This Is How It Really Sounds (24 page)

“How do you know he's lying?”

“I just know. It's his type. He's trying to squeeze your father for more money.”

He explained the same thing to Maier that night and saw the same mix of emotions as with his daughter, made more pathetic by his gaunt, pale face.

“If there's even the smallest chance she's alive…!”

“I don't believe she is, Mr. Maier. She would have contacted your cousin, as you said. She would have found—”

“But if she
is
!” he hissed. The man was in agony. “We must find her! We must make Richter tell what he knows!”

This was going exactly the way he had thought it would as soon as Maier had told him Richter was in Shanghai. “Mr. Maier, I'm sorry. This is out of my—”

He had come to his feet. “I'll pay you ten thousand dollars! In any currency you choose! In gold! I'll deposit it in Hong Kong, if you like. Or America. Anywhere!”

Anna interrupted him. “Charlie,” she said softly. “Please. It's my mother.”

He looked at her green eyes. It wasn't that she was promising anything; she didn't have that kind of guile. There was nothing playful or coquettish about her but, on the contrary, something very elegant and reserved and sincere. He wanted that part of her, that part that he'd always thought was unattainable for a farm boy from western Washington.

“Okay. But we're not going to kidnap him.”

“What do you suggest?” Maier asked.

“I have another idea. Let me take care of it. And don't worry: he won't leave Shanghai until he's found you.”

*   *   *

Charlie's cell phone went off. He was
here
again, in this Shanghai, standing at the gate of a house on Lane 37. He'd been staring at the front door some time, but all the staring in the world wouldn't make it open and release its missing people. He took the cell phone out. It was Pete Harrington.

“Charlie! How's it hanging?”

The joviality of Harrington's tone annoyed him. “It's fine. What have you been doing?”

“Just walking around, checking out the whole scene here. I was here in '92, and I don't remember
anything
! I've still got some fans, though. I was recognized twice. It was freaky. Like, these big crowds of Chinese people just surrounded me and stared!”

“Glad you're enjoying yourself.”

“Yeah, that's what I called about.” Charlie heard a soft woman's voice in the background. “Umm … I met a girl, and”—Harrington lowered his voice to a near whisper—“I'd say I've got a pretty good shot, you know?” His tone returned to normal again. “We're supposed to meet up tonight. She's coming by the hotel. So this is kind of a scheduling thing. What time were you and I going to go out?” He added quickly, “I mean, I can cancel, Charlie. No problem. But you just want me to ride in the car for a little while and get a look at this guy … Right? You don't need me all night.”

“Are you serious?”

The singer hesitated at the sound of his voice. “Well, yeah, I mean … Yeah, but not really—”

“Because if you're serious, I'm done here. I'm getting on the next plane to L.A.”

“No, man, definitely, it's … you know, I've got my priorities. We're here to do this, so—”

“No!” Charlie cut him off savagely. “
You're
here to do this! I'm here because you're paying me! And you're paying me whether I stay or go. Understand?”

“I do, Charlie.”

“Is she with you right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Get rid of her. Right now, while I'm listening. So I can hear it!”

Harrington's next words were distant, spoken past his phone.
No, not tonight, but maybe—

“Get rid of her!”

“Yeah, sorry. No time. Good-bye! Gotta go! No, don't come with me! Sayonara! Bye-bye!
I'm walking away from her, Charlie. It's done.”

“What is it with you? Do you just compulsively have to screw off? Because I have to deal with the bodyguard, and right now I don't see why I should be getting ready to throw myself on a grenade while you chase a piece of ass around Shanghai!”

The plea coming through the tiny speaker was twisted with pain. “
Please,
Charlie. Don't give up on me!”

“You were the guy who was going one-on-one with the universe! Who was going to kick the crap out of greed.”

“I still am!”

He let the assertion drop into silence. It took a while for Harrington to muster the courage to venture a question. “It's still on, right? Just tell me that.”

Charlie looked around the quiet walls and tree branches of Lane 37, and through the gate at house number 116. This was his now, too. “It's still on.”

He closed the phone and started walking back toward the car. Why was he still in this? There was a good chance his client would blow it and an even better chance he himself would get hurt in the process. That'd be a little piece of hell: stuck in a Chinese hospital with a broken hip and anybody but Zhang seven thousand miles away. Crappy way to end a career. All the people who looked at him as a living legend would see him instead as a silly old man hanging on to one last client, no matter how ridiculous.
Of course,
and this made him smile as he walked back to the cross street, if he
did
pull it off … Well, he'd studied Peter Harrington's business dealings fairly carefully, his rise through the bank and his double-dealing with his bond fund. If Pete Harrington really did punch the banker in the face, it was going to make a lot of people very happy. There'd be a loud noise, and then word would get around, quietly, among those who knew, and some of those men who'd turned him down for jobs, who'd put him out to pasture, were going to say,
Holy smokes, it's Charlie Pico!
They'd know that the living legend was still
alive
.

*   *   *

The bells of a nearby church rang three o'clock, which left him very little time to reconnoiter and get back to the financier's apartment before he went out for the evening. It took him ten minutes to get back to the car, then he pulled off the surveillance and had the driver take him down to the Bund. The place had been considerably spruced up. Used to be for international banking and trade; now it was all fancy restaurants and chain stores stuffed with overpriced jewelry and clothing. The old resonance wasn't coming back to him. Too many people around, and, besides, he was working, searching for just the right spot. And there it was, just like he remembered, with its roaring bronze lions and its stately columns and steps, the old Hongkong Bank building, now the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. Perfect. Looked like a Bank with a capital B. Crowded but not constricted. Room for three or four people to get a view from different angles. Easy access to the escape vehicle. He could walk him around and tell him a few stories to get the timing right, if necessary; then Pete Harrington could come from the direction of the old Cathay. Things were getting clearer.

“Pull over here.” They double-parked, their police plates making them invulnerable, and he walked the terrain and planned out their trajectory. “This is where we're going to do it,” he told the driver. “You'll put one man
there
. He's going to follow our client with a cell phone camera, like he's just recognized him and is getting a souvenir. Put the second one over
here
. Start him at ten meters away, and then he can move in. He should keep the lions in the background and make sure he gets the bank sign. Get somebody who's not afraid to get physical, because if the bodyguard gets past me and chases our client, your man will need to get in his way and slow him down without creating any suspicion. And I want
you
over
there.
” He indicated a place a hundred yards down the street. “You'll be parked. Use a cell phone with a good zoom and keep an eye on everything; then get him out of here afterwards. Our client should have a ten-second head start, and he'll come straight to your car. Have the motor running. Got it? From here, you take him straight to the airport.”

Charlie could tell by the man's questions that he understood. Zhang worked with good people. He felt okay at the moment. Not too tired, and his foot wasn't so bad. He had a plan. He just had to get the financier to this spot, and that was what he'd try to set up next. Now all he had to do was go back and sit Harrington's house, take a little nap in the car. But it was the time of day when the late-afternoon sun burnished everything with a film of dusty golden light, like the whole avenue was trapped in honey. And here he was, again. “Why don't you wait here for a while,” he told the driver. “Give me ten minutes.”

He walked a few hundred yards along the Bund. The sidewalk was filled with well-dressed Chinese people, heavily salted with foreign tourists gaping at the porticos and columns. All so different now, so lousy with cappuccinos and jewelry stores.
Where was that place, anyway? Was it this block, or the next one?
He came to the alley and walked away from the river, and at first he couldn't recognize it, because there was a fancy Russian restaurant with a striped awning. He stared for a long time, taking away the awning and the brass menu holder until he saw it once again. Maier's shipping office. He took a deep breath, then walked farther down the alley to the backstreet that ran parallel with the Bund. It was much quieter here, as it always had been. Three-story row houses somebody was trying to lease out as restaurants, architecture offices. More of an alley than a street. He turned left and walked along the back of a building. There was the window, now bricked closed, and the doorway sealed shut with a barrier of gray metal. No sign on it, but there hadn't been a sign back then, either. Not in the telephone directory, either. A guy like Vorster didn't necessarily want to be located. You could find him, or else you probably had no reason to find him. Charlie could find him. Still could.

The operative piece of information in that whole encounter with Richter and Vorster at the Shanghai Club was that Vorster knew all along who and where Hermann Maier was. His office was virtually around the corner, and, moreover, an operator like Vorster who dealt in shipping on a regular basis would have run across Maier sometime in the past eight years, by name if not in person. They might even have done business. He arranged to meet Vorster at his office one block in from the river. The black marketeer rented a ground-floor office in a building built in the boom of the thirties, with pink and black tiles on the floor and a sleek black telephone and intercom system imported from America. On the walls were pictures of Vorster standing over the bodies of various dead African game, taken in the twenties, from the looks of the clothing. Vorster offered him a cigar and some brandy, joking that he liked to be on the ground floor because in case of an unwanted visitor one could always climb out the window.

“Interesting business,” he told him.

Vorster took out a knife and clipped the end of the cigar. “You know my business, Charlie. I buy. I sell. I try to be a little bit smarter than the next man. Is that illegal?” He shrugged. “Who makes the rules? The people who profit the most. The Generalissimo only shoots the smugglers who don't give him his share.”

He passed the knife over to Charlie, who trimmed the end of his own cigar. It was a dark heavy Cuban leaf. He looked at it as he spoke. “I'm curious about your friend Karl Richter.”

“Oh, Karl! Quite a sad story, isn't it? But maybe with a happy ending.”

Charlie laughed. “You're a hell of a smuggler, Matthias, but you're no Olivier. You know very well Hermann Maier has an office right around the corner from where you and Mr. Richter were having breakfast.”

Vorster became slightly less jovial. “Why are you here, Charlie? Has the export market gotten slow these days?”

His tattered cover story. “Isn't anybody buying that one?”

“No one important.”

He shrugged. “That's the guys in Washington for you. I'd have made a great feed and grain salesman, but there's not too much call for that here.” He put the open penknife down. There was a leather-covered desk lighter about the size of an eight ball, and Charlie flicked a blue and yellow flame out of the top. “Who do you think's going to win this war, Matthias? Communists or Nationalists? I'm putting my money on the Commies. The Nationalists … Chiang…” He paused to ignite the cigar. “There's just nothing much to save there.”

“I give the KMT two years.”

“But the Communists still need materiel. Artillery shells, radios, M-1 cartridges. They're sitting on a bunch of Arisaka Type 99s. I don't suppose you've got a line on some old Jap ammo lying around that maybe got stranded when the war ended.”

“It's an interesting thought.”

He was conscious as he spoke the next words that he was straying far over the line of what his bosses would accept from him. “How would you like to meet a couple of Communists with the wherewithal to do some business?”

“Is that before or after they shoot me for being a collaborator?”

“Oh, hell, Matthias! You don't have to worry about that until after Liberation. And by then you'll be in some other war zone. Here's the deal: I'll introduce you to a couple of interested friends of mine in exchange for some information about your Dutch pal, Herr Richter. Is he a business associate?”

“
Ex
-business associate.”

“From the far eastern part of Holland, I'll bet. The part that's Germany. Around Kiel.”

“Are you working for Hermann Maier?”

“Does it matter who I'm working for? We have a deal, right? What's Richter's story?”

Vorster reached for the lighter and lit his cigar as he looked down at the blotter on his desk. “You know about Maier's wife, don't you? Terrible. Sassoon told me, but I never knew it was Karl that was involved in it.” Vorster recounted a briefer version of what Maier had already told him about his wife. A sudden pall of philosophy came over him. “They went too far,” he said. “I have no love for the British. That's not a secret. But the Nazis went too far. It's inhuman. I had no idea until after the war ended.”