He was dressed more casually than the one time we’d met—almost elaborately so—in a plain blue shirt, dark gray slacks, and black loafers, all screaming some Mom-and-Pop store where the merchandise was more expensive than in a big-box outlet, without any difference in quality. Had he shown his infamous face in Walmart or Meijer or any mall in the metropolitan area, the security footage would have been on TV and the Net inside an hour.
He was a big man still, but the way he stood, shriveled inside himself, lessened the effect, and the absence of careful tailoring showed off his physical defects; he wasn’t noticeably overweight, but when it came to even a modest spare tire, cheap beltless trousers weren’t made with flattery in mind.
I put aside my drink and climbed out of the recliner. “Next time you go underground, don’t try so hard to be invisible. If I just got back from Mars and hadn’t seen a paper or TV or been online, I’d still report you to the cops as a suspicious person.”
He blinked a little, completing the image he projected. With his pale curly hair and Elmer’s Glue-All complexion, he could have passed for albino. It was ironic; in ordinary circumstances he was the original Mr. Cellophane, seldom noticed and instantly forgotten. On the lam, he stuck out like a snowy owl in a flock of crows.
“Mr. Stackpole made me well aware of the conspicuous figure I cut,” he said in that shallow tone. It made you want to lean closer to hear him. Maybe that was his secret, what had attracted a charismatic character like Carl Fannon to him in the first place. From across a room, anyone polite enough to address him in conversation would look as if he were hanging on to every word he said. “You must understand I’ve had no practice.”
I looked at Barry, sitting up in bed now with the can of nuts in his lap, tapping the plastic lid and turning it into a toy bongo. “Where’d you two crazy kids meet?”
“Right in this room. He was checking out as I was checking in—figuratively speaking. His name wasn’t in Hadaad’s box any more than mine, but room sixteen was in the active file, the only blank card there. There were always at least a few under the old management. You boys threw away a gold mine when you canceled company policy regarding unregistered guests,” he told Haas.
“Carl said the same thing, but I said we’d make many times that legitimately by razing the place and putting up a professional building. He said, ‘It’d take us three years to recoup the investment. Meanwhile the place is bringing in as much as the Hilton, and most of it under the IRS radar.’ I’d suspected his moral compass was out of whack, but it was then I decided to follow his paper trail.”
“What took you so long?” I asked. “You two have been buying up the city for years.”
“He always made a good pitch, and we cleaned up by flipping the property or renovating it and leasing space. I created a Frankenstein there. When we started out, he wanted to invest in sites in New York, Chicago, and L.A. I told him everyone did that, buying high when the local economy was booming and selling low when it went bust, when it should be the other way around. I reminded him of all those high-rise office buildings that sprang up in Houston like mushrooms when oil was selling at sixty dollars a barrel; when it dropped below thirty, the owners were offering three months’ occupancy rent-free to fill the empty space. In Detroit, you can buy a row of abandoned houses for a dollar apiece and back taxes, an empty industrial plant for less than the cost of a loft in Manhattan, and turn them over three years later for a million. When we started doing that, I saw no reason to question why the money came in so fast, or where the initial investment was coming from. I parked my nose in the black column and ignored the red as a temporary situation.”
Barry said, “You can get in a lot of trouble not asking the questions you don’t want to know the answers to.”
“I didn’t think to ask the questions. When Cecil Fish and his cronies started accusing Velocity of fronting for foreign interests, I started. Carl kept ducking the issues I kept bringing up, so I opened my own inquiries outside the office. We were right in the middle of the Sentinel Building deal when I found out about Peaceable Shore.” He turned to me. The blinking stopped. “That’s when I missed our appointment with the owners and went to see you instead. Things had gotten to the point where it was too dangerous to keep the secret to myself.”
“Walker told you when you came to his office you’d saved a lot of people a lot of time and money. You could have saved a lot more if you’d said your piece there.”
“A lot more,” I said. “Like your partner’s life.”
“I told you I didn’t trust speaking out in a strange place.”
I said, “You’ve got a half-interest in almost every empty hulk in town. You picked the Sentinel for what, sentimental reasons?”
“Hardly. It’s closed to the public, the workers go home at five, and I had a key. Also the building was germane to the conversation. It was during our negotiations to buy it I found out just who we were dealing with. My meeting with you would be brief: One name.”
“I was there. Where were you?”
“Across the street in the first doorway I came to after I left the basement. I saw you talk to the derelict in the alley, then go inside.”
“You left an Easter egg behind.”
He nodded, and went on nodding. As large as his brain cavity was, it still wasn’t big enough for a bobblehead. “I thought it must have been you who found Carl, though no one said or wrote anything about who it was.
“No,” he said, shaking his head now, “I didn’t put him there, but when I found the vault door was shut and discovered it was locked, I decided to get out. We’d left specific instructions to the workmen to remove the door to avoid just that kind of mishap. I’d have opened it myself if I knew anything about it. I suspected someone was trapped inside, a natural reaction; and I couldn’t afford to be found there under those circumstances. I panicked. I can’t deny it. Still, I don’t suppose I could have saved Carl in any case. Unless the police gave the media false information?” He looked like a man begging for scraps.
“He’d been dead for hours.” I scooped my cup off the lamp table and drank. The ice was gone, diluting the bourbon. It tasted like one of those spiked lemonades kids drink when they think they’re boozing. “I’m no more safe cracker than you are. The lock let go while I was standing in front of it. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Good God. I didn’t see a timer. Do you think someone set it to open while I was there?”
“That was the first thing I thought; only I thought I was supposed to be the patsy. But if someone tipped the cops to stumble over one or the other of us red-handed, the message got lost. They didn’t show until after I told your office manager not to expect Fannon to check in from Beijing.”
Barry had stopped thumping the can in favor of shaking it and rattling the almonds inside. “Not so far-fetched. There are nine-one-one operators I wouldn’t trust to remember to pick up my dry cleaning.”
“Maybe. I’m still on the list for reporting the body late and not directly to the authorities. Maybe whoever put him in storage and set the clock thought that would happen. Or that I’d pretend I was never there and then they’d have something on me.”
“My God.” Haas came the rest of the way into the room and lowered himself into the recliner. “And I thought legitimate business was Machiavellian.”
“Forget Machiavelli,” said Barry. “He was an Our Gang kid compared to Charlotte Sing.”
I finished my drink in one steady draught and set it down with a bang. “There it is, damn it. I was hoping no one would mention the name. Now it’s real.”
* * *
Outside, a Volt or a Tesla or something equally electric and quiet hummed down the interstate. That’s how silent the room had gotten.
Emil Haas broke it. “I didn’t even know who Charlotte Sing was until I ran a computer check on all the possible synonyms for Peaceable Shore. And I’d never heard of Peaceable Shore until I found it on Carl’s. He thought by erasing it from his hard drive, he’d eradicated it. He forgot I got my start designing programs. I traced Peaceable Shore to Pacific Rim. The images that followed were hellish. That company managed to turn terrorism into a commercial enterprise. And it was run by a woman.”
“She’s not a woman,” I said. “She’s a pandemic in Prada.”
Barry said, “I’ve been underestimating Cecil Fish. His computer guru must have found out about it the same way you did.”
I was staring at Haas. “How could you not know who Madam Sing was? Six months before the North Koreans reported her arrest, sure, but six weeks after that she was Time’s Person of the Year, edging out Sheikh Killabunchachristians.”
“If I came across her at all, I dismissed it as not important to Velocity. Had I known my own partner was financing us with funds provided by an international criminal, I’d have done the homework I’ve been doing since I found out about Peaceable Shore.”
“She’s dead. You said it yourself, Barry. They hanged her in Pyongyang for every count in sixty-three countries.”
Barry scowled at his can of nuts and threw it in a corner. “I know all Asians are supposed to look alike, but she outdid herself when she cast her substitute. I even did a face match on that shot somebody bootlegged onto the Net. It was grainy, and there’s bound to be distortion when a neck is broken at the end of a length of coarse Tibetan hemp, but it rang a gong from every angle.”
I said, “It was probably one of the human-trafficking cases in her prostitution ring, helped along by plastic surgery. For someone who started out as a slave in a cathouse, she wasn’t above running the same racket. She’d smuggled drugs and human organs and committed murder personally, just to keep in practice. Add it to her tab.”
“Isn’t above running the same racket,” Barry said. “You keep referring to her in the past tense.”
“Maybe if I do she will be.”
Haas was watching me. “You talk as if you’ve met.”
“He shattered her hand the last time.” Barry’s tone was funereally low. “It’s how she wound up in custody to begin with.”
“We’ve met,” I said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “One time or a hundred. Never is too much. Just why she doesn’t pick on another city every time she comes back—it keeps me up nights. Urban blight, wholesale corruption, and the worst homicide rate in the country aren’t punishment enough. We have to have Charlotte Sing. Why not the apocalypse?”
“Haas gave you the answer a minute ago. She told you the last time her bank account was hovering down around a hundred million. These days you need a couple of billion just to put the destruction of western culture on the table. Detroit is the only place in America where you can gobble up real estate with pocket change and turn it into serious cash. Whatever she’s got cooking this time, we know where she’s getting her case dough.
“And Amos,” Barry added, “you’re here. That’s got to be another fortune in her cookie.”