Love You Dead

19 Sunday 22 February

Tooth, in a leather jacket, black T-shirt and chinos, sat on a sofa in a quiet corner at the rear of the Macanudo cigar bar on 63rd Street in New York, whiling away the Sunday evening by chain-smoking his Lucky Strikes and drinking Diet Cokes. A group of guys sat in front of the wall-mounted television screen at the far end of the room, watching a re-run of the Superbowl.

He didn’t do football games.

He didn’t do cold, either, and right now outside at 7 p.m. it was freezing cold, dark and sleeting. He shot a glance around the room, which was decorated like a gentleman’s club and dimly lit. It was the way bars used to be in the years before the smoking ban had turned smokers like him into exiles in most places in the western world.

Apart from the waitress, who occasionally came over to check on his drink, no one took any notice of him.

He took from his wallet the one-hundred-dollar bill that Vishram Singh had handed him, and looked at it. Looked again at the serial number printed on it. 76458348.

One phone call yesterday evening had established it came from a sequence of numbers from the new one-hundred-dollar bills, totalling $200,000, that had been in the suitcase apparently taken from the Park Royale West suite of a scumbag Romanian called Romeo Munteanu. He was a bagman for a bunch of Russian businessmen based in the enclave called Little Odessa, down in Brooklyn, near New York’s Brighton Beach, who had become his main paymasters in the past year.

The first part of this job, for which he had been paid his requisite total fee of one million dollars in advance, into his Swiss bank account, had been accomplished. It had been to teach Romeo Munteanu a lesson that would send a signal to anyone else that his bosses were not to be messed with. That had been easy. The next part was more challenging.

Five thousand dollars, handed over in the back office of the night porter, had secured him a copy of the videotape of the woman who had checked in to the hotel under the name Judith Forshaw, and a copy of the registration form she had signed. But the porter reckoned he knew who she really was. Just as he was about to tell Tooth, a news bulletin came on the small television in the office. It featured further revelations of indicted financier Walt Klein’s misconduct, stating that the scale of his fraud was even greater than at first thought. It referred to the arrival back in the USA, the previous week, of his body, accompanied by his distraught fiancée, Jodie Bentley. The images showed Jodie, looking bewildered in a storm of strobing flashlights in an airport arrivals hall, then subsequently entering the New York Four Seasons hotel.

‘No question, buddy,’ the porter had said. ‘She was all nervous, had a British accent, I think that name was a cover or something. Guess maybe she’s trying to escape the paparazzi, you know.’

The blade of his stiletto, which still had fresh blood on it from Romeo Munteanu, accompanied by his threat that the trembling porter would end up the same way as the man in Suite 5213 if he breathed a word to anyone, had also secured him the man’s silence.

The address Judith Forshaw had put on the registration form was in Western Road, Brighton, England. A seaside city he had gotten to know. He’d been there twice before, once to kill an Estonian sea captain who’d attempted to run off with a cargo of drugs, in a harbour to the west of the city. And on a second occasion to avenge the death of the son of a New York mobster — which had nearly ended badly for him. If he needed to make a transatlantic trip to Brighton, at least he would be returning to a city he knew. Most of his assignments were to places totally alien to him.

With earphones plugged in, he played the video of her in the foyer of the Park Royale West Hotel. Judith Forshaw. She had taken $200,000 that wasn’t hers.

As well as something much more important to his paymaster. Something worth more than the million-dollar fee he had been paid. A USB memory stick that his paymaster needed back. Urgently.

Tooth studied her face for some moments. He would remember it now forever. He never forgot a face.

Judith Forshaw or Jodie Bentley. He would find her.

She might have gone to LaGuardia Airport, but he reckoned that was a false trail. Her fiancé, Walter Klein, was dead. Klein was a Jewish name. He knew the Jewish tradition was to bury their dead very quickly. He imagined the funeral would be taking place sometime this coming week, assuming his body was released by the Medical Examiner. As his grieving fiancée, Jodie Bentley would surely attend. Or would she?

Walt Klein was all over the news. His assets had been frozen. Clearly Jodie had been left high and dry — why else would she do a dumb thing like robbing a stranger? Desperation?

Was she going to risk hanging around Manhattan? To see an old crook, who’d left her penniless, being put in the ground?

Would he have hung around, in her situation?

He didn’t think so. He’d have gotten the first plane out of this freezing hellhole.