Floating City (31 page)

Ushiba listened to the dull throbbing of the washing machines. He consoled himself with the thought that there would be a measure of satisfaction in devising the method of bringing Chosa to heel.

He rose, thanked Akinaga for his time. They worked out a timetable for their parallel missions, and promising to keep each other closely informed, they parted company, Ushiba to return to his office at MITI, Akinaga to oversee the laundering and bundling of thousands of snowy white undergarments.

When Croaker returned to the hotel, he ascertained that Margarite still had not put in an appearance. Neither had she checked out. He picked up the agency hard copy waiting for him with the concierge.

He took the elevator to the floor below his, went down the corridor to Margarite’s room. He looked both ways; the corridor was clear. He got out his set of picks, went to work on the lock, popped it without trouble.

Inside, the room was completely spotless. Two chocolate mints in gold foil lay on the coverlet of the unslept-in bed, along with a printed sheet for room service breakfast. He went into the bathroom. The soaps were unwrapped and the outer leaf of the toilet paper roll was still neatly folded. Nothing had been used. He went back into the room, crossed to the closet. No luggage. He pulled out the desk chair, sat on it thoughtfully.

Margarite had never been in here; her bags hadn’t been brought up despite the fact that he had seen Dedalus’s limo driver drop them off at the hotel. Also, the driver had checked in for her. That could mean only one thing: Margarite knew she was being followed from the moment his taxi had swung in behind the limo on the way from the airport.

He went out of the room, took the elevator up. Back in his room, he splashed cold water on his face and ordered room service. Then he lay down until the food arrived. He still had two hours before he had to call Dedalus’s office with the directions to his rendezvous with Vesper.

He closed his eyes but his heart was pounding so heavily he was obliged to sit up and take long, slow breaths. His mind was filled with Vesper. The more he learned about her the more fascinating—and dangerous—she seemed to him. She was Dedalus’s woman, it appeared, from the moment she set foot at Yale with Avalon’s money. It seemed to him that Avalon must be owned by the Godaishu. But then what was she doing running Morgana? Was there a connection between the two?

He licked his lips; they were salty. That was when he realized that he was in trouble. Thinking of Vesper Arkham, he had broken out into a cold sweat. He hadn’t done that since he had shot his first human being, an addict who had felled his partner with a vicious blow of a crowbar to the back of the head. That had been his rookie year on the force, a long time ago.

The food came, and he wolfed it down while looking over the twelve sheets the phone company had provided for Moniker’s last three months of calls.

He didn’t know what he had been looking for, but whatever it was, he hadn’t found it. There was nothing unusual. No calls to Senator Dedalus, the president, or anyone connected with organized crime. He had been most interested in calls that repeated both within any one month and from month to month. There were a number of those, none of any immediate interest: caterers, carting, liquor distributor, laundry service, and the like. Just what you’d expect in any legit business. However, a series of calls to a number in London caught his attention. According to the trace, it was listed to Malory Enterprises in Hammersmith. It could be nothing, or...

Croaker glanced at his watch. It would be late afternoon in London. He picked up the phone, accessed an overseas line, dialed the number.

“Malory,” a bright female voice with an English accent answered.

“Oh, hello, this is Philip Marlowe. I’m with Morgana, Inc. Just come on board, in fact. I was told to—”

“Hold a moment, won’t you?”

Silence, then, “Marlowe? Philip Marlowe, like the American detective?” It was a deep, booming baritone with a mid-Atlantic accent, a combination of English and American.

“Uh, that’s right. But no one gets us confused.” Croaker tried a small laugh.

“I never heard of you, Marlowe. When did you say you were hired on?”

“I didn’t,” Croaker said, hanging up. He stared down at the telephone records. So Malory Enterprises was linked in some way to Morgana, Inc. On a hunch, he opened the hard copy the woman he believed to be Vesper had given him. The phone records matched except, as he had suspected, the Hammersmith number of Malory Enterprises was nowhere in evidence. She had falsified the material. Clever girl, but not, it seemed, clever enough.

He finished up his food, then took out the card Dedalus had given him, dialed the senator’s office number. The secretary told him that Dedalus had not yet arrived, but had phoned to tell her that Croaker would call. He gave her the place where Vesper should meet him, then hung up, deep in thought. Where had the senator gone after Croaker had left?

He stopped at the concierge’s desk, asked them to have a rental car waiting for him as soon as possible. Then he took a cab to Dupont Circle. He walked the several blocks to the Phillips museum. Originally the private home of Duncan Phillips, an heir to the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, the building became a museum for impressionist and postimpressionist paintings in 1921.

Croaker stood beneath the most famous acquisition of the Phillips Collection, Renoir’s
The Luncheon of the Boating Party,
which he had had the extreme good fortune to purchase for $125,000 in 1923. The scene was lush and vivid, like the best of Renoir’s works, saturated with sumptuous summer colors and a typically Gallic joie de vivre. The muscled men were masculine, the women frilly, flirtatious, and round. Everything was as it should be.

Croaker lost himself in the painting. For him, at this moment, it became a meditation and a comment on the baffling modern life he was living, filled with chimerical people such as Margarite, Vesper, Dominic Goldoni, and Caesare Leonforte who defied traditional classification. The old ensigns of persona with which he had grown up had changed—and more: they were mutating at such a rapid rate that he needed to form an entire new mind-set to understand them.

At length, he became aware of the passage of time. It was well after noon, and still no sign of Vesper. He strolled through the museum, only marginally aware now of the art hanging on the walls. He waited ten minutes in the lobby, then another five outside on the front steps. The sky was still dark and gloomy, but at least the mist hadn’t changed to rain or, worse, snow.

He called a cab at twelve thirty-five and was back at the hotel ten minutes later. His rental car was waiting for him and he filled out the forms hurriedly, surrendered his credit card for a moment, then took possession of the keys.

Before one, he was on his way back to Senator Dedalus’s office. He got caught in the seemingly ubiquitous traffic. He needed another inning with the senator, and this time he did not want Dedalus to have any advance warning. Vesper had failed to show and that could be for a number of reasons. She might not have wanted to come, or she might not have been given the message. Dedalus had told Croaker he’d be at his office—or had he?

Croaker, staring at the cars in front of him, thought back to their conversation. Dedalus had merely said he’d be in conference, then had handed Croaker the card with his office number on it. Croaker had assumed... Shit!

Ten to one the good senator was still at home, deep in conference... with whom?

Croaker turned off at the next light, went back out of town. He arrived at Dedalus’s McLean estate just before two. He pulled into the granite-set driveway, then ran the car over the Belgian-block curb, across an expanse of lawn, into the trees. There, he turned off the engine, got out, and headed toward the manor house.

The mist had thinned and the ghosts of shadows could be seen on the ground. A moment later, the sun broke through the banks of clouds and blue sky began to appear. Up ahead he could see the gardener in his golf cart. Croaker automatically went behind a tree, beginning an arc to take him around the gardener.

He kept the man in view as he made his way through the trees and underbrush. The gardener had stopped, and wiping his forehead with his sleeve, he took off his cap.

Blond hair shone like gold in the sunlight. It was pinned up flat against the gardener’s head. Croaker, who had come up short, now melted deeper into the glade of trees. He moved cautiously toward the golf cart. The gardener turned his head, as if, like a deer, he had caught a whiff of an unfamiliar scent.

And Croaker’s heart skipped a beat. The intense blue eyes, the line of the nose, coalesced in his mind with that unforgettable hair color. Unless he was hallucinating from lack of sleep and spoiled food, Senator Dedalus’s gardener was Vesper Arkham.

As it happened, the Russian from the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy was not difficult to find. Van Kiet, from his office, told them that he had been checked into the Cho Ray Hospital six hours before Nicholas and Tachi had returned to Saigon from Vung Tau. Of course, they had come back with Seiko, but the chief inspector did not know this.

The Russian, whose name was V. I. Pavlov, had been brought into the hospital’s emergency room at about the time Van Kiet, Nicholas, and Tachi were having their meeting aboard the chief inspector’s ketch. He spent seven hours in surgery before the doctors got him near to stabilized.

“What happened to him?” Nicholas asked over the phone.

“Plenty.” Nicholas could hear the rustling of papers and knew Van Kiet was looking at the official admission report. “The surgeons spent three hours picking lead out of him; they spent another three probing for the bullet that was supposed to enter the base of his brain. Apparently, the top of his spinal cord got in the way. He’s completely paralyzed—and he may not make it at all. I think you’d better get over there right away. I’ll dispatch one of my men to get you through the red tape. Keep me informed.”

Cho Ray Hospital was on Nguyen Chi Thanh Boulevard in Cholon. It was well-known throughout Vietnam as an excellent medical facility that employed a number of English-speaking doctors. Though it was hardly up to Western standards, it was said one had a decent chance of walking out in good health.

The tenth floor was given over to foreign patients, and Van Kiet’s sergeant met them here, guiding them past protesting nurses, doctors, and the hospital security.

The room was as stained and yellowed as sun-bleached paper. When they entered, Nicholas thought they were too late. V. I. Pavlov lay in his bed, tubed and tented, as white as paste. His lips were purple and the rise and fall of his chest was barely discernible. He was a big man. Time had turned youthful muscle into a thick girdle of fat. Those outer layers lay loosely on him like bags of suet tied to a pole.

“They really did a number on him.” Tachi circled the bed like a boxer sizing up his opponent.

“Whoever
they
are.”

“You know about Russians in this part of the world.”

“A bullet to the base of the skull is not the MO of a street criminal. A knife to the belly or a sock filled with coins to the temple is more like it.” Nicholas pulled an old wooden chair to the side of the Russian’s bed, sat on it. “We need some answers from Dr. Pavlov.”

Tachi, peering at the array of monitors, said, “I don’t think he’s in the proper frame of mind.”

“He will be.” Nicholas bent forward, pulled the plastic of the oxygen tent away. One part of him was aware of Tachi observing him, another part was already deeply in Tau-tau, concentrating on V. I. Pavlov. Nicholas almost recoiled the moment he projected his psyche. The Russian was in an almost unimaginable amount of pain, and Nicholas enfolded the man in the strength of his
ki.
Then, with the methodical precision of a microsurgeon, he worked on the overloaded pain receptors, restoring their ability to transfer the correct messages to the brain. In this way, it began to manufacture the endorphins and nucleopeptides that would naturally reduce the pain to bearable levels. Then he hit a wall.

Without breaking his connection, he said to Tachi, “There’s a heavy-duty narcotic in his system; morphine, I think.”

Tachi nodded. “I expected as much. As long as it’s there, he won’t be of much use to us.”

“I can do something about that.” Nicholas increased his connection to Pavlov. The colors in the room sparked, then dimmed as if the light had been sucked out. Shapes shifted and jumped as Nicholas, sunk deeply into Tau-tau, caused the transformation of thought into deed. The darkness pulsed around him, and time, a beast with 10 million eyes, seemed tethered to a stake in the earth. Nicholas, outside the dictates of time, began the manipulation of life on a cellular level.

So gradually he had to strain to be sure of it, the Russian’s blood chemistry began to alter as he drained the morphine from Pavlov’s bloodstream. This was a dangerous procedure. He had to hypermetabolize the morphine—in other words, speed up its breakdown. If he went too fast, he would overload Pavlov’s lymph and renal systems and the patient would go into shock.

Pavlov groaned, his head moving from side to side on the damp pillow.

Tachi dragged his chair a few inches closer. The scraping sound caused the Russian to open his eyes. They were an opaque blue, bloodshot, the whites as sickly yellow as the room.

He said something unintelligible. Nicholas gave him water. He sucked it up, staring at Nicholas and Tachi.

“Are you doctors?” he said in Vietnamese.

“I’m the surgeon who worked on you,” Nicholas said. “And this is Dr. Van Kiet, the hospital administrator.”

“He looks Japanese,” Pavlov said vaguely.

“My misfortune,” Tachi replied. “Can you tell us what happened to you?”

Pavlov closed his eyes, and for an instant, Nicholas thought they were going to lose him. His pulse rate jumped, and his blood pressure rose. Nicholas, enfolding him in comforting warmth, said, “You’ll feel better in a moment.”

Pavlov’s breathing slowed. He opened his eyes and looked at them mutely. Nicholas suspected what was going through his mind.