you. Why don't you help me make it not a wasted trip, okay?”
There was a pause, and Ben could imagine Alex fuming. Yeah, well, tough shit if he didn't like hearing the truth.
“Yeah, okay,” Alex said.
“One more thing. Lock the connecting door and leave all the lights on. And leave the closet and bathroom doors open.”
“Anything else?” Alex said. Ben heard the sarcasm and tried not to let it irritate him. Was it really so hard to understand that Ben didn't want to come back to a room he couldn't easily clear?
“Why don't you just acknowledge that you'll do it,” he said.
“Yeah, I'll do it.”
“Good. I'll call when I'm back.” He clicked off and pocketed the phone.
A minute later, Sarah walked out of Pearl's and starting heading southeast on Columbus, back the way she had come.
Ben opened one of the casement windows. “Sarah,” he called.
She stopped and looked around. A bus went by and for a moment she was gone in a roar of diesel.
“Sarah,” he called again. “Across the street. In the window.”
She looked up and saw him. She gave a small wave of acknowledgment.
He looked around again and detected no problems. What she was up to? Keep him at Pearl's while someone else visited Alex? Could be that. Well, Alex was safe for the time being.
She couldn't be here to do him herself. No, it didn't figure. He could imagine her being an access agent, something like that, but not a trigger puller. He didn't read her that way.
Still, if he was wrong, the penalty for missing would be high.
“Come on over,” he said.
21
INSUBSTANTIAL
Alex had yawned three times in an hour, and the last two had been infectious. Sarah looked at him and said, “We ‘re going in circles. I say we call it a night.”
Alex fixed her with that unreadable gaze of his, then something in his face seemed to soften. “You're right,” he said. “We need to come at it from a different direction to see what we're missing, and that's not going to happen without a break. Are you hungry?”
She had thought he might ask, and was ready for the question. “No, I'm okay. I'm just going to go out and buy a change of clothes. I guess I'll see you in the morning?”
He nodded. “Seven o'clock too early?”
“No, it's good. I doubt I'm going to sleep well anyway. This is all too crazy.”
She went to her room through the common doorway, stripped off her clothes, and got in the shower. Something had been building up in her all day, and if she didn't deal with it, she thought she might explode.
The day had started out weird and then had become downright frightening. Her files missing. The strange call from Alex. Then this guy in his office who she could tell was dangerous in some way, who turned out to be Alex's brother. When they'd told her what had been happening, she was concerned, but not really frightened. Looking back, she realized her relative sangfroid was the result of a lack of understanding. She didn't really believe she was in danger. Yes, she understood the police probably couldn't help, but she had agreed to go with Alex and Ben and try to figure out what was so valuable or dangerous about Obsidian almost as a lark, a kind of adventure, a break in the routine. And then Ben had come back to the car outside the Four Seasons with blood on his face, and she'd seen the report on the news, and she realized that Alex's brother was someone who could kill two men-gangsters, it seemed-with about the same level of difficulty most people faced when pouring a cup of coffee. Could kill? He had killed them. There was no other explanation.
And what was she doing now? Had he made her, or had she made herself, in any way an accessory? She'd taken criminal law her second year of law school and had purged her mind of all of it about five minutes after graduating and taking the bar exam. She didn't know how bad this might be for her legally. And legally might be the least of it.
She knew he didn't trust her. And the way he looked at her, the way he'd casually walked over to see what was on her laptop screen… was he afraid she would freak out, go to the police? And what would he do if she did?
There were two ways she could deal with it. She could keep her mouth shut and hope it would somehow be all right. Or she could confront the problem directly.
She left the hotel and headed north on Stockton. The night was cold and clear and a crescent moon hung low in the sky. Chinatown was quiet, most of the stores closed now, hidden behind corrugated metal gates. Some of the gates had doorways, a few of which were open, and through them she caught glimpses of families eating dinner and friends playing cards, caught the smells of cooking rice and sweet pastries and the sound of laughter and conversations in a musical language she wished she could understand. Some of the doorways revealed steep, narrow staircases that ascended beyond the angle of her vision, and she wondered what rooms they led to, who traversed them every morning and night, what lives were lived in the secret spaces at their top.
She passed a street mural celebrating the Chinese railroad workers. Paper lanterns set at its base flickered, shivering in the breeze. She turned right on Pacific, looking up at the old wooden buildings, their balconies painted green and red, the eaves turned up in the Asian fashion. An old man was closing up his store at the front of one of them, an herb shop whose windows displayed glass jars filled with ghastly specimens that might have come from the earth or the sea or somewhere else entirely. He waved and smiled toothlessly at her as she passed, and she nodded and smiled in return.
She emerged onto Columbus, and the quiet of the somnolent Chinatown evening ended abruptly with the traffic and neon of North Beach. There it was, Jazz at Pearl's, a first-floor club with windows on the street and a doorway under a red awning. She crossed the street and went inside, explaining to the doorman that she had no reservation but she was supposed to meet a friend here… could she just take a quick look around?
It was a small place, maybe thirty people, soft carpet and red-hued lighting and small round tables covered in white linen. A voluptuous black woman was singing “Need My Sugar” with piano and bass accompaniment, and the audience was toe-tapping heartily along with it. Ben wasn't there. Maybe he was in the bathroom? She waited five minutes and then gave up, surprised at how disappointed she was. If she didn't confront him, if she didn't get past this, she didn't know how the hell she was going to sleep tonight.
She had just turned left onto Columbus, thinking maybe she'd grab a bite at Cafe Prague before finding a Walgreens or something else open at night where she could pick up a change of underwear and a few other items, when someone called her name. She looked around, seeing no one. A bus went by. Had she imagined it? And then she heard it again. She looked up and saw Ben, in the second-story window of Vesuvio. “Come on over,” he called.
She felt an odd burst of pleasure that she couldn't quite placeexcitement? relief?-and crossed the street.
She went inside and immediately liked it. She supposed it was weird that she lived in San Francisco and had never been inside Vesuvio, but she'd never been to Alcatraz, either. It was one of those places, well known to tourists, you figured would always be there and you'd get to it eventually. Not that she'd been in too much of a hurry. In her imagination, the place was more of a Beat museum than a real bar someone might want to go to for a drink, but the atmosphere struck her immediately as authentic and she was glad she'd been wrong.
She went up to the second floor and walked alongside the balcony overlooking the bar below. The ceiling was close overhead, maybe seven feet, and painted dark brown or black. There was some light from the street but other than that it was so dim she found herself squinting. A few indistinct groups were talking and laughing around tables in booths. She made out Ben's shape against a window, silhouetted by the neon sign of the Tosca Cafe across the street. He was sitting away from his table, his feet planted on the floor. There was something
