The Bancroft Strategy (18 page)

“All calls may be monitored for quality assurance,” Gomes said, a casual warning.

“Do you know how many years of digital tape they've already accumulated? Recording is easy, because it's automated. As for listening, nobody ever has enough man-hours. I'll take my chances that nobody's taking a special interest in you.”

“Your chances, or my chances? 'Cause ‘when I think of you, another shower starts.'”

“I just need you to do what Pat Boone did: Cover for me.”

“Can you assure me that this is strictly pursuant to an officially authorized operation?” There was a wink in Gomes's voice.

“You took the words out of my mouth,” Belknap said. Then he told Gomes what he needed him to do. As to favors owed, the junior officer needed no reminding.

At all the international hotel chains, there was always someone who served the American spy agencies as a facilitator when some
special service was required. It was the nature of a business that provided temporary habitation for tens of thousands of travelers that criminals, even terrorists, would occasionally seek refuge among them. In return for the informal alerts, the CIA would sometimes provide the hotels, on an equally informal basis, background checks, information about prospective security risks, and the like.

Gomes would not call anyone at the Palace directly; he would call someone at the Chicago headquarters of the holding company that owned it. That person would then call the hotel manager at the Palace. Five minutes later, Belknap's cell phone silently vibrated. It was Gomes with the name of an assistant manager who had been reached and given to understand that he was to give Agent Belknap his full cooperation.

And he did. His name was Ibrahim Hafez, and he was a small, well-educated man in his thirties, probably the son of an hotelier who managed another of the emirate's stately pleasure domes. He was neither overimpressed nor sullen in the American's presence. They conferred in a small office, hidden away from the guests. It was a tidy nook, with neat stacks of envelopes and two photographs, evidently of Hafez's wife and infant daughter. The wife was slender, with luminous black eyes, and she smiled at the camera with an expression both brazen and somehow abashed. For the assistant manager, she must have been a necessary reminder of what was real in a realm of simulacrum.

Hafez seated himself before the terminal and keyed in the Rome exchange numbers. Moments later, the screen displayed the search results. The number had been called half a dozen times.

“Can you tell me what room number these calls originated from?” The girl had told her parents that she was “someplace nice,” which was, if anything, an understatement. If she were a guest of the Palace, she was being royally treated indeed.

“A room number?” The assistant manager shook his head.

“But—”

“Each time, a different room number.” He tapped on a column of digits with the capped point of a pen.

How was that possible? “So the guest has checked into different rooms?”

Hafez looked at him as if he were dense. A small headshake. He clicked on a few room numbers, opening data fields that showed the name of each registered guest and the duration of his or her stay. Each name was different; each was male.

“Then you're saying that…”

“What do
you
think?” It was a statement, and not the most polite one. Lucia Zingaretti was working as a prostitute—an “escort”—and, given that she was frequenting the Palace, undoubtedly a high-priced one. If she occasionally made a phone call from the rooms she visited—perhaps while using the bathroom—her clients were unlikely to raise a fuss with hotel management about the extra charges.

“Can you give me the names of the girls who work the place?”

Hafez looked at him blandly. “You must be joking. The Palace Hotel does not condone such activity. How could I have any knowledge of it?”

“You mean you turn a blind eye to it.”

“I turn no eye to it at all. Rich Westerners come here to play. We accommodate them in nearly every way possible. You will have noticed in the lobby natatorium that we have a
sharmuta
swimming around all day.”
Sharmuta
was Arabic slang for slut or whore, and Hafez almost spat the word with unconcealed distaste. He had made a profession of catering to the fantasies of his guests, but he would not pretend that he approved of them. He noticed that Belknap was looking at the photograph of his wife, and, with a fluid movement, he placed the picture facedown. It was not that he had taken offense: It was that the unveiled face of his wife was not meant to be seen by strangers. Belknap suddenly realized the significance of her slightly abashed expression. This was a woman who would appear in public only in a veil. The exposure of her full face and hair was something
of a transgression, akin to a nude picture, for her and for him. “We wash your soiled sheets and clean the toilets and the filthy leavings of your menstruating women, yes, we do all this, and smile even so. But do not ask us to enjoy it. Grant us that much dignity.”

“Thanks for the fatwa. But I need names.”

“I have none.”

“The name of someone who does, then. You're a professional, Ibrahim. There's nothing that goes on in this place you can't find out about.”

Hafez sighed. “There's a bellhop who will know.” He pressed a five-digit extension from his telephone console. “Conrad,” he said. “Come to my office.” Again, he did not disguise his disapproval. Undoubtedly Conrad was one of the European employees foisted upon him by the foreign owners. Hafez clearly placed him in the same category as soiled sheets and used sanitary napkins.

An Irish voice could be heard on the console speaker: “Be right there.”

Conrad was a jockey-sized young man with curly red hair and a too-quick smile. “Yo, Bram,” he said to Hafez, with a mock salute from his visored Palace Hotel cap.

Hafez did not deign to respond. “You will answer this man's questions,” he told the bellhop severely. “I leave you two together.” With a curt bow, he did so.

Conrad's smile faded and reappeared with offputting rapidity as Belknap questioned him, his expression shifting from puzzled and solicitous to conspiratorial and lascivious, equally obnoxious from Belknap's point of view. “So what kind of hoochie are you looking for, my friend?” he finally asked.

“Italian,” Belknap said. “Young. Dark.”

“My, my,” said Conrad. “You're mighty particular. A man who knows what he wants. Gotta respect that.” He was obviously confused by Hafez's involvement, however.

“You know anybody who fits the bill?”

“Well.” Conrad's eyes were calculating. “As a matter of fact, I've got just what the doctor ordered.”

“When can I see her?”

Conrad sneaked a peek at his wristwatch. “Soon,” he said.

“Within the hour?”

“I could swing that. For a consideration. If you're having a party, by the way, you might want some party favors. Ecstasy, blow, sensimilla, whatever—just say the word.”

“She's in the hotel now?”

“Now why would you be asking me that?” Conrad said, a clumsy feint. The answer was yes.

“What room number?”

“If it's a threesome you want…”

Belknap took a step toward the small Irishman and grabbed him by the collar, lifting him a few inches into the air. He pressed his face near Conrad's. “Tell me the goddamn room number,” he barked. “Or I'll have you rendered to the goddamned Egyptians for interrogation. You got me?”

“Bejabbers!” Conrad flushed, beginning to understand that he was in over his head.

“You want to interfere with an international investigation, I suggest you get yourself lawyered up. And when our Egyptian friends offer you the option of scrotal electrodes, say yes. Because the alternative is even worse.”

“Fourteen-fifty, sir. Floor fourteen, straight to the left from the main elevators. All I ask is that you leave me the hell out of it.”

“You gonna call and warn them?”

“After what you were saying about scrotal electrodes? I don't think so, mate.” A forced guffaw was meant to convey nonchalance but conveyed the opposite. “Those were the magic words. Quite vivid.”

Belknap just held out a hand. “Master key,” he demanded.

Reluctantly, the bellhop handed over his keycard. Then he hovered, in a way peculiar to the serving professions, as if expecting a
tip. “Scrotal electrodes”: Belknap mouthed the words as he brushed past him.

Less than four minutes later, he was outside Room 1450, two-thirds of the way up the hotel's central tower. He paused at the door, could hear nothing. The Palace was a well-engineered building, constructed of premium materials. He placed the card in the slot, watched the light blink green, and turned the knob. On the other side of the door he would find Lucia Zingaretti: his one thread.
Hang on, Jared
, he silently urged.
I'm on my way.

 

Andrea Bancroft had meant to clear out her desk at Coventry Equity Group, but as she sat there she had another thought. The office's resources would be helpful to her. Her colleagues were sorry to see her go; they would hardly begrudge her the right to spend her last day as she wanted to.

There was something else, too. She kept thinking about what her nameless visitor had said:
You look a lot like your mother
. What was the significance of that? Was she becoming undone by suspicion? Perhaps it was the result of some delayed grief reaction from her mother's death, the jolting abruptness of the Bancroft bequest, perhaps—but no, she wasn't some hysteric. That wasn't the kind of person she was. Except that she wasn't sure she knew what kind of person she was anymore.

You're a professional
.
Do what you're trained to do.
The foundation was ultimately another organization—a nonprofit corporation—and she had expertise in doing due diligence on corporations, in researching companies both public and private, in peering beneath the glossy assurances of their brochures and press releases. She might as well take a closer look at the Bancroft Foundation itself.

Seated before the networked computer terminal at her desk, she roamed through a series of arcane databases. A nonprofit entity that
was chartered in the United States—even a private one like the Bancroft—had to abide by various statutes and regulations; mandated federal filings included the original charter, bylaws, and employee identification numbers for certain senior officers.

After peering through digitized documents for two hours, Andrea worked out that the foundation was—at least formally—a complex of separately incorporated entities. There was the Bancroft Estates, the Bancroft Philanthropic Trust, the Bancroft Family Trust, and on and on. Funds seemed to slosh through them as through the pipes and valves of a manifold.

All around her she saw her colleagues—
former colleagues
, she corrected herself—working busily at their stations. They seemed drone-like, in a way that she'd never noticed before; seated at desks, fingering keyboards, speaking on telephones—performing hundreds of tasks through about three or four basic motions that were repeated all day long.

What makes me any different?
she thought.
I'm doing the same thing.
It felt different from inside, that was all. It felt different when you knew that what you did truly mattered.

Her phone purred, intruding on her thoughts.

“Hey, girl!” Brent Farley's smooth baritone was dialed up to its most ingratiating pitch. “It's me.”

Her voice was tundra-dry. “How can I help you?”

“How much time you got?” he breezily replied. “Look, it's just that I hated the way we left things. We need to talk, okay?”

“And what would this be in regard to?” Maintaining the secretarial permafrost took surprisingly little effort.

“Hey, don't be that way, Andrea. Look, I got us a couple of tickets to—”

“I'm just curious,” she cut in. “Why is it that you're calling me out of the blue? Why now?”

He stammered. “Why—why am I calling? No special reason,” he
lied. At that moment, she knew for sure: The word had reached him. “I just, like I said, I just thought we needed to talk. Maybe start over again. But, however it goes, we really need to talk.”

Because suddenly the “small-time” girl is worth more than you'll ever make?

“We did need to talk,” she replied calmly. “And, thank goodness, we just have. Good-bye, Brent. Please don't call again.”

She hung up, feeling vindicated, excited, and, oddly, tired.

She walked over to the coffee machine, waved at Walter Sachs, the firm's tech guru, who seemed to be in the middle of a riff with an assistant on the subject of granola bars. He was a brilliant guy, really, and a classic underachiever. Sachs, oddly, took satisfaction in being absolutely indifferent to what he did for a living; he did it well, but found it entirely undemanding, which was to his liking.

“Hey, Walt,” she said. “Working hard or hardly working?”

He turned his long, rectangular head toward her and blinked hard, as if there was something stuck in his contact lenses. “Running the systems here is something I can do in my sleep and with my left hand or, come to think of it, with my left hand asleep. The ‘or' is inclusive, not exclusive: My claim, in its strongest form, is that the tingling left hand of a sleeping Walt Sachs would suffice. Sorry, Andrea, I'm feeling very Boolean today. I blame granola-bar intoxication. Did you realize that granola bars are essentially conduits for com syrup? Do you know how many products on the supermarket shelves are essentially conduits for corn syrup?” He blinked again, a hard, windshield-wiper-style clench. “Consider, of all things, ketchup.”

“See you, Walt,” she said, and returned to her desk with a Stryro-foam cup of coffee.