Scimitar

12

Why had he run?

Hadn’t he seen her last night? Heard her?

She’d screamed at the top of her lungs. Startled the Brits — especially Miss Lucy Phipps — out of their collective wits. Well, the shock of it. Seeing him there. In a business suit and wearing some kind of identification tag, was he the doctor in residence or something? I mean... what was he doing there? And why had he ignored her, dashed through those doors and out into the corridor as if there was an emergency someplace, calling Dr. Hemkar, emergency in the operating room, Dr. Hemkar, report to the operating room at once.

“Sonny!” she’d yelled, and “Sonny!” again, and then, embarrassed to death — first her gushing to Mrs. Thatcher and then bouncing out of her chair like a teenager — she almost whispered his name the third time, a question mark at the end of it this time, “Sonny?” and since she was standing anyway, she muttered, “Excuse me, please,” and went after him. By the time she reached the corridor, he was gone. Penn Station all over again. And now, ladies and germs, it gives me great pleasure to present The Amazing Disappearing Dr. Krishnan Hem... oops, where’d he go? Amazing.

He probably hadn’t seen her or heard her. There’d been a lot of noise in the place, after all, people talking and laughing and table-hopping, waiters bustling about, it was entirely possible that her voice had been drowned in the babble and boil. Because surely, after what they’d done together, after the intimacies they’d shared, he wouldn’t just ignore her... would he? I mean, if he’d heard her or seen her, would he have just run off that way? Unless there was some kind of dire emergency that required a doctor. Which may have been the case, after all. His beeper had gone off and he’d...

Wasn’t that a walkie-talkie she’d seen in his hand?

Well, a doctor.

She supposed doctors sometimes carried walkie-talkies. She guessed. Especially at a large important function like that one, where he was most likely the doctor in attendance, that was the word she’d been looking for. There to be on hand in case anyone had a fainting spell or a fit, I’m a doctor, ma’am, please let me through. Open the woman’s blouse, put his stethoscope to her chest, lucky lady. Just thinking of him, she...

Damn it, she had to stop this.

He had heard her.

He had seen her.

He had ignored her.

Period.

She picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number at the beach.

She let the phone ring a dozen times, and then she hung up and punched out the numbers again, and let it ring another dozen times. On the offchance that Mr. Hackett next door might have gone out there by now — this was Thursday already and a lot of people were starting the Fourth of July weekend early — she dialed his number, too, and let it ring and ring before finally giving up.

In the basement of the Hackett house, Sonny was dissecting Carolyn Fremont’s body.

He worked expertly, wishing he had a scalpel or a surgical saw, but settling for a cleaver he’d taken from the kitchen, and a hacksaw he’d found hanging on the basement wall. He planned to pack the separate body parts into plastic garbage bags, disposing of them tonight, after yet another glorious Hamptons sunset. Tie the bags loosely so that the air inside would eventually escape and cause them to sink. Toss them into the ocean on separate strands of isolated beach, miles apart, watch them floating away to Europe. The head, the torso, the severed legs and arms.

Even though he hadn’t dissected a cadaver since medical school, the task was virtually automatic, requiring little thought. He found what he was doing somewhat relaxing, in fact, the way roller skating or riding a bicycle might have been, his hands reverting to a skill he had learned years ago, freeing his mind for other thoughts.

The idiot last night.

Calling out his name in a room thronged with strollers and spooks.

What the hell was she doing there?

She hadn’t followed him there, had she? Well, no, she couldn’t have. It was just one of those damn ridiculous coincidences that sometimes toppled empires. It all got back to the train again. The mistake he’d made on the train. Automatically giving her the Sonny Hemkar cover name instead of the Scott Hamilton double cover. Dumb. But excusable. No. Unforgivable. Because now she was here to haunt him, popping up like a nemesis where he’d least expected her, shrieking “Sonny!” at him across the room, when his name plate and his ID card read something entirely different.

Come on, he thought, and hacked again at the cartilage separating femur from tibia.

Perhaps he should call her.

Ask her to please stop bothering him.

No.

Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

He picked up the portion of leg he had severed, dropped it into a black plastic garbage bag, and set the bag on the floor beside the work bench.

Carolyn Fremont’s lifeless blue eyes stared up at him as he began severing her head from her torso.

The two people staring up at the Statue of Liberty were not the slightest bit impressed by her awesome majesty. They were looking for good camera angles. These were the President’s advance men, and they were here to make certain that everything went well, campaignwise, on the Fourth of July. You could maybe fool some of the people most of the time and most of the people some of the time, but you couldn’t fool anybody anytime when it came to a good television show. Heather Broward — who was female but nonetheless one of the President’s men — sometimes thought that America itself was one big gaudy television show.

“How about we line the band up behind him?” she suggested.

She was dressed for work — linen slacks, loafers, a sand-colored, long-sleeved cotton blouse, a peach-colored ribbon holding her short brown hair, a Polaroid camera slung on a strap over her shoulder. Ralph Dickens, the man with her, was sixty-three years old and had been setting up Republican campaign stops from when Nixon was making his first bid for the presidency, but thirty-one-year-old Heather was his boss. He figured placing the band up behind The Man would steal his thunder, but he said nothing about it. He was thinking it was nice and cool out here on the island with the river breezes playing. He was wondering how hot it would be on the Fourth.

“Think they’d all fit up there?” Heather asked. “The band?”

She was indicating the area above ground level, some fifteen, twenty feet higher than where they were standing and looking up. White wall, looked like limestone or something, good backdrop for the podium behind which the President would stand, battery of network microphones on it. Blue suit, white shirt, red tie — the Republican uniform. White wall behind him. Above him the Marine Band in dress uniforms, all red-white-and-blue, and then the grey stone of the pedestal and above that the Lady herself all coppery green. Not bad, Ralph had to admit.

“How many people are in the band, anyway?”

“We can trim it to fit,” Ralph said.

He’d been through this shit a thousand times before. The President of the United States wanted a four-hundred-piece orchestra, he got a four-hundred-piece orchestra. He wanted just one guy with a piccolo up his ass, he got that, too. When you were President of the United States, you got whatever you wanted, period.

“We’d better go up there, check out the width, see how many musicians we can fit up there,” Heather said.

“Good idea,” Ralph said.

“How the hell do you get up there?” she asked.

The more CIA Agent Alex Nichols studied the letter purportedly written by Bush when he was Vice President in 1986, the more he wondered why it had been written and how it had ended up at the General Investigation Directorate in Tripoli.

During World War II, MI5 — in collaboration with Naval Intelligence and the Twenty-Two Committee — sent a British submarine to the coast of Spain. Its mission was to drop off the corpse of a so-called Major Martin of the Royal Marines, who incidentally happened to be carrying in his dispatch case plans describing a forthcoming totally fabricated Allied invasion of Greece. The Germans fell for the ruse, and were caught with their pants down when the Allies invaded Sicily instead.

When you got hold of something like this letter, you had to begin wondering why somebody had gone through all this trouble. Well, maybe not so much trouble, after all. Any intelligence agent worth his salt — as Miss Piggy Peggot had put it — could work up a piece of vice-presidential stationery and type on it any damn thing he felt like. The stupid part, the amateur part — and this was what separated the men from the boys — was that he’d used Bush’s presentday signature on it, instead of...

He suddenly wondered if Mossad had cooked up the letter; he wouldn’t put anything past the Israelis, they were the sneakiest fuckin’ spies in the entire universe.

But why?

Work up a phony piece of goods, hide it like it was the family jewels till some sucker took the bait and nabbed it. Then sit back and wait for it to work its way into the hands of the GID. Which, if their information was correct, was exactly where it had finally surfaced, only to be pilfered yet again by a conscientious digger.

If the Israelis were behind all this, what were they hoping to gain?

Nothing that he could see.

In fact, what could anyone gain by faking a letter and making certain it got into Libyan hands?

And then, all at once, Alex remembered something he’d been taught at The Farm, when he was just beginning to learn his craft. The instructor was a man who’d spent twenty-two years in the Middle East before coming back home to teach new CIA recruits like Alex. He’d been talking about Iraq’s Al Mukhabarat, when suddenly he’d cocked his head to one side and said — somewhat wistfully as Alex now recalled — “There’s an old Arab proverb that’s saved my life more times than I can count. ‘He who forgets is lost. He who forgives is doomed.’”

The fake letter had ended up in the hands of Libyan intelligence.

It placed directly at Bush’s doorstep full responsibility for the air raid that had killed Quaddafi’s fifteen-month-old daughter.

Alex figured he now had something to go on.

The telephones were secure. The one here at the beach, the one at SeaCoast. They could freely discuss whatever they wished, with no need for codes or veiled meanings.

“A man’s fate is written on his forehead,” Arthur said.

“I know that,” Sonny said.

“If it had been fated for Bush to die last night, God would have willed it,” Arthur said. “This means only that the Fourth will be a more propitious date.”

“I’m sure,” Sonny said.

He wasn’t at all sure.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said.

“Yes, I have your messages. But I’ve been busy working for you, Sonny.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t know if you’ve heard or read anything about this second murder...”

“I have, yes.”

“I’ve been trying to find out who or why.”

“What do you think?”

“Well... I hope you haven’t been targeted.”

Sonny hoped so, too.

“What have you got so far?” he asked.

“Not much. But I have my very best people on it.”

“Good,” Sonny said.

He was thinking two of Arthur’s very best people were already dead.

“In any case, I don’t want you to be concerned about it.”

No, huh?

“If it turns out you’re in danger, you’ll get all the protection you need.”

Like the protection the two women got?

“But getting back to last night,” Arthur said, “at least it gave you an opportunity to study the security setup.”

“It won’t apply,” Sonny said.

“No?” Arthur said, sounding surprised.

“It wasn’t representative,” Sonny said. “There were agents from four countries there. It won’t be that way on the Fourth.”

“Lighter, do you think?”

“Almost certainly. The island will be closed to the public till noon. If there’re half a dozen people around him, I’ll be surprised.”

“That should make your job easier.”

“God willing,” Sonny said.

“But be prepared for...”

“I will be.”

“... the worst,” Arthur said, the tone of impatience creeping into his voice again. “There’s a saying you may not be familiar with. My mother taught it to me. It goes like this. ‘When you hear of no robbers, lock the door twice.’ It means...”

“I understand,” Sonny said.

“They may double the security only because they feel too secure.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“So expect an army...”

“I will.”

“And be happy with a platoon.”

“I’ll be prepared for either,” Sonny said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Arthur said.

“At ten,” Sonny said.

“Is there anything I can do for you meanwhile?”

“Yes,” Sonny said.

Elita caught the jitney to Westhampton Beach on Seventieth Street and Lexington Avenue at eleven-fifteen that Thursday morning. She had packed into her mother’s Louis Vuitton bag the lingerie and shoes she’d requested, and she had packed for herself a small duffle containing a pair of blue jeans, four T-shirts, a half-dozen panties, a pair of sandals, and — just in case — a pair of French-heeled shoes and a black cotton shift. She planned to stay at the beach only through the Fourth, returning to the city sometime Sunday.

Her concern for her mother had given way to anger.

A person should know better than to go gallivanting around — an expression her mother was fond of using — without first informing any other person who might be worried about her. When Elita went off to UCLA a year ago, she and her mother made a deal of sorts. If ever one of them planned to be away for a while, even if it was just for a couple of days, she would inform the other, and leave a number where she could be reached. A simple bargain which Elita had, in truth, begun finding too restrictive in recent months, but which had served them both extremely well until then. Until now, actually, when her mother apparently felt it was perfectly okay to break a solemn contract and disappear from the face of the earth without so much as a lah-dee-dah. Just a phone call would have been sufficient. Hi, Elita, I’m off to Phoenix, Arizona, for a few days, here’s where I’ll be. But, no. Silence instead. And anxiety. Or anger. Which was how anxiety usually translated itself, thank you, Professor Jaeger, Psychology 101.

The jitney dropped her off in front of the Quogue Emporium Mall at a bit past one-thirty. She got into a waiting taxi and gave the driver the address on Dune Road. He didn’t want to go into the sand driveway because his tires were either too low, or too inflated, or whatever the hell they were, she couldn’t make any sense at all of what he was saying. Either way, he dropped her off at the top of it, for which discourtesy she tipped him only half a buck. Carrying the bags down the drive, she noticed a car parked at the Hackett house next door, and wondered why Mr. Hackett hadn’t answered the phone all those times she’d called.

Shrugging, she went around the side of the house to the service entrance where her mother always hid the key in a little magnetized box fastened to the rear side of the fill spout for the oil tank. The key was where it usually was. Elita unlocked the kitchen door, put down the bags, blinked into the sunshine streaming through the window over the sink, and yelled, “Mom?”

There was no answer.

“Mom?” she yelled again, and stood stock still, listening.

Where the hell are you? she thought, and then, aloud, she shouted, “Mom? Where the hell are you?”

There was only silence.

In the driveway next door, she heard the car starting.

She went to the window and saw it backing out.

The sun glancing off its windshield made it impossible to see the driver’s face.

Detective-Lieutenant Peter Hogan welcomed the opportunity to get out of the office. He had always thought of himself as an active street cop until he’d been promoted three years ago, and all of a sudden found himself pushing papers around a desk. The murder of one of his best detectives — and incidentally one of his closest friends — gave him the excuse he needed to get out into the field again.

He started the investigation into Al Santorini’s death the way he’d have started any other homicide case. He tried to work it backwards from the time Santorini’s body was discovered in the laundry cart, hoping to learn what had brought him to the Hilton in the first place. The assistant manager who’d talked to Santorini informed Hogan that he’d clocked the call in at one o’clock sharp, and that all the detective had wanted to know was the name of whoever was in room 2312. He’d told him they had a man named Albert Gomez registered in that room, and that he’d checked into the hotel on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June. That was it. The manager remembered that the call had come at one, because he’d just got back from lunch.

Hogan was trying to piece together a 24–24.

The twenty-four hours preceding a homicide were important because anything the victim had done, anyone the victim had talked to during that time might provide information leading to his killer. The twenty-four hours following a homicide were important in that everything was still fresh during that time. The killer, unless he was more professional than most murderers Hogan had known, would not yet have covered his tracks. The trail would not yet have been obscured. The longer a murder case dragged on, the narrower became the hope of solving it. Al Santorini had been killed on Monday. This was now Thursday. As far as Hogan was concerned, the killer already had a three-day edge.

He went through the Detective Division reports Santorini had filed in triplicate. He’d been investigating two separate murders, the victims both women with British passports, both of them tattooed with some kind of green sword. One of them had lived on the upper west side, the other on the upper east side. East side, west side, all around the town, some fuckin’ city. Santorini had been in contact with someone named Geoffrey Turner at the British Consulate and also with an FBI agent named Michael Grant, downtown at Federal Plaza. Nothing in the files told Hogan where Santorini had been on Monday before he ended up dead at the Hilton.

But the desk sergeant at the Two-Five, where Homicide North had its offices, told Hogan that the last time he’d seen Santorini was around ten-thirty that morning when he’d passed the desk on his way out. He’d said only, “Heading downtown, George,” which was the desk sergeant’s name. He did not say where downtown. Both of the dead ladies lived more or less downtown. Since the Two-Five was located at 120 East 119th Street, Hogan decided to check out the more convenient east-side location first.

He was in the upstairs bedroom — lying on the bed, looking through the newspapers he’d bought in town, hoping to garner more information about the President’s Fourth of July speech — when the doorbell rang, startling him. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, called, “Just a moment, please,” and then went downstairs. Standing just inside the front door, he asked, “Who is it?”

“Mr. Hackett?”

“No, I’m sorry, he’s not here,” Sonny said.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” a woman’s voice said, “but could you please open the door?”

Annoyed, he unlocked the door and opened it.

Elita Randall was standing there.

There was, for each of them standing on either side of that door-jamb, an identical shocking instant of recognition. It was as if they had run into each other again at the base of Victoria Falls or the summit of Kilimanjaro, or for that matter any other unlikely, unforeseen, and totally unexpected location. Here across the open doorway of a house at Westhampton Beach, they stared at each other uncomprehendingly, and wide-eyed, and literally open-mouthed, neither of them able even to breathe a name, each separately stunned into mutual speechlessness.

And then — just as there’d been separate agendas for each of them on the day they visited the Statue of Liberty — there were now separate recoveries and separate wonderings and separate fears and separate hopes and separate plans for the future.

She was the first to blink her way out of the silence.

“Jesus,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

“I... Martin is a friend of mine.”

He was shaking his head in wonder now. How the hell had she found him?

“Mr. Hackett?” she asked, still astonished.

“Yes. But... what... how...?”

“My mother has the house next door,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the house where first he’d seen Carolyn Fre...

Her mother?

His heart was suddenly beating very fast.

She was thinking how gorgeous he looked barefooted, in blue jeans and a T-shirt.

He was thinking her mother was in black plastic bags in the basement.

“This is... I just can’t... I just came over to ask Mr. Hackett if he’d seen her. And here I find... God, this is...”

“It is amazing,” he said, and smiled.

He was thinking she was trouble.

She was thinking she’d never let him out of her sight again. Now that she’d found him again, she’d...

“Was that you at the Plaza?” she asked.

He had still not moved out of the doorframe.

He was thinking he could not let her into this house.

“The Plaza?” he said.

Trouble, he thought. She’s trouble.

“Wasn’t that you? In a blue suit? With a walkie-talkie in your hand?”

“No.”

“I was sure it was you.”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“Well, I...”

“God, I’m so glad to see you again,” she said, and threw herself into his arms, virtually knocking him out of the doorframe and back into the living room. “Listen,” she said, her arms around his neck, “you’d better not run out on me ever again, you hear?” She kissed him on the mouth, a light little peck. “Have you got that?” she said.

“I’ve got it,” he said.

“Gee, I’ve never been inside this house,” she said, taking his hand and leading him deeper into the living room. “It’s really very nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s lovely,” he said.

Sunlight was streaming in through the French doors. Sunlight glowed like molten gold on the water beyond.

“How do you happen to know Mr. Hackett?”

“A friend of my parents,” he said.

Careful, he thought.

“I called you in Los Angeles, you know,” she said.

“Called me? Where?”

“At your apartment...”

“How’d...?”

“And also at the hospital. I spoke to a doctor named BJ something, he said you’d better have a good story for Hokie. What’s in here? The kitchen?” she said, and was about to push open the swinging door when he shouted, “Don’t!”

The plastic bottle of sarin was in the refrigerator. He didn’t want anyone going anywhere near that bottle.

“It’s a mess in there,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s try the bedroom instead,” and looked at him, head cocked, one eyebrow raised in faint inquiry. “Must be a bedroom, no?” she said, and smiled in invitation, her eyes narrowing smokily. “No?” she said again.

He shook his head.

“I have work to do,” he said.

“Okay, later,” she said airily, but her heart was pounding. “I’ve got to make some calls, anyway, find out if any of her friends... hey, you didn’t see her, did you?”

“No,” he said.

“Blond, blue-eyed? People say we look alike?”

“No, I didn’t see anyone like that.”

She came to where he was standing. Stood very close to him.

“I’ll be back,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

“I won’t,” he said.

The place smelled as if a tiger had been let loose in it. Hogan folded his handkerchief into a triangular-shaped mask, and tied it over his nose and mouth. He knew that the Nineteenth had already been through the apartment and had probably bagged and tagged anything there’d been to find. He was guessing, too, that Santorini had been through both apartments with a fine comb, this one here on the east side and the one further uptown on the west side. What he didn’t know was whether or not he’d found anything that had led him to Albert Gomez, whoever the hell he turned out to be; with race relations bubbling close to the boiling point in this city, all the police needed was some crazy Latino fuck running around sticking icepicks in cops’ eyes.

My God, the lady must’ve let her pet tiger piss all over everything in the place.

Hogan wondered if Santorini had gone through the garbage.

He did not want to go through the garbage.

He went into the lady’s bedroom instead. Same stink in here, how could anyone have lived in this joint? He checked out the closet and the dresser drawers. Didn’t find anything but a lot of frumpy clothes. He sure as hell didn’t want to go through that garbage. There was a small desk in one corner of the room, gooseneck lamp on it, some envelopes sitting on the desktop, right where the lady had left them. The detectives from the One-Nine had probably gone through them, figured they weren’t going to be of any help to anybody, left them sitting there. A bill from Con Ed, another bill from a dry cleaning establishment named Madame Claudette’s, a third one from Citibank, that was it. He reached into the Citibank envelope, removed from it what turned out to be a MasterCard bill. Scanned the bill, nothing of any importance he could see on it, restaurants, shops, the usual... well, wait a minute...

No.

Saw the word United, thought it might be United Airlines, which would’ve meant the lady had taken a trip someplace. But it was only a charge to something called United Neighbors, which he guessed was some kind of Upper East Side Do-Gooder association to which she’d contributed twenty-five bucks which she should’ve spent on a cleaning lady instead, get rid of the tiger piss. He gave the bill another run-through, and then put it back into its envelope.

There was a drawer over the kneehole.

He opened it.

One of those Month At A Glance calendars. He guessed the One-Nine had gone through that, too, and found nothing significant in it, otherwise it wouldn’t be sitting here like a lox. He looked through it, anyway, comparing the month of June to the month of May to see if the lady had done anything special or unusual that might have led to her murder on the twenty-sixth. He found nothing extraordinary. Well, two calendar entries for appointments at a place called SeaCoast, which he guessed was a restaurant, one for twelve-thirty on the twenty-third of June and the other for the same time the following day. Eating in the same restaurant on two successive days seemed a bit odd to him, especially since the lady didn’t seem to dine out all that often. He found a Yellow Pages directory in the bottom drawer to the right of the kneehole, and looked up SeaCoast under restaurants. There was no restaurant named SeaCoast in the city of New York.

He looked in the lady’s personal telephone directory, which the One-Nine again had left behind, or perhaps brought back after they were done with it, such courtesies were not unknown in the NYPD, although exceedingly rare in cases where the owner of the property was no longer alive to complain. Either way, the directory was here to be studied, but there was no SeaCoast listed in it, so Hogan figured the hell with it. His eyes were beginning to smart from the stink of tiger piss in here.

In the middle drawer on the right-hand side of the desk, he found three little books with green covers.

He lifted the topmost book from the drawer, and opened it.

There was some kind of funny squiggly writing in it.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation,” a woman’s voice said.

“Agent Grant, please,” Hogan said.

“Special Agent Michael Grant, yes, sir,” the woman said, subtly correcting his error; in the FBI, all agents were special agents.

Grant came on the line thirty seconds later. Hogan introduced himself, told him what he was working, told him he’d found some kind of little green books with foreign writing in them, and wondered if Santorini had discussed these when he called.

“If this is the Green Book,” Grant said, “then we...”

“Three of them. Three green books,” Hogan said.

“Collectively, I mean,” Grant said.

“Uh-huh.”

“If this is what I think it is, then yes, we discussed it. In connection with the scimitar tattoos. Apparently he had some victims with scimitar tattoos...”

“Yeah, the green swords.”

“Yes. And he wanted to know if I knew anything about an Iranian terrorist group that called itself Scimitar.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I told him our current thinking was that they’d been inactive since the JFK bombing...”

“Uh-huh.”

“... back in 1989. So we sort of eliminated them as...”

“He was considering them as possibles, huh?”

“Well, I think he was looking for a place to hang his hat.”

“Uh-huh. So where’d you go from there?”

“We talked about Libya a little. Because the tattoos were green, you know...”

“Uh-huh.”

“... kicking around the idea that this might be something Libyan, those crazy bastards. He wears women’s dresses and makeup, you know...”

“Who?”

“Quaddafi. And goes to sleep with a teddy bear.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. Totally weird. Sends his people out to buy new bedsheets whenever he checks into a hotel room. Nuts.”

“Uh-huh. So what’d you tell him?”

“Your guy? I said I didn’t have anything new on Libyan intelligence, the whole thing sort of died down after the big scare six years ago, when everybody thought Reagan was on a hit list.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I told him he’d do better contacting the CIA. They’d be the ones with any current stuff. He said he might do that.”

“I don’t see any indication he did,” Hogan said.

“Well,” Grant said.

They were both thinking he’d been murdered before he’d got around to it.

“Have you got a number for them?” Hogan asked.

“Sure, hold a sec.”

Hogan waited.

When Grant came back on the line, he gave him the number of the New York Field Office of the CIA, and told him the man he usually dealt with there was a man named Conrad Templeton. Hogan thanked him for his time, hung up, and checked through Santorini’s files again, to see if he’d missed anything about a call to the CIA. There was nothing. He dialed 755-0027, got a woman’s voice saying, “Central Intelligence,” and asked for Agent Templeton.

“One moment, please,” the woman said.

Hogan waited, wondering how a nice Irish kid from Staten Island had grown up to be a man phoning secret agents all over the fuckin’ city. He was hoping this really was some kind of crazy green spy shit from Libya; you could always unite New Yorkers by telling them some lunatic foreigner was running around hurting innocent people. Though, tell you the truth, most people in this city thought cops deserved to get stabbed in the eye. He kept waiting. He was just about to light a cigar, when a man came on the line.

“Alex Nichols,” the man said.

“This is Detective-Lieutenant Peter Hogan,” Hogan said. “Homicide North.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was trying to reach Agent Templeton...”

“In the field just now. I’m his superior, maybe I can help you.”

“I hope so,” Hogan said. “One of my people was killed during a double-homicide investigation. The victims were tattooed with green scimitars, and I just now found three little green books that the Feds tell me...”

“Where are you?” Nichols asked at once.

She sat at the desk just to the left of the windows facing the beach, thumbing through her mother’s telephone directory, sorting out city people from beach people. The next beach name she recognized was McNulty, James and Amanda. She dialed the number and waited.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.

“Mrs. McNulty?”

“No, this is Helga,” the woman said. “Who’s calling, please?”

“Elita Randall.”

“Hold on, please.”

“Tell her it’s Caro...”

But she was gone.

Another woman came onto the line.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. McNulty?”

“Yes?”

“This is Elita Randall, Carolyn Fremont’s daughter?”

“Hello, Elita, how are you?”

“Fine, thanks, Mrs. McNulty. I’m sorry to bother you...”

“No bother at all.”

“But I’m trying to locate my moth...”

“Helga! What is that dog doing? Excuse me, darling. Helga!”

Elita waited. In the background, she could hear voices and barking. At last Mrs. McNulty came back onto the line.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she said, “we’re getting ready for a Fourth of July party, and the caterers are here, and the dog decides at this very moment... well, never mind, it’s been taken care of. You were saying?”

“I’m trying to get in touch with my mother, would you happen to know where I can reach her?”

“Well, I’m sure she’s out here, have you called the house?”

“I’m at the house now, Mrs. McNulty. I came out when...”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry, darling, I’m sure she’s all right.”

“It’s just...”

“Helga! Will you please get that damn dog...? Excuse me, darling,” she said. “Helga! How many times do...?”

Her voice faded. There was more barking. More yelling. Elita waited a moment longer, and then hung up and began leafing through her mother’s directory again.

Except for the bag containing her head, all of the black plastic bags were bulky and awkward to handle. He loaded all five of them in the trunk of the car, and then went back into the house for his suitcase.

The suitcase was packed much as it had been yesterday, when he’d checked into the Plaza. In addition to some casual clothes he planned to wear tomorrow, there was the same blue suit and muted tie, a fresh white button-down shirt, clean underwear and socks, the same polished black shoes. The sealed plastic bottle of sarin was inside a shoe again, a fresh strip of transparent tape holding its nozzle in the OFF position. He got nervous each time he handled it. He was nervous now as he placed the suitcase on the floor behind the passenger seat. He went back into the house for a last-minute check, making sure all the lights were out and the faucets turned off, and then he locked the front door, and got into the car.

In the house next door, Elita didn’t hear the car starting because she was on the phone with a woman named Sally Hemmings who’d just told her she’d seen her mother at a cocktail party this past Monday night.

“Actually,” Elita said, “I spoke to her after that. On Tuesday. But I haven’t been able to reach her since, and I’m beginning...”

“Well, I’m not surprised,” Sally said.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s probably in San Diego.”

“San Diego? Why would she...?”

“That’s where the young man lives,” Sally said.

“What young man?”

“The one she was with Monday night.”

“Do you know his name?” Elita asked.

“Scott Hamilton.”

“And you say he lives in San Diego?”

“Owns a cable television station out there.”

“Then... what’s he doing in Westhampton?”

“I assumed he was visiting your mother.”

“Visiting my...”

“Staying with her. That’s the impression I got.”

“Well, no, he’s not here. Neither of them are here. I’m at the beach house, and it’s empty.”

“Like I said,” Sally said knowingly. “San Diego.”

The hotel Sonny had chosen was the Marriott Financial Center on West Street, just a short walking distance from Battery Park. He felt the room rate was exorbitant for this part of the city — two hundred and twenty-five dollars for a single — but the location was perfect, and there were five hundred and four rooms in the hotel, a number that virtually guaranteed anonymity.

He allowed a doorman to take his suitcase out of the backseat of the car...

“Anything in the trunk, sir?”

“Nothing.”

... and left the car with a valet who gave him a claim ticket for it. He checked in as Lucas Holding, Jr., showing a valid Visa card made out to that name. The bellhop carried his bag up to room 1804. He tipped him two dollars. The moment he left the room, he dialed Arthur’s direct line at SeaCoast. The phone here at the hotel wasn’t secure. He would have to go through the ritual.

“SeaCoast Limited,” Arthur said.

“Arthur Scopes, please,” he said.

“Who’s calling?”

“Scott Hamilton.”

“This is Martin, go ahead, Scott.”

“I’m here. Room 1804.”

“Fine. I have that item you wanted.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“And will you still be here at ten?”

“You can be sure,” he said, and hung up.

From his room on the eighteenth floor of the hotel, Sonny could see the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty.

He looked at his watch.

5:27.

Still time to do what had to be done.

He would go out for dinner at seven-thirty, eight o’clock, and then come back to the hotel for the car.

It was hard to believe that the two men from the Westhampton Beach Police Department were detectives. They looked as if they should be selling haberdashery in Oxnard, California. Then again, Elita’s concept of what detectives should look like had been derived entirely from motion pictures and television. These two didn’t seem like cops, but they seemed to be asking all the right questions, so she guessed they were okay.

One of them was named Gregors and the other was named Mellon.

They wanted to know what she and her mother had talked about on the phone this past Tuesday.

“Did she say where she might be going that night?” Gregors asked.

“Or the next day?” Mellon asked.

“No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”

“And you say some of these people you spoke to on the phone saw her on Monday night, is that what you said?”

“Yes. With a man named Scott Hamilton.”

“Do you know anyone by that name?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Mother ever mention anyone by that name?”

“No.”

“Better call these people she spoke to,” Mellon said to Gregors.

“See if they can describe him for us,” Gregors said.

“Can you give us their names?” Mellon asked. “These people you talked to?”

“I’ll get my mother’s book,” Elita said.

She went over to the Hackett house the moment the detectives left.

Sonny’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

She rang the doorbell. No answer. And then knocked. No answer. She tried the doorknob. The door was locked. She went around to the kitchen door and tried that one, too. Locked. There were no lights on anywhere in the house.

She guessed he was gone again.

After the huge grey buildings of finance and justice closed their doors for the day; after all the work was done, and all the people were gone; after darkness fell, and the streets emptied, and the only sound was that of a patrolman’s footsteps, or the hiss of a passing automobile, or the click of a traffic light; then here in this lower part of the city, there were only eyeless buildings and long shadows and emptiness.

Sonny was looking for garbage dumpsters.

Whenever he spotted one, he checked the street ahead and behind and if there were no pedestrians and automobile traffic, he stopped the car alongside the hulking metal container, popped the trunk from the button on the door to the left of the driver’s seat, got out of the car at once, went around to the back, raised the trunk lid all the way, hoisted out one of the black plastic bags, and hurled it up into the dumpster.

Took maybe forty seconds.

By eleven o’clock that night, he had disposed of all five bags.

He wondered if he could still catch a late movie.