by Barry Eisler
He crossed the street, his back to the club, and went into Vesuvio, the venerable Beat generation bar next door to an equally famous Beat landmark, City Lights Bookstore. Vesuvio was one of the bars Ben and his friends had occasionally managed to sneak into back in high school. He looked around and had the weird sense he had gone backward in time. The place hadn’t changed at all—the long wooden bar and pleasantly cramped tables; subdued chandelier and sconce lighting that made you feel you were entering a secret cave; Beat memorabilia plastered on walls the color of tobacco smoke. The air smelled faintly of beer and coffee. It felt like twenty years ago, and for a moment the contrast with the present was almost paralyzing.
A grizzled old man in a gray tweed coat sat at one of the booths, nursing a beer and reading a newspaper and looking as permanent a fixture as the tiled floor and the accumulated bottles behind the bar. A jazz number was playing in the background, piano and sax mixing with the disparate chords of conversation from the people sitting at the bar and surrounding tables. Ben walked past them, then took the narrow staircase in back to the dimly lit second floor.
He was in luck. One of the window seats looking out over Kerouac Alley and Columbus was open. He sat down and had a perfect view of the double doors and red awning that marked the entrance to Pearl’s. He checked his watch. Seven o’clock. If something were going to happen, it would happen in the next hour, two at the most. A waitress came by and he ordered a coffee.
If the girl were tied into this, she would let someone know where Ben could be found. Unless Ben had killed all of them, which he doubted, he expected they still had local resources. If he was right, one or maybe two men were going to show up at Pearl’s. If it were two, one would wait outside to ensure the target could at best spot only one of them. If it were one, he would of course go in alone, and then emerge after confirming Ben wasn’t inside. If they showed, Ben would move out and follow them, and improvise from there.
What he was looking for was something that would be hard to articulate, but—what was it that Supreme Court Justice had said about obscenity?—he would know it when he saw it. The men would be alert and aware of their environment. Their expressions would be deliberately casual, but their postures would be possessed of purpose. Their clothes would be dark, bland, and without any identifying logos. There would be a look in their eyes he would recognize even from across the street. It was the same look in his.
He sipped his coffee, watching car traffic flowing up and down Columbus, noting pedestrians. The sky went from indigo to black; the street, from daylight to neon. Around seven-thirty, Pearl’s started filling up, mostly with casually but well dressed couples who were of no interest to him. Eight o’clock came and went, but he didn’t see what he was looking for. Well, he’d wait until the end of the show. If nothing happened, it wouldn’t prove anything. The girl might still be involved; maybe her people just couldn’t mobilize fast enough. After all, they’d lost two players that morning. It was possible they were having trouble putting together a full team now.
At a little before eight-thirty, he saw an attractive, dark-haired woman in a waist-length black leather jacket coming up Columbus. He looked closer. Son of a bitch, it was Sarah.
He watched her go into Pearl’s, not knowing what to make of it. It didn’t make sense. He could imagine her being an insider on whatever kind of operation Alex had gotten himself into trouble with, but not being an active part of it. He looked up and down the street, but saw nothing out of place.
There wasn’t much time to think. He would just have to make it up as he went along.
He took out his cell phone and called Alex. “Just checking in,” he said. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Nothing new. No breakthroughs. We just called it a night. Sarah went out to buy a change of clothes.”
She hadn’t told Alex she was going to Pearl’s. He wasn’t sure what that meant.
“I want you to do something,” Ben said, watching the double doors through the glass. “There’s a room key under the bottom drawer in the bathroom. It’s for an extra room I took—758, right across the hall. Use it. Don’t stay where you are.”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“No, everything’s copacetic. I’m just being sensible, or you can call it paranoid if you want. I just don’t want you to be where she knows you’ll be until I’m back.”
“Ben, I work with her. I know her. She’s not mixed up in this.”
“Yeah, everyone thinks they know everyone. But you know what, I flew halfway around the world to help you. Why don’t you help me make it not a wasted trip, okay?”
There was a pause, and Ben could imagine Alex fuming. Yeah, well, tough shit if he didn’t like hearing the truth.
“Yeah, okay,” Alex said.
“One more thing. Lock the connecting door and leave all the lights on. And leave the closet and bathroom doors open.”
“Anything else?” Alex said. Ben heard the sarcasm and tried not to let it irritate him. Was it really so hard to understand that Ben didn’t want to come back to a room he couldn’t easily clear?
“Why don’t you just acknowledge that you’ll do it,” he said.
“Yeah, I’ll do it.”
“Good. I’ll call when I’m back.” He clicked off and pocketed the phone.
A minute later, Sarah walked out of Pearl’s and starting heading southeast on Columbus, back the way she had come.
Ben opened one of the casement windows. “Sarah,” he called.
She stopped and looked around. A bus went by and for a moment she was gone in a roar of diesel.
“Sarah,” he called again. “Across the street. In the window.”
She looked up and saw him. She gave a small wave of acknowledgment.
He looked around again and detected no problems. What she was up to? Keep him at Pearl’s while someone else visited Alex? Could be that. Well, Alex was safe for the time being.
She couldn’t be here to do him herself. No, it didn’t figure. He could imagine her being an access agent, something like that, but not a trigger puller. He didn’t read her that way.
Still, if he was wrong, the penalty for missing would be high.
“Come on over,” he said.
21 INSUBSTANTIAL
Alex had yawned three times in an hour, and the last two had been infectious. Sarah looked at him and said, “We’re going in circles. I say we call it a night.”
Alex fixed her with that unreadable gaze of his, then something in his face seemed to soften. “You’re right,” he said. “We need to come at it from a different direction to see what we’re missing, and that’s not going to happen without a break. Are you hungry?”
She had thought he might ask, and was ready for the question. “No, I’m okay. I’m just going to go out and buy a change of clothes. I guess I’ll see you in the morning?”
He nodded. “Seven o’clock too early?”
“No, it’s good. I doubt I’m going to sleep well anyway. This is all too crazy.”
She went to her room through the common doorway, stripped off her clothes, and got in the shower. Something had been building up in her all day, and if she didn’t deal with it, she thought she might explode.
The day had started out weird and then had become downright frightening. Her files missing. The strange call from Alex. Then this guy in his office who she could tell was dangerous in some way, who turned out to be Alex’s brother. When they’d told her what had been happening, she was concerned, but not really frightened. Looking back, she realized her relative sangfroid was the result of a lack of understanding. She didn’t really believe she was in danger. Yes, she understood the police probably couldn’t help, but she had agreed to go with Alex and Ben and try to figure out what was so valuable or dangerous about Obsidian almost as a lark, a kind of adventure, a break in the routine. And then Ben had come back to the car outside the Four Seasons with blood on his face, and she’d seen the report on the news, and she
realized that Alex’s brother was someone who could kill two men—gangsters, it seemed—with about the same level of difficulty most people faced when pouring a cup of coffee. Could kill? He had killed them. There was no other explanation.
And what was she doing now? Had he made her, or had she made herself, in any way an accessory? She’d taken criminal law her second year of law school and had purged her mind of all of it about five minutes after graduating and taking the bar exam. She didn’t know how bad this might be for her legally. And legally might be the least of it.
She knew he didn’t trust her. And the way he looked at her, the way he’d casually walked over to see what was on her laptop screen … was he afraid she would freak out, go to the police? And what would he do if she did?
There were two ways she could deal with it. She could keep her mouth shut and hope it would somehow be all right. Or she could confront the problem directly.
She left the hotel and headed north on Stockton. The night was cold and clear and a crescent moon hung low in the sky. Chinatown was quiet, most of the stores closed now, hidden behind corrugated metal gates. Some of the gates had doorways, a few of which were open, and through them she caught glimpses of families eating dinner and friends playing cards, caught the smells of cooking rice and sweet pastries and the sound of laughter and conversations in a musical language she wished she could understand. Some of the doorways revealed steep, narrow staircases that ascended beyond the angle of her vision, and she wondered what rooms they led to, who traversed them every morning and night, what lives were lived in the secret spaces at their top.
She passed a street mural celebrating the Chinese railroad workers. Paper lanterns set at its base flickered, shivering in the breeze. She turned right on Pacific, looking up at the old wooden buildings, their balconies painted green and red, the eaves turned up in the Asian fashion. An old man was closing up his store at the front of one of them, an herb shop whose windows displayed glass jars filled with ghastly specimens that might have come from the earth or the sea or somewhere else entirely. He waved and smiled toothlessly at her as she passed, and she nodded and smiled in return.
She emerged onto Columbus, and the quiet of the somnolent Chinatown evening ended abruptly with the traffic and neon of North Beach. There it was, Jazz at Pearl’s, a first-floor club with windows on the street and a doorway under a red awning. She crossed the street and went inside, explaining to the doorman that she had no reservation but she was supposed to meet a friend here … could she just take a quick look around?
It was a small place, maybe thirty people, soft carpet and red-hued lighting and small round tables covered in white linen. A voluptuous black woman was singing “Need My Sugar” with piano and bass accompaniment, and the audience was toe-tapping heartily along with it. Ben wasn’t there. Maybe he was in the bathroom? She waited five minutes and then gave up, surprised at how disappointed she was. If she didn’t confront him, if she didn’t get past this, she didn’t know how the hell she was going to sleep tonight.
She had just turned left onto Columbus, thinking maybe she’d grab a bite at Café Prague before finding a Walgreens or something else open at night where she could pick up a change of underwear and a few other items, when someone called her name. She looked around, seeing no one. A bus went by. Had she imagined it? And then she heard it again. She looked up and saw Ben, in the second-story window of Vesuvio. “Come on over,” he called.
She felt an odd burst of pleasure that she couldn’t quite place— excitement? relief?—and crossed the street.
She went inside and immediately liked it. She supposed it was weird that she lived in San Francisco and had never been inside Vesuvio, but she’d never been to Alcatraz, either. It was one of those places, well known to tourists, you figured would always be there and you’d get to it eventually. Not that she’d been in too much of a hurry. In her imagination, the place was more of a Beat museum than a real bar someone might want to go to for a drink, but the atmosphere struck her immediately as authentic and she was glad she’d been wrong.
She went up to the second floor and walked alongside the balcony overlooking the bar below. The ceiling was close overhead, maybe seven feet, and painted dark brown or black. There was some light from the street but other than that it was so dim she found herself squinting. A few indistinct groups were talking and laughing around tables in booths. She made out Ben’s shape against a window, silhouetted by the neon sign of the Tosca Café across the street. He was sitting away from his table, his feet planted on the floor. There was something about him that always seemed … ready. For what, she wasn’t sure.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as she approached.
She stopped in front of the table but didn’t sit down. “I wanted to talk to you.”
He nodded and looked out at the street, then back at her. “Do you have a problem with my putting my hands on you?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head, thinking she had misunderstood. “What?”
“I’m not going to be comfortable sitting here with you if I don’t pat you down. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
She didn’t know what to make of it. Was he serious?
As she stood there, trying to take it all in, he got up and stepped close to her. He leaned in close, and she realized this was for the benefit of anyone who might be watching, to obscure what he was really doing. She caught a whiff of the hotel’s soap, and something else underneath it, something masculine she couldn’t otherwise place. She felt his left hand move inside her coat and slide up her right side, the palm of his hand firm against her kidney, her ribs, the edge of her breast. Then his right hand was doing the same on the other side. He pulled her against him and ran his hands lightly across the small of her back and over her hips. She felt her heart beating fast and told herself it was because she was angry.
He took a step back and glanced around the bar, then knelt in front of her and quickly ran his hands up each of her legs, ankle to groin. She heard her breath moving forcefully in and out of her nose.
He stood and looked at her. She glared back. “Satisfied?” she asked.
He nodded and sat, with no indication she should do the same.
The insolence of it, and her failure to do anything effective in response other than a single lame word of sarcasm, made her so angry she imagined herself picking up a chair and swinging it at him like a baseball bat. “Stand up,” she said.
“What?”
“Stand up,” she said again.
He did.
She stepped in close and looked into his eyes. “We better both be careful, no?”
She slipped her hands inside his blazer and ran them slowly up his sides. She could feel the warmth of his skin through his shirt, the muscles underneath. She never took her eyes from him. He wanted to play it mocking and insolent? She could play it that way, too.
She knelt in front of him and touched him with the same clinical ease, the same sense of entitlement, that he had used on her. Then she stood and put a hand on his stomach. It was hard and flat and she could feel it expanding and contracting slightly with his breathing.
“I guess you’re unarmed,” she said, still looking into his eyes.
He put his hand over hers and started pushing it lower. She couldn’t believe it … what was he doing, one-upping her? But she wasn’t going to blink first.
Lower. Her heart was pounding but she wouldn’t look away.
Her hand stopped at a hard protuberance just above his groin. She realized what it was—a gun, in some kind of special concealed holster.
“Maybe I can trust you after all,” he said.
She glared at him. “Why?”
“Because nobody, with even the most rudimentary training, could have done such a lame pat-down. Maybe you are just a lawyer.”
“And maybe you’re just an asshole.”
“Oh, I’m a lot more than that.”
His hand was still covering hers. She pulle
d it away and sat down. After a moment he joined her.
“Well? What did you want to talk about?” he asked, his tone and expression casual enough to suggest that he didn’t really care.
She looked at him for a long second, anger seething inside her. “Forget it,” she said, and stood to go.
He was out of his seat with such liquid speed it amazed her. He caught her arm. “Why?” he said. “You mad because I patted you down? Because I didn’t get turned on when you did the same to me?”
“Getting turned on is a human quality. I don’t see it in you.”
“Listen. I don’t know you, so I don’t trust you. It’s not personal.”
“The hell it’s not. You trusted me fine right up until you heard my name. So don’t tell me it’s not personal.”
“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll buy you a drink.”
“I’ll buy my own drink.”
Ben glanced over her shoulder. “All right, buy one for me, too.”
She looked, and saw the waitress standing behind her.
“Bombay Sapphire martini,” Ben said. “No olive, no vermouth.”
The hell with it. She nodded to the waitress. “Make it two.”
They sat. Ben said, “You going to tell me why you’re here?”
She felt her heart beating and it made her angry again. She hated that he could be so cool with her, and that at the same time he made her nervous. And she was scared about what she was going to say next.
She cleared her throat. “It’s … about the Four Seasons. I’m thinking about what you’re thinking, putting myself in the other person’s shoes, the way you said to do. And if I were in your shoes, I’d be afraid that I might … go to the police or something. I’m afraid of what you might do to prevent that.”
He looked at her for a long moment, and she thought she saw something play across his eyes in the diffused light from the street. Sympathy? Regret?
Then he glanced away. “When we’re done with this, you’ll look back and it’ll seem like it never happened.”