I let go of him, and he drops down onto the desk, slides miserably back into his chair.
"Look, Officer-" he says, and I interrupt him.
"I"m a detective."
"Detective. Variegated, they"re shutting the franchises one by one. They"re looking for reasons. Stamford. Montpelier. If that happens here, I don"t know what I"ll do. We have no savings. My wife and I, I mean." His voice is trembling. "We won"t make it."
I stare at him.
"If I call Boston and I tell them I need to see the overnights, and they say why, and I-" He breathes, trying to keep it together, I"m just staring at him. "I say, gee, I"ve got missing files, I"ve got-I"ve got dead employees." He looks up at me, his eyes wet and wide, pleading like a child. "Just let me sit here. Just let me sit here until it ends. Please just let me sit here."
He"s weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It"s exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it"s an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy"s skirts.
"Mr. Gompers, I am sorry." I rise. "But you"re going to get those files. I want to know everything that"s missing, and I want you to tell me, specifically, if any of the missing files were Peter Zell"s. Do you understand?"
"I will-" He gets himself together, sits up a little and honks into a handkerchief. "I"ll try."
"Don"t try," I say, standing, turning. "You have till tomorrow morning. Do it."
I take the steps slowly back down to the first floor, trembling, shot, my energy expended, and while I was upstairs ha.s.sling Gompers the sky has decided to send down a miserable frozen drizzle, which slants into my face while I cross Eagle Square on the way back to my car.
The man with the sandwich board is still stalking the plaza, parka and fur hat, and again he hollers, "Do you know what time it is?" and I ignore him, but then he"s planted himself in my path. He"s holding up his sandwich board, DO THEY THINK WE"RE STUPID, raising it between us like a centurion"s shield, and I mutter, "Excuse me, sir," but he doesn"t move, and then I realize it"s the guy from last night, from the Somerset, out of his Harley jacket now but still the heavy untrimmed mustache, red cheeks, doleful eyes.
And he goes, "You are Palace, right?"
"Yeah," and I realize what"s happening too late, I reach for my shoulder holster but he"s already dropped the sign and he"s got something jammed up into my ribs. I glance down-a pistol, short and black and ugly.
"Do not move."
"Okay," I say.
The rain splatters steadily down over both of us, frozen in the center of Eagle Square. People are walking down the sidewalk, a couple dozen feet away, but it"s cold and it"s raining hard and everybody"s looking at their feet. n.o.body notices. Who cares?
"Do not say a word."
"I won"t."
"Okay."
He breathes heavily. His mustache and beard are stained in patches, dirty cigarette-yellow. His breath is stale with old smoke.
"Where is she?" he hisses. The gun is pressed painfully into my ribs, angled upward, and I know the path that the bullet will take, gouging through the soft flesh, severing muscles, slamming to a stop in my heart.
"Who?" I ask.
I"m thinking about Toussaint"s desperation move, with the ashtray. To make a move like that, Alison said, he would have had to be desperate. And now here is this man with his sandwich board: a.s.saulting a police officer, use of a sidearm in the commission of a felony. Desperate. The gun twists into my side.
"Where is she?" he asks again.
"Where is who?"
"Nico."
Oh, G.o.d. Nico. It"s raining harder and harder while we"re standing here. I"m not even wearing a raincoat, just my gray blazer and blue tie. A rat darts by, out from behind a Dumpster, bounds across the square and out toward Main Street. I track it with my eyes while my a.s.sailant licks his lips.
"I don"t know where Nico is," I tell him.
"Yes, you do, you do know."
He jams the pistol in harder, digs it deeper into the thin cotton of my dress shirt, and I can feel him itching to fire it, his anxious energy warming the coldness of the barrel. I picture the hole that had been left in Naomi, just above and to the right of her left eye. I miss her. It"s so cold out here, my face is soaked. I left my hat in the car, with the dog.
"Please listen to me, sir," I say, raising my voice over the drumbeat of the rain. "I do not know where she is. I"ve been trying to find her myself."
"Bulls.h.i.t."
"It"s true."
"Bulls.h.i.t."
"Who are you?"
"Don"t worry about who I am."
"Okay."
"I"m a friend of hers, okay?" he says anyway. "I"m a friend of Derek"s."
"Okay," I say, and I"m trying to remember everything Alison told me about Skeve and his ridiculous organization: the Catchman report, secret bases on the Moon. All nonsense and desperation, and yet here we are, and if this man twitches just one finger just a little bit, I"ll be dead.
"Where"s Derek?" I ask, and he snorts, angrily, says, "You a.s.shole," and heaves back with his other hand, the one not holding the gun, and punches me closed-fist on the side of my head. Instantly, the world loses focus, blurs, and I double over and he hits me again, an undercut rushing up into my mouth, and I bounce backward against the wall of the plaza, my head banging against the bricks. The gun is immediately back in place, grinding into my ribcage, and now the world is spinning, swimming, rain overflowing around my eye patch and flooding my face, blood oozing from my upper lip into my mouth, my pulse roaring in my head.
He comes in close, hisses into my ear. "Derek Skeve is dead, and you know that he"s dead because you killed him."
"I didn"t-" my mouth fills with blood, I spit it out. "No."
"Oh, okay, so you had him killed. That is a pretty cutthroat technicality."
"I promise you. I don"t know what you"re talking about."
It"s funny, though, I"m thinking, as the world slowly stops rotating, the furious face of the mustache man comes back into focus with the cold desolation of the plaza behind him, I sort of did know. I probably would have said that Skeve was dead, if you"d asked. But I haven"t really had time to think about it. G.o.d, you wake up one day and everybody is dead. I turn my head, spit out another black stream of blood.
"Listen, friend," I say, bringing my voice to an easy place. "I promise you-no, wait, look at me, sir. Will you look at me?" He jerks his head up, his eyes are wide and scared, his lips twitching under the heavy mustache, and for a second we"re like grotesque lovers, gazing into each other"s eyes in this cold wet public square, a gun barrel between us.
"I do not know where Nico is. I do not know where Skeve is. But I might be able to help you, if you tell me what you know."
He thinks it over, his fearful inner debate playing out in his big, dolorous eyes, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily. And then, suddenly and too loudly he says, "You"re lying. You do know. Nico said her brother had this plan, some secret policeman plan-"
"What?"
"To get Derek out of there-"
"What?"
"Nico says her brother has this plan, he gets her a car-"
"Slow down-wait-"
The rain is pounding.
"And then Derek gets shot dead, and I barely get out of there, and when I get out she"s nowhere."
"I don"t know about any of this."
"Yes, you do."
A cold metal snap as he clicks off the safety. I yelp twice and clap my hands, and Mustache Man says, "Hey-" and then there"s a ferocious bark from the street side of the square, and he turns his head toward it, and I raise my hands and shove him hard in the face, and he stumbles backward and lands on his rear end. "s.h.i.t," he says from the ground, and I draw my sidearm and aim, right down at his thick torso, but the sudden motion has thrown off my balance, and it"s dark and my face is soaked, I"m seeing double again, and I must be pointing the gun at the wrong man, because the kick comes out of nowhere-he swipes out with his feet and catches me in the heel, and I topple like a statue being pulled down with ropes. I roll over, look wildly around the plaza. Nothing. Silence. Rain.
"Shoot," I say, sitting up and drawing out my handkerchief and holding it up to my lip. Houdini comes over and stands in front of me, bouncing back and forth, growling tenderly, and I hold out my hand, let him sniff it.
"He"s lying," I tell the dog. Why would Nico have told some story about me having a prison-break plan? Where would Nico get a vehicle?
The problem is, a person like this guy doesn"t have the brains to lie. A person who really thinks that the United States government somehow, over the last half decade, secretly constructed a warren of habitable bases on the dark side of the Moon, that we would have dedicated that level of resources toward mitigating the risk of a 1-in-250-million event.
It"s weird, I think, struggling to my feet. My sister is too smart for this nonsense.
I wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve and start to lope back to the car.
The thing is, she really is. She really is too smart for this nonsense.
"Huh," I say. "Huh."
An hour later I"m down in Cambridge, in the sunken plaza across from Harvard Yard, where there"s a group of ragged college-age homeless kids in a drum circle, and a couple of hippies dancing, and a man selling paperback books from a shopping cart, and a woman in a halter top on a uni cycle, jugging bowling pins, singing "Que Sera Sera." A very old woman in a silver pantsuit is smoking a marijuana cigarette, trading it back and forth with a black man in thrift-store fatigues. A drunk snores loudly, sprawled across the steps, his lower half soaked with urine. A Ma.s.sachusetts state trooper keeps a wary eye on the scene, his big mirrored sungla.s.ses propped atop his ranger-style hat. I nod at him, a fellow policeman"s nod, but he doesn"t nod back.
I cross Mt. Auburn Street and find the little green kiosk with the boarded-up windows. I still have no idea where Alison Koechner works, and there is no one answering the phone at the old number, so this is all I"ve got: one place I know she goes a lot "Well, well," says the Coffee Doctor in his hat and beard. "If it isn"t my old nemesis."
"I"m sorry?" I say, narrowing my eyes, looking around at the dark room, empty but for me and the kid. He puts his hands up, grins. "Just kidding, man. Just something I say." He points at me with both hands, a big boisterous two-finger point. "You look like you could use a latte, friend."
"No, thank you. I need information."
"I don"t sell that. I sell coffee."
He bustles around behind his counter, swiftly and efficiently, inserting the conical base of the portable filter into the espresso machine and pulling it out again, a light ka-chunk. He levels off the ground beans, tamps them down.
"I was in here a couple days ago."
"Okay," he says, eyes on his machine. "If you say so."
The paper cups are still lined up along the counter, one for each continent, step right up and place your bets. North America has only one or two beans in there-Asia a handful-Africa a handful. Antarctica remains in the lead, overspilling with beans. Wishful thinking. As if the thing would just plow into the snow, snuff out like a candle.
"I was here with a woman. About this tall, short red hair. Pretty."
He nods, pours milk from a carton into a metal jug. "Sure." He sticks a wand into the jug, flicks a switch, it begins to foam. "Coffee Doctor remembers all."
"Do you know her?"
"I don"t know her, but I see her a lot."
"Okay."
For a moment I lose my train of thought, entranced by the frothing of the milk, staring along with the Coffee Doctor into his jug, and then he flicks the thing off with a sharp, birdlike movement, exactly at the moment before it would have foamed over.
"Ta-da."
"I need to leave her a message."
"Oh, yeah?"
The Coffee Doctor c.o.c.ks an eyebrow. I ma.s.sage my side, where the a.s.sailant"s gun barrel has left me with a patch of tenderness, just below the ribs.
"Tell her that Henry was here."
"I can do that."
"And let her know that I need to see her."
"I can do that, too." He lifts a white ceramic demita.s.se off a hook and fills it with espresso, layers in the foamed milk with a long-handled spoon. There"s a kind of genius at work here, a delicate sensibility being applied.
"You didn"t always do this," I say. "Coffee, I mean."
"No." He keeps his eyes on his work, he"s got the demita.s.se cradled in his palm and he"s delicately jostling it, conjuring a pattern of dark coffee and cloudy foam. "I was a student of applied mathematics," he says, and very lightly inclines his head to indicate Harvard, across the street. He looks up, beaming. "But you know what they say," he concludes and presents me my latte, which bears a perfect and symmetrical oak leaf in milk foam. "There"s no future in it."
He"s smiling, and I"m supposed to laugh, but I don"t. My eye hurts. My lip is throbbing where I got punched.
"So, you"ll let her know? That Henry was here?"
"Yes, dude. I"ll tell her."
"And please tell her-" You know what? At this point, why not? "Tell her Palace needs to know what all this Jules Verne moon-shot hok.u.m is covering up. Tell her I know there"s more to this, and I want to know who these people are, and what it is they want."
"Wow. See, now, that"s a message."
I"m pulling my wallet out of my pocket, and the Coffee Doctor reaches up and stills my hand.
"No, no," he says. "On the house. I gotta be honest, friend. You don"t look so good."