The Chosen One

21

New Orleans, Thursday March 23, 00.06 CST

The cab threaded its way first through the streets close to the hotel, where blues licks still drifted through the air wreathing themselves around the wobbling groups of miniskirted girls, drunk in their stilettos. But then it left the French Quarter behind and the streets slowly became wider and more desolate. Soon they were passing boarded-up shops and whole blocks that seemed abandoned.

Maggie leaned forward to speak to the cab driver, an African-American whose hair was tipped with grey. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Just where you told me to go.’

‘Is it far?’

‘’Bout ten minutes. Maybe less. You don’t want to go?’

‘No, I want to go. I just thought it was closer, that’s all.’

‘Not many tourists come round here. I’m taking you the scenic route. This is the Ninth Ward.’

‘I see.’ Everyone in America knew of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, the part of the city where Katrina had packed her hardest punch. Maggie had seen the footage on the news a hundred times, but still it was a shock to see a house that had clearly been swept clean off its pilings wedged against a tree some three yards away. It was a shock to see it was still there – and that so much of the area looked as if the hurricane had just struck.

Even in the dark she could read the warning daubed in white paint on the door of one ruined home – U Loot U Die – and the other houses still marked by crosses, spray-painted in orange, the legacy, the driver explained, of rescue workers who hastily marked those buildings they had already searched for survivors – or corpses. Harder to make out in the dark, but no less striking, were the gaping gashes visible in roof after roof: the holes people had chopped as they tried to escape the rising flood waters that had chased them up into the attic and continued to rise, even there.

Eventually there were a few lights at the side of the road: a gas station, a Denny’s, a liquor store, outside of which four men sat on the sidewalk drinking from bottles clad in brown paper bags. And then, what looked like a warehouse or a giant shed, a single-storey building of grey corrugated steel decorated by a vertical sign: The Midnight Lounge. The illuminated black-and-white graphic of a curvy, thick-lipped stripper might have conveyed glamour once. Now it just looked forlorn and tatty.

Maggie paid the driver, nodded to a bouncer the size of a fridge on the door, as if she came to places like this all the time, and walked in.

Save for a few feeble table candles, the place was cast in a deep gloom, one that matched the rancid smell in the air. She had to walk past a cloakroom and a bar in order for the dimensions of the room to reveal themselves. Now she saw what it was: a stage area, dully lit in low purple, facing a clutch of small tables, all of which lay under a blanket of darkness. A strip joint, designed to spare the blushes of the audience and – judging by the performer bending into an improbable angle at that moment – to spare nothing of those on stage.

‘You here alone?’

She looked up to see a waitress wearing a strip of material that few would recognize as a skirt and the skimpiest of bras, inside which were two unmoving globes of not-quite-flesh. She could see Maggie staring.

‘You here on business, darling? How about we get you nice and relaxed with a private dance, just us two girls, now what d’ya say?’

Maggie had her response ready. ‘I need to talk to your manager right away. A personal matter.’ Nervous, but doing her best to be friendly.

The expression on the human blow-up doll dropped instantly; now she looked as bored and surly as a checkout girl at an all-night supermarket. She inclined her head towards a table near the bar and slunk off, heading for richer pickings in the corner, where a bearded man, the sweat visible on his pate, was staring at the stage open-mouthed, as if he’d been hypnotized into a deep trance.

It was impossible to see who was at the manager’s table until she was just a few feet away. A woman, short blondish hair, Maggie’s age, dressed – to Maggie’s relief – in actual clothes. Black cigarette pants, a spangly top.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Can we speak in private?’

‘This is private.’ The voice, like the words, was firm but not quite harsh.

Maggie stayed in character for the part she had sketched for herself during the cab-ride over. She leaned in closer, then lowered her voice. ‘I need to speak about something personal. Very personal.’

‘It’s going to have to be right here.’

‘OK. Can I sit down?’

The woman gestured her into the seat opposite. A black leatherette portfolio wallet filled the space between them on the small circular table. On top were papers that looked like inventories, invoices and the like – as if the Midnight Lounge was a regular American small business. Which, Maggie supposed, it was.

‘I know you have your rules about privacy and all,’ Maggie began, her voice wavering just as she intended it to. ‘But I need something from you. I need to know if my husband was here last night.’

‘I’m sorry, we have a strict pol-’

‘I knew you would say that, but this is different.’ Maggie hoped her eyes were full of imploring desperation and, to her surprise, she saw something that was, if not quite warm, then at least not cold, in the eyes scrutinizing her.

‘I know you have a business to run, but this is about my life.’

‘I’d love to help, but we couldn’t function if our guests didn’t feel their confidentiality would be resp-’

‘You see,’ Maggie whispered, playing her trump card, ‘I’m pregnant.’

The face of the woman opposite softened, only for a fleeting second, but visibly.

‘And I need to know what kind of man I am married to.’ She looked down, examining her own hand. ‘I took the ring off my finger this morning. You see, I need to know if this man is capable of being a father to my child. Or if I need to protect myself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t want to insult what you do here.’

‘Why don’t you go right ahead?’

The tone was sardonic but the woman’s face told Maggie she should press on.

‘He said he had stopped all this: coming to strip clubs, seeing hookers. He promised me months ago. I told him I needed that if we were to be a family.’

‘But you think he’s been coming round here?’

Maggie nodded mutely, trying to look as distressed as possible, though it required an effort on her part. She had learned long ago that some men simply couldn’t stay away from places like these. That was just how they were.

‘I tell you, honey, if a woman didn’t hate men before working at this joint…I’d say you were better off without him. But you didn’t come here for relationship advice.’

Maggie gave a weak smile.

‘Like I say, I’d really like to help. But we don’t exactly take names at the door.’

‘You have CCTV though.’

‘Yeah, but-’

‘Why not let me just see the tapes for last night? You’ve got a camera over the door; I saw it on my way in. That’s all I need. Put me in a room and let me look. Please…’

‘There must be, like, a million rules against that.’

‘I won’t make any noise, I promise. But then at least I’ll know if I’m being taken for a sucker or not.’ She laid her hand on her stomach. ‘Just let me look.’

The blonde woman shook her head, with a small, world-weary smile. ‘There’s not a man in this town who would let you go anywhere near those tapes. I must be an idiot.’

Maggie let out a sigh of relief and extended her hand across the table in thanks. The manager clasped it, holding it for a long second or two, her eyes not shifting from Maggie’s. Finally she stood up and, as Maggie did the same, she saw the woman take in the full sight of her, her gaze lingering, she thought, around her bottom.

‘I gotta say, guilty or innocent, your husband must be a major league asshole. Why would he drink Sprite here when he could be having vintage champagne at home?’

Maggie said nothing, following the manager down a flight of stairs, past the restrooms and through a door marked ‘Authorized Staff Only’. Inside was a corridor with three glass-panelled doors, all apparently opening onto offices.

They stopped at the third, the only one that seemed to be unlocked and whose light was on. One side was cluttered with old equipment, including what seemed to be a long-deceased fax machine, its cord coiled up like a defunct tail, while the other was dominated by four TV screens. Barely watching them, preferring to concentrate on the Puzzler magazine in front of him, was a man Maggie identified as the companion bouncer to the fridge she had seen upstairs. Perhaps he was the freezer.

‘Frank, this lady is a friend of mine,’ the manager said, setting no more than one foot in the room. ‘She wants to see the tapes from last night. Give her whatever she needs. And get her a glass of water. She’s pregnant.’

With that, she turned and gave Maggie one last look. ‘I have a twelve-year-old daughter at home. She hasn’t seen her father in ten years. You’re smarter than I was. Best of luck.’

Still bored, Frank pulled out a second swivel chair from under the work-bench that served as his desk, and nodded for Maggie to sit in it.

‘You know what time you’re looking for?’

Since she had assumed she was never going to get this far, she had not given a moment’s thought to the question. She tried to remember what Telegraph Tim had said earlier. There had been so many details, she had begun tuning out after a while. But he had told her, she was sure of it.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘I’m sorry. I need time to think.’

He went back to his puzzles.

Twelve thirty. The estimated time of death; Tim had mentioned it twice. But when Forbes’s evening began, there was no way of knowing. He could have been here hours earlier. Would she really have to get Frank to spool through four or five hours of CCTV footage, looking for, what, a glimpse of a man Maggie had never met, whom she had seen only on television?

Television. That was it. She had watched Forbes give that live interview on TV while she sat in Stu’s office, before the meeting in the Residence. It had been just before eight. That would have been 9pm local time. And then, nearly an hour later, they had been interrupted with the statement Forbes had just released. That made it 10pm in New Orleans.

‘Frank, is there only one entrance and exit to this building?’

Slowly, as if wrenching himself away from his Sudoku puzzle, the security guard brought his eyes to rest on Maggie. ‘For staff or guests?’

‘Guests.’

‘Hmm-hmm,’ he said, by way of affirmation.

Anticipating her next question, he added, ‘Besides, there ain’t no camera on the other one.’

‘So this one it is,’ said Maggie, grateful to have one less decision to make. She rubbed her temples: haggling with the European Union at three in the morning over the right language for a cap-and-trade clause in a climate change treaty suddenly looked like a walk in the park.

As Frank punched the buttons that would bring up last night’s recordings, Maggie’s BlackBerry chimed. A message from Stuart.

Call me urgently. Situation grave.

‘Anything here, ma’am?’

She forced herself to come back to the moment. She had to concentrate.

Until now she had only been half-watching the faces going in and out. She’d ignored groups, especially those made up of the young. She had been looking for bald, middle-aged men which, given the Midnight Lounge’s clientele, did not narrow it down much.

She looked at the time-code clock at the top left of the screen. It was just past eleven. A procession of heavy men, thin men, black men, white men, men who looked furtive, men who looked flushed, men who looked like fumbling boys, men who looked like wifebeaters – Christ, no wonder the manager had grown to hate the entire sex. And Maggie had only been staring at an hour’s worth of the Lounge’s customer base, and that was at 2x, twice normal speed.

Half-way through the second hour, at what would have been eleven thirty in real time, something caught Maggie’s eye.

It was not a man but a woman. Tall, her dark hair cut in a chic geometric bob, she instantly stood out from the rest: classier than the handful of other women the CCTV had picked up that night, who either wore the forlorn expression of the luckless wife bullied into playing along with her husband’s threesome fantasy, or radiated the drunken, tottering jollity of the hen night.

Not that Maggie could see her face; she kept her head down. But she walked elegantly. And with something else too. Purpose.

And now she could see why. Walking a pace behind her, as if tugged by an unseen rope, was a man in a flat golfer’s cap – pulled down low to conceal his face – and a dark grey suit. He looked sharply left and right as he came out, slipping a tip into the hand of the bouncer on the door as he did so. He looked left and right again, this second sweep exposing his face to the CCTV camera. There was no sound, so there was no way of knowing if he was actually panting. But his eyes were almost bugging out with what Maggie could see, even from this grainy angle, was desire.

It was only then, once she had determined that this was a man leaving the Midnight Lounge with a beautiful woman he had picked up, that she thought to identify him. But there was no doubt about it.

She asked to freeze the frame, so that she could take a good, long look at the man who had stared so knowingly from the television set last night. For there, caught on tape and on heat, was none other than Vic Forbes.