hundreds of American citizens in his business—”
“I haven’t claimed Hasul’s a villain,” Noriko said. “I never told you I’m convinced a crime’s been committed by his company, or that it would be on his shoulders if it has. What I’ve said is I’ve noticed some things that make me curious, and then noticed other things that raise questions and might or might not be related, and want to see how they fall into place. Or don’t fall into place. My office is working this. But the whole bit about an absent husband… I’ll keep my eyes open for dope on him. Anything turns up, you’ll know about it. If not, you’ll also know. Why let it sidetrack us, or worse, trigger alarms?”
Megan laced her fingers together on the table.
“Top executives. Members of the sales force. People at every level of every division,” she said. “Those are your words, Noriko. Describing the sort of employees who could lead a company into trouble, or be led into it. And Patrick Sullivan is a salesman in a
Noriko looked at her without answering, a stony expression on her face.
Megan returned the stare, her hands still folded.
“I’m making Sullivan a priority of your investigation,” she said. Then surprised herself, as well as everyone else, by adding, “We’ll be sending a team to help you cover it.”
And that was when Sword’s operatives truly became involved, though Megan could never for a moment have imagined where her decision would lead them.
Avram emerged from beneath the neon glitz and computer animations of the marquee subway entrance at the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, walked a block north to 43rd past more flashing electronic graphics, and then turned west toward Eighth Avenue. Clinton, they called this section nowadays. Sparkling, tidy, swarmed with tourists. The MTV studios, ESPN Zone, they were all within a block or two of here. He felt as if he’d arrived at a giant outdoor theme park for out-of-towners. The corporate pitchman’s idea of urban redevelopment. But where had their giant broom swept reality in its mingled beauty and ugliness?
When Avram was a boy the area had still commonly been known as Hell’s Kitchen, and he’d been warned to steer wide and clear of the
On a late spring day when he was seventeen, Avram and some friends had cut classes at school, drunk two six-packs of beer in Central Park, and gotten the idea to go to the peepshows. He didn’t recall who’d proposed it. One of the other boys had boasted of having done it before with an older friend or cousin, and had given graphic descriptions of his experience. Maybe the notion had arisen in all the rest as they’d listened. At any rate, it had exerted an irresistible pull on them, and they had hopped the train downtown, jittery and eager. Imagine what Rabbi Zeimann, the principal at their yeshiva, would say, somebody had commented. Hope we don’t run into him, another snorted. There had been a lot of nervous talk.
The place was on Broadway or Seventh, and Avram had seen smut magazines on wall racks inside the entrance. A potbellied man sold him four tokens for a dollar. Then, in back, there were curtained booths where a slotted token played a minute-long snippet of some pornographic film reel on a small viewscreen. The air had smelled of Lysol and something sour the disinfectant couldn’t cover. Avram had parted ways with his friends as each went into a different booth. Farther toward the rear were more booths with doors instead of curtains. Two tokens made a metal partition rise from a window to offer a glimpse of a nude woman gyrating on a semicircular stage. The music was loud and throbbing. The woman would go around from window to window. The panel wouldn’t stay up long before it fell and you’d have to insert another couple of tokens. If a window panel stayed up longer than the others, she would spend some extra time in front of it.
Avram had used up the tokens he’d bought, and then hurried back to the counter for more, spending the rest of the ten or twelve dollars he’d originally had with him. The woman had been black, with large pendulous breasts. She had smiled, licked her lips, run her hands over herself, a vulgar burlesque with a two-minute expiration, renewable with another trip to the fat man outside, the dropping in of more tokens. His arousal rising over his mixed embarrassment and disgust over the smell of the place, Avram hadn’t cared that she in all likelihood could not even see his face through the glass. Once, he’d noticed the hardened glaze in her eyes and quickly looked away from them, concentrating on her flesh, her body. Thinking it was beautiful, no matter what, beautiful.
There, in that darkened stall, taking rapid breaths of its sour air, Avram had first seen a naked woman. And he’d never forgotten it. How could he? It was one of those crossings a man remembered. The beauty of her body, her sham lust, they remained inseparable in his mind, bound together without contradiction. Granted, it had been many, many yesterdays ago. When Avram was a teenager. But he could not say that anything he’d learned since would make him believe they were mutually exclusive.
Now Avram snapped from his thoughts to discover he’d come to the Charleston Hotel down the street from the Port Authority. Among the few welfare hotels left in this neighborhood, it was a tall old building with some closet-sized private rooms fixed up to lure budget travelers… and hurried couples whose only interest was immediate availability and a bed, Avram surmised. The long broom still had some work to do.
He entered, crossed the lobby to the registration desk, set down his briefcase, and caught the attention of a drowsyeyed man seated behind it.
“I’m Mr. Cartwright,” he said, giving the name Lathrop had told him to use. “You’ll have a reservation for me.”
Barely looking at him, the clerk rolled his chair over to his computer, lifted his hands to its keyboard. It seemed a heavy task.
“Here it is.” He tapped some keys and scanned what had come up on the monitor. “Cash payment made in full last night, I see?”
“That’s right.”
“Then you’re set.” The clerk parted ways with his chair, got Avram’s card key. “Room seven-oh-nine. ’Course that’s on the seventh floor.”
“Of course.”
“When you leave the elevator, hook a right, your door’s the last one at the end of the hall.”
“Thank you.” Avram took the card key and hefted his briefcase from where he’d set it on the carpet beside him. “A visitor should be coming to see me any minute.”
The clerk gave a sluggish nod without turning his eyes toward Avram’s face.
“Sure, whatever,” he said. “Long as he, she, or it’s of legal age.”
Minutes after he entered the hotel room, Avram heard a knock at the door, opened its peephole, saw Lathrop outside, and let him in.
The room was squarish with a double bed, a combination dresser/night stand, and a single straightbacked chair against the wall. Lathrop swept past Avram with a flap of his outback coat, going straight to a window above the dresser.
“You’ve found some choice accommodations.” Avram said to his back. “Only the best for us, no?”
“The staffers mind their business.”
“Provided we’re consenting adults.”
Lathrop said nothing. He reached over the dresser to part the curtains, opened the blinds, and glanced out through its slats, his eyes darting from side to side. After a moment he drew the curtains back across the window, leaving the blinds as they were.
“You’ll be able to see okay in here,” he said, and turned toward Avram. “Plenty of sunlight.”
Avram nodded.
“Northern exposure,” he said. “Very considerate.”
Lathrop moved the chair over to the nightstand, sat facing the bed, and produced a flat black gem case from inside his coat.
“Come on, take a look,” he said. “Neither of us has all day.”
Avram settled onto the edge of the bed opposite him, hoping his anticipation wasn’t too close to the surface.
“So,” he said. “I’d imagine what you have to show me must be very remarkable… worth your demanding this
