locking the door behind him. He'd almost been hoping she would protest, or say she had to go in there first, or do some other thing that would bolster his suspicions. But nothing. Still, he took the opportunity to quickly and quietly search the room. Again, nothing.
He thought he would nap for maybe twenty minutes, but when he woke he realized from the weak light coming through the window that he'd slept much longer than that. He checked his watch. Damn, it was almost six o'clock. He'd slept nearly three hours. Still on Istanbul time, he supposed. But he was glad he'd been out so long. He'd obviously needed it.
He opened the common door and looked in. Alex and Sarah were still in front of their computers. He walked in rubbing his face. “Anything?”
Alex shook his head. “No. Nothing yet.”
Ben nodded and walked into the bathroom. He showered and changed into an oxford-cloth shirt. Before leaving the bathroom, he hid a key card for the extra room under a drawer. He would call Alex and tell him about it later, when the girl couldn't overhear.
He walked back out into the room. They were still working the computers. Good.
“There's an eight o'clock show at Jazz at Pearl's on Columbus,” he told them. “I'm going to catch it and I'll be back after.”
“Since when do you listen to jazz?” Alex said.
Ben looked at him. “Since when was the last time we talked about music?”
He covered the half mile to the corner of Columbus and Broadway on foot in fifteen minutes. He could have made it in five, but he made a few aggressive moves on the way to ensure he was alone. He didn't go into the club. The truth was, he didn't know the first thing about jazz, Kim Nalley, or anything else, and if Sarah, who increasingly struck him as an astute observer, had probed even a little, she might have found some suspicious lack of depth in his musical knowledge. But she didn't. He was good to go.
He crossed the street, his back to the club, and went into Vesuvio, the venerable Beat generation bar next door to an equally famous Beat landmark, City Lights Bookstore. Vesuvio was one of the bars Ben and his friends had occasionally managed to sneak into back in high school. He looked around and had the weird sense he had gone backward in time. The place hadn't changed at all-the long wooden bar and pleasantly cramped tables; subdued chandelier and sconce lighting that made you feel you were entering a secret cave; Beat memorabilia plastered on walls the color of tobacco smoke. The air smelled faintly of beer and coffee. It felt like twenty years ago, and for a moment the contrast with the present was almost paralyzing.
A grizzled old man in a gray tweed coat sat at one of the booths, nursing a beer and reading a newspaper and looking as permanent a fixture as the tiled floor and the accumulated bottles behind the bar. A jazz number was playing in the background, piano and sax mixing with the disparate chords of conversation from the people sitting at the bar and surrounding tables. Ben walked past them, then took the narrow staircase in back to the dimly lit second floor.
He was in luck. One of the window seats looking out over Kerouac Alley and Columbus was open. He sat down and had a perfect view of the double doors and red awning that marked the entrance to Pearl's. He checked his watch. Seven o'clock. If something were going to happen, it would happen in the next hour, two at the most. A waitress came by and he ordered a coffee.
If the girl were tied into this, she would let someone know where Ben could be found. Unless Ben had killed all of them, which he doubted, he expected they still had local resources. If he was right, one or maybe two men were going to show up at Pearl's. If it were two, one would wait outside to ensure the target could at best spot only one of them. If it were one, he would of course go in alone, and then emerge after confirming Ben wasn't inside. If they showed, Ben would move out and follow them, and improvise from there.
What he was looking for was something that would be hard to articulate, but-what was it that Supreme Court Justice had said about obscenity?-he would know it when he saw it. The men would be alert and aware of their environment. Their expressions would be deliberately casual, but their postures would be possessed of purpose. Their clothes would be dark, bland, and without any identifying logos. There would be a look in their eyes he would recognize even from across the street. It was the same look in his.
He sipped his coffee, watching car traffic flowing up and down Columbus, noting pedestrians. The sky went from indigo to black; the street, from daylight to neon. Around seven-thirty, Pearl's started filling up, mostly with casually but well dressed couples who were of no interest to him. Eight o'clock came and went, but he didn't see what he was looking for. Well, he'd wait until the end of the show. If nothing happened, it wouldn't prove anything. The girl might still be involved; maybe her people just couldn't mobilize fast enough. After all, they'd lost two players that morning. It was possible they were having trouble putting together a full team now.
At a little before eight-thirty, he saw an attractive, dark-haired woman in a waist-length black leather jacket coming up Columbus. He looked closer. Son of a bitch, it was Sarah.
He watched her go into Pearl's, not knowing what to make of it. It didn't make sense. He could imagine her being an insider on whatever kind of operation Alex had gotten himself into trouble with, but not being an active part of it. He looked up and down the street, but saw nothing out of place.
There wasn't much time to think. He would just have to make it up as he went along.
He took out his cell phone and called Alex. “Just checking in,” he said. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Nothing new. No breakthroughs. We just called it a night. Sarah went out to buy a change of clothes.”
She hadn't told Alex she was going to Pearl's. He wasn't sure what that meant.
“I want you to do something,” Ben said, watching the double doors through the glass. “There's a room key under the bottom drawer in the bathroom. It's for an extra room I took-758, right across the hall. Use it. Don't stay where you are.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“No, everything's copacetic. I'm just being sensible, or you can call it paranoid if you want. I just don't want you to be where she knows you'll be until I'm back.”
“Ben, I work with her. I know her. She's not mixed up in this.”
“Yeah, everyone thinks they know everyone. But you know what, I flew halfway around the world to help
