“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “But stay there a minute.”
He pulled back his jacket and unclipped the flashlight he kept with his shoulder holster. He switched it on and shined it under the car’s front bumper. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Tracking devices were so small now, he’d never find one on his own. Bombs hadn’t gotten any smaller since he’d joined the force, but he didn’t think there’d be anything like that. If someone had wanted him dead, he’d already be dead. They wouldn’t have brought him back to his place, wouldn’t have put his car in its stall.
He aimed the light through the windshield. The curved glass sparkled like the face of a fine watch. They’d washed it before bringing it here. Detailed it. He stepped to the driver’s door and lit up the seat. The upholstery had been cleaned so thoroughly, it looked factory new. There wouldn’t be any prints inside, no physical evidence at all. On the other hand, they surely wouldn’t have cleaned it so well if packets of plastic explosives were wired into the batteries.
Switching off the light, he turned to Mia.
“It’s okay.”
He took out his remote and unlocked the car. Mia came around to the passenger side and they both got in and shut their doors.
“That smell,” Carver said. “You said it was like hot metal, coming out of my skin. This is the same?”
“Yeah.”
Everything he’d carried had come back with the same scent—his phone, his gun, his wallet. Now his car, too.
“You must’ve driven somewhere,” Mia said. “To wherever it happened.”
Carver nodded.
He powered up the car, scanning the gauges as the console lights came aglow. The batteries were full. Carver waited for the GPS to come online, then swiped through the menu with his fingertip.
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“When I’m driving, I keep the tracking on,” he said. “It’s department policy. It makes it easier to testify. We can go back, figure out where we’ve been, and when.”
He pointed at the screen. It displayed a blank map of San Francisco. A blue dot pulsed off Grant Avenue, showing their location. But there were no track lines tracing the history of his past routes.
“They cleared the memory,” Carver said.
“Now what?”
“Start with what we know. The one thing we know.”
“The Fairmont.”
He nodded and slid the transmission into reverse, but he didn’t take his foot from the brake. He leaned against the headrest and closed his eyes, his hands on the wheel.
“Ross?” Mia asked. Her fingers alighted on his shoulder.
“I need a minute. But there’s some stuff I’ve got to ask you. You mind?”
“Go ahead.”
“You watched me three, four days. You sat with me, read to me,” he said. When he turned to her, she looked away. “For all I know, you bathed me. Dressed me. I don’t know why.”
“You said it already,” she said. “You nailed it. I need a friend.”
“Why me?”
In the long silence after the question, he could see the reflection of her face in the window glass, could see the tiny movements in her eyes as she worked through it. He wanted to give her another chance to lie to him. The more she talked, the more she might begin to contradict herself.
She turned to face him.
“You’ve been around a cat?”
“Sure.”
It wasn’t what he was expecting, but nothing ever was. Night after night, he talked to people while the blood was still wet on the walls. Questions in tenements and warehouses. On rooftops and in the backs of ambulances. No answer ever came directly back at what he’d asked. There was always something askew.
“You like them?”
“Cats?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Not especially.”
“Neither do I, but that’s not the point. You go to someone’s house—a dinner party, maybe—and there’s a cat. Ten, fifteen other guests, and they all like cats. After dessert, when you’re all in the living room having a brandy, where’s the cat jump?”
“On me,” Carver said, guessing where she was going with this. “My lap.”
The last time he’d been to a dinner party like that, he was about twelve. His parents were the ones having brandies. His father had gone with other men to a library or a study. A gun room, maybe. His father’s friends lived in houses with that sort of thing. Someone would have given Carver a club soda.
“Why’s it pick you?” Mia asked. “Every single time, it picks you.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He wanted to let her finish, let her try to explain it.
“Because you’re not looking for cats,” she said. “So you don’t pay attention to them. You don’t blow kisses at them, try to call them over with your fingers. You just ignore them, like they’re not there. And in a cat’s mind, that makes you the safest person in the house.”
Her eyes held steadily on his now, and he hadn’t expected that either. Most of the time, when his witnesses deflected a question, they’d look away. So her eyes were as interesting to him as anything she’d said. He lifted his foot from the brake and let the car slide from its space.
The rain eased for a moment as he steered out of the garage. A garbage truck was blocking all of Sutter Street as it wrestled with a dumpster, so he went farther down the hill until they were driving past some of the finer blocks close to Union Square. There were restaurants where you could still find a good steak from cattle that had walked on grass, the sun on their backs. The wine on offer was genuine, not counterfeit swill made of lab-grown grapes. They passed a jeweler’s showroom built like a Greek temple, its marble façade held aloft by bare-breasted caryatids. Aphrodite and Themis, selling diamonds. Across the square, there was an SFPD roadblock. Red and blue lights pulsed and glittered on the shattered glass that blanketed the street and the sidewalk. He slowed to look at the crowd of uniforms.
“We’ll go around up here,” Carver said. “Skip past all that.”
“What is it?”
“Smash and grab.”
He pointed at the Vendôme, the marvel of mercantilism that had taken over the Macy’s when he was a teenager—part of the ever-spreading Ønske empire. Every display window on the first floor was gone. A stripped mannequin tilted through a newly shattered opening, her plastic hand gesturing to the gathered patrolmen. Glass lay everywhere, the aftermath of an ice storm.
“That happens a lot?”
“In this neighborhood, a couple times a night,” Carver said. “Sometimes more.”
He took a right on Powell and accelerated up the hill.
“Before you got on Homicide, that’s what you did—dealt with those?”
“Things were different when I was on patrol,” Carver said. “We had other problems, in other places.”
“How long ago?”
“Before you were born, I bet.”
“Maybe.”
Above Bush Street, they passed into the new blight between Union Square and Nob Hill. Carver could remember when this used to be a nice street, all the way up. It had been glittering windows and filigreed stonework, building toward the final extravagance atop Nob Hill. Now liquor stores with blacked-over windows anchored the corners. A string of underground clubs stretched between them, all marked by their red-painted doors. A girl in an open silk robe and black panties leaned against a parked car at the mouth of Fella Alley. Pulses of purple light and bass-heavy music slipped like smoke from an open door.
As they went up the slope, Mia turned to look down the side street, but Carver didn’t need to look. He was here whenever the men got out of hand in the basement clubs. There was always something to get them started. The drinks were laced; the girls were underage. Once the knives came out, the men usually finished each other down there, tucked inside the cordoned-off private rooms. Sometimes they’d lurch up and end it on the sidewalk. Then he an
d Jenner would come, if it was their draw. Had they marked the outlines with something indelible, by now these blocks would be a collage of human anatomical possibility—spread-eagle bodies, men curled up like shivering infants, young women sliced into their constituent parts and scattered.
It hadn’t been anything like that when he’d been a patrolman. Sex clubs tried to minimize the number of on-premises murders because the city would shut them down. So as a consequence, he’d walked his first beats in the sunshine. But San Francisco lived under a shadow now. Maybe everywhere else, too. He was too busy to get out and check.
He turned to Mia.
“When you were watching me, did you use my computer?”
“Of course not.”
“Did I ask you to send any emails?”
“You asked me not to call 911. You didn’t say anything about email.”
“Did you see me send any emails?”
“You couldn’t sip from a cup with a straw. You weren’t typing anything.”
“The people who brought me back, did you see them in my apartment, see what they were doing?”
Carver came to a stop at a red light. The rain started again and he turned on the wipers. As they swept across the glass in front of him, he felt a warm rush of longing. It bloomed in his chest, its delicate petals unfolding in the dark behind his ribs. He didn’t understand it, couldn’t fathom how a few raindrops and the arc of the windshield wipers could set this off.
“The light?” Mia said.
“What?”
“It’s green.”
He started through the intersection.
This wasn’t just déjà vu. That was an illusion, some kind of mental stutter. Revenants of true memories blowing past in the storm. This was physical, and as distinct as a lover’s fingertips in the dark.
He stared at the windshield wipers, waiting for the feeling to come again. Hoping it would come again—that slow-rolling wave of peace, carrying a desire as urgent as thirst—so that he could catch hold of it and place it.
He saw that he’d stopped the car, that he’d pulled to the curb. Mia was watching him.
“What was I asking you?”
“The people who dropped you off,” Mia said. “I didn’t see what they were doing inside your place. Two of them—the woman and one of the white men—were with you in the living room. They had you on the floor. The others were back in your bedroom, maybe. I couldn’t see.”
Carver started driving again.
“You saw all that through the peephole?”
“That’s right.”
“Someone used my computer,” Carver said. “Or got into my email account, anyway.”
“How do you know?”
He decided to take a risk. To give her a little information and see where she ran with it.
“I talked to my partner —”
“Jenner.”
“—and he said our lieutenant sent a memo. I had the flu, is what it said. I was off-limits, contagious. And Jenner said I’d been emailing back and forth with Hernandez, the lieutenant. Giving her updates.”
“Updates?”
“On my condition—how I was feeling.”
“You’ve checked your email?”
Of course he’d checked his email. It was the first thing he’d done after getting off the phone.
“They were in my Sent folder. Like Jenner said. One on Thursday, three on Friday. Last one’s from Saturday afternoon.”
“You didn’t email anyone Friday or Saturday. I was with you the whole time.”
“That’s what you said.”
“Who’d do that?” Mia asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll report it? Tell your lieutenant?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Someone wants me to forget,” he answered. “Wants me to think I was out with the flu. That I was delirious, writing emails in a fever. And it worked. I forgot it, whatever it is I’m not supposed to know. But they weren’t perfect. They made mistakes, left a trail.”
When she didn’t respond, he slowed the car and looked at her.
“You were there, and they didn’t count on that,” Carver said. “And if I tell anyone what I know, they’re going to start wondering if someone like you exists.”
“Is it dangerous?” she asked. “For me . . . for either of us?”
She must have already known the answer. The real question was whether she knew more than he did.
“Not so long as I play along,” Carver said. “Go about my business.”
“That’s just what you think.”
“What I think,” he said.
“Not what you know.”
“At this point, I don’t know anything,” Carver said.
5
THEY CAME TO the crest of Nob Hill and saw the Fairmont Hotel rise above them. It was not wrapped in silk, nor was it tied up with red ribbons. There were no strings of Chinese paper lanterns winding through the boxwood hedges, hanging from the manicured cypress trees.
Carver turned onto Mason and then came to a stop beneath the hotel’s porte cochère. He stepped from the car, putting his keys in his pocket as the valet approached.
“Sir?”
Carver flipped his badge holder open and held it out for the man.
“I’m leaving this here a couple minutes.”
The valet looked at the empty street, and then at Mia as she got out of the car and freed her dark hair from the fold of her scarf with a flip of her hand. Carver watched him think through a range of remarks. He must have thought better of all of them, because he finally turned his face down and addressed Carver without meeting his eyes.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Sir.”
Carver came around the front of the car and then walked with Mia to the hotel’s main entrance. A uniformed doorman let them inside, murmuring good morning to Mia as she brushed by him. What they stepped into, when they passed through the brass door, was a jewel. A time capsule, shimmering like the evening star of the Gilded Age. Somehow that star had never set, as if the hotel and the city moved through time on different tracks. Just blocks from here, there were buildings without power, wary inhabitants navigating the fire stairs with candles and knives. But marble still stretched across this lobby floor, and gold leaf set off the coffered ceiling. Carver spotted a concierge desk between a pair of matched Corinthian columns, each column a single piece of stone the size of a redwood trunk.
“There,” Carver said. “Let’s talk to her.”
The concierge was the only person in view, and she was asleep in a leather wingback chair, her hands folded across the front of her cream-colored suit.
They walked over to the desk and sat in the guest chairs across from the concierge. He watched her sleep a moment longer, waiting to see if she might wake on her own. Then he leaned over and rapped his knuckles twice against the desktop. The woman started awake, then smoothed her hair with her hands.
“I’m sorry—yes?”
“I’m not a guest here,” Carver said.
He showed her his badge, putting it flat on the desk so she had to lean across to look at it. He watched her eyes, saw how they focused and started to scan it, then put it back inside his jacket.
“I have a couple questions,” he said.
“Something’s happened, here in the hotel?”
“Right now this is just background. Tracking down something I heard.”
The woman looked around. The doorman had stepped back outside. The registration desk was empty. Helpless, she looked back to Carver. She was waking up fast.
“We’ll help if we can.”
“Of course you will,” he said. “Something came up about one of your events. You decorated the hotel, wrapped it in black cloth?”
The woman breathed out and sat back. She smiled for the first time, not one of those joyless professional smiles, but something stirred by pleasure.
“Everybody knows about that. It was huge
. But we didn’t do it ourselves, the wrapping. That was an artist.”
“When was it?”
“This past Thursday night. G. Franklin Pan—the artist—he and his crew started Monday morning. Then we had the ball on Thursday night. I was up seventy-two hours straight, handling it. But we pulled it off. It was unforgettable.”
“There was a ball?”
“The Black Aria Ball,” she said, enunciating the words so that he could hear the capitalization of each one.
This was beyond reverence. She might have been whispering to her lover. Then she blinked, as if she’d forgotten for a moment that Carver was there.
“The launch party,” she said. “For the new fragrance?”
“That was here, on Thursday night?”
She nodded.
“Thursday night, and into Friday morning.”
“I’ll need any pictures you have—anything showing the hotel, with the wrapping.”
“You want to see pictures?”
“To see them. To keep them. Whatever you have.”
“I’m sure they’re all over the internet. Everyone’s been talking about the ball.”
“Then we’ll wait,” Carver said. “While you go back and print them.”
The woman looked at him, then turned to Mia. But Mia stared back coolly, not giving her any help. Finally the woman pushed her chair back and stood.
“I’ll be right back, Officer.”
“Inspector,” Carver corrected.
She went to the registration desk and then disappeared through a door behind it. When she was gone, Mia reached across and touched his wrist.
“You must have seen it,” she whispered. “The Black Aria Ball. You must have been here Thursday night.”
“Or I went past it on the street—this lobby’s not ringing any bells,” he said.
He looked around again. He’d seen it as a ten-year-old, had managed to drink half a neat Glenlivet when his father wasn’t watching. That was the only memory that stood out. He hadn’t been back since. He was sure of that.
The Night Market Page 5
