by Lee Stone
Kate let out a long sigh and Lockhart heard the waver in her breath. Looked up to see her apprehensive eyes searching his for an answer, and he wilted. Maybe he could get her safely through the airport and out of Cambodia. He could fly with her to New York. Once she was home, there was nothing to keep him in there. He could take another flight almost as soon as he landed. And besides, maybe doubling back on himself would be more random, more confusing, than any other move he could make.
‘Well, I can get you to the airport,’ Fischer said, rousing himself. ‘One more coffee and I’ll be good to go.’
Kate looked at Lockhart, silently questioning the lawyer’s ability to drive so soon after his poisoned gin. Lockhart shrugged. He preferred their chances on the road with Fischer compared to standing still and waiting for Ta Penh to catch up. He called the airline from the lawyer’s office, checking Kate and himself onto an evening flight back to America. He found an Ethiad flight through Abu Dhabi and made separate bookings for himself and Kate. He ticketed them a few rows apart, just in case anyone was watching for them at the airport.
*
Lockhart and Kate reached Phnom Penh late in the afternoon. The lawyer had taken them as far as Kep, where they had picked up an air-conditioned coach which spilled out into the oppressive afternoon gloom in front of the terminal. The monsoon clouds gathered above the airport and the passengers moved quickly inside the boxy and uninspired terminal building. They had built it in thick layers of terracotta and cream, like the architect had left a tuna sandwich resting on his drawings and scaled up the result. Stark white neon capitals spelled out the airport’s name in a perfunctory fashion on the front facade. On the pavement underneath, tropical greenery crammed into heavy concrete sewage pipes, apparently adding some aesthetic consideration to the design and working as a security feature. Low sodium bulbs washed the plants in dull yellow light and they looked jaundiced under the gray-black sky.
Lockhart watched the tourists moving together towards the rotating glass doors under the airport canopy. They were shoals again, just like they had been on the beach in Kep. Now though, the backpackers mingled with businessmen, and Lockhart watched them carefully as he took a last breath of Cambodian air. Then, when he was sure there were no sharks circling, he took Kate’s arm and followed the crowds inside.
25
Harry Glinka left his desk at the New York Times before most of his colleagues arrived, and headed out into the storm, trying to get ahead in an industry which struggled to keep up with its audience’s veracious appetite. An industry doomed to fail because of the events that had unfolded on 9/11 in the city where Glinka was standing at that very moment. The problem was that there would never be a bigger story. And ever since that terrible moment of impact, editors and shareholders and those ravenous vampire audiences had all demanded bigger, and brighter, and better. More news. More sensation. More speed. More horror. And yet how? September 11 had been, and remained, the zenith of breaking news. Those single, revoltingly hypnotic moments of world-changing actuality, caught on film and broadcast in real time were rare beyond anything else on earth. Nothing since had quite lived up to that exquisitely horrible moment when the world stopped and stared at their screens, united in disbelief, waiting for the newscaster to tell them it was real.
The last lines of the Great Gatsby (and Glinka was from that generation of journalists who had studied the written word before attempting to make a living from it) said that Gatsby believed in an orgastic future that receded in front of him. And so it was for the viewing and reading masses, as far as Glinka could see. They were waiting for the next Twin Towers like addicts wait for their next hit. They simultaneously craved and dreaded a story so sickening that they would be transfixed to the screen while the world they knew was swept away from under them. And while they waited for it, the ratings soared. The web traffic grew, more iPhone apps were downloaded and even the good old-fashioned newspaper continued to survive against all odds.
And as The Jam told it, what the public wants, the public gets. Armies of editors gave it to them. In the years following the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, newsrooms shamelessly sexed up and sensationalized every single story they published. But that took time and creativity. And churn. It took interns. And newbies. Zombies. Unthinkers. In Glinka’s opinion, half of the new breed flooding into America’s newsrooms was no more skilled than packing workers. The job they did was repetitive and required no real skill in judgment. The industry satisfied the newfound desire for relentless news coverage by using people who were, to put it bluntly, not up to the job. People who had enough brains to fill an internet page with reviews of shoes and video games, but who were dangerous when let loose on a live feed or allowed outside the building to talk to real people. Glinka had worked with plenty of them. Sometimes they astonished him with their stupidity. The more he thought about it, the more pleased he was to be out of the building for a while.
That was why he was hustling across 42nd Street and down into the Port Authority Subway with its shiny white tiles and yellow-gray grouting that betrayed half a century of lack luster cleaning, and a lifetime of soaking up all manner of gruesome airborne horrors. His legs felt heavy as he headed down the second tier of stairs and onto the subway platform. Working early had always been a part of working hard, but as the years had gone on, the early starts had become tougher. He felt them in his legs and in his chest. A bronchial strain, like sleep, was still cloying in his lungs. A tin can train rumbled along the opposite track and came to a rest against the platform. Glinka watched the sardines spill out and sighed to himself. He didn’t like the way they moved. A herd of unthinking people. They were zombies, lumbering towards their desks. As they moved along the tunnel, they shuffled and ricocheted into one another, like marbles in a glass.
Glinka went back to his thoughts. He was heading for Pelham Parkway, and then Siberia, hidden away in the heart of the projects. It was a place the cops ignored and the rest of the city had forgotten. Nothing thrived there that was any good. Nothing thrived except for the drug lords and the gangsters, at least. Glinka had stumbled across the story by chance, having overheard two women talking in a train a few nights back. They had been sitting directly behind him and talking about Siberia thawing out. That caught his attention because it sounded like a secret code from an old Ian Fleming book. Glinka, who still enjoyed those old cold war stories, was intrigued.
‘They say it’s just one guy,’ the first woman said.
She had a lazy, lethargic sounding voice. Her friend sounded more wired, and from what Glinka could make out she was chewing gum.
‘Bullshit, one guy.’
‘That’s what they say.’
There was a long pause where neither of them said anything. Glinka, unable to tame his curiosity, twisted in his seat to face them. They were too young to be his daughters and too old to be his grandchildren. That was a strange trait he had noticed in himself recently. He had taken to aging people by where they would fit in his family, even though he saw his own family more rarely than ever since he had moved to New York.
‘Where’s Siberia?’ he had asked.
One girl, the one with the gum, looked at him as if he were mad. The other scowled at him as if his question was the first salvo in some weird ordeal he was planning to put them through. But years of doing his job had given him a sense of entitlement when it came to asking questions, and when he didn’t shift back around in his seat the girl with the gum answered him.
‘If Pelham Parkway’s a donut,’ she said, ‘then Siberia is the hole in the middle. It’s nothing. There’s nothing there except trouble.’
‘That’s why they call it Siberia?’ Glinka asked. ‘Because it’s cold and unwelcoming?’
It was not a sparkling observation, Glinka thought, but then it was enough to keep the conversation going until the girls loosened up.
‘What do you care?’ the girl with the lazy voice asked.
The train rattled over a rough
bit of track, and when Glinka asked another question, the girls scowled again, and the one with the gum cupped her hand to her ear.
‘So who’s the guy?’ he asked again, when the track settled down. ‘And how’s he thawing out Siberia?’
This was how Glinka found news stories. By listening.
‘Let me buy you a drink,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’
They hesitated and glanced at each other, but Glinka saw their eyes light up. Both girls had spent time on their hair and makeup, but time and effort were no substitute for an expensive cut or a refined touch. One of them, the one with the drawl, wore a tight green nylon top, with thin straps that did nothing to cover up black bra straps. The skin pinched between the straps was pale and her complexion was poor. The green top gaped in the middle and revealed a lot of rib cage between her breasts. They were young and poor, and there probably wasn’t too much they wouldn’t tell him for money, if he put the questions in the right way.
They got off the 5 train at the next stop, and he took them to an Asian place on Lexington, where he introduced them to Japanese sake and a few games that helped them to drink it faster. The more sake he ordered, the more they had told him about the guy who was thawing out Siberia. They said he had taken potshots at dealers and pimps and each time the number of gangsters roaming the streets of Siberia had halved.
‘How can I contact him?’ Glinka had asked eventually. ‘Do you got a number?’
That was interesting grammar. Do you got a number? That was not how he spoke, nor how he wrote. It was his best attempt at relating to the young people of New York City, and it made him shudder. Do you got a number? Patronizing. A little portion of his soul wilted and died, but the girls had seemed not to notice anything good or bad in how he talked. The one with the strappy green top shrugged.
‘No, I don’t got no number,’ she said, contorting the sentence even more, and he couldn’t tell whether she was mimicking him. He felt out of touch. He felt old.
‘But how hard can it be?’ she continued, chewing on the gum she had kept in her mouth even through all the glasses of sake. ‘The guy stands on the same corner every day. Go find him.’
Glinka knew she was right. Glinka, who so often griped about the young reporters lacking initiative. Glinka, who had once considered himself a swashbuckler. Glinka who, in that moment of weakness, had needed to be fired up to go chasing the story by a kid he had just met on the subway. That was a reality check.
So three days later, Harry Glinka traveled north on the 5 train, past Lexington and up into the Bronx. He had picked up the train at Grand Central, and felt sure there was a more direct route, but like all newcomers, he took some comfort in traveling through the huge city via landmarks that had been familiar to him even before he arrived. Today was a good day for it. The story was coming, and everyone would be assigned to reporting it. But tomorrow everything would dry out, and the editors would wake up wide-eyed and short of stories. And when that happened, Glinka would ride into town with his story about the vigilante. The story of an abandoned community, and a brave man bringing justice to the meanest streets.
26
Jake Leisler followed Jimmy Penh upstairs to the room above the bar. He gritted his teeth, soaked up his anger, and tried to imagine the pain away. He tried to guess what had gone wrong, and what might have upset his boss. Nothing sprang to mind. As ever, he had been thorough and careful. Which meant that whatever had happened, it was somebody else’s fault. Whoever it was, Leisler decided he would land ten blows on them for every one he had received from Jimmy. Ten to one felt fair. Ten to one made him smile, and for a moment the pain dulled.
‘Close the door, Jake.’
Leisler did as he was told. Jimmy Penh watched him turn and walk into the room. Jimmy was impressed. Leisler was as calm as a victim as he was as a killer. The office above The Elbow had an air of renaissance opulence about it. The furniture was ornate in leather and gold, chairs looking more like thrones and the woodwork polished and gleaming. The tiled floor was covered in a heavy rug and classic European artwork hung from the walls. The pictures showed saints from a Thirteenth century text called the Golden Legend, according to Jimmy. Leisler couldn’t name any of them. His knowledge of the arts stopped at George and Iva Gershwin.
Everything about Jimmy’s office said, I am not one of you. And it was true. While Jake Leisler had clawed his way up from the projects to become king of the streets, Jimmy had arrived unannounced at taken his seat at the top of the pile. He didn’t ask permission or play by the rules. He bought with him a guaranteed supply of cheap pills, undercut the competition, and strangled his rivals.
He tossed the baseball bat onto the desk and sat down. The bat looked ugly and out of place in the beautiful room. From just inside the doorway, Leisler wondered if he could snatch it and knock Jimmy’s head clean off with it. But he was smart enough to wait for his moment. Other people had landed blows on him, just like Jimmy. But all of them were in the ground now, and behind his poker face, Leisler resolved that one day he would put Jimmy in the ground too. But not today. There were plenty of people downstairs in the Elbow who owed Jimmy a lot. He was generous to the people surrounding him, and if Leisler killed him, he wouldn’t make it out of the bar, king of the streets or not. Their whole empire was based on the packages that came in from Jimmy’s family. Without Jimmy, the whole thing would fall apart tomorrow. The bars, the girls, the Lamborghinis would all wither and die overnight.
Jimmy Penh watched Leisler carefully. Jimmy had not been interested in becoming king of the streets. If Leisler wanted a reputation for ruthlessness, and extortion, and murder, he was welcome to it.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
Leisler sat down opposite Jimmy Penh.
‘You hit me with a fucking baseball bat, Jimmy. That’s what fucking happened.’
‘Don’t be cute.’
Leisler scowled. ‘I’m not being cute. You nearly broke my leg, and I don’t know why. Tell me what happened and I’ll get it fixed. But I can’t fix it if I don’t know what it is.’
Jimmy picked up the bat and began tapping it on his desk, drumming out a rhythm. He took a moment to eye Leisler suspiciously and then said, ‘What happened to the package?’
Leisler paused.
‘Nothing happened to the package,’ he said warily. ‘You told me what you wanted done, so I got it done.’
Jimmy smashed the baseball bat down on the desk.
There was a moment’s silence.
‘No, Jake,’ he hissed. ‘You didn’t.’
Leisler rubbed his hand across his face, taking a moment to compose himself. Making sure he said nothing stupid.
‘Look Jimmy,’ he said. ‘You ask me to do things, and I get them done. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked. If something’s gone wrong, tell me what it is and I’ll look into it.’
Jimmy smiled.
‘You’ll look into it?’
‘I’ll look into it. I’ll fix it.’
For a moment Jimmy stared at him. Weighing him up. If anyone would ever take his crown, it would be Leisler. He couldn’t do it yet. He didn’t have the contacts or the money. But he had the inclination and the desire. Jimmy knew that. And if a sudden rush of premature ambition and stupidity would ever catch Leisler, then this might just have been the moment. The package might have given him the opportunity.
‘Are you stealing from me, Jake?’ he asked quietly.
‘No.’
‘What happened to the suitcase?’
‘I found a courier. Booked her flight. Packed her bag.’
‘Then what?’
‘I texted her picture to Lim just like you told me.’
‘Did you put her on the plane?’
‘You know I didn’t,’ Leisler said. ‘The work I do for you, Jimmy, means I’ve got a reputation. Cops know me. If I turn up at the airport with her, she will be red flagged right from the start. She wouldn’t make it out of JFK. You know that.’
‘So who watched her?’ Jimmy said. ‘Who did you trust?’
‘I trusted her.’
‘Who?’
‘The courier. I trusted the fucking courier, okay?’
For a moment, he put his head in his hands. He knew it was a mistake. Jimmy was right. He should have watched her onto the flight.
‘So nobody watched her?’
‘I know her. I chose her. I trusted her.’
‘Do you still trust her?’
Leisler sighed. Jimmy was smart. He had trapped him. If he trusted her, then she was his girl, and it was his problem to find the cash. If he didn’t trust her, then he had screwed up by not watching her onto the plane.
‘What do we do?’ he asked.
‘I will cut you some slack.’ Jimmy said.
Leisler looked up at him, waiting for the bad news.
‘I will give you seven days. A whole week to sort this out. Okay?’
There it was. Leisler sat in silence for a minute and then swallowed his pride and thanked Jimmy for the stay of execution.
‘Also, I will not worry about the suitcase,’ Jimmy continued. ‘Don’t you worry about it either.’
Leisler nodded.
‘But the cash inside it?’ Jimmy said, picking up the bat again. ‘I want every dime back on this desk in seven day's time. Understand?’
Leisler nodded. ‘Sure, Jimmy.’
‘There was a wooden box in the case too,’ Jimmy said. ‘If that doesn’t back, we’re all fucked.’
Leisler knew about the box. There were reasons the box was never going to leave New York City. Reasons Jimmy didn’t need to know about yet. But the money should have gone. A million-dollar deficit put the heat on him, and it was heat he could do without. Someone was making a quick million at his expense, and it was time to go find out who it was.
27
Lockhart did not like airports. Back in the day, he had enjoyed the bustle of the long haul lounges. But these days he found them ominous. They were the gatekeepers of nations; checkpoints between one country and the next. They were the pinch points. The choice between one future or another. Airports, as far as Lockhart could see, were vulnerable and dangerous places to be, if you were in the business of lying low. They were places where the hunted come up for air, and where the monsters lurk in wait. Places where the camouflage slips away; where everyone is watching, and everyone is watched.