Known to Evil

51

It only took a minute for Tiny "Bug" Bateman to disengage the lock on the shamrock-green, reinforced metal door to his underground apartment/workshop. This door was eight feet below street level on Charles, near Hudson.

The electronics lab that had once been a living space was now a series of rooms lined with worktables containing every sort of gadget that a spy-store devotee could imagine. Listening devices, hidden lenses, specialized walkie-talkie telephones, motion sensors, and a lot of things I couldn't even begin to explain.

I was walking down the hall toward the one-time master bedroom that was now filled with a dozen or more linked CPUs that combined to make one of the fastest civilian computers in the world.

Bug met me in the hall.

I had never seen Tiny outside of the hole cut into the round table that dominated his control room. There he always sat, surrounded by more than a dozen screens, swiveling this way and that between keyboards and other, more exotic, devices.

I had never seen his fat, cafe au lait feet before. As usual, he was wearing blue-jean overalls with no shirt and the red-and-blue iridescent glasses used to track the otherwise invisible spectrums that appeared on some of his more bizarre screens. He was four inches taller than I, close to three hundred pounds, and very, very soft. His curly hair was longish and unruly.

"Tiny?"

He lifted his hinged ultraviolet lenses, so that they flipped up over his forehead, and gave a rare smile.

"Did you talk to her?" he asked.

"What?"

"Zephyra," he said as if he were the pope and I a priest who had somehow forgotten the Latinate Lord's Prayer.

"No, man," I said. "I've been on a case. I've been working."

"You couldn't make a call?"

"Zephyra Ximenez is not a call girl," I said. "Not when it comes to something like this, anyway. I was thinking that if I survived the next few days I'd meet with her at the Naked Ear and we'd talk. But now that I see you got feet that actually work, maybe all three of us could meet there."

The look on the brooding young man's face was classic. He went from monadic particulate to an eight-year-old boy in no time.

"Um…" he said.

"I'll take that as a yes. Now can we get down to some business?"

EVEN ONCE HE WAS back in his hole, Tiny was still a little off at first. I kept having to repeat myself when explaining about the Leontine Building and the man named Shell.

In order to prime him for more challenging work, I had him look up the license-plate number I got from Lonnie, the redheaded ex-con, but that was just a rental to a guy named Bob Brown.

"And you want to know where this Shell is?" Tiny asked once we were back into the meat of my visit.

"If that'll help me find out who he's working for," I said. "I need to know who's behind all this."

After some time Tiny settled down to his usual brilliance and brought his bug-eyes to bear on the subject of Oscar Shell.

Problems showed up immediately when it became clear that no one by that name worked for any company situated in the Leontine Building. No Oscar Shell had ever rented space there. As a matter of fact, there wasn't an Oscar Shell that fit Angie's description anywhere in the tristate area.

"This isn't gonna work," Tiny said after an hour on the bully's trail. "How about we take another route?"

"The building?" I asked.

From there the fat genius went into overdrive.

T. D. Donnie and Sons were listed as the owners of the Leontine but they actually owned less than one percent of the building, making their money as absentee property managers. The corporation they answered to was Graski Incorporated, which was located in Chicago. Graski had gone out of business in 1955, however, though the corporate name was owned by a woman named Hedda Martins of Miami. Hedda had died three years earlier, and a Florida lawyer's report had informed her heirs that Hedda was a small partner in a company in San Francisco called Real Innovations. RI had listed among its properties the Leontine.

The trail might have ended there, except for one of Hedda's pesky heirs-a man named Thom Soams. Soams filed suits in New York, Illinois, Florida, and California in an attempt to receive payment for what he felt was the heirs' rightful due. After two and half years of wrangling with a new firm, Mallory Investments, Soams collected the sum of $22,307.31 in settlement.

Mallory Investments was a subsidiary of Regents Bank of New York, a private institution owned lock, stock, and barrel by a sometime socialite oddly named Sandra Sanderson III.

It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but at least I had a business, and maybe even a name.

The articles we pulled up on Sanderson painted her as a hands-on tyrant in her multibillion-dollar business. She fought long and hard against anyone who stood in her way. The New York skyline owed a lot to Regents Bank, which collected its interest with a stopwatch and a stable of lawyers.

Her son, Desmond, had died of a rare heart disease at the beginning of 2008, and Sandra had gone into seclusion, which was peculiar, because mother and son had been on the outs for years.

The structure of this story put me in a rather literary frame of mind.

If Desmond was Grendel, and Sandra Grendel's mama, then maybe Alphonse was Beowulf and this was all a reenactment of a classic masterpiece.

I smiled to myself, leaning on Tiny's round white table as I read the articles he'd produced for me.

"Uh-oh," the genius said.

"What?"

"Somebody's trying to track me down."

"Regents?"

"Not by the signature, but you can bet whoever it is, they work for them."

"How close are they?"

"I've laid down four thousand ninety-six false trails," he said, unrattled. "They might could get through them all, but I doubt it."

"What if they do?"

"If they pushed hard enough they might break the shield on my place."

"That's a lot of work, isn't it?"

"I hacked their database," he said blandly. "They're worth billions. But don't worry, I have a lot of traps set. It's very unlikely that they'd make it all the way here."

" 'Unlikely' is not a word I swear by," I said. "Maybe we should get you out of here for a couple of days."

"No."

"No?"

"No one drives me from my home. My life's work is here in this room. I'll die before I let anyone take it from me or me from it."

"You don't really mean that," I said.

"This bunker could withstand a nuclear blast," he told me. I believed him. "It would take a crew of construction engineers just to take down my front door. Being underground, I don't have any assailable walls, and the apartment overhead is mine, with a reinforced floor. There's booby traps all down the hallway and even in the toilet and I have plastic explosives embedded in all four walls of this room. If they ever got this far-they'd never get out."

I didn't doubt a word that Tiny had said. I did, however, wonder if he had considered how vulnerable someone like Zephyra would make him. She wouldn't agree to live in a hole, or to a suicide pact, in order to protect data.

"You got a pencil?" I asked him.

He reached under the table, coming out with a cheap retractable pen and a violet notepad. I scribbled down a phone number and pushed the tiny binder back at him.

"What's this?"

"That's a special number that every important person in the city has. It connects to a solitary 911 operator who has at her beck and call an elite SWAT unit, one in each borough. All you have to do is call that number and the police will be here in force in under five minutes-no questions asked."

In my years moving among gangsters and bent businessmen I'd accumulated a whole treasure trove of information. The special emergency number came from Alphonse Rinaldo himself.

"Wow." It was a rare thing to impress Bug.

"Yeah," I said. "Before you level the block, you might just use that."