Silence

Poliakoff, please.”

30

PAUL INCHED the rental car along the freeway in the heavy traffic toward the cluster of tall buildings downtown. It was only four o’clock, but it seemed that rush hour started earlier and earlier. Paul turned his head away from the road in front of him and looked at Sylvie. She was quiet today. He wished that the reason she was not giving him an argument was that she understood the uncomfortable situation he was in, and not because she was thinking of all the ways he had disappointed her. He was almost sure that she was saving up the complete list of his offenses and trying out in her mind different ways of saying them so they would inflict the maximum pain. It was possible—even easy—for Paul to ignore the opinions of most people, but he was vulnerable to Sylvie. After being on the most intimate terms with a woman for fifteen years, it was difficult for a man to tell himself she didn’t know much about him.

He tried to distract her, to get her to think about the present, the things they had to accomplish. “At least we’ve had a chance to stop at home and get some sleep. We’re coming rested and prepared. This could even turn out to be easy.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not blaming you for this. You’ll still get laid.”

He laughed, more relieved than amused. She could be uncomfortably perceptive about the ridiculousness of the relationship between men and women. He tried to make the feeling of affection grow. “Well, I’m sorry anyway. It’s not what I would have chosen to do. I’d like to be taking you to the airport to get on the plane to Madrid—that Air France/Delta flight that leaves around dinnertime.”

She stared at him in silence for a couple of seconds. “I know.”

“Maybe we can do it as soon as this is over.”

“Maybe we’ll have to.”

“Don’t worry. The situation may not be good, but we’re good.”

She said carefully, “I’ll do my best to make this whole thing end the way it’s supposed to. But after this, we’ll have to be more careful what we agree to do, and for whom.”

“We will. This is a special case. Densmore—”

“Is what I’m worried about,” she said sharply. “I understand how we got into the position of having to finish this job for him. But the thing to remember is that he didn’t tell us the truth.”

“He’s paying us twice the original price.”

“He’s making us do something we don’t want to do.” She stared at Paul again, her eyes not moving from his face. “Isn’t he?”

Paul saw the trap and was almost grateful to her for placing it in the open where he could see it. “Well, yeah.”

“I’m not going to be Densmore’s underling.”

“When this job is done and we collect our pay, it will be the last thing we do for Densmore.”

“I hope so.”

“It will be.” He knew from her tone that she would remember and hold him to it. He didn’t like losing Densmore, who had been the perfect middleman for eight years. Densmore had kept the clients at a distance from Paul and Sylvie, collected their money, and kept them frightened so that none of them had ever talked to the police. It was a shame to have to lose Densmore, but Sylvie had a point. Densmore had begun to presume too much. This time he had told the client who Paul and Sylvie were. His excuse was that this was a client who would never talk to the police under any circumstances. But the long-standing arrangement was not that the client wouldn’t talk, it was that the client couldn’t, because he didn’t know anything.

Paul drove along Temple Street past the fortresslike structure of Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral and then the Superior Court building. He could see the gleaming stainless-steel curves of the Disney Concert Hall. “All right. Here it comes,” he said. “That building coming up is 210 West Temple. The offices of the Assistant DAs working on this case are upstairs, but what we want to study are the approaches and openings.”

“I am.” Sylvie looked carefully at everything she could see from the car. It was difficult to assess the security of a building like this one, because the whole neighborhood was part of the court complex. The court buildings were full of bailiffs and marshals and deputy sheriffs. There were guards in all the lobbies to be sure nobody came in armed, but there were probably other security people who weren’t visible. The biggest danger would be that there were so many armed cops coming and going on various kinds of legal business in a normal day, a lot of them in plainclothes. The building slid by her window, and Paul turned at the next corner.

She could see the twenty-story white rectangle of the New Otani Hotel a block away. It was a feature of the downtown skyline. Downtown was a difficult place to do the kind of business that Paul and Sylvie did. During the day it was lively, and there were lots of pedestrians around the courthouse complex, the cathedral, the Museum of Modern Art, the Disney Concert Hall, the plaza outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. But an hour after the evening’s events, very few people remained. The big hotels—the Biltmore, the Bonaventure, the Otani—were full, but no life spilled out into the surrounding blocks. People parked underground or in structures, so there weren’t even many cars on the streets. Few people lived down here. There were a few new condominiums and a lot of talk about building lofts in old buildings, but she had not seen any change yet.

She sat quietly while Paul drove up to the entrance of the New Otani. A bellman appeared with a cart and lifted their luggage onto it, and the parking attendant took their car away. She walked inside with Paul, and sat on a couch in the lobby while he checked in.

Sylvie had made the reservations using her best secretary voice, and gotten them the special Attorney Rate. The hotel Web site promised them accommodations within walking distance of state and federal courts, “affording your legal team a productive workplace” and “war rooms” that included conference tables, fax machines, workstations, copiers, and shredders. Today Paul was attorney Peter Harkin, and Sylvie was his wife, Sarah Harkin. They were from Charlotte, North Carolina. Peter had a distinguished-looking head of graying hair and a matching mustache, and Sarah had blond hair of the type that was just light enough to look as though its color had a genetic component.

Sylvie had selected their clothes and wigs to be especially misleading from above, where most surveillance cameras were mounted. Her blond wig was already feeling tight and uncomfortable. It reminded her of a movie Cherie Will had made called Blond-sided. She and three other actresses had all supposedly been cheerleaders who arrived from Texas for the Rose Bowl and missed their team bus. She and two of the others had needed to wear blond wigs, and she had hated it. Whenever Cherie had an idea for a movie, it didn’t matter if it meant actors had to be run over by a truck, as long as it was quick and cheap.

Sylvie distracted herself by looking at the lobby. The space was large, with lots of long angles and a mezzanine above, all in beige. There was a lounge that consisted of a long marble counter with tables and chairs along both sides of it, and at either end, an enormous arrangement of flowers exploding upward in various tones of bright red.

Paul stepped away from the front desk and Sylvie joined him on the way to the elevator. She said, “Any problem about the room?”

He shook his head. Then the bellman caught up with them and they had to wait to speak again. She had specified that the room be on the north side, high enough for a good view of the city. She had not dared to be more specific than that. There were over four hundred rooms in the hotel, so at there were at least eighty that would do.

They rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor. Paul and Sylvie both followed the bellman, looking down at the carpet as they walked, as though they were trying to be sure their luggage didn’t fall off the bellman’s cart. This kept their faces away from the lenses of the surveillance cameras in the hallway. At their room, the bellman unlocked the door and they had to endure his standard tour. When he began his recitation of the hotel’s amenities, Paul put a bill in his hand and said, “Thanks, but we’ve been here before.” He left.

Sylvie locked the door, then stood beside it and listened. When she heard the sound of the luggage cart clanking off the carpet onto the bare floor of the elevator, she took off the blond wig, then the hairnet, and shook out her own hair. “Oh, man,” she muttered. “Feel my neck.”

Paul touched the nape of her neck dutifully. “Sweaty.” He kissed it.