“NOW HERE’S WHAT YOU do,” suggested Jake. “Very slowly and carefully, turn around. Then explain why the hell you’ve been tailing me.”
The pretty, auburn-haired young woman was smiling when she faced him. “I underestimated you,” she said, rubbing the toe of her boot across the imitation flagstones of the inn courtyard. “You’ll have to forgive me. I guess taking care of myself over in the gangzones has made me a trifle too confident.”
“You’re not with the police?”
“No, the Welfare Squad,” she explained. “I’m Marj Lofton.”
“Oh, so?”
“Beth Kittridge suggested that I look you up.”
“Really?”
“Didn’t she tell you about me? Beth implied that she had. We’re old friends from SoCal Tech days.”
In the stable one of the robot horses whinnied.
Jake took a careful step backwards, keeping his stungun aimed at her. “Show me your ID packet.”
“Sure.” She slid her hand into a jacket pocket. “I was going to introduce myself to you in a minute. Honest.”
He accepted the proffered IDs, glanced through them. “Why trail me at all?”
“Showing off. I was anxious to impress you.”
After handing the packet back, Jake slipped his gun away. “Why?”
Marj said, “Beth told me, when she called a couple hours ago, that she thought I might be able to help you. But she also warned me that you’re very independent, a true loner.”
Jake grinned. “Nope, I’m actually a team player from way back,” he assured the young woman. “Thing is, I have to be captain of the team and pick all my crew.”
“Fair enough,” Marj said. “Do you know for certain that your son’s over in gang territory?”
“There’s a very strong possibility,” he answered. “He’s trying to find his missing girlfriend and she’s supposed to be holed up with the Westminsters.”
Frowning, Marj shook her head. “A very rough bunch,” she observed. “Why’d the girl pick them?”
“A friend of hers apparently runs with the gang. Kid they call Silverhand Sally.”
“Yes, I know Sal. For a while I even thought she might be salvable.”
“You don’t think that anymore?”
“Oh, it’s still possible maybe, but the odds are getting longer.”
Jake said, “I’d like to go over there soon as I can.”
“Could you use a guide?”
“I could use a good one,” Jake told her. “But I don’t want anybody who’s trying too hard to impress me. Somebody who’s more interested in showboating than in getting the job done.”
“I’m sorry I stalked you,” she said. “Most days I’m not like that.”
“When can we leave?”
“I have to gather up some stuff for the trip,” Marj said. “Suppose I meet you at your hotel in two hours?”
“Okay, fine.” He held out his hand.
Shaking it, she said, “I really am pretty good.”
“I’m counting on that,” he said.
The Parisian night was crisp and clear. Hands in the pockets of the stylish thermocoat he’d purchased earlier in the day, Gomez was strolling along beside the dark Seine. He’d found over the years that solitary walks sometimes helped him think.
“Muy frio,” he remarked to himself. “Being a crackerjack international investigator has its disadvantages. One of which is frigid climes.”
On the night river a music barge was slowly sailing by. A band of brightly uniformed robot musicians was playing a solemn Xmas carol. The golden glitter of their uniform trim sparkled and flashed in the illumination from the boat’s multicolor tube-lights.
Gomez continued along parallel to the boat for a few minutes. Then, turning his back to it, he walked away from the river and headed in the direction of his hotel.
“I have a hunch that various events, including some of what’s afoot in England with Jake’s offspring, ought to tie together,” he reflected. “But, madre, I still don’t see quite how.”
He chose a different route than the one he’d traveled on his way to the Seine and just off the Place du Châtelet he spotted someone who looked vaguely familiar. The man was walking hurriedly along, coming toward Gomez on the opposite side of the street.
“Who the hell is that hombre?” the detective asked himself, feigning indifference.
Then, snapping his fingers without taking his hand out of his pocket, he realized who it was.
The man hurrying now up the stone steps of a narrow apartment building across the way was Bram Wexler, the head of the Paris office of the International Drug Control Agency and the guy Natalie Dent had just been showing him pictures of. He was the one their client’s late husband had suspicions about.
Gomez glanced, quickly and casually, around. He spotted a recessed doorway that was very sparsely lit. He entered it, striving to look innocent, and took up a watchful position.
The night grew colder.
Gomez turned up the controls on his coat, but then the garment started giving off a burning plaz smell. He turned the controls down again.
Fifteen chill minutes later, the IDCA man came out of the building. He was accompanied by a plump woman of forty-some years. The two of them walked to the end of the block and got into a parked landcar.
“Chihuahua,” commented Gomez. “I know that lady. In fact I once enjoyed a broken leg because of her. What the devil is she doing in Paris? And why’s she hobnobbing with this lad?”
Gomez was hunched in the vidphone alcove, a glass of ale in his left hand, talking to a robot. He was in the living room of the suite at the Louvre Hotel and the bot was in the Data Center of the Cosmos Detective Agency in Greater Los Angeles.
“Nothing out of the ordinary on Dr. Hilda Danenberg,” the silvery mechanical man was telling him. “Her record seems to be, as always, spotless.”
“Why’s she in Paris?”
“Vacation, it says here.”
“She’s hanging around with a lad name of Bram Wexler, who’s—”
“Head of the Paris office of the IDCA,” supplied the infobot. “According to our sources they’re just friends.”
“And she’s got no official reason for keeping company with Wexler? The IDCA didn’t send for her?”
“Nope.”
Pausing, Gomez took a sip of his ale. “Is the lady still in contact with Professor Kittridge?”
“They’re no longer on friendly—Oops, wait now, Gomez. Here’s something,” said the robot. “Dr. Danenberg has made three visits to the Bay Area in NorCal in recent weeks. And—”
“Yeah, that’s where Kittridge is at work on his long-awaited anti-Tek system. Any indication that she dropped in on the prof?”
“None, but it’s still a possibility, isn’t it? Her activities, keep in mind, weren’t that closely monitored.”
Nodding, Gomez said, “Okay, thanks.”
“De nada,” said the robot. “That’s a little bit of Mexican lingo I—”
“I noticed. Gracias.” Ending the conversation, he left the phone alcove.
He was standing at the window, gazing out at nothing in particular, when the door announced, “A Miss Dent to see you.”
“Oy,” observed the detective, turning to frown at the door. “Yeah, all right, let her in.”
Natalie came in carrying a vidcaz clutched in her right hand. “I thought, since we’re allegedly working side by side and shoulder to shoulder on this mess, that you’d enjoy viewing what Sidebar has just shot.”
“He’s not going to drop in, too, is he?”
“No, he went over to the—”
“Bueno. Make yourself to home, dear lady,” he invited with moderate enthusiasm. “My casa is yours and so on.”
Ignoring the chair he was pointing at, the reporter walked over and thrust the vidcaz into a slot in the wall. “You’ll find, I’m near certain, that this footage is most interesting.”
“Did you have something sour for dinner?”
“I didn’t, truth to tell, manage even to have dinner, since I’ve been much too busy tracking down leads.”
“You’re wearing a rather grim expression on your usually lovely puss, chiquita, and I thought perhaps you’d ingested something that—”
“I tend to take on a glum look whenever I’m in your vicinity, Gomez. Now, please, shut your yap, and watch.”
A familiar stretch of Parisian thoroughfare blossomed on the vidwall. Walking rapidly along it was Bram Wexler. The camera followed him down the street and up the steps of Dr. Hilda Danenberg’s apartment. The sound of his footfalls came out of the wallspeakers.
“Nice bit of cinematography,” commented Gomez.
Then, blown up large on the wall, appeared Gomez himself. He was hunched in the recessed doorway and watching the Danenberg apartment.
“Some operative you are,” said Natalie. “You’re about as obvious as an elephant in a china shop, and you stick out, if you don’t mind my mentioning the fact, like a sore finger or a—”
“Thumb.”
“What?”
“People tend to stand out like sore thumbs,” he said. “And it’s bulls, not elephants, who create havoc in china shops.”
“Well, an elephant wouldn’t be all that inconspicuous either, but that’s not the issue at hand.”
“You say Sidebar snapped this stuff?”
“He did, yes.”
“He’s very unobtrusive. I never suspected that he was—”
“That’s what good surveillance is all about. The trick, and I should think you’d be aware of that by now, since you’ve spent untold years as an alleged snooper, the trick is not to allow anyone to notice you.” She watched the wall as Dr. Danenberg and Wexler drove away. “Simpleton that I am, Gomez, I persist in giving you the benefit of the doubt and therefore I’m assuming that you were intending, eventually, to share with me the insights you gathered from this clumsy shadowing job.”
“Clumsy it wasn’t,” he corrected. “I was quite cunning and deft, considering that I had to improvise. Bumping into Wexler , purely by chance, I—”
“Oh, really now. Don’t try to con me into believing that you didn’t even know—”
“Es verdad,” he insisted. “Absolutely true that I encountered that hombre by chance and decided to tail him.”
She eyed him up and down. “You really weren’t aware he was going to call on Dr. Danenberg?”
“I wasn’t even aware the dear lady was in Paree. Last time I heard, she was in far-off Greater LA.”
“But you worked on a case involving her. It was, in fact, the first case that Jake Cardigan handled for Cosmos. You teamed up right after he was sprung from the Freezer prison through the machinations of your boss, Walt Bascom, and—”
“Nat, I don’t keep in touch with all the folks I’ve bumped into on cases over the years. We don’t have annual reunions, don’t even exchange Xmas cards.” He finished his ale. “Actually, you know, I never met the doctor herself but only an android sim. When the damn thing chanced to blow up, I executed an impromptu somersault off a sunny boardwalk and ended up with a busted leg.”
Natalie gave him a brief look of sympathy. “Yes, I recall hearing about that incident,” she said. “Just one more example of how clumsy you can be at times. However, we’d better forget your past foul-ups and concentrate on—”
“Do you happen to know why Dr. Danenberg’s in town?”
“Not yet, though I expect we—”
“You are aware that she used to be both an associate and a ladyfriend of Professor Kittridge?”
Nodding, Natalie said, “Yes, and I’m trying to find out if she’s still in contact with him.”
“Sí, that would be worth knowing,” agreed Gomez, studying the ornate ceiling.
“What we also have to learn is why she’s seeing Wexler, a man who’s probably in cahoots with the Tek cartels.”
Gomez smiled broadly. “I think I’ll drop in on the lady.”
“That might be too obvious, a tipoff that we’re suspicious of her.”
“Not the way I’ll handle it,” he assured her. “You’ve apparently never seen the subtle, clever side of my character at work.”
“But I have,” Natalie said. “That’s what worries me.”