Floating City (18 page)

“Nevertheless, I want you to set up a meeting with Delacroix. It’s critical that I speak with him.”

Seiko, drawing closer to him, bowed her head; he recognized in that gesture the emblem of her acquiescence.

Deplaning at Washington’s National Airport, Croaker watched Margarite head directly for a limo with darkened windows. A uniformed driver had the rear curbside door open for her. He touched the bill of his cap as she approached, slammed the door after her, then hustled around and got in behind the wheel. By this time, Croaker was already at the taxi stand and was using his federal badge to get himself to the first taxi in line.

As Margarite’s limo pulled out from the curb, he tapped the cabby on the shoulder and, shoving the badge into the man’s face, said, “Keep that limo in sight, okay? There’s a fifty in it for you.”

“For that kind of money you’re the boss,” the cabby said, merging with the airport traffic outflow.

Croaker leaned forward, peering through the windshield. He jotted down the limo’s license number, noting that it wasn’t a rental. He thought that was curious; he had been here with Margarite before and he had expected her to pick up a rental car at the airport.

This unscheduled trip to Washington was the first blip in her otherwise methodical and arduous program. It interested him for a number of reasons. She had made it without Tony D., who would otherwise have been needed to front for her with those who assumed he was running Dominic’s operation. Also, recalling Dominic Goldoni’s federal file, he had pulled up the fact that the dead don had made periodic trips to D.C. Not that that was in itself suspicious. Quite the contrary. With Dominic’s many deeply entrenched relationships with the country’s political heavyweights, it would have been odd had he not made frequent trips to Washington. Still, the coincidence, imagined or not, lodged in Croaker’s cop’s intuition like a stone in a boot.

As his taxi dodged through the heavy traffic on Washington Memorial Parkway, he stared out at the flat gray Potomac and tried to dredge up the places Dominic had frequented while here. No doubt the don had been aware that he was being followed, so he’d known better than to meet with anyone who would trigger the feds’ suspicions if he or she was investigated. Still, for many years Dominic had proved himself far more clever than the feds. Who knows what they might have missed?

He counted off the places he remembered: Dom’s elegant brick house in Kalorama; his favorite watering hole, the Occidental Grill; the Museum of History and Technology; the Washington Hotel; Moniker’s, a businessmen’s show-girl bar where he picked up his one-night stands; a club called Omega in Georgetown; the restaurants where he took them: Villa D’Este in Alexandria’s Old Town, Veneziano and Blue Angel Cafe in Adams Morgan; the private tennis courts in McLean belonging to the senior senator from Texas; the Belle Rive Country Club in Chevy Chase where he golfed with legislators, international bankers, and lobbyists. Did any of these have a significance other than the one Dominic had wanted his federal tails to see? Perhaps Margarite held the answer.

Croaker fully expected her first stop to be her stepmother’s Georgian mansion in the rolling hills of the Potomac horse country. He had been to Renata Loti’s house with Margarite and had learned that she was Dominic’s mother. She was also highly connected to the complex machine of the government. But, to his surprise, Margarite’s limo headed into town.

It was early evening, and the lights were already on along the parkway and the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Clouds had gathered as ominously as the rush-hour traffic, and the smell of incipient ozone was in the air. A light sooty rain was falling on the shoulders of the State Department joggers as they pounded the concrete footpaths along the bridge. One heavyset man stood, winded, hands on his knees, bent over, head down. Poor bastard, Croaker thought, fighting the urge to give him a lift back to the office. Having had to battle bureaucrats almost all his adult life, Croaker had never had anything but contempt for them, but today he would gladly have changed places with even this oxygen-starved wretch.

He was trying not to think of Bad Clams Leonforte in whose service he now reluctantly toiled like a sinner in the depths of hell. Bad enough he was working against the woman he loved; now he was in the employ of her archrival, a madman who would like nothing better than to see Margarite and Tony D. dead. And he had made it all too clear that he wanted to use Croaker to get that done.

Margarite’s driver dropped her bags off at the Hay-Adams, then took her to have drinks at the Washington Hotel with Senator Graves of Indiana. Fifty minutes later, she met Renata for dinner at a hot new spot on Pennsylvania Avenue. Hot in D.C. meant that it was a favorite of the new administration. Scanning the menu while the women chatted over martinis, Croaker supposed they could run up a bill of over $250. He gave the cabby a hundred-dollar bill, along with a ten-spot, and sent him off for some fast food. Fifteen minutes later Croaker was wolfing down something that might have been a double cheeseburger, though he couldn’t be sure. His stomach started to hurt almost immediately. Nicholas was right, he thought. How did people eat this crap as a steady diet? Next time, he vowed to duck into a sushi bar.

Margarite’s dinner with her stepmother took just over two hours. Then she climbed back in the waiting limo and was off.

“How long you think you’ll need me?” the cabby said over his shoulder. “My shift ends in about an hour.”

“Hard to say.” Croaker handed him another $100.

“Thanks. I’d better tell the dispatcher to phone my wife and tell her to put my dinner in the freezer.”

They drove through the city, on the limo’s tail. The rain was falling harder now, and the wind had picked up, gusting down the side avenues, shaking the trees like admonishing fingers. Croaker was trying to figure ways to nail Bad Clams without finding Margarite smeared all over the New Jersey badlands. Right now, on that score his mind was a blank.

“Not the greatest part of town your friend is going to.”

The cabby’s nervous voice broke Croaker’s train of thought. He could see that they were indeed in a sleazy neighborhood that might make the typical tourist think twice about taking a stroll at night. Honky-tonk bars, neon-fronted strip joints, and cheap restaurants lined the streets, and the sidewalks were filled with hustlers, petty henchmen, whores, and other assorted lowlifes.

Croaker watched as the limo slid to a stop at the curb outside Moniker’s, the place Dominic had used for his white-meat pickups. Margarite went inside.

Now this
was
interesting, Croaker thought.

“What d’you think your classy broad is doing at this dump?”

Croaker wanted to know that himself. “Wait here,” he said as he got out. Inside the club he found a pay phone outside the coatroom and, using the credit card Lillehammer had given him, dialed a number. He hoped that Looking-Glass, the American clandestine espionage organization Lillehammer had worked for, was still operating. Since the death of Leon Waxman, its director, it could have been dismantled. He was still using the large advance on expenses Lillehammer had given him last year, but it would help to be able to continue to tap into the agency’s extensive resources.

The number rang twice before being answered. Croaker gave the voice the coded ID Lillehammer had provided him with last year, praying it hadn’t been discontinued. The ID was his passport inside Looking-Glass; it had the highest classification. When the voice acknowledged the ID, he breathed a sigh of relief. He was instructed to punch in the last four digits imprinted on his card, then he waited while a series of relays shunted his call through God only knew what federal catacombs.

At length, he could hear a series of double rings. A female voice answered with a simple “Yes.”

Looking-Glass was still in business.

Croaker then told the voice what he wanted: a trace on the limo’s license plate.

“Forty-five minutes,” the female voice said.

“I need it in twenty.”

“It’s after hours,” the voice complained.

“Just do it.” He hung up, went into the club proper.

Moniker’s was pretty much what you’d expect: red and silver wallpaper, colored spots bristling off mirrored globes that had seemed old-fashioned even in the seventies, a stench of cigar smoke and sweat. Harsh and jarring rock spit out of banks of speakers hung from the ceiling by black cables. Lurex-wrapped dancers with long legs and top-heavy chests spent ten heavy-breathing minutes on a long stage running across the width of the room. It was mirrored so nothing was left to the imagination. Without the essential mystery, Croaker thought, there wasn’t an ounce of eroticism in the place. But the babes, without a hair on their sleek bodies, knew their business, and there was a good goggle-eyed crowd bellied up to the stage shooting whiskey and beers at an astonishing pace.

A hostess who jiggled more than a bowl of Jell-O came up to him, and Croaker opened the federal badge in her face. She seemed unimpressed—maybe she’d seen too many of his kind in her time—but at least she didn’t push the watered-down drinks on him.

He described Margarite. “Sorry.” Her smile was as inviting as Medusa’s. “Nobody like that’s come in here tonight.”

Croaker leaned toward her and, leering obscenely at her, said, “How’d you like me to rip off those false eyelashes one at a time?”

“Shit.” All the same, she pointed the way backstage. She seemed disappointed she hadn’t been able to snow him like, the horny marks at the bar.

The music pulsed and moaned, the kind of grunge metal that with sufficient exposure could make you break out in hives. Croaker picked his way through the crowd toward the left side of the club. There he found his way blocked by a large black man with a bald pate shiny with sweat, and muscles bulging with years of steroids. This individual appeared to believe Croaker’s badge was either a forgery or a mirage because he steadfastly refused to move aside.

“Everyone wants to get back there,” he said laconically. “No one does.”

“I know you’re just doing your job—”

“Get the fuck outta my face!” Bluto said with such ferocity it cut through even the grunge rock. He poked a meaty forefinger hard into Croaker’s sternum, then spun him around. “Out,” he hissed, “or I’ll eat your fuckin’ liver for dinner!”

Without a word, Croaker grasped Bluto’s right wrist with his biomechanical fingers and squeezed. It was interesting watching the changing expressions on the big man’s face as Croaker applied enough pressure to contort muscle and shatter bone.

Still, Bluto tried to get at Croaker, hammering out with his other fist. Croaker sidestepped the vicious blow, kicked in the side of the big man’s knee. Bluto went down and more bones shattered.

“Hope you’re not hungry,” Croaker said, stepping over him. He went to the closest door but it was locked. He dug out a rig of picks, popped the lock. He was in a storeroom. He went back into the hall, gripped Bluto under the armpits, dragged him into the storeroom and shut the door. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be missed for the short time Croaker planned to be at the club.

The narrow hallway vibrated to the amplified bass. Bits of paint and plaster lay at the corners of the floor, and cheap green-shaded lamps swung on their chains as if attached to a ship on stormy seas.

A great deal of naked female flesh was flying about, but no one gave him a second look. He figured he had Bluto to thank for that. As the man had said, everyone wanted to get backstage but no one did. And now Croaker could see why. There were no doors to the dressing rooms, so roving male eyes would not be appreciated. Having instant access to every room made his job easier.

He was three-quarters of the way down the corridor when the one door at the far end opened and he saw a flash of Margarite’s oxblood suit. He ducked into the nearest dressing room, gave the leggy blonde and redhead in residence a boyish grin, then turned back to peer into the hallway.

Margarite was exiting the back room, probably the manager’s office, with a stunning young woman with pale blond hair swept down over one cheek, huge cornflower blue eyes, and a heart-stopping figure. She could easily have been a dancer here and put all the others to shame, but clearly she was not. She wore an olive-and-ocher-striped Armani suit as if it had been made for her. In her left hand she carried a Nile green crocodile attaché case that cost more than any employee of this club made in a year. Matching Bulgari earrings and a wrist cuff glinted sumptuously in the shifting overhead lights.

That makes
two
classy broads at this dump,
he thought.

The two women made no attempt to come back up the corridor, but turned to their left, disappearing through a door. Croaker went after them, found himself in a dim, cold service corridor. It smelled of booze, garbage, and urine. A red sign above the only other door said “Exit.” He went through that, found himself in a dank alley lined with Dumpsters. Nocturnal creatures, probably feral cats, hissed at him.

He looked around in time to see a black Nissan 300ZX pull away from the curb. He had just enough time to ID Margarite and the blonde and get a partial on the license plate before the wall of the alley intervened.

He went back inside the club. There was no hope of following them so he did the next best thing: he broke into the back room where they had been closeted.

He closed the door behind him, careful to lock it against unwanted intrusion. It was a cramped, windowless space with a sooty air vent high up in one wall. A swaybacked Swedish-modern couch in a fabric that was once whiskey-colored tweed was parked against a side wall. To its left was a standard fake-wood and metal desk and black vinyl executive chair. Behind that, a cheap metal file cabinet rounded out the office’s mean complement of furniture. The walls were bare save for a poster, incongruous in this context, of John Singer Sargent’s mysterious
Fumée d’Ambre Gris,
a painting of a woman in flowing white robes, in a vaguely Middle Eastern milieu, whose face was made somehow incandescent by shadows partially obscuring it. Croaker wondered what this said about the stunning blonde. She was classy
and
brainy?