by Lee Child
Chapter 29
Right there in the precinct lobby Jacob Mark talked for about five straight minutes, with the kind of rambling fluency that is typical of the truly anxious. He said that the USC football people had waited four hours and then called Peter’s father, who had called him. He said that for a star senior on a full scholarship to miss practice was completely unthinkable. In fact to make practice no matter what else was going on was a major part of the culture. Earthquakes, riots, wars, deaths in the family, mortal disease, everyone showed up. It emphasized to the world how important football was, and by implication how important the players were to the university. Because jocks were respected by most, but disrespected by some. And there was an unspoken mandate to live up to the majority’s ideals and change the minority’s minds. Then there were the straightforward machismo issues. To miss practice was like a firefighter declining a turn-out, like a hit-by-pitch batter rubbing his arm, like a gunslinger staying inside the saloon. Unthinkable. Unheard of. Doesn’t happen. Hangovers, broken bones, torn muscles, bruises, it didn’t matter. You showed up. Plus Peter was going to the NFL, and increasingly pro teams look for character. They’ve been burned too many times. So missing practice was the same thing as trashing his meal ticket. Inexplicable. Incomprehensible.
I listened without paying close attention. I was counting hours instead. Close to forty-eight since Susan Mark had missed her deadline. Why hadn’t Peter’s body been found?
Then Theresa Lee showed up with news.
But first Lee had to deal with Jacob Mark’s situation. She took us up to the second floor squad room and heard him out and asked, “Has Peter been officially reported missing?”
Jake said, “I want to do that right now.”
“You can’t,” Lee said. “At least, not to me. He’s missing in LA, not in New York.”
“Susan was killed here.”
“She committed suicide here.”
“The USC people don’t take missing persons reports. And the LAPD won’t take it seriously. They don’t understand.”
“Peter’s twenty-two years old. It’s not like he’s a child.”
“He’s been missing more than five days.”
“Duration isn’t significant. He doesn’t live at home. And who is to say he’s missing? Who is to say what his normal pattern might be? Presumably he goes for long periods without contact with his family.”
“This is different.”
“What’s your policy over there in Jersey?”
Jake didn’t answer.
Lee said, “He’s an independent adult. It’s like he got on a plane and went on vacation. It’s like his friends were at the airport and watched him go. I can see where the LAPD is coming from on this.”
“But he missed football practice. That doesn’t happen.”
“It just did, apparently.”
“Susan was being threatened,” Jake said.
“By who?”
Jake looked at me. “Tell her, Reacher.”
I said, “Something to do with her job. There was a lot of leverage. Had to be. I think a threat against her son would be consistent.”
“OK,” Lee said. She looked around the squad room and found her partner, Docherty. He was working at one of a pair of twinned desks in the back of the space. She looked back at Jake and said, “Go make a full report. Everything you know, and everything you think you know.”
Jake nodded gratefully and headed toward Docherty. I waited until he was gone and asked, “Are you reopening the file now?”
Lee said, “No. The file is closed and it’s staying closed. Because as it happens there’s nothing to worry about. But the guy’s a cop and we have to be courteous. And I want him out of the way for an hour.”
“Why is there nothing to worry about?”
So she told me her news.
She said, “We know why Susan Mark came up here.”
“How?”
“We got a missing persons report,” she said. “Apparently Susan was helping someone with an inquiry, and when she didn’t show, the individual concerned got worried and came in to report her missing.”
“What kind of inquiry?”
“Something personal, I think. I wasn’t here. The day guys said it all sounded innocent enough. And it must have been, really, or why else come to the police station?”
“And Jacob Mark shouldn’t know this why?”
“We need a lot more detail. And getting it will be easier without him there. He’s too involved. He’s a family member. He’ll scream and yell. I’ve seen it before.”
“Who was the individual concerned?”
“A foreign national briefly here in town for the purpose of conducting the research that Susan was helping with.”
“Wait,” I said. “Briefly here in town? Staying in a hotel?”
“Yes,” Lee said.
“The Four Seasons?”
“Yes,” Lee said.
“What’s his name?”
“It’s a her, not a him,” Lee said. “Her name is Lila Hoth.”
Chapter 30
It was very late in the evening but Lee called anyway and Lila Hoth agreed to meet with us at the Four Seasons, right away, no hesitation. We drove over in Lee’s unmarked car and parked in the hotel’s curbside loading zone. The lobby was magnificent. All pale sandstone and brass and tan paint and golden marble, suspended halfway between dim intimacy and bright modernism. Lee showed her badge at the desk and the clerk called upstairs and then pointed us toward the elevators. We were headed for another high floor and the way the clerk had spoken made me feel that Lila Hoth’s room wasn’t going to be the smallest or the cheapest in the place.
In fact Lila Hoth’s room was another suite. It had a double door, like Sansom’s in North Carolina, but no cop outside. Just a quiet empty corridor. There were used room service trays here and there, and some of the doorknobs had Do Not Disturb signs or breakfast orders on them. Theresa Lee paused and double-checked the number and knocked. Nothing happened for a minute. Then the right-hand panel opened and we saw a woman standing inside the doorway, with soft yellow light directly behind her. She was easily sixty, maybe more, short and thick and heavy, with steel-gray hair cut plain and blunt. Dark eyes, lined and hooded. A white slab of a face, meaty, immobile, and bleak. A guarded, unreadable expression. She was wearing an ugly brown housedress made of thick man-made material.
Lee asked, “Ms. Hoth?”
The woman ducked her head and blinked and moved her hands and made a kind of all-purpose apologetic sound. The universal dumb show for not understanding. I said, “She doesn’t speak English.” Lee said, “She spoke English fifteen minutes ago.” The light behind the woman was coming from a table lamp set deep inside the room. Its glow dimmed briefly as a second figure stepped in front of it and headed our way. Another woman. But much younger. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Very elegant. And very, very beautiful. Rare, and exotic. Like a model. She smiled a little shyly and said, “It was me speaking English fifteen minutes ago. I’m Lila Hoth. This is my mother.”
She bent and spoke fast in a foreign language, Eastern European, quietly, more or less straight into the older woman’s ear. Explanation, context, inclusion. The older woman brightened and smiled. We introduced ourselves by name. Lila Hoth spoke for her mother. She said her name was Svetlana Hoth. We all shook hands, back and forth, quite formally, crossing wrists, two people on our side and two on theirs. Lila Hoth was stunning. And very natural. She made the girl I had seen on the train look contrived in comparison. She was tall but not too tall, and she was slender but not too slender. She had dark skin, like a perfect beach tan. She had long dark hair. No makeup. Huge, hypnotic eyes, the brightest blue I had ever seen. As if they were lit from within. She moved with a kind of lithe economy. Half the time she looked young and leggy and gamine, and half the time she looked all grown up and self-possessed. Half the time she seemed unaware of how good she looked, and half the time she seemed a little bashful about
it. She was wearing a simple black cocktail dress that probably came from Paris and cost more than a car. But she didn’t need it. She could have been in something stitched together from old potato sacks without diminishing the effect.
We followed her inside and her mother followed us. The suite was made up of three rooms. A living room in the center, and bedrooms either side. The living room had a full set of furniture, including a dining table. There were the remnants of a room service supper on it. There were shopping bags in the corners of the room. Two from Bergdorf Goodman, and two from Tiffany. Theresa Lee pulled her badge and Lila Hoth stepped away to a credenza under a mirror and came back with two slim booklets which she handed to her. Their passports. She thought official visitors in New York needed to see papers. The passports were maroon and each had an eagle graphic printed in gold in the center of the cover and words in Cyrillic above and below it that looked like NACHOPT YKPAIHA in English. Lee flipped through them and stepped away and put them back on the credenza.
Then we all sat down. Svetlana Hoth stared straight ahead, blank, excluded by language. Lila Hoth looked at the two of us, carefully, establishing our identities in her mind. A cop from the precinct, and the witness from the train. She ended up looking straight at me, maybe because she thought I had been the more seriously affected by events. I wasn’t complaining. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She said, “I am so very sorry about what happened to Susan Mark.”
Her voice was low. Her diction was precise. She spoke English very well. A little accented, a little formal. As if she had learned the language from black and white movies, both American and British.
Theresa Lee didn’t speak. I said, “We don’t know what happened to Susan Mark. Not really. Beyond the obvious facts, I mean.”
Lila Hoth nodded, courteously, delicately, and a little contritely. She said, “You want to understand my involvement.”
“Yes, we do.”
“It’s a long story. But let me say at the very beginning that nothing in it could possibly explain the events on the subway train.”
Theresa Lee said, “So let’s hear the story.”
And so we heard it. The first part of it was background information. Purely biographical. Lila Hoth was twenty-six years old. She was Ukrainian. She had been married at the age of eighteen to a Russian. The Russian had been knee-deep in nineties-style Moscow entrepreneurship. He had grabbed oil leases and coal and uranium rights from the crumbling state. He had become a single-figure billionaire. Next step was to become a double-figure billionaire. He didn’t make it. It was a tight bottleneck. Everyone wanted to squeeze through, and there wasn’t room for everyone to succeed. A rival had shot the Russian in the head, one year ago, outside a nightclub. The body had lain in the snow on the sidewalk all the next day. A message, Moscow style. The newly-widowed Lila Hoth had taken the hint and cashed out and moved to London with her mother. She liked London and planned on living there forever, awash with money but with nothing much to do.
She said, “There’s a presumption that young people who get rich will do things for their parents. You see it all the time with pop stars and movie stars and athletes. And such a thing is a very Ukrainian sentiment. My father died before I was born. My mother is all I have left. So, of course, I offered her anything she wanted. Houses, cars, holidays, cruises. She refused them all. All she wanted was a favor. She wanted me to help her track down a man from her past. It was like the dust had settled after a long and turbulent life, and at last she was free to concentrate on what meant most to her.”
I asked, “Who was the man?”
“An American soldier named John. That was all we knew. At first my mother claimed him only as an acquaintance. But then it emerged that he had been very kind to her, at a particular time and place.”
“Where and when?”
“In Berlin, for a short period in the early eighties.”
“That’s vague.”
“It was before I was born. It was in 1983. Privately I thought trying to find the man was a hopeless task. I thought my mother was becoming a silly old woman. But I was happy to go through the motions. And, don’t worry, she doesn’t understand what we’re saying.”
Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded at nothing in particular.
I asked, “Why was your mother in Berlin?”
“She was with the Red Army,” her daughter said.
“Doing what?”
“She was with an infantry regiment.”
“As what?”
“She was a political commissar. All regiments had one. In fact, all regiments had several.”
I asked, “So what did you do about tracing the American?”
“My mother was clear that her friend John had been in the army, not the Marines. That was my starting point. So I telephoned from London to your Department of Defense and asked what I should do. After many explanations I was transferred to the Human Resources Command. They have a press office. The man I spoke to was quite touched. He thought it was a sweet story. Possibly he saw a public relations aspect, I don’t know. Some good news at last, perhaps, instead of all the bad. He said he would make inquiries. Personally I thought he was wasting his time. John is a very common name. And as I understand it, most American soldiers rotate through Germany, and most visit Berlin. So I thought the pool of possibilities would grow enormous. Which apparently it did. The next thing I knew was weeks later when a clerk called Susan Mark telephoned me. I wasn’t home. She left a message. She said she had been assigned the task. She told me that some names that sound like John are actually contractions of Jonathan, spelled without the letter h. She wanted to know if my mother had ever seen the name written down, perhaps on a note. I asked my mother and called Susan Mark back and told her we were sure it was John with the letter h. The conversation with Susan turned out to be very pleasant, and we had many more. We almost became friends, I think, the way you sometimes can on the phone. Like pen-pals, but talking instead of writing. She told me a lot about herself. She was a very lonely woman, and I think our conversations brightened her days.”
Lee asked, “And then what?”
“Eventually I received news from Susan. She said she had arrived at some preliminary conclusions. I suggested we meet here in New York, almost as a way to consummate our friendship. You know, dinner and maybe a show. As a way of saying thank you for her efforts, certainly. But she never arrived.”
I asked, “What time were you expecting her?”
“About ten o’clock. She said she would leave after work.”
“Too late for dinner and a show.”
“She planned to stay over. I booked a room for her.”
“When did you get here?”
“Three days ago.”
“How?”
“British Airways from London.”
I said, “You hired a local crew.”
Lila Hoth nodded.
I asked, “When?”
“Just before we got here.”
“Why?”
“It’s expected,” she said. “And sometimes useful.”
“Where did you find them?”
“They advertise. In the Moscow papers, and in the expatriate papers in London. It’s good business for them, and it’s a kind of status check for us. If you go overseas unassisted, you look weak. And it’s better not to do that.”
“They told me you brought a crew of your own.”
She looked surprised.
“I don’t have a crew of my own,” she said. “Why on earth would they say that? I don’t understand it.”
“They said you brought a bunch of scary types.”
For a second she looked mystified and a little annoyed. Then some kind of comprehension dawned in her face. She seemed to be a fast analyst. She said, “Perhaps they were inventive, strategically. When Susan didn’t arrive, I sent them out looking. I thought, I’m paying them, they might as well do some work. And my mother has a lot of hope invested in this business. So I didn’t
want to come all this way, and then fail at the last minute. So I offered them a bonus. We grow up believing that money talks loudest, in America. So perhaps those men were making up a story for you. Perhaps they were inventing a scary alternative. To make sure they got their extra money. So that you would be tempted to talk to them.”
I said nothing.
Then something else dawned in her face. Some new realization. She said, “I have no crew, as you call it. Just one man. Leonid, one of my husband’s old team. He couldn’t get a new job. He’s a bit of a lame duck, I’m afraid. So I kept him on. Right now he’s at Penn Station. He’s waiting for you. The police told me that the witness had gone to Washington. I assumed you would take the train, and come back the same way. Did you not?”
I said, “Yes, I came back on the train.”
“Then Leonid must have missed you. He had your picture. He was supposed to ask you to telephone me. Poor man, he must still be there.”
She stood up and headed for the credenza. For the room phone. Which gave me a temporary tactical problem. Because Leonid’s cell was in my pocket.
Chapter 31
In principle I know how to turn off a cell phone. I have seen it done, and I have done it myself on more than one occasion. On most models you hold down the red button for two long seconds. But the phone was in my pocket. No room to open it, and no chance of finding the red button by feel alone. Too suspicious to take it out and turn it off in full view of everyone.
Lila Hoth hit nine for a line and dialed.
I put my hand in my pocket and used my thumbnail and found the catch and unlatched the battery. Separated it from the phone and turned it sideways to avoid any chance of accidental electrical contact.
Lila Hoth waited, and then she sighed and hung up.
“He’s hopeless,” she said. “But very loyal.”
I tried to track Leonid’s likely progress in my head. Cops, paramedics, probably an obligatory trip to the Saint Vincent’s emergency room, no ID, possibly no English, maybe worries and questions and detention. Then the trip back uptown.
