Melody looked out at the other defeated, terrified young women locked in their cages. It was barbaric. There were too many for them to have been kidnapped for ransom or to satisfy Blake Cunningham’s sexual fantasies. This was business. Mr. McCall hadn’t mentioned the words, but perhaps he didn’t know yet.
White slavery.
Her cage partner crawled forward. She was a little younger than Melody, her short black dress ripped until it was basically tatters exposing most of her breasts and legs. Melody instinctively flinched. The girl put her arms around Melody and held her close. Melody laid her head against the girl’s chest.
“It’ll be okay,” Emily Masden whispered. “Someone is coming for us.”
* * *
Norman Rosemont had found a key to apartment 4B in the pants pocket of his Hugo Boss suit that he had missed before. In the morning, he marched across the corridor and pounded on the door of apartment 4A. Sam Kinney opened it with his usual flourish. He wasn’t wearing his Liberty Belle Hotel uniform, but a brown cardigan over a maroon silk shirt that looked as if he’d borrowed it from Mick Jagger and flip-flops. Sam’s face lit up.
“Hey, new neighbor! All moved in now?”
“I haven’t got any hot water!” Rosemont accused Sam, as if it were his fault.
“Furnace is out again, huh?” Sam shook his head, still grinning. “Come on in, you’re just in time for breakfast!”
Sam ushered Rosemont to an alcove where he could see a dining table set for two. Sam had a stack of pancakes on a platter, a pitcher of OJ, some cold cuts, and English muffins.“I’m just cooking a Colorado omelet and I got coffee brewing.”
“You eat like this every morning?” Rosemont was flustered that his moral indignation had been put on hold.
“Oh, I never know which one of my neighbors is going to come gate-crashing! Sit! Sit!”
Sam hustled through a doorway where Rosemont could see a kitchen with a counter cluttered with enough gadgets to open a restaurant. Rosemount sat down at the dining table. “I looked for the super, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.”
Sam came back out into the dining room with a Presto stainless-steel coffeemaker. “When anything bad happens in the building you’ll find the super at the Meadowlands racetrack, the fat fuck.” Sam poured them coffee. “City Roast Colombia Supremo.”
“Get the landlord who owns the building out here,” Rosemont said, then realized what he’d just suggested.
“That’ll be the day.”
Sam hurried back into the kitchen. Rosemont took a swallow of his coffee. It was really good. Sam came back with two big plates heaped with Colorado omelets, bacon, and hash browns. “The tenants in this building have more to deal with than a furnace that could blow up any minute. You see the size of the rats down in the basement? We used to take ’em for walks with leashes in Tompkins Square Park until the pit bulls and Dobermans started retreating.”
Sam sat at the dining table. Rosemont took a bite of his Colorado omelet and shrugged.
“That’s pretty good.”
“Pretty good! Gordon Ramsay has been chasing my recipes for years!”
The doorbell rang. Sam shot up from the dining table and returned with an attractive older woman, well dressed, her hair looking like she had spent two hours at the beauty salon. Rosemont thought she was probably in her late seventies, but didn’t look it.
“Sam! I’m so sorry to barge in when you’re having breakfast, but—” She pulled up short. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had a guest.”
“Four B, across the hall,” Sam said affably. “Just moved in. I can whip up another omelet for you, Connie, throw in some jalapeños, I know you like them real hot.”
“It has been said,” Connie murmured, and almost got a smile from Rosemont. “No, no, I left Donald in our apartment looking for reruns of Game of Thrones. It’s Mr. Toast, Sam! He went missing this morning!”
“I’ll check for him.” Sam said to Rosemont, “Connie was a Rockette, you know!”
Sam dashed out through the kitchen, down a short corridor into a bedroom.
Connie smiled. “My Rockette days are long gone now, but I do get the chance to kick my legs at Christmastime when we watch the show on TV. Much to my husband’s horror when we have guests over!”
“How long were you a Rockette?” Rosemont asked in spite of himself.
“I joined the troupe in 1955. Was a part of it for thirty-six years. Had to give it up when I was pushing sixty up a hill.” She took a small photo from her jacket pocket and showed it to Rosemont. “Here’s a picture of me with the Rockettes, circa 1962. Our hearts were all aflutter because we were posing with Cary Grant. God, what a hunk. That’s me in the first row, second from the left. Oh, my, look at that gorgeous red hair, comes out of a Clairol bottle of Born Red Nice’n Easy now. Mr. Grant was so gallant and charming.” Connie’s face suddenly lit up. “Oh, Mr. Toast!”
Sam had entered the alcove with a large short-haired Egyptian Mau cat with a mottled body with leopard’s spots. He was squirming in Sam’s arms and hissed at Rosemont, who almost leapt off his chair. Connie grabbed the cat from Sam and snuggled him against her copious chest.
“Where did you find the rapscallion?”
“He was under my bed.”
“Well, there are worse places I could find myself!” Sam actually blushed. “This is a red-letter day! What’s the lyric, Sam? You know the Broadway show I’m thinking of? ‘I’m in the mood to get high with, love until I’m totally blind! Going to find me a guy with, the same kind of future in mind!’ ‘Red Letter Day!’ Rumple, 1957, Broadway!”
Sam grinned as he sat back down to his breakfast. “Connie is a encyclopedia for Broadway shows. Forget Wicked or Book of Mormon or The Lion King. Sing one more for me, Connie! Just to make an old spy happy!”
“Oh, you never were a spy, Sam! You can’t fool an old hoofer, but okay.” If she’d been projecting, Rosemont thought she could have been heard out on the street. “‘The little things you do together … that make perfect relationships, The concerts you enjoy together, Neighbors you annoy together, Children you destroy together, That keep marriage intact.’ Can’t go wrong with lyrics from Sondheim. Thanks for rescuing Mr. Toast. Nice to meet you, Mr.…?”
“Just call him Mr. Apartment Four-B,” Sam said.
Connie nodded and let herself out. Sam grinned and took another bite of his omelet. “She’s something our Connie, isn’t she?”
“Are all of the tenants in this building so gregarious?”
“I haven’t met all of them, but some real nice folks.”
Then there was another pounding on Sam’s apartment door.
“It’s like Grand Central in here this morning.” Sam jumped up. “Have some more coffee.”
Sam disappeared. Rosemont heard raised voices, then Sam returned with Linda Hathaway and her daughter, Gemma. Rosemont stiffened immediately. He recognized the little girl who had been bitten by rats in his building. Gemma was in shy mode today, hugging her mom.
Linda was apologetic. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast, Sam.”
“No problem. Say hi to my new neighbor, Four B. What can I do for ya?”
“My daughter has ripped up her jeans! It’s the only pair she’s got that isn’t in the wash, she’s got a school play today with all of her friends looking nice with their parents attending. I can’t sew on a button!”
“Sit down right here, Gemma,” Sam said. “Scoot out of those jeans! Be right back!”
He disappeared. Linda sat Gemma down on one of the dining-table chairs and pulled off her jeans. Rosemont couldn’t help but notice the myriad bites on the child’s legs. Sam came back with a sewing kit and sat down. “What did you do to these jeans, Gemma?”
“I was playing monsters in the playground.”
Linda noted that Rosemont had noticed the telltale marks on Gemma’s legs. “Rat bites. The building is infested with them.”
“So do something about it!” Rosemo
nt snapped, the guilt getting to him. “The building super can have the basement fumigated and the rats cleaned out in two days. No child should suffer like that.”
“I’ve told Gemma not to go down into that basement! The hot water is off again, Sam, did you know that? So what’s the verdict?”
“Almost finished. It’s just a patch job. Done!”
Sam handed the jeans to Gemma, who squirmed back into them.
Linda kissed Sam on the cheek. “You’re a lifesaver! We can’t be late for the school bus.” She scooted Gemma toward Sam’s front door, acknowledging Rosemont. “Nice to meet you!”
Linda flew out into Sam’s living room, and in another moment the front door slammed. Sam put away his sewing kit.
“Nice young gal. Warm up that coffee for ya?”
“No, I need to be on my way, too.” Rosemont hastily got to his feet. “I’ll have that furnace working by tonight.” He glanced down at his Rolex Daytona watch. “And I’m late for a shareholders meeting. Another fiasco waiting to happen.”
“If you want to drop in for breakfast tomorrow morning, I’ll be whipping up a spinach-and-mushroom omelet with fresh vegetables.” Sam’s cell rang on the kitchen counter. “I’m telling ya, Grand Central Station. Let yourself out, okay?”
Sam ran into the kitchen to answer his cell, and Rosemont left the apartment.
“Hello?” Sam said. “Yeah, he’s gone. You did great, Connie. I could listen to your Broadway repertoire all morning. Right after you left, Linda Hathaway came by with Gemma, who needed some repair work on her jeans. Spontaneous visit. Linda didn’t recognize Rosemont, but he recognized her daughter. He’s kind of an in-your-face cold bastard, but I think those rat bites resonated with him. Thanks for helping out.”
Sam hung up and looked around the small, shabby apartment he’d rented the day before yesterday. In that time he had made it a point to meet and greet as many of the tenants as he could, all of whom had grievances against Norman Rosemont and his real estate company. Sam didn’t know if McCall’s scheme would work. He thought McCall should do what he was good at and leave Norman Rosemont beaten up in an alleyway somewhere. But McCall’s sense of justice wouldn’t allow for that. Too bad. Sam wanted to see the billionaire taken down a few notches.
Down in front of the apartment building, Norman Rosemont almost collided with a young black student who ran down the apartment steps and leaped over the rancid garbage bags. He gestured to Rosemont he was sorry and ran on. Rosemont climbed into his silver Mercedes-Maybach S600 that he’d had delivered the night before. He pulled away from the curb, then recognized Linda Hathaway and Gemma running for the school bus parked at the corner. The bus doors closed and the vehicle drove off. Rosemont pulled over and purred the Mercedes passenger window down.
“I can give you and your daughter a lift to her school.”
“Thanks, but we’ll take the L at Fourteenth Street and First Avenue,” Linda said, out of breath. “Thanks, anyway.”
Linda grabbed Gemma’s hand and they ran down the street. Rosemont was pissed off that she hadn’t taken him up on his offer. But he couldn’t get those rat bites on Gemma’s arms and legs out of his mind. Behind him, Sam Kinney came running down the steps of the apartment building, but Rosemont had already pulled back out into the traffic.
* * *
The young man seated in the East Village Tavern on the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue C had left about 2:00 a.m. in the morning when he had realized that Sam Kinney was staying in this apartment building. Obviously he was spending the night. He was kind of an old fart to be visiting some woman’s apartment, but to each his own. The Equalizer had returned to his table outside the East Village Tavern at six the next morning, where he ordered coffee and an apple bran muffin. Finally Sam Kinney came out of the apartment building and headed toward Avenue B and the L subway.
The Equalizer took a last swallow of coffee, devoured the apple bran muffin, and followed him.
CHAPTER 27
McCall waited for Control’s executive assistant at the bar of the Duke of Argyll pub in London’s Soho. It was packed with the after-theater crowd that had also spilled outside onto Brewer Street. The atmosphere in the pub was boisterous. McCall liked it. In an olde-worlde pub such as the Duke of Argyll, you met your friends, found out the scores of the soccer matches, what was on the telly, and who was screwing who while you nursed a pint for two hours. There was no TV, no music, no games. He’d last met Control in a pub like this. Control had brought him the dossier on Vladimir Gredenko, a Russian interrogator known in intelligence circles as Arbon, the “devil,” whom Control had wanted McCall to impersonate. The life of a Company agent named Serena Johanssen was on the line. Six months later Serena Johanssen was dead and McCall had killed her assassin.
It would be the last assignment he ever took from Control.
McCall saw Emma Marshall enter the pub. It was a balmy night in London, which meant her skirt was just a little shorter than one a Star Trek yeoman would wear. She had on a man’s white shirt showing a lot of cleavage and low pumps. She spotted McCall and slid onto the barstool beside him. She picked up his drink.
“Organic wheat beer?”
“When in Rome…”
One of the bartenders came over. Emma said, “Hey, Jeff, the place is jumping tonight. Give me a large gin and tonic with a slice of lemon, easy on the ice.”
Jeff moved away. Emma looked around at the boisterous crowd. “I just came from the Apollo Theatre, Nell Gwynn, pretty racy for 1660. It was either that or seeing No Man’s Land at the Wyndham’s with Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart, two old farts, one gay, the other straight, being obtuse and brilliant, but I wasn’t in the mood for Pinter and complex ambiguities.” She looked back at him. “I know you didn’t come all the way to London to see me.”
“Control. What happened?”
“I was summoned to his office and sent packing. A nice golden handshake and don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out.”
“Control fired you personally?”
“Not his style. He used one of the other Controls. There was a shake-up at The Company. I was just squeezed out.”
“Control wouldn’t have tolerated that. You were close to him.”
“You never got too close to Control.” Emma broke off as the bartender dropped her gin and tonic on the bar and moved back into the fray. “There was always a barrier up.”
“No cups of coffee late at night when there was no one else there but the two of you?”
“He was my boss and I loved him. He looked down my shirt occasionally, particularly on days when I’d left my bra in the washing machine, and there was one night when he opened a bottle of Rémy Martin XO Excellence cognac and we got a little tipsy.”
“Tell me about that night.”
“He wanted to talk. About a lot of memories that had nothing to do with the spy business. Places he’d traveled to. In Singapore he liked going to the PasarBella in Bukit Timah, a marketplace like the one here in Covent Garden, with shops that sold steamer trunks and colonial dressers from a bygone era. He liked taking walks around the sacred sites in Lhasa in Tibet—I think he said they were koras—which one circumambulates, whatever the hell that is, where he’d go to the Potala Palace to see the lifeless halls where His Holiness used to live. The Tibetan Buddhists walk in a clockwise direction, did you know that? Did you ever see Control when he was pacing? Always did it in a clockwise direction. He spent time in Venice at the Scala Contarini del Bovolo in the San Marco area, which has a spectacular open spiral staircase called the snail shell, where you could climb up to the top of the palace and look out on the domes of Saint Mark. He liked Wharariki Beach on the tip of New Zealand, which has towering stone archways and windswept dunes where he could wrestle with the atrocities that were on his conscience.”
McCall had noticed a young man enter the pub and look around. He was in his midtwenties with a gaunt face and close-cropped hair that was almost white-blond. His gr
ay silk suit was expertly tailored with a coral twill paisley tie and diamond cuff links that caught the light. McCall saw his gaze fix on Emma. He moved toward her with the liquid grace of a caged jaguar. McCall noted a silver ring on his right hand of a demon-claws skull and, beside it, a second silver ring. As the man got closer, McCall saw that the engraving on the slim silver ring said REMEMBER THAT YOU MUST DIE.
“Memento mori,” McCall said.
Emma paused in her reminiscences. “What’s that?”
“It’s a warning to prompt human beings to remember the inevitability of death and their own mortality. Philippe de Champaigne’s painting Still-life with a Skull in the 1600s took the three basic elements: life, death, and the inexorable march of time.”
“How charming.” Emma motioned to the bartender for another round. “I’m broke, out of work, and my mother would drive any healthy, heterosexual daughter into an early grave. Where was I?”
“Telling me about your late-night session with Control.”
“There were other exotic places Control said I should go to on my bucket list, but he didn’t offer to take me to any of them.”
“Did he talk about any enemies in The Company?”
“He had a lot of enemies, but he had been acting strangely the last time I saw him. Something was going on. He said it had to do with national security and people were talking conspiracy theories, but he had his own theories.”
“Did he tell you anything about any of the other Controls?”
“I know Jason Mazer. He still has a hard-on about you, but you’re kind of yesterday’s news.”
“What about Matthew Goddard?”
“I don’t know him.”
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