The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  CLOSED

  The chauffeur came around and opened Carver’s door. This time, he had a slim automatic pistol in his left hand and he’d taken his gloves off.

  “He’ll show you and the lady inside,” the man across from him said. He was tapping another cigarette out of his case. “Mr. Wong, I’m sure, is waiting.”

  Carver stepped from the limousine and waited for Mia to slide out after him. She took his arm and they walked together up the steps to the club’s front door. The chauffeur followed from ten feet back.

  “Open it,” he said.

  Carver took the handle and turned it. The door was heavy, made of steel thick enough to stop anything. The club itself was made of poured concrete, and had no windows. No one on the street would hear anything that happened inside. If he wanted to try anything, the time was now. They might hesitate to shoot here. The street was twenty feet away, traffic rolling past. Once they got inside, there would be no witnesses.

  “It’ll be her,” the chauffeur said.

  Carver turned around. The man had raised the gun, was holding it in both hands so anyone would see it.

  “Right in her neck,” he said. “So I’d open the door—or don’t you like her?”

  Carver pulled the door open and held it for Mia. Before she went inside, she leaned up and kissed him.

  The chauffeur followed them down the entry hall. There was a palm-flanked fountain, a statue of a nude girl sitting astride a goldfish in its basin. Carver wasn’t sure if she had been carved from marble or cast in concrete. They crossed a hundred feet of red carpet, went under a low-hanging chandelier, and through a wide door to the bar.

  A bartender was polishing glasses with a white cloth. In a velvet-lined booth, there was a man with his back to the door. He was the only other person in the place. His close-cropped hair was a mix of white and gray, but his shoulders were broad and muscular. He wore black suspenders over a white dress shirt; a dinner jacket lay across the back of the banquette.

  The chauffeur hadn’t come into the bar. He closed the door, so that Carver and Mia were sealed in with the bartender and the man in the booth. Carver looked at the closed door, at the bartender, and then at Johnny Wong.

  “You must trust your people,” Carver said. “Sitting with your back to the door. I don’t even do that.”

  “Then you need better people.”

  “Maybe so.”

  The man still hadn’t turned. The bartender set down one glass and picked up another. If he’d been following the conversation, he gave no sign.

  “Go see Sam,” the man said. “Get a drink. Then come sit, and we’ll talk.”

  The bartender put down his glass and his cloth. He wiped his hands on his apron and then set them on the bartop. He looked at Carver.

  “What’s yours, friend?” he said. “And how about the lady?”

  Carver didn’t answer. Behind the bartender, there was a fish tank. It was built into the back bar, just beneath the mirror. It held the usual things—coral castles, sunken ships. But in the center there was a small screen. It couldn’t have been more than six inches across. On the screen there was a woman. She appeared to be swimming across the satin sheets of a circular bed. Her naked legs kicked lazily. She rolled over, one forearm draped demurely across her bare breasts as she swam.

  “If they don’t tell you what they want,” Johnny Wong said, “just pour two of what I’m having.”

  “Yessir,” the man said. “And how are you doing? You need another?”

  “That’d be fine.”

  The bartender bent and came up with a bottle. A plain glass bottle, no label of any kind. Carver glanced at the back bar. None of the bottles had labels, just as it had been in the limousine. There were no advertisements in the bar. Just polished glass and shimmering wood. Red and black damask on the walls.

  The naked girl in the fish tank swam across her sea of silk.

  The bartender poured a long measure from the bottle into a shaker of ice, then strained it into three martini glasses. He garnished them with lemon twists, cutting each slice from a different lemon. If he had a gun, it was tucked into the back of his pants, or somewhere out of sight behind the bar. But if he had a gun, it was secondary to his role. The man was a bartender, and a good one.

  “I’ll bring them,” he said. He turned to get a tray. “Just sit.”

  Mia still had Carver’s arm. She led him to the booth. She slid onto the seat and Carver sat beside her. She touched his leg, a gentle but deliberate brush, and then folded her hands on the table.

  Johnny Wong watched them, his fingers pinching at the bit of lemon peel on the rim of his empty glass. He was the man in the picture Carver had seen. The same age as Carver, and the same build. Like a boxer. But his shirt might have cost a thousand dollars at a bespoke Hong Kong tailor, and his gold cufflinks, when they clicked across the tabletop, sounded as heavy as bullets.

  “The girl you see in the tank, she’s really in the basement,” he said. “She’s got a dressing room down there. Over the bed, it’s all optics. Like a periscope on a submarine. Takes her image, projects it into the fish tank. No electronics at all.”

  He looked at Carver and waited, but Carver gave him nothing.

  “Don’t you like that? Isn’t it nice, the way they used to do things?”

  The bartender came over with the tray. He set down Mia’s drink first, then Carver’s. He served Johnny last, took his empty glass, and left.

  “When I took this place over, the girl, Dolphina—they’ve always been Dolphina, since maybe 1930—she asked me, ‘What am I going to do?’ And I told her, ‘Honey, you keep doing what you do best. Seven nights a week, as many hours as you want, whether anyone’s here or not.’ And she tells me she’s never swum better.”

  Johnny picked up his drink, ran the lemon peel along the edge, and took a sip.

  “What do you want?” Carver said.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Johnny answered. “What do you want?”

  “I was minding my own business. You brought us here, guns in our faces.”

  “Please,” he said. “Minding your own business—you’ve been looking for me. You were all over town. Asking about my nephew, asking about me.”

  He took another sip of his drink. Carver glanced at the bartender. He was polishing glasses again, not watching them at all.

  “You went to Patrick’s place, the San Lung Lounge,” Johnny said. “You tore it up, cracked the safe. And you left your calling card on the table.”

  He took Carver’s business card from his breast pocket and laid it on the table between them.

  “After you found Patrick, you went to see Calvin Tran,” he said. “So, really, it’s me who should be asking you: ‘What do you want?’ Except that I know.”

  “You know what?”

  “That you think I killed Hadley Hardgrave. That I got nervous when you were looking for my nephew, so I killed him. His mistress and his neighbor. You think I was upset when Calvin sent you a message about something he’d heard—something that isn’t even true.”

  “Upset,” Carver said. “That’s what you do when you’re upset?”

  “I didn’t cut off his hands and take out his eyes. I didn’t pay anyone to do it, and I didn’t ask anyone to do it as a favor. I didn’t do Hadley, or Patrick, or Calvin. That’s what I brought you here to say.”

  Four hours ago, Carver wouldn’t have believed a word. He might have reached across the table to throttle the man. Grabbed his three-hundred-dollar tie and slammed his face into the table. But everything was different now. Jenner was gone, and he and Mia had until sunrise to find a sanctuary. He’d watched the snuff film on the memory card he’d taken from the motorcyclist’s phone. He knew for a fact that Johnny Wong hadn’t killed Hadley personally, and Wong wouldn’t have brought him here just to deny a story Carver couldn’t prove.

  “You’ve got men in the Department, men on your payroll,” Carver said. “So maybe you know it’s pointless to tal
k to me.”

  “I heard you got suspended. You and Inspector Jenner,” Johnny said. “But you’re still working a case.”

  “What else do you know about Jenner?”

  “The usual—the ex-wife, the young daughter. He’s honest. He’s good with his fists, when it calls for it.”

  “You know he’s missing?”

  “Since when?”

  “Since tonight.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Your men were looking for me. Were they looking for him, too?”

  “Nobody was looking for anybody until we got the call. Then we didn’t have to look.”

  “Fremont, you mean. He’s the one who called.”

  “Fremont,” Johnny Wong said. He finished his drink and waved for another. “He’s a friend. He was a more useful friend before he retired. He thought we should talk, you and I. I think, when we’re done, you’ll agree.”

  “Hadley Hardgrave,” Carver said. “That’s what he wants us to talk about. I heard she stole a hundred thousand dollars from you.”

  “Hadley never took anything that I didn’t give her,” Johnny said. He pointed around the bar. “This place? I’d have given it to her like that. It’d have been perfect for her.”

  “Calvin Tran’s note ​—”

  Johnny stopped him with a sideways wave of his hand.

  “The thing you don’t get is Calvin’s got ties to my wife. They’re second cousins. Maybe they didn’t like how I spent my money. But the fact is, I gave it to Hadley. And it was mine to give.”

  “But she didn’t come to you for money.”

  “No,” Johnny said. He leaned back and let Sam switch his old glass for a new one. “She came for information. She took the money first, because she didn’t want me to think she was after something else. It was a long seduction. She was seducing me while I seduced her. Different aims, the same methods—but if she’d just asked, the first time we met, I’d have given it to her.”

  “Asked for what?” Mia asked. “What did she want?”

  “She wanted to know about a job, ten years ago.”

  “The Laurent show,” Carver said. “The Legion of Honor. It was your crew, your money that backed it.”

  Johnny looked up from his drink and studied Carver. He might have had a man at every substation, and he might have a line open to Fremont. But he couldn’t possibly know everything Carver had seen in the last week.

  “The crew,” Carver said. “Three men and a woman. The woman’s on point. Two of the men are white and one’s Asian.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One of the white men, he’s psychotic. Out of control.”

  Johnny nodded. Under the table, Mia took Carver’s hand. When she squeezed his fingers, he knew what she was thinking about. The man had cut Hadley Hardgrave to pieces, but he hadn’t broken her. He’d only wanted one thing. He’d promised to stop, had promised to end it with an easy bullet if Hadley would just give it to him. But she’d died without ever saying a word to expose Mia.

  “Tell me what you talked about,” Carver said. “You and Hadley.”

  27

  “THE FIRST THING you have to understand,” Johnny said, “is that this wasn’t really my crew. They weren’t my people. I hired them for the job—the Laurent job. These people, they were in from New York. Came with a recommendation. That’s all they were to me.”

  “Whose recommendation?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Johnny said. “You get what I give you. That’s it.”

  “It’s your place,” Carver answered. “You make the rules.”

  “I’d heard you’re smart,” he said. He pointed at the three martini glasses. “Drink if you’re thirsty. They’re all from the same shaker.”

  “I don’t know what was in the glass before he poured it.”

  Johnny Wong leaned around the edge of the booth.

  “Hey, Sam—you poison the glasses?”

  “No, sir.”

  “See?”

  Johnny reached across and took Carver’s glass. He used it to refill his own, which he then drank.

  “I was saying . . . They weren’t my crew. A guy I trust said they’d get the job done. But that’s all I knew.”

  “You didn’t know their methods, is what you’re saying.”

  “I didn’t expect it to go like that,” Johnny said.

  “The body count.”

  “You don’t go into an art job thinking twelve dead. Women missing.”

  “But you didn’t wash your hands, either.”

  “I didn’t,” he said, without turning his eyes or dropping his voice. “I had a deal.”

  “What was your take?”

  “My place,” Johnny said. “My rules. Or did you forget?”

  “All right.”

  “The second thing you need to understand is, it wasn’t my idea. The Laurent job. Someone approached me, asked if I could put it together. Asked how much it’d cost.”

  “This was a flat-fee operation,” Carver said. “You put in a bid. You didn’t need a fence, because you had a client who wanted the paintings for himself.”

  “Not for himself—he wanted to give them as gifts. Rewards, for a job well done.”

  “Some reward,” Carver said. “What did you think they were worth?”

  “I figured they were priceless. But the guy just wanted a quote for the job, so he got one,” Johnny said. “He said okay, and then we had a deal. I went and found a sub.”

  “This East Coast crew,” Carver said.

  “After it was done, they dropped out of sight.”

  “Except you heard where they landed,” Carver said. “The client from the Laurent job picked them up. Didn’t he?”

  Johnny nodded.

  “I heard it around,” he said. “Don’t ask where.”

  “That’s what Hadley wanted to know—the client’s name?”

  “I don’t know where she heard everything else,” Johnny said. “She knew about the job, knew where the crew had gone. She was good.”

  Mia looked like she was about to say something, but stopped herself.

  “Or she got around,” Johnny continued. “That’s a skill too, isn’t it? Not that it’s a bad thing. And I’m not putting her down—I liked her. I appreciated her, all the more after I figured out her game. That’s why I’m helping you.”

  “Then tell us what she wanted to know,” Mia said.

  “The only thing she was missing was a name. That’s all she needed.”

  He finished his drink and poured some of Mia’s into his glass. Then he slid hers back across the table.

  “His name was Alex. We met three times. He said he was negotiating for himself. That when we talked, it was principal to principal. But I saw through it.”

  “Saw what?” Carver asked.

  “You meet a man ready to pay that kind of cash, for a thing like that, and he acts a certain way. You meet his second, his go-between, and you see something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hesitation.”

  He looked at Carver, his eyes flicking from his worn-out suit to his cheap, steel-banded watch.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” he said. “And it’s not about money. It’s position. You’ve got that—or you had it—so you know. It doesn’t even matter if you speak the same language. You meet a man, a woman, with position, and you know. You see eye to eye.”

  “So you dealt with Alex,” Carver said. “He wasn’t the real guy. But you must have given Hadley more than that, or she wouldn’t be dead.”

  “It was a year after the job,” Johnny said. “After the crew dropped off and I’d heard the rumors about who picked them up, I saw a picture in the news. A man getting an award, and behind him, like a lackey, was Alex. That’s how I knew who I’d been dealing with—I saw the hand inside the glove.”

  Carver waited for him to go on.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”r />
  “That’s a name I won’t say out loud,” Johnny said. He glanced around the room, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “If they can get into your head, think what they can do on the outside. You can’t sweep for bugs anymore. Not when they can burrow and walk. I won’t say his name as long as he’s alive and looking for me.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?” Carver asked.

  “It’s more about what I won’t do. I won’t show my face on the street, because there are cameras everywhere. These days, you don’t know if a bird’s a bird. It could be something else. And it’s worse than just worrying about cameras. The feds have old wiretaps sitting in a file, so if he’s looked, he’s got my voice signature. And that’s why in here, I don’t even speak in my own voice.”

  He loosened his tie and undid his shirt’s top button. A band of black fabric circled his throat, tight and slim, like a priest’s collar. It was interfering with his vocal cords, probably bringing his voice down an octave and changing the entire signature. Anyone could buy an illegal voice band in the backroom of a Chinatown shop. But the one Johnny was wearing was so good, Carver hadn’t even realized it was there.

  “All it would take is one mistake,” Johnny said. “I’ll show up like a blip on a radar screen. I know who he is and what he’s done, so you don’t have to think hard to guess his next move.”

  “If you won’t say his name, then what do we do?”

  “Your briefcase is still in the car. Everything I gave Hadley, it’s in there. My driver will take you wherever you want to go,” Johnny said. “Don’t open it until you’re somewhere safe.”

  He pushed up his left cuff and looked at his watch.

  “You’re not holding anything back?” Carver asked.

  “This is for Hadley,” Johnny said. “I owe her.”

  Carver looked at the rows of unmarked bottles around the fish tank. Someone had taken the time to peel all the labels off, then wash off every trace of glue. This was a throwback nightclub, a gangster hangout. But the only thing Carver could think of was Mia’s apartment.