“There’s an inherant weakness in that line of thought, if you’re a Christian.”
“I’m not sure I am, although I’ve donated fortunes to the Greek Orthodox Church. All my sins postdate Christ, so I don’t accept that He died for them. But Christianity doesn’t hold the monopoly on the afterlife. You can call my plan a cynic’s perversion of faith, but I’m a practical devout. I’m very fond of Ouida. I like to think I’d do anything in my power and beyond it to bring her back safe strictly out of the kindness of my heart, but if I’m the cause of her death, it means everything I’ve invested in my spiritual delivery up to this point will come to nothing. I can’t write it off, and I can’t afford to die in a state of celestial bankruptcy.”
“You will, though, regardless. You can’t buy holy indulgence. The bottom fell out of that market when the Spanish Inquisition went bust.”
“It’s enough that you know where I stand. If you go against my wishes in this matter and the worst happens, I’ll have nothing to lose. But you will. You and your friend Barry Stackpole.”
“That speech usually comes with a gun in someone’s hand.”
“I held one only once, when it was given to me as a gift. But I know how to dial a telephone.”
I pinched a cigarette from the pack and rolled it along my lower lip. Her nostrils turned white; plainly it was a nonsmoking house. I said, “And you’ve separated yourself from Nick how?”
TWENTY-ONE
Barry showed up looking like a cable installer. I might not have recognized him coming up the driveway if it weren’t for the rolling sailor’s walk he’d developed to throw off muggers who specialized in cripples. He’d slid his athletic frame into plain dark blue coveralls, slanted a cap to match over his right eyebrow, and carried a black metal toolbox the size of a dwarf’s coffin. His face was the same vintage as mine, but he ironed his more often and packed it in ice overnight. It belonged on the cover of an Archie comic book.
I let him in and introduced him to Eugenia Pappas. There was a little hesitation before they shook hands. “I know you now,” she said. “There was a bombing incident.”
He met her reserved smile with a broad one of his own. They were equally synthetic. There was no sign in hers of the incipient madness she’d shown only twenty minutes earlier, and none in his to indicate how he felt about anyone connected with organized crime. “It’s only an incident when it happens to someone else. Where’s the box?”
“The box? Oh, the computer. I’ll take you to it.”
Ouida’s office was across from the morning room, a square space done in cocoa brown and cool pinks with a window looking north. On the lawn a woman carved from chalky limestone stood pouring water from a jar into a basin at her feet, her drapery gathered down around her hips. Beyond that a line of blue spruce discouraged surveillance from the neighbors.
“Impressive,” said Barry. “Nick hired a landscape architect to inconvenience the FBI without turning the place into a prison. You’ve done a nice job of keeping it up.”
“The FBI lost interest many years ago. I maintain the screen for privacy, not security.” Mrs. Pappas sounded patient.
“Yeah. Funny how the money turns clean after it circulates a couple of hundred times, just like the water gushing out of that naked lady’s jug.” He set down his toolbox, spun his cap backward, and straddled the chair facing the computer desk. The screen saver on the slim monitor was a montage of sepia images including the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and a Frenchified Victorian portrait of a woman with pixiesh features and frank eyes. I didn’t know Ouida’s literary namesake from crêpes suzette, but anyone can guess.
We watched Barry play riffs on the keyboard until a password was called for. “No hunches?”
Eugenia said no. “I had to learn a whole new language when Nick died, or be taken to the cleaner’s. It exhausted my capacity. When I couldn’t afford to ignore the new technology any longer, I hired someone I could trust. It would defeat the purpose if I stood looking over her shoulder all the time.”
“Trust and sex drive the economy. Otherwise, the same old money would keep passing through the same old hands until it wore clean out.” He leaned down, opened the toolbox, rummaged in a compartment, and came up with something that looked like a Pez dispenser, which he inserted in a portal in the side of the computer tower. Something shuddered, the screen changed, and combinations of numbers and letters piled up in rows, filling the monitor from left to right and top to bottom. The image scrolled upward to make room for more. Barry sat back, unconsciously flicking the two empty fingers of the flesh-colored glove on his injured hand against the edge of the keyboard.
“Little invention of my own, with some technical assistance from a hacker I helped spring from Jackson,” he said. “Programming it to run every possible combination of characters was the easy part. The hard part was coming up with a cookie to fool the computer into thinking each attempt was the first. Most security programs shut down after two or three failures.”
I asked how long it usually took.
“Two hours is the record. It can take days.”
Eugenia said, “We don’t have days.”
“You can pare the odds by calling your people. Maybe you’ll get lucky and turn those converters before Black Bart here warms up.”
“The western stagecoach bandit?” I asked.
“No, the eighteenth-century pirate. Bartholomew Roberts took four hundred ships, a hundred times as many as that blowhard Blackbeard, and still the mark to beat. No one else came close, even in Hollywood.”
“I’ll make those calls,” Eugenia said. “This is making me a nervous wreck.”
Barry waited a few seconds after the door shut, to give her time to lose patience listening at the keyhole. “She as nuts as they say?”
“I haven’t heard what they say.”
“The local Greek Orthodox church declined a generous offer to endow a youth recreation center when she wouldn’t budge on drawing a halo around Nick’s head on the plaque.”
“Nuttier. She thinks Saint Peter’s a headwaiter: table for one with a view of Eden on a twenty-buck tip.”
“Who’s to say she’s wrong? What makes Paradise different from an evening at the Rooster Tail?”
“That’s blasphemous even for you.”
“I sold my soul to Scratch when I joined the Press Club. What’s important about those converters?”
I hesitated. “You can’t use it.”
“For how long?”
“Forever, at a conservative estimate. I’d like not to be the first private cop hanged for treason.”
“Ah. The spooks. Mob Lite. You lack the soul of a pioneer. Shoot the works.”
I did. There was no use holding back from him. What you didn’t give him he went out and got.
He said, “I heard about Johnny. Rotten shame. If it wasn’t for enterprising types like him, we’d be up to our eyes in junk cars and refrigerators. Those scraphounds have done more for recycling than Greenpeace and the EPA combined. I’d push for a statue if I thought it would stand two hours before one of Johnny’s competitors got to it. They snatched four bronze Titans from a civic center last year. That takes a crane and two flatbed trailers.”
“Even Greenpeace doesn’t recycle material currently in use by its legal owners.”
“Give ’em time. No mention of converter boxes in the Toledo kill: cagy, those counterintelligence wonks. I flagged that Crossgrain case, and I’ve been tracking these heroin O.D.s for old times’ sake, but I didn’t make a connection.”
“Somebody screwed up major league. The stuff’s white as cotton. You don’t throw it away on a place like Detroit.”
“Not unless you’re running a field test.”
“I thought of that. They don’t need guinea pigs. An operation this well-heeled, with sources in the Golden Triangle, has all it needs to measure quality in a controlled environment, without the risk of attracting attention from the authorities.”
�
��An operation with those connections is its own authority. But I’m not talking quality. I mean witnessing the effects in actual practice. What if nobody screwed up at all? What if high-test dope is this year’s hijacked passenger plane and someone wanted to see how well it worked, in a place the rest of the country’s already given up on so nobody’d notice?”
“New Orleans’d be a better bet.”
“Too much press since Katrina. Bunch of dead junkies in the Motor City? Let’s see what’s on Channel Six.”
“I bounced the terrorist angle off John Alderdyce,” I said. “He shot it down.”
“Once he gets his teeth in, he wouldn’t give up jurisdiction if Osama turned up in a sweep. Also he may be thinking of the wrong kind of terrorist. You said this killer Johnny took the picture of is Asian?”
“They recruit Asians.”
“So does China, and exclusively.”
“China’s not a terrorist nation.”
“It’s worse. It’s a communist country breaking out in a severe case of capitalism. Mao and the little Maos that followed him spent fifty bloody years wiping out the tongs, but now that the economy’s off the waterwheel standard, it’s opened itself back up to all the benefits and disadvantages of free enterprise, including organized crime. Same thing happened in Japan after V-J Day and in Russia after the Iron Curtain fell. Heard of the Chih Kou?” He spelled it in Roman letters, but it sounded like Sure Cow.
“I’m guessing it isn’t a cocky Hereford.”
“It means Paper Dog. It’s the most populous of the societies that manage smuggling, gambling, and extortion in the People’s Republic. That’s old information. NATO and the CIA have been sniffing around after tips that the Paper Dog is dividing its various interests into subsocieties, each specializing in a single area of crime. Naturally, the Dog has rivals: Tears of the Dragon, White Silk Pig, half a dozen others that also sound like rock bands. There have been street shootings, storefronts bombed, a prominent importer-exporter with ties to the Dog sliced into pieces and divvied up in empty lots and alleys from Chungking to Shanghai.”
“Sounds like Chicago 1929.”
“More like Manchuria 1922. Some of the leaders claim direct descent from the warlords of that period; they host long, elaborate feasts wearing ceremonial masks and bamboo armor. They say at one of them a suspected informant was fed to a crocodile. That may be an urban legend. I’d give plenty to be Chinese and crash one of those dinners.”
He wasn’t being facetious. He had a Pulitzer Prize and his name in the acknowledgments of hundreds of books about hoodlums, but for him the real attraction of investigative journalism was the opportunity to play dress-up. The FBI had four files of telephoto shots of thugs it hadn’t identified, all of them Barry under the sharkskin suits, wigs, and false noses.
I shook my head. “I’ve got to start spending some quality time with CNN. This is all news to me.”
“It still would be if you did. Apart from the fact that Anchor Ken and Stand-up Barbie are too busy diving in celebrity Dumpsters to cover it, the government in Beijing is just as repressive as it always was. The Chinese press won’t report any story that casts a negative light on its so-called liberalization, and the investigation by Western agencies is top secret. Officially, the population there is happy with its Lee Riders and Stones tickets. Hatchetmen are ancient imperial history.”
I didn’t bother asking how Barry knew different. He was on the receiving end of an Internet the Internet itself knew nothing about. “This is all starting to sound just a little bit Sax Rohmer.”
“Those old-time pulp writers never got the recognition they deserved. Criminal mastermind plotting to overthrow the West by way of a shadowy underground organization spread across the globe? What was the old boy smoking in that pipe of his?”
“So who’s the mastermind?”
“No clue so far. That’s his name for now: No Klu So Fa. This notion of the modern underworld being run by a board of directors is a smoke screen to discourage personal advancement through assassination. There’s always someone up top giving the orders. Conventional intelligence is No Klu So Fa encourages these clowns to parade around in costume to draw lightning away from him. That plan has worked up till now, but one of these days he’ll be forced to show himself. You have to lead a movement to go forward. You can’t push it from behind.” He was monitoring the rows of characters racing across the screen out of the corner of one eye. “One of these subsocieties I mentioned specializes in training professional assassins. It’s got its own compound somewhere in Manchuria, complete with mockup city streets for acting out real-life scenarios, just like at Quantico.”
I saw where he was headed. “We don’t know for sure our guy’s Chinese. The picture was too small to make out details.”
“Even a cheap digital blows up sharper than most film. I wish you’d come to me with it before you went running to the cops.”
“Yeah. Did I mention they hang you for treason?”
“They use lethal injection, which as we know now is neither cruel nor unusual. I understand it tickles. If the Dog is exporting talent, it could be a real break in smashing up these gangs before they get a foothold here.”
“Can we save the Union tomorrow? Today I want to find Ouida.”
“Would you settle for now for finding those converter boxes?”
I looked at the screen. It had changed while I was talking, swinging open like Ali Baba’s door.
TWENTY-TWO
“This can’t be right.”
Eugenia Pappas leaned back from her blanched pine desk, looking at the printout. Barry had accompanied me to the morning room, the features of which seemed to interest him more than the view of Anchor Bay, glittering under the sun breaking through the clouds. Bright-colored sails had sprung up like crocuses on the surface. The days to play with outdoor toys were growing short.
He said, “Ouida bookmarked it: ten boxes logged in yesterday morning. That’s the day she went to lunch and never came back. Someone hacked into your system, knew about the shipment the same time she did.”
“I mean the location. That warehouse has been empty for months. I’m negotiating with developers who want to raze it and build condos.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time someone used the Detroit riverfront to store contraband,” I said. “How often do you take inventory?”
“Never. I employ people who do that.”
“Shame on you,” said Barry. “Nick knew every stolen tape deck in his possession and where to lay hands on it. In his racket he had to micromanage in order to keep the help from stealing him blind. It isn’t like he taught them honesty by example.”
“I resent that. You’re in Nick’s home.”
I stepped in before the sparring started. “I believe you, Mrs. Pappas, so far as not dealing in dope. The work’s dangerous enough for people with experience. If you’ve got an employee who’s gone into business for himself, his reporting those boxes would give him the chance to pass the buck to the top in case the cops got nosy. He might have accepted that shipment before Crossgrain’s murder was reported. A garden-variety burglary wouldn’t have rated high enough for you to be asked to check the books. He might have rung up the sale based on the going rate for converters and shipped the heroin profits off to Switzerland.”
“But you asked me about the boxes before there was a murder.”
“I’m not the police. It rated high enough with me. Your chiseler wouldn’t know I’d been hired to find the boxes.”
“I’ll arrange to have them picked up.” She scooped up her telephone.
Barry reached over and thumbed down the plunger. “We’ll pick them up. All part of the service.”
I said, “If you tip off the help, the snow will drift to another location. If we deliver ten empty boxes to the stadium, that’s how many pieces you’ll get Ouida back in.”
She replaced the receiver, frowned, drew open a shallow drawer, and took out a checkbook bound in printed silk.
“You can do what you like with the extra. The original amount was for risking your life to bring Ouida back. Now you’re suggesting risking your life a second time just to obtain what the kidnappers are after. You might want to cash it before you set out. The beneficiary of your estate will never find a bank that will honor a check made out to a dead man.”
“This is my estate.” I put the check in my wallet. “Three times, by the way, not two.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Risking my life. You promised to kill us both if we ring in the cops.”
“You didn’t tell me that part,” Barry said. “You know, I canceled an interview with the governor for this.”
“You’re welcome.”
*
Barry was driving a buzzy little sports job with an emerald finish and the top folded down. It would be a gift from some high-placed snitch in return for keeping their association a gentleman’s affair, registered to some branch of some corporation whose comptroller didn’t know his stock options depended on the house advantage in Las Vegas. The arrangement was a conflict of interest only if Barry put anything more into it than his customary silence. He disliked owning things outright. It made them harder to part with if he had to take off in the middle of some night. That long-ago bomb had taken away more than a leg and sundry other pieces of his body; it had blown apart his faith in the permanence of anything.
I followed him to the garage where he stored the car, just down from the converted department store where he rented his apartment on a month-by-month basis, waited until he climbed in next to me, and let out the clutch while he transferred the big chrome fifty-caliber magnum from the slash pocket of his coveralls to the glove compartment.
“If you packed lighter, you wouldn’t have to keep moving it around all the time,” I said.
“It’s no trouble.”
“You don’t have to do this. I brought you in for your computer skills.”
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels Page 14
