This last was a philosophical problem, best worked out before a roaring fire with my feet in worn slippers steaming on the fender and a glass of cognac growing older and mustier in one hand. The first order of business was to get past Hadaad.
The homey look of the Liberty Inn was deceptive. Beyond the whitewashed wood and open porches skulked a state-of-the-art security system, complete with cameras, motion sensors, and cameras behind the cameras activated by body heat. More than in most hostels, the guests there were the most precious thing on the premises; one tip toward the feds in the MacNamara Building downtown to the present whereabouts of a Ten Most Wanted, and someone paid with his hide. The humble desk clerk earned close to the salary of any General Motors board member, but his golden parachute had a hole in it as big as the RICO Act. It led six feet down in the poured foundation of the Red Wings’ new arena.
I was sixty feet away from Barry’s room where the information the late Carl Fannon had paid me for was waiting; not counting Emil Haas’s and daughter Gwendolyn’s retainers, however cut-rate. A five-minute walk any other day, but today it was the 500 K. Hemingway had said something along those lines while revisiting the scene of his wounding during the First World War; thirty-some yards that had taken more than a year and 75,000 casualties to cover.
The Romanian housekeeper gave me some hope. The rustle of the two fifties in her apron pocket whenever she shifted her weight from one foot to the other had thawed the snowcaps of the Carpathians. She offered me one of her cigarettes. It was a Turkish knockoff, oval-shaped to fool the uneducated eye, but probably Nigerian in origin, laced with lead and toxic runoff from some off-shore operation based in New Jersey. A veteran could burn a thousand of them without effect, but six puffs by a pampered American could put him in Intensive Care.
I accepted it, of course. You never turn down hospitality on the job, at least not on my job. When I put flame to it, it burned a third of the way down its length and ignited the tobacco—or whatever it was stuffed with—in a pyrotechnics display of sparks and glowing bits of metal, probably steel shavings. I tried to exhaust as much of it out the corner of my mouth opposite the one where it rested. I preferred to fill my lungs with homegrown poison.
“Is there a back way up to the second floor?” My throat felt tight; the stuff corrugated the lining.
She drew the last of her latest to the floor of her lungs, took it from her lips, contemplated what was left, took one last puff, and let it fall to the ground. A gust of smoke escaped her mouth.
“You have another suit, yes?” She evaluated mine with the gimlet eye of an Odessa tailor.
“Yes. But this is my best.”
“Too bad.”
* * *
I’d done worse, but not since Saigon fell.
Local codes had mandated an air shaft through the center of the construction, to supply ventilation to the second floor. Architecturally speaking, it was a hollow square leading from ground level to the roof, furnishing a handy place for the incessant parade of renovators to dispose of unrecyclable waste. Piles of broken Sheetrock, drywall, and acoustical ceiling lay at the base of a rectangular shaft broken only by ledges of mortar squeezed out between two-by-fours. They made convenient handholds: for Spider-Man. For a somewhat-past middle-aged detective, they represented stripping out of his suitcoat, frequent deep breaths, and disgruntled spiders.
At the end of ten minutes I hoisted myself onto the second-story walkway by my elbows and looked up, square into the lens of a camera mounted directly above the shaft. I climbed to my feet, listening for the thunder of jackboots on the stairs, and when five more minutes had passed in peace I took a closer look at the camera. There were no cables connected to it.
Romanian Annie might have told me it was a dummy; but it would probably have cost my dead client another hundred.
The boards creaked underfoot, but there was nothing I could do about that. If Hadaad had orders to make sure Barry didn’t leave his room and no one came to rescue him, I just had to move fast. I took out the stiff vinyl strip ostensibly designed to reinforce my wallet, but before slipping the latch I tried knocking, and damn if the peg-legged rascal didn’t swing open the door and aim a Taser at my heart. He’d probably heard me coming ever since I started up the air shaft.