Night Film

83

I strolled into the Waldorf Towers lobby to do some reconnaissance.

Today, behind the front desk there was an attractive woman, thirties, with long shiny black hair — her nametag read DEBRA — and a young Japanese man, MASATO. After answering the phone a few times, Debra fumbled under the desk and produced a large Louis Vuitton bag, a good sign; it meant she liked luxury goods, would welcome some extra cash to buy more. This, while Masato stood stoically at the other side of the desk, doing and saying nothing, like a Kendo warrior proficient in the Way of the Sword.

The single girl and the last samurai — it didn’t take a genius to decide who’d be amenable to bribery.

I caught up to Nora and Hopper on the steps of Saint Bartholomew’s, across from the hotel. I gave them Debra’s description and put the three of us on a surveillance rotation, so we could catch her alone as soon as she left the hotel. One of us monitored the employees’ entrance from Saint Bart’s while the other two waited at a Starbucks down the block.

Four hours passed. And though quite a few employees exited — crossing the street to discreetly smoke a cigarette — Debra never appeared.

At four, I did another drive-by and realized Debra must have ducked out another entrance, because only Masato remained.

“Everyone has their price,” Hopper said, when I explained this unfortunate development.

“Yeah, well, from the look of this guy, his price is three hundred beheadings and a katana sword.”

At the stroke of six, Nora alerted us that Masato was leaving the hotel. I managed to flag him down.

“Sure, I’ll do it,” he announced in a flawless American accent, after I explained. “For three thousand dollars. Cash.”

I laughed. “Five hundred.”

He stood and walked out of the Starbucks. I was certain he was bluffing, but then he was on the subway escalator descending into the dense crowd.

“Eight hundred,” I said, fighting shopping bags, women giving me dirty looks, to reach him. Masato didn’t turn. “One thousand.” I jostled an owl-looking girl in tortoiseshell glasses to get beside him. “Complete with home addresses.”

Masato only put large blue deejay headphones over his ears.

“Twelve hundred. My final offer. And at that price we should know what nuts they ate from the minibar.”

It was a deal.

Minutes later, Masato, displaying a fairly impressive poker face, ducked back inside the Waldorf, I went around the corner to an ATM, and then returned to the Starbucks. An hour passed, the crowd of commuters, once a flash flood, had drained to a meager trickle of women with tired faces and men in rumpled suits. Another half-hour, and there was still no sign of Masato. I was beginning to think something had happened, when suddenly he entered, pulled a thick envelope out of his bag.

There were more than two hundred names, alphabetized according to date, complete with calls made from the hotel phone. I handed him the cash, which he counted in plain sight. Apparently, this Starbucks was used to underworld transactions, because the employees behind the counter who’d witnessed us skulking in the window all day dully carried on taking orders.

“Quad venti soy latte!”

Masato stuck the envelope into his shoulder bag and left without a word, donning his headphones and vanishing into the subway.

The three of us ordered coffees, sat down at a table in the back corner, and started combing through the names, checking them against the Oubliette membership.

We’d been doing this for more than an hour, taking turns reading aloud, when Nora excitedly jerked forward in her seat, eyes wide.

“How do you spell that? The last name you just said?”

“Villarde,” Hopper repeated. “V–I-L–L-A-R-D-E.”

“It’s here,” she whispered in amazement, holding out the paper.

I stared down at the name on the Oubliette list.

Hugo Gregor Villarde III.

On the Waldorf list, he was Hugo Villarde.

Villarde was a guest in room 3010 for one night on October the first. He made no phone calls. His home address was in Spanish Harlem.

175 East 104th Street.

I Googled the name on my BlackBerry.

Not a single result came up.

“That’s the scariest result of all,” said Nora.

“Try Googling his address,” said Hopper.

A business listing came up, a shop called The Broken Door. It had no website, only a bare-bones listing on Yelp.com, which described it as a shop for “discerning connoisseurs of oddity antiques.”

“Open Thursday and Friday, four to six,” Nora read over my shoulder. “Those are weird hours.”

“We’ll go there tomorrow when it opens,” I said.

Staring down at the single name on both pages, I felt a wave of exhilaration and relief. At long last, a decent break—a minute crack to wedge my fingers into to pry the whole thing wide open: the man Ashley had been searching for in the days before she died.