Читать книгу The Intruders - Michael Marshall - Страница 16

I got to the Hotel Malo just before ten a.m. I’d been awake since before six, but realized I could not call Amy’s office for several hours. So I put myself in movement instead. Seven was the earliest I could arrive at the Zimmermans’ and borrow a car without looking too strange. Inspired by Fisher’s visit the day before, I told them I’d got a call from an old friend and was heading to the city for lunch. Bobbi looked at me a beat longer than was necessary. Ben got straight to explaining how steering wheels worked.

I headed west on 90, joining 5 as the rush hour was starting in earnest, and fought my way off at James Street. Familiar territory so far, the route we’d taken when we came to spend a day in the city a week after we moved up north. Amy had showed me a couple of major draws like the Pike Place Market and the Space Needle, but she was more familiar with the city’s boardrooms than its tourist attractions. The sky was low and an unrelenting grey. It had been that way the previous time too. I eventually spiralled onto 6th Avenue, a wide downtown canyon with tall concrete buildings on either side, lined with small and well-behaved trees bearing little yellow lights.

I pulled up outside the Malo, joining the back of a line of black town cars. The hotel had an awning of red and ochre stripes. A guy in a coat and hat tried to take my car someplace but I convinced him not to. The lobby was done in limestone and rich fabrics, a big fireplace on one side. The luggage trolleys were of distressed brass, and the bellhops were demure. Something unobtrusive and New Age floated discreetly from hidden speakers, like the smell of vanilla cookies almost ready to come out of the oven.

The woman behind the desk was the one I’d spoken to a little after midnight. I was surprised to find she did have an envelope for me, and a receipt for my twenty bucks. Also that she’d had the initiative to get the driver to write down his name – which is more than I’d done – together with the company he worked for. His first name was Georj, the second a collection of crunchy syllables from not-around-here. The company was Red Cabs. She relayed this information in a way that implied guests at her hotel usually employed more upscale or funky means of transport, like native bearers or cold fusion hoverboards. I got her to check a final time for a reservation, implying I was a colleague, believed my assistant had made one and that he was going to catch seven shades of hell if he had not. No record, still.

‘Can you do me another favour?’ I asked, having also planned this on the journey. ‘I’m sure we’ve booked her in here before. Can you check back a few months?’

She tapped and squinted at the screen for a minute, nodded, then tapped again.

‘Okay,’ she said, pressing her finger on the screen. ‘Ms Whalen did stay with us three months ago, two nights. And before that I have a reservation back in January. Three nights that time. You want me to go farther?’

I said no, and went back outside. Walked up to the corner, where I was beyond the influence of the doorman and his familiars, who remained keen that I do the right thing with my car. I still wasn’t sure if I was over-reacting, and I knew from experience that I have a tendency to stomp on the gas pedal when sitting and waiting would be the more considered option. But now I knew Amy had stayed in this hotel before, and that changed things. Not because it confirmed she’d been in Seattle on those occasions – I knew that – but because it meant she was familiar with the Malo and unlikely to have turned up and rejected it this time. I knew from an enquiry via their website that the hotel had vacancies for this week. So it wasn’t a screwed-up booking either.

I went over to the doorman, gave him some money and told him I’d be right back. I zigzagged the few blocks to the Hotel Monaco on 4th Avenue. Amy would have liked this place too – God would have liked it – but a quick conversation confirmed neither had stayed there in the recent past.

The hotel had always been a dead end. It was time to forget about it. Time to forget about the whole thing, probably. I’d made the decision to come to the city around one o’clock the previous night, telling myself it was to do Amy the favour of retrieving her phone. A hundred plus miles is not a huge deal in the Pacific Northwest. But it wasn’t just that, of course. Amy had made business trips six, seven times a year ever since I’d known her. We had a standard operating procedure. We didn’t go for whole days without being in contact, however brief. But … bottom line, she hadn’t been staying in the hotel she’d used before. That was all I had, and in the light of day it didn’t amount to a whole lot. I felt embarrassed for being there and was not entirely inclined to dismiss the voice in my head which claimed it was merely an excuse for leaving my desk for the day.

When I got back to the Malo I went inside and perched on a chair by the big window. I opened the envelope and got out Amy’s phone. It was easy to recognize, though I noticed she’d changed the picture she used as her background. It was a standard cell phone, and no more: in an uncharacteristically anti-corporate stand she’d resisted getting sucked into BlackBerry hell. I pressed the green button. The ‘outgoing’ list showed a call to my cell at the top – from cab guy late last night – preceded by names and numbers I didn’t recognize, until it showed incoming from me the afternoon before last.

I switched to her Contacts and scrolled through it, searching for Kerry, Crane & Hardy, Seattle. It wasn’t there, of course. She’d know these people by first name and direct line, rather than hacking her way in through the general switchboard.

I noticed the battery indicator was flashing about two seconds before the cell went dead.

Using my own I rang directory assistance and got a number for KC&H. I called the number and heard a perky voice sing out the familiar three letters. I asked to talk with someone who worked with Amy Whalen. I figured I’d find some underling who knew Amy’s schedule, come up with a time and place to meet her. She might even be right there in the office. I could take her to lunch.

The phone went quiet for a while and then I was talking to someone’s assistant. She worked for a person named Todd and confirmed he’d be the guy to talk to, but he was in a meeting right now. I was told he’d phone me just as soon as he possibly could, if not sooner.

Then I called Red Cabs and tried to learn how to get in contact with Georj Unpronounceable. He was off duty and the dispatcher was cagey but claimed he’d tell the guy to get in touch with me when he came back on stream. I ended the call knowing it would never happen.

So I left the hotel and walked across the street to a Seattle’s Best. I sat at a table outside there with a big, strong coffee, smoking and watching the rain and waiting for someone – anyone – to call me back.

By half past eleven I was cold and getting pissed off. The ten bucks I’d left with the Malo’s doorman had worn off and he’d gotten uptight about the car’s continued presence outside the hotel. The Zimmermans’ second-best SUV did not make a great advertisement for the establishment. For any establishment, actually. Retired professors apparently don’t care a great deal about mud and dents, and the faded anti-war stickers in the back window were large and strident. Finally the guy in the hat crossed the street to come give me grief and I agreed to move along.

I drove around the block until I found an underground lot. When I re-emerged I spent a couple of minutes with a downtown map I’d scored from the Malo reception. It was optimized toward shopping and eating opportunities and it took me a while to locate the agency’s street. It wasn’t where I expected, either. I’d assumed the agency would be located a zillion floors up in one of the corporate behemoths that surrounded me. Instead it seemed to be in a narrow street near the Marketplace.

I walked down a couple of vertiginous blocks until I found the big Public Market Center sign, then asked directions from a guy running a news stand. He directed me down a narrow road that went under the main market and swerved sharply and steeply left. A sign confirmed this was Post Alley. It looked more like a locale for loading and unloading fish and/or selling drugs. After a hundred yards, however, it suddenly segued into a section remade in 1990s post-modernist, with hanging baskets, a sushi restaurant and a little deli with a row of people sitting in the window eating identical salads. Soon after I saw a restrained sign hanging from a picturesque wooden beam and knew I was in the right place.

I walked in, deciding how to play this. Our working lives had always been very separate. I’d gotten to know Amy’s assistant in LA a little from crisis phone calls and occasional flying visits to the house, but she’d left to have a baby a couple of months before Amy re-aligned her working conditions. I’d heard colleagues’ names mentioned, some enough to vaguely remember. I was pretty sure a Todd was among them. Could be this one, could be some other. There was probably a Todd working in every advertising agency in the country, on a quota basis. The whole deal would have been easier to handle on the phone – I could pretend I was still back out in the sticks and trying to casually get in touch with her – but I was tired of waiting for a return call.

Reception was an existential statement and they’d spent a lot of money on it, mainly in an attempt to make it look like they hadn’t, which is presumably the kind of thing that impresses the hell out of other advertising folk. Each chair cost far more than the woman behind the desk earned in a month, but she didn’t seem put out by this. She was all in black and willowy and big-eyed – yet also possessed of a fierce intelligence, you could just tell – and came across like a girl who inhabited the best of all possible worlds and was keen to spread the joy around.

I asked for Todd and was asked if I was expected.

‘Oh no,’ I said, shrugging in what I hoped was a charming way. I didn’t have much practice. ‘Just here on the off-chance.’

She beamed, as if this was simply the best possible way of stopping by, and got on the phone. She nodded vigorously at the end of her conversation, so I assumed that either I was good to go or she had mildly lost her mind.

Five minutes later someone eerily identical appeared from behind a frosted glass door at the end of the room. She beckoned and I got up and followed her into the offices beyond. This woman evidently inhabited only the third or fourth best of all worlds, and was not disposed to mirth or unnecessary chatter, though I did learn she was called Bianca. We took an elevator up two floors and then marched along a corridor with glass walls, past funky little rooms in which pairs of short-haired people were working so hard and creatively it made me want to set off a fire alarm, preferably by starting an actual fire.

At the end she opened a door and ushered me through.

‘Todd Crane,’ she announced.

Ah, I thought: only at that moment realizing I was about to talk to a third of the people who made up the company name.

I found myself in an austere space with big windows on two sides, giving a wide view of Elliott Bay and the piers. The remaining walls were covered with framed certificates and awards and huge and celebratory product shots, including a few campaigns I knew Amy had been involved with. In the middle of the room there was a desk big enough to play basketball on. A trim man in his early fifties was coming out from behind it. Chinos, well-pressed lilac shirt. Hair once black now streaked with flecks of grey, bone structure so blandly handsome he could have been cast in a television spot for just about anything good and wholesome and reasonably expensive.

‘Hey,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I’m Todd Crane.’

I’ll just bet you are, I thought, as I shook it. And I don’t like you.

He was smooth, though. I guess half his job was making strangers feel at home. There was a framed photograph on one corner of his desk, a studio portrait showing Crane with his arm around a glossy woman, flanked by three daughters of widely spaced ages. Curiously, it was angled not towards his chair, but out into the room; as if it were another credential, like the certificates on the walls. There was a retro radio on the floor in the corner of the room too, 1970s era, presumably another character statement.

‘So, Jack,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Great to finally put a face to the name after all this time. I’m amazed it never happened before.’

‘Didn’t get out of LA often,’ I said. ‘Until we moved.’

‘So what brings you to the city today? You’re in books now, right?’

‘I have a meeting. Plus Amy managed to leave her cell phone in a cab yesterday. So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, get the phone to her right away. She must be in withdrawal by now.’

Todd laughed. Ha, ha, ha. The beats were separate, as if the sequence had been composed, practised and perfected in private many, many years before.

Then he paused, as if waiting for me to say something else. I thought that was weird. I had been expecting him to be the one to start volunteering information.

‘So,’ I said, eventually. ‘What’s the best way of me doing that?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Crane said. He looked confused.

‘I assumed someone here would have her diary.’

‘Well, not really,’ he said, folding his arms and pursing his lips. ‘Amy’s our roving trouble-shooter now. As you know, of course. Finger in a lot of pies. A global view. Strategic. But fundamentally she still reports to the LA office. They’d be the people who’d—’

He stopped, as if he’d just put things together in his head. Looked at me carefully.

‘Uh, Amy’s not in Seattle this week, Jack,’ he said. ‘At least, not with us.’

I was as fast as I could be, but my mouth must still have been hanging open for a second. Maybe two.

‘I know that,’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘She’s visiting friends. I just wondered whether she was expected to touch base at any point. As she’s here anyway.’

Todd shook his head slowly. ‘Not that I know of. But maybe, you know? Have you tried her hotel? We always book people in the Malo. Or is she staying with her … friends?’

‘I left a message for her there already. Just wanted to get this phone back to her as quick as I can.’

‘Understand that,’ Todd nodded, all smiles again. ‘Lost without them these days, right? Wish I could help you more, Jack. She stops by, I’ll tell her you’re on the hunt. You want to give me your number?’

‘I left it already,’ I said.

‘That’s right, sorry. Hell of a morning. Clients. Can’t live with them, not recommended business practice to shoot them in the head. Or so they say.’

He clapped me on the shoulder and walked me out back along the corridor, filling the journey with praise of Amy and a sustained meditation on how her new position was going to shake things up for the company, and in a good way. It was not difficult to imagine him greeting his wife and kids in a similar manner every morning, a goals and achievements spiel capped with assurances of his best attention at all times, cc-ed to his personal assistant.

He left me at the door and I walked out across reception alone. I turned my head just before stepping back out into the world. It seemed to me that there might be someone standing behind the frosted glass door, watching me leave, but I couldn’t be sure.

I walked down the alley slowly. I hadn’t brought Amy’s organizer but I remembered the contents. Three days full of meetings. Sure, I hadn’t read the details and they could theoretically have been in LA, San Francisco or Portland – the last only a three-hour drive away – but I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d confused the city. Plus I had her phone in my pocket, found here in this city last night. Amy had come here, and until the night before last had been in contact as usual. Now she was nowhere to be found. The hotel was a blank. The people at her job didn’t know where she was, or said they didn’t.

And neither did I.

Post Alley deposited me in a stubby dead-end, over which the beginnings of an elevated street set off towards the bay, before banking sharply left to join the Alaskan Viaduct above. The concrete supports had been covered in graffiti, over what looked like many years. ‘Rev9’, and ‘Later’ and ‘Back Again’ it said, amongst other things. While my eyes were wandering over this I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.

I turned, slowly, as if that was simply what I was doing next. A few people were walking back and forth at the end of the road, going about their business in the shadow of the elevated highway, getting in or out of cars, moving stuff here and there. Beyond that there was a wide road and a couple of piers, and then the flicker of light hitting water out on Elliott Bay.

No one was looking in my direction. Everyone was in motion, walking or driving. Traffic rumbled over the elevated highway above, sending deep vibrations through the buildings and sidewalks around me, until the whole city almost seemed to be singing one long, low note.