“Neither do I,” Nancy said, and there was that curious helplessness again. Song wanted to wrap her arms around the girl—and the last person she’d hugged had been her brother’s murdered body. She knew she should refuse Nancy’s request. But she also wanted to know what would happen if she said yes.
“You’re Persian, no?”
Nancy nodded.
“Do you happen to speak Arabic by any chance?”
“Some. It’s rusty, though.”
“I have an Iraqi gentleman coming in tomorrow. I’m sure he’d appreciate not having to bring a translator into the room.”
Naz looked at herself in the mirror. She brought the brush to her hair, then put it down again—a tacit acknowledgment that the face that looked back at her was already perfect.
“He won’t be disappointed,” she said quietly.
“No,” Song mused. “For some reason, I don’t think he will be.”
Washington, DC
November 14, 1963
It was almost true: clothes make the man. Just as the maid in the Department of Justice Building had taken a clean-cut white fellow in a soiled uniform ten sizes too big for an electrician, so did the residents of Dupont Circle take BC for one of them: a man of the world, of power, influence, prospects—and sexual needs.
He paused before the double doors of the Newport Place town house: a sheet of plate glass sandwiched between an ornately curved wrought-iron scroll without and golden gossamer curtains within. The curtains were just thick enough to obscure the view inside but still thin enough to allow a globe of soft yellow light to illuminate the porch, whose upper landing was shaded by a delicate tangle of wisteria. And there, reflected in the gold-backed sheet of glass, stood the new, improved BC Querrey. Beauregard Gamin, at your service, ma’am.
Or, rather, madam.
“Song won’t be fooled by cheap imitations,” Jarrell had told BC. “You go to her house, you wear bespoke or nothing at all.” He’d given BC the name of a tailor on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. Told him to order two suits, one in a simple charcoal twill, the other in a shiny black. “Tell him to widen the lapels a bit on the charcoal, cut the trousers a little loose in the ankle—say, 1960, 1961 at the latest. You want it to look like you’ve had it for a while. The black should be mod—one-inch lapels, stovepipe legs. The jacket should fall just above the bottom of your ass and the trouser cuffs should expose a good inch of sock when you’re standing up. Trust me, Song’s business is appearances. She’ll notice.”
BC had regarded the disheveled man delivering such specific sartorial advice with more than a bit of skepticism. “How much is this going to cost?”
“The suits are going to run about a hundred each,” Jarrell said, and BC fought back a gasp. “But first-timers at Song’s have to pay a cool grand just for the privilege of saddling up. After that it’s two hundred and fifty dollars a ride.” He’d looked BC up and down in his thrift store costume. “You can put your hands on that kind of cash?”
For some reason an image of Gerry Burton flashed in BC’s mind.
“I’ll get it somewhere.”
An Asian boy answered the door. He wore a plain black suit, not quite livery, and despite the fact that it fit him loosely, and that he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, he still managed to project an aura of barely contained strength and menace.
He neither spoke nor stood aside, just looked at BC as if he were stripping off the newly minted threads and seeing the naked, quaking man beneath.
BC took a moment to hear his grandmother’s rolling drawl in his mind. Then:
“Good evening, sir. Is there any chance Madam Song is at home on such a beautiful night?”
The majordomo continued to stare at him blankly. Finally, after BC was about to repeat the pass phrase, he moved aside. BC took a step forward, only to be stopped by an arm that, however thin, still felt as hard as an iron bar. The boy flicked BC’s arms away from his side, and nimble, pincer-strong fingers squeezed each limb from wrist to shoulder, patted the outside of his jacket, then reached inside. BC felt the boy’s hands on his chest, his ribs, his waist.
“The only man who usually touches me this way is my tailor,” BC drawled.
The boy used his foot to nudge BC’s legs apart, knelt down and gave each leg the same thorough going over. At the end he brought his hand up sharp at BC’s inseam, let it sit there a moment longer than BC was comfortable with. He looked up at BC with a little smile on his face.
“No weapon,” he said, standing up. “Suit nice though.”
“Thanks,” BC said. “I had to sell my momma’s house to pay for it.”
“Security consists of three men,” Jarrell told him. “The majordomo will answer the door. Lee Chul-moo. Don’t let the baby face fool you. Song picked him up off the street in Korea. He’s supposed to be versed in all those kung fu–sumo wrestling maneuvers.”
“Kung fu is Chinese. Sumo is Japanese.”
“Let’s just say that he can rip your legs off and beat you to death with them. Once past the front vestibule, you’ll see a staircase directly ahead of you. There’s a security booth in the room below it. It’s manned by a single guard who monitors the closed-circuit cameras installed in each of the guest rooms. For the past couple of years it’s been a guy named Garrison Davis. He’s more of a gadget geek than Chul-moo, but you can expect he’ll be packing. No one knows where the third man is stationed, but you don’t need to worry about it. If you catch a glimpse of him, chances are it’ll be the last thing you ever see. And then of course there’s Song.”
Chul-moo led BC past a large parlor to the end of the hall, where he knocked on a closed door. The door opened on a small office. The parlor-height ceilings were taller than the room was deep, and a single coffin-shaped window, heavily draped, added to the cloistered feeling. A series of framed sketches depicted Victorian women holding little frilly dogs in their laps. The rest of the furniture was similarly proper—female but not feminine, cool but not cold—without a hint of the Eastern, let alone the harem. Just like the woman sitting at the small escritoire.
“Song does a lot of business with the intelligence community. Because your entrée is coming from me, she’ll immediately have a scenario in mind, namely, that I’m going to try to blackmail you into performing services for the Company. I suggest a munitions cover—bullets perhaps, or handguns. Nothing too fancy, but something the Company might be interested in acquiring at a discount. So in addition to the money she takes from you, she’ll be looking at a substantially larger payment when she sells me the copies of the film footage of you and one of her girls. That said, she can smell bullshit a mile away. She wouldn’t have gotten where she is otherwise. You’re a young, good-looking man and, as far as she knows, quite wealthy. Obviously you don’t need to resort to prostitutes. In order for you to gain her trust, you’re going to have to convince her that you’re not just another pussy-hound. You’re a connoisseur of tail. You’ve had the starlets, the debutantes. Now you want the kind of girls you can’t get back home in Georgia or Ole Miss or wherever you decide to hail from. The kind of girls who do the kinds of things that, well, no respectable girl would do.”
“Things—”
“Choose your kink,” Jarrell said with a wicked gleam in his eye. “And if I were you, I’d seal the deal, if you know what I mean. You’re forking over twelve hundred and fifty dollars. Might as well get your money’s worth. And believe me, Song’s girls are worth it.”
Because she was Asian, and because she ran a bordello, BC had pictured something a little more exotic. A kabuki girl or whatever they were called. A geisha. A dragon lady. Instead he found himself facing a demure, almost prim woman in a dun-colored herringbone suit lightened only by a bit of pale fur at the end of the three-quarter-length sleeves. Her black bouffant was the spitting image of the First Lady’s, and she’d shadowed her eyes in such a way as to minimize their epicanthic fold. Her accent was similarly Americanized, her vowels as flat as a Midwesterner’s, her consonants as firm as her handshake.