Pied Piper

CHAPTER 63

The following morning at 11:22, Boldt and Daphne checked into the Soniat House under the name Brehmer. Deep in the French Quarter on a quiet side street away from the T-shirts and the smell of stale beer, away from the movie crews and tourists swollen with crawfish and hot sauce, the hotel’s office and courtyard were accessed through a single door painted kelly green. They stepped into another, older world, a New Orleans Boldt had not yet experienced, but one he quickly realized lingered beneath the surface glitz and souvenirs. Its cobblestone courtyard resplendent in a lush jungle of deep greens and sharp vivid colors, the Soniat House delivered the New Orleans of the nineteenth century.

The male receptionist wore a dark suit, looked Boldt in the eye and bowed his head slightly to Daphne. “We have a lovely room for you, Mr. and Mrs. Brehmer. Charles will show you the way. I note that your stay is open-ended. We will need notice day after tomorrow if you’re intending to spend the weekend with us.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.” Boldt paused a beat too long as he signed the guest slip, in part because he had to remember to sign Brehmer’s name-it was Brehmer’s credit card he was using-in part because the daily room rate was twice his rental car’s weekly rate.

As a couple they were shown through the courtyard and up a century-old set of winding wooden stairs, past a seven-foot-tall oil portrait of a southern general, and a smaller oil of a harlequin in full regalia. Boldt had no way of knowing how far Chevalier’s influence reached, or what kind of underground existed in this city, but it didn’t take an Intelligence officer to understand it was a place of influence peddling, of favors. For this reason, they had changed nothing about the Brehmers’ hotel reservation or the couple’s itinerary.

Charles keyed open the extremely narrow nine-foot wooden door and motioned for Daphne to lead the way. He heard her gasp as he followed into the long hardwood hallway, its walls covered with oil paintings, light sparkling from a cut glass chandelier. The hallway ended at a large bathroom all marble and brass. Through another pair of towering doors to the left was a sitting room with a crushed velvet love seat, two French chairs and three seven-foot windows that started at floor height and led out onto a balcony with flowering baskets issuing green waterfalls of tendrils and runners and overlooking the narrow street and a nunnery beyond.

Charles, the bellman, explained in his warm affected voice that a century earlier city property taxes had been assessed according to the number of a building’s exterior doors, and so huge, double-hung windows had taken their place. He lifted one, admitting the sounds of the Quarter as a horse-drawn buggy passed and the driver’s voice was heard lecturing his passengers on the Soniat House’s place in the city’s history. Breakfast-biscuits, juice and coffee-would be served on the balcony.

The bedroom held a four-poster with a red satin duvet, flanked by antique end tables hosting leaded glass lamps. A telephone was the only fixture that brought the suite into the current century. Boldt tipped the man, whose footsteps faded down the impossibly long hallway. The door to room 22 bumped shut.

Any of the hotel staff could be on Chevalier’s payroll-bellhops, chambermaids-their every move might be monitored. They would maintain the impression of being a married couple. The Brehmers had a dinner reservation arranged in advance by Chevalier that Boldt and Daphne would honor. There was no saying to what extent Chevalier screened his prospective buyers. Certainly he conducted credit reports. Perhaps he placed the adoptive parents under surveillance for a day or two preceding the adoption; this would help explain his having made various arrangements for both the Hudsons and the Brehmers. Any such possibility required Boldt and Daphne to play along, at least on a superficial level-a married couple excited by the prospect of an adoption.

“We had better practice our signatures,” she said in a businesslike manner.

She ordered a mint julep from room service; Boldt, a ginger ale. When the waiter had come and gone, they sat out on the balcony in green wicker chairs with chintz padded cushions, the sonorous clip-clop of horse and buggy carrying up the cobblestone street. They worked on their forged signatures. Intricate shadows from the wrought-iron artistry played onto the decking, black and white and gray, like Chinese shadow puppets. After attempting a page of signatures, Boldt glanced over at her, his face flushed from the heat. He said, “Want some irony?”

“The laundry service provides the irony,” she said, clearly feeling the bourbon.

Boldt smirked, finished the ginger ale and said, “The irony is that the tables have turned. Now who are the con artists trying to steal a baby?”