scrolling.
‘It’s from Docherty,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t dumped me yet.’
Then she read and scrolled, read and scrolled. I counted fifteen-second intervals in my head, and imagined the GPS chip sending out a little burst of data for every one of them, saying
‘You were right. The dead guys under the FDR Drive were Lila Hoth’s crew. I guess the 17th called everyone in the phone book and checked out the only one that didn’t answer. They broke into their offices and found billing records made out to Lila Hoth, in care of the Four Seasons Hotel.’
I didn’t answer.
She said, ‘But here’s the thing. Those billing records go back three months, not three days. And the other data is in. Homeland Security has no record of two women called Hoth ever entering the country. Certainly not three days ago on British Airways. And Susan Mark never called London, either from work or from home.’
FORTY-EIGHT
Use the phone and move on immediately, was the rule. We took Broadway north. Taxis and police cruisers sped past us. Headlight beams washed over us. We hustled as far as Astor Place and then ducked underground and burned three of my four remaining Metrocard rides on the 6 train north. Where it all began. Another bright new R142A car. It was eleven in the evening and there were eighteen passengers in addition to ourselves. We got three spaces together on one of the eight-person benches. Lee sat in the middle. On her left Jake half turned and bent his head, ready for quiet talk. On her right I did the same thing. Jake asked, ‘So which is it? Are the Hoths phony or is the government already covering its ass by erasing data?’
Lee said, ‘Could be either.’
I said, ‘The Hoths are phony.’
‘You think or you know?’
‘It was too easy at Penn station.’
‘How?’
‘They sucked me in. Leonid let me see him. He was wearing a jacket that looked bright orange under the lights. It was practically the same as the safety vests I saw some railroad workers wearing. It drew my eye. I was supposed to notice it. Then he let me hit him. Because I was supposed to take the phone from him and find out about the Four Seasons. They manipulated me. There are layers upon layers here. They needed to talk to me but they didn’t want me to see everything. They didn’t want to show their whole hand. So they set up a way in for me. They lured me to the hotel and tried a sweet, easy approach. Just one guy acting incompetent at the railroad station, and then the soft soap. They even had a back-up plan, which was coming to the precinct house and making the missing persons report. Either way I would have showed up eventually.’
‘What do they want from you?’
‘Susan’s information.’
‘Which was what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Not journalists,’ I said. ‘I guess I was wrong about that. Lila was acting one thing, acting another thing. I don’t know what she really is.’
‘Is the old woman for real?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where are they now? They bailed out of the hotel.’
‘They always had somewhere else. They had two tracks running. Public consumption, and private business. So I don’t know where they are now. Their alternative place, obviously. Some long-term secure location, I guess. Here in the city, probably. Maybe a town house. Because they have a crew with them. People of their own. Bad people. Those private guys were right. How bad, they just found out the hard way. With the hammers.’
Lee said, ‘So the Hoths are covering their asses too.’
‘Wrong tense,’ I said. ‘They already covered them. They’re hunkered down someplace and anyone who might have known where is dead.’
The train stopped at 23rd Street. The doors opened. No one got on. No one got off. Theresa Lee stared at the floor. Jacob Mark looked across her at me and said, ‘If Homeland Security can’t even track Lila Hoth into the country, then they also can’t tell if she went to California or not. Which means it could have been her, with Peter.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It could have been.’
The doors closed. The train moved on.
Theresa Lee looked up from the floor and turned to me and said, ‘What happened to those four guys was our fault, you know. With the hammers. Your fault, specifically. You told Lila you knew about them. You turned them into a loose end.’
I said, ‘Thanks for pointing that out.’
The train rattled into the 28th Street station.
We got out at 33rd Street. None of us wanted to hit Grand Central. Too many cops, and in Jacob Mark’s case at least, maybe too many negative associations. At street level Park Avenue was busy. Two cop cars came past in the first minute. To the west was the Empire State Building. Too many cops. We doubled back south and took a quiet cross street towards Madison. I was feeling pretty good by then. I had spent sixteen hours out of seventeen fast asleep, and I was full of food and fluids. But Lee and Jake looked beat. They had nowhere to go and weren’t used to it. Obviously they couldn’t go home. They couldn’t go to friends, either. We had to assume all their known haunts were being watched.
Lee said, ‘We need a plan.’
I liked the look of the block we were on. New York has hundreds of separate micro-neighbourhoods. Flavour and nuance vary street by street, sometimes building by building. Park and Madison in the high 20s are slightly seedy. The cross streets are a little down at heel. Maybe once they were high end, and maybe one day they will be again, but right then they were comfortable. We hid out under sidewalk scaffolding for a spell and watched drunks staggering home from bars, and people from nearby apartment houses walking their dogs before bed. We saw a guy with a Great Dane the size of a pony, and a girl with a rat terrier the size of the Great Dane’s head. Overall I preferred the rat terrier. Small dog, big personality. That little guy thought he was boss of the world. We waited until the clock passed midnight and then we snaked back and forth west and east until we found the right kind of hotel. It was a narrow place with an out-of-date illuminated sign backed with low-wattage bulbs. It looked a little run down and grimy. Smaller than I would have liked. Bigger places work much better. Greater chance of empty rooms, more anonymity, less supervision. But all in all the place we were looking at was feasible.
It was a decent target for the fifty dollar trick. Or maybe we could even get away with forty.
In the end we had to bid our way up to seventy-five, probably because the night porter suspected we had some kind of a sexual threesome in mind. Maybe because of the way Theresa Lee was looking at me. There was something going on in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what. But clearly the night porter saw an opportunity to raise his rate. The room he gave us was small. It was at the back of the building and had twin beds and a narrow window on an air shaft. It was never going to show up in a tourist brochure, but it felt secure and clandestine and I could tell that Lee and Jake felt good about spending the night in it. But equally I could tell that neither one of them felt good about spending two nights in it, or five, or ten.
