“Who says I vacated?” Jeffreys replied. “Did I say I vacated?”
“I believe,” Malisse said, “you did.”
“Uh-uh, no way you heard me say it. Because that’d mean the post was unattended when I stepped out, and I can tell you it ain’t so. Never been so in all my years here. Never will be, either.”
Malisse sighed over his mug… steam rising from an ordinary but full-bodied Italian roast this time.
“I’m merely trying to determine what went wrong—”
“That’s fine,” Jeffreys said. “But stick to what I told you and don’t twist my words around. This spy business feels lousy enough without me havin’ to be insulted by your accusations.”
“No disrespect was intended.”
“Fine,” Jeffreys repeated. And took an audible breath. “What went wrong is I went on a ten-minute break fully thinkin’ our man would be up in the big room a while.”
“Waiting for his appointment.”
“Uh-huh. What he called an important appointment.”
“But he didn’t wait for it.”
“No, he didn’t. And since my spotter don’t know anything about my snoopin’, and you and my bosses don’t want nobody told about it, I couldn’t very well have him question our man about where he was goin’. Bein’ none of our security team’s affair, it’d make both of them suspicious.”
“But our man did leave behind a note.”
“For his customer, right.”
“Katari.”
“Right,” Jeffreys said. “Two, three sentences. Just to apologize for runnin’ out like he did, explain some emergency came up that wouldn’t take long, and ask him to sit tight in the Club till he got back.”
“Which he… Katari, that is… continues to do as we speak.”
“Right again,” Jeffreys said.
Malisse remained silent as a group of people at a nearby booth cleared out and filed past him toward the door. What was he to comment? Crude at best, Plan A was at least out of the way, albeit disposed of sooner than anticipated. Already well formulated in his mind, Plan B would be far more elegant and effective. Expensive, too, alas… but Lembock had put no restrictions on his budget, and his years in the Sûreté had left him with expert contacts even here in New York.
“I’d like to ask one more question,” he said. “Without casting any blame or insult at you, but rather for future reference. So we can decide how to best adjust our methods of working together.”
“Shoot.”
“Is this morning break of yours something regular?”
“Regular as my sixty-five-year-old ass startin’ to hurt,” Jeffreys replied. “Also regular as me havin’ an urge to smoke a cigarette, which the law says I got to do on the goddamn street here in this city.”
Malisse smiled ruefully, and told himself he should have known it all along.
His ears filled with the metallic rattle and squeal of an arriving train, Avram trotted from the mouth of the underpass to the wide 42nd Street shuttle station, where the S line between Times Square and Grand Central operated on four tracks. The two trains currently waiting were on Track 1 and Track 3. Though the train on Track 1 was almost packed, its doors had been left open for additional riders to squeeze aboard. A lighted sign above the platform said it would be the next out.
Avram presumed the train he’d just heard clanking to a stop was on Track 3 to his right. It sat empty, its doors closed. The conductor would open them for passengers once its alternate was about to move, and close them again moments after receiving the signal that the other had begun its return trip from Times Square, providing a continuous and, by the standards of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, impressively punctual service loop between the stations.
Avram reached the platform with ample time to catch the train on Track 1, but let it go without him. Lathrop had directed him to board the third car of the second train to leave the station.
And so Avram did, dancing to his lead.
Among the first of the passengers through the train’s retracting doors, he saw plenty of unoccupied seats inside. A rare thing in itself, their availability was a distinct lure, but he felt too charged with nervous energy to take one. Instead he chose to stand, gripping a hand rung as the car loaded up with people. That the choice was his own, and not another shot called by Lathrop, made it all the more desirable.
The train idled with its doors wide open for several minutes. As he waited for it to get underway, Avram found himself listening to a scrawny, long-haired kid who’d strolled aboard playing an acoustic guitar riotous with decals and hand-painted decorations. A donation can in front of him, he’d launched into a Mexican-flavored instrumental that was a fierce tease to Avram’s memory, something he recognized but couldn’t quite place, but associated with summer nights of another, distant time. Ten, eleven years old, a portable transistor radio hidden under his pillow, he’d spent so many of those nights listening to top-forty rock and roll in violation of his father’s rigid decree, alone with the secret pleasure that only came when youth came into contact with the forbidden.
WABC AM, he thought. Cousin Brucie playing all your favorite hits.
Avram almost didn’t notice when the train’s doors finally slid closed. He’d become captivated by the musician, who was now midway through a flawless rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Big Band standard, keeping rhythm with some kind of jangling percussive setup on his foot, beating out its extended drum solo on the body, pick guard, and edges of his guitar. As they started pulling from the station, the guitar player concluded his second piece with another radical shift in musical styles, chopping out the introductory chords to an up-tempo country-and-western tune with vocals. His singing clear and strong over the cacophonous noise of the train, he belted out lyrics about riding the rails, and having to get on out of town in a hurry without a dime for a cup of coffee.
Impressed, Avram was certain the kid had timed his set so the third song, with its loud strumming, would coincide with the train’s startup — a smart, practical touch, since the complicated single-note melody lines of his other numbers would have been buried under the loud racket of its wheels moving over the tracks.
He listened with pleasure for the rest of the short ride, wholly engaged by his skill and cleverness. Lathrop, their secretive rendezvous, all of its roundabout maneuverings faded from his mind. What pure talent, he thought. What marvelous, underappreciated talent.
A squeal of brakes now, and the train jolted into Times Square.
Before making his exit, Avram waited for the crowd of discharging passengers around him to thin out, eased his way over to the guitarist, and leaned down to slip a crisply folded ten-dollar bill into the can at his feet.
“Wow,” the kid said. “Appreciate it.”
Avram straightened, hesitated.
“That first song,” he said. “The one you played while people were getting on at Grand Central… what’s its name?”
“ ‘Walk, Don’t Run,’ ” the kid answered with a smile. “By the Ventures, that sixties group. Figure it kind of goes with the action around here, you know?”
Avram looked at him in silence. A smile flashed across his own lips only to vanish after the briefest of moments.
Then he turned, stepped onto the platform, and reached for the ringing cell phone in his coat pocket.
When dealing with her peers and superiors at UpLink San Jose, Noriko Cousins had found that an inverse logic tended to prevail over their discussions, at least from where she sat… which was to say the stuff Noriko felt ought to be hardest to communicate generally turned out to be fairly easy, while the easy stuff was often a gargantuan pain in the ass for her to get across. Hard-easy, easy-hard, she wasn’t sure what made it so, but thought it might be some kind of East Coast — West Coast thing. People living and working out there on the edge of the lazy, hazy, crazy Pacific just seemed to have synapses that were routed along very different paths from her own.