He finally picked them up just after two o’clock. The first thing he noticed was the perfume, it had a scent that screamed ostentatious wealth, but that, in itself, was no reason to suspect anything. Nor were the clothes, overtly elegant, fashion for people with more money than style. The giveaway was the accents, a nasally New Jersey accent and a laid-back West Coast sound, trained to neutral-American. Two American accents in the foyer of the Corker Cola building: it might mean nothing, but alarm bells were going off in Fizzer’s head.
‘I don’t care,’ he heard a scrap of conversation as they exited the lift. Other people were passing, talking, and he had to really focus to isolate the Americans. The man was speaking. ‘I’ll camp on their doorstep if I have to. I want my money.’
Fizzer silently nudged Tupai. Tupai asked no questions, but casually rose after the pair had passed, and placed his boxing magazine back on the rack.
The woman was talking now. ‘They’re just waiting until all the loose ends are tidied up. You should be more worried about the call from Atlanta. Something must be up. Why else would … ?’ The rest of the conversation was lost as they passed out through the rotating door.
Fizzer remained seated until they had turned a corner outside the building, then got up, speed-dialling Dennis as he did so.
‘Guy with a cream-coloured jacket, woman in red trousers. We’ll follow them on foot, try and keep close.’
They had disappeared into the crowds that were thronging the inner city streets by the time they emerged, and Tupai wanted to race ahead and catch them. Fizzer caught his arm.
‘I’ve got them,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose.
Tupai sniffed the air and looked at him uncertainly. ‘Are you sure?
‘I’m sure.’ That Fifth Avenue perfume was unmistakeable.
Wherever they were going, they were walking there, and they seemed nervous, stopping a lot and looking behind them, pretending to admire things in shop windows while watching the reflections in the glass.
It was basic spy stuff out of a thousand cheap novels and old movies, and it would have been laughable if it weren’t for the seriousness of the situation.
Whatever they thought they were looking for, it wasn’t two teenagers in t-shirts and jeans, and, anyway, they would scarcely have got a glimpse of the pair, as most of the time Fizzer kept right out of sight of them, hidden in the bustling crowd, the congested pavements. He followed them by smell, and it was easy with the strong, distinctive perfume.
Dennis stayed close, circling the block occasionally when forced to by traffic patterns, other times pulling to the side of the road behind them and waiting for a few moments.
It was a warm sunny day and the air was still. That helped the trailing as well, as a breeze could push the scent into wrong directions and lead them up blind alleys, while rain would have brought all sorts of other smells up from the pavements, gutters and drains making it so much harder to stay on track.
When they weren’t stopping and doing their comical ‘spy stuff’, the man and the woman walked swiftly, as if they had quite a distance to cover and not much time. They eventually pulled to a halt in Chinatown, at a long bank of pay phones on the edge of a crowded, bustling, noisy food hall. If you wanted privacy it was the perfect place, as the surrounding hubbub enveloped you like a blanket, smothering you away from any possible eavesdropping.
Fizzer found a free table.
‘Go and order something to eat,’ he suggested.
‘I’ve already eaten.’
‘I know, but it’ll look odd if we just sit here and don’t order any food.’
Fizzer was conscious that the eyes of the man were roaming the room. He was a dark-haired man, in his fifties, and took no notice of two ordinary-looking teenagers having lunch.
The walls of the food hall were grimy, but the stalls themselves looked spotlessly clean. Posters, in all colours of the rainbow, shouted loudly in large Chinese characters. Above each stall, faded pictures of Chinese dishes were taped to lightboxes that had also seen better days. One flickered nearby, as though one of the tubes inside was trying, and failing, to spark into life.
The seats were hard plastic, for easy cleaning, and the table was polished metal, for the same reason. Even so, the tabletop he sat at had the dried remains of at least the last six occupants’ meals, hurriedly wiped over then left to dry.
All this he registered, then eliminated. The aroma of the many varieties of food he ignored, defocussing from his sense of smell and becoming more and more conscious of the sounds that reached his ears. He stilled his own breathing and eliminated that sound. An extended family was arguing in a harsh, guttural Chinese dialect to his immediate left, that too was sent to the background.
Gradually he eliminated most of the hubbub and chatter, including Tupai’s voice behind him, discussing, in Cantonese, various dishes with the owner of a yum cha stand. Fizzer had forgotten that Tupai spoke Cantonese, but didn’t let the realisation interfere with his concentration.
That left him listening to the whir of the fans above the frying vats (eliminated), the clack and clatter of cutlery (eliminated), the sound of banknotes rustling into tills, and, from somewhere, the sharp hiss of running water (both eliminated). Then, finally, the purp, purp of the digits on the pay phone in the booth on the wall opposite.
It was the woman dialling, and her voice, when the call was connected, came to him in tiny morsels, drifting through the clouds of blanked out sounds in his mind. The sound came opaquely, sometimes muffled, sometimes obscured altogether, but always unclear, as if viewed through distant fog.
He would have heard better if he’d sat closer, but that would also have increased the risk of their being noticed.
He was barely conscious of Tupai’s return, or the way he placed the tray of lo-bak-go, ju-chuen-faan, and char-sui bau on the table so quietly as to make no sound at all.
Tupai’s bulk blocked some of the sound from the family next door though, and the conversation on the pay phone crystallised a little more clearly.
The words ‘Coke carton’ came to him along with ‘fake, set-up, and trap’, none of which made any coherent sense. The next bit did though.
‘… clean (missed) fly out to the (missed) make sure (missed) and kill them all.’