Zero Hour pp-7 Page 9

  Lembock let the sentence fade, shrugged his rail-thin shoulders. In this trade everybody knows somebody, who knows somebody else.

  There was an extended silence. Malisse sat in deep thought, attempting to pull together the threads Lembock had dangled as a tease to his inquisitive mind. The radiator knocked insolently, a reminder that it was doing its best to melt him into a pool of sweat.

  “The question I originally put to you was whether you’d whiffed fakery or theft,” he said at last. “But it would seem impossible these stones could be counterfeit. Not unless their grading reports were forged or otherwise suspect.”

  “They are legitimate.”

  “You’re convinced of this.”

  “Absolutely convinced.”

  “Then the probabilities are narrowed,” Malisse said. “It can only be that your broker has found his way into either a trove of outstanding good fortune or the black market. Creating an authentic but enhanced sapphire that could slip past laboratory analysis is immensely difficult. All the harder to produce a single outright fake able to escape detection. I don’t believe there’s yet been a successful attempt, and would think the chances of it being done with multiple counterfeits, sapphires of different types and cuts, would be infinitesimal.”

  Lembock held up a bony hand to interrupt him.

  “As we thought about color-enhancing diamonds until General Electric proved us wrong a decade ago,” he said.

  Malisse did not answer. Having caught Lembock’s point, what could he truly say? Regiments of scientists employed by De Beers had taken five years before they came up with an advanced detection technology to catch up with the high-heat, high-pressure GE/POL enhancement method. Identification involved cryogenics — cooling a diamond to a temperature as close to absolute zero as possible, then, using expensive spectroscopes, looking for lightband shifts under argon and cadmium laser excitation, vacancies within the diamond’s structure that contained a single nitrogen atom…. Malisse had studied the process for a considerable amount of time and hadn’t managed to fully grasp what was involved.

  He sat there thinking for another few seconds.

  “If the client is asking the investigator whether he means to keep an open mind, then the investigator’s reply is that he will… assuming he is entrusted with the case.”

  “Does he desire it?”

  “Very much so.”

  Lembock looked at him.

  “The broker’s name is Avram Hoffman,” he said.

  “Is he still in Antwerp?”

  “He’s flown back to New York.”

  “And my airline and hotel reservations?”

  “Have been made for the day after tomorrow,” Lembock said.

  * * *

  Tom Ricci’s head felt simultaneously light and full, as if his brain had been packed inside a thin foam liner. While he wasn’t sure he liked the feeling, it did offer some relief. And Ricci had learned that he could appreciate something he needed, even be very grateful for it, without having to like it very much at all.

  He stood under a working streetlight — a rarity on this Northside San Jose street — and studied the row of parallel parked cars along the curb, trying to remember where he’d left the Jetta. To his right, it was down the block to his right. Over by the public mailbox.

  Ricci turned toward the car and fished around in a pants pocket for his keys. No footsteps in back of him yet, okeydoke. He was honestly thinking he could duck a confrontation he didn’t want, make the night a complete success. And why examine too closely how he felt? Why push it? Too much of the time, far too much, Ricci’s thoughts would come raging over the dam he’d built to contain them, and he’d feel a band of pressure spread across his forehead, and a throbbing in his temples, and terrible stabs of pain under the tops of his eye sockets — that pain below the brow radiating up and out to intensify the pressure at the sides of his head and then run multiple paths around the back of his skull to its base. Before long it would seem as if his entire head was locked inside a steel cage from the neck up, its bars red-hot and tight, and Ricci wouldn’t know whether to curse his rampant thoughts for having put him in that hateful torture mask, or turn all his anger onto himself for leaving the floodgates unattended in the first place.

  But at the moment he was doing okay, his brain nestled in its soft cushion of foam. So say he felt grateful for that. Say he was relieved his thoughts hadn’t rocked him with another agonizing blowout tonight, and then be wise enough to leave well-enough alone. Dig too deep and the poisoned water would come gushing from its reservoir again.

  Ricci moved down the sidewalk toward his Volkswagen, the key chain out of his pocket, his finger on the button of its remote door opener. Only now he heard the slap of shoes on the pavement behind him and realized he’d been too confident of having gotten in the free and clear.

  They had picked him up. There were dark store entrances along both sides of the street, service alleys, one broken streetlight after another with nothing but shadows underneath them… and the dive he’d just left probably had a side or back exit they could have slunk through just as he’d been heading out the front door. They had seemed like regulars, asinine, bored, and pathetic. They would know the shortcuts and places to hide, and see this as a chance to spice their dreary routine with some action. Unlike himself, of course.

  Ricci increased his pace slightly, pressed the key-fob remote. His Jetta chirped, blinked its headlights and taillights as the locks and burglar alarm disengaged. He’d had reasons galore for not having taken a walk the moment he noticed a situation brewing. If none occurred to him right now, there must be a reason for that, too. Say he was focused on getting to his car, peeling off into the night with a squeal of tires and blast of tailpipe exhaust.

  Ricci reached for the VW’s doorhandle, missed, grabbed air instead. What the hell, it was dark out here, easy to short-arm it. He got hold of it on the second try, looked back up the block toward the sound of footsteps. They were coming toward him from maybe twenty feet away, a couple of bodybuilders with the cliff-top brows and widened jawlines of hardcore steroid abusers. Both of them probably pumped full of Equipoise or some spinoff muscle-mass enhancer formulated for three-thousand-pound farm horses and beef cattle. The tall one with tanning-parlor bronze skin and a mustache, his stockier pal wearing a short-sleeved shirt to display his hairy, bulked-up arms. Suntan was on the curb side of the row of parked cars. Hairy Arms in the street. Subtle tacticians, these guys.

  A beater Ford sped past, Latino kids in head scarves hanging out its lowered windows, drumming their palms against its sides to loud pulses of hip-hop on its stereo. Ricci opened his door. The lugs who’d followed him weren’t carrying hardware, nothing heavy anyway, or he’d have spotted it under the tight shirts and pants gripping their virile physiques. But a knife was easier to hide. So was a sap, or brass knuckles. Ricci knew he should have checked them out when he first realized they’d be a problem back in the dive, couldn’t understand why he hadn’t. What the hell.

  He looked over his shoulder again, felt a sort of lag as he turned his head. Thick and full, wrapped in foam.

  His guys were just a few cars down the curb and moving at a decent trot. No chance to pull away in the Jetta. He would need to scramble just to get behind the wheel before they caught up to him.

  Ricci wasn’t about to do that.

  He held onto the doorhandle as they approached. Suntan sidling around the door to stand in front of him. Hairy Arms stepping around the mailbox onto the sidewalk and then hanging back around the front fender.

  “Okay,” Ricci said. His eyes on Suntan. “I think we should call it a night.”

  Suntan shook his head.

  “It’ll be okay when I decide,” he said. “My old lady’s no house show, blue boy.”

  Ricci looked at him. Blue Boy. Now they all had smart little nicknames for each other, though he supposed the guy’s darling had coined that one. Blond, a tight figure, she’d slid up next to Ricci while he
’d been on his stool waiting for a refill, given him a practiced eyebrow flash, hair swish, and flirty smile. Then she momentarily leaned close, held her arm out next to his, and remarked how his navy-blue shirt matched the shade of her blouse… except the word she’d used for the articles of clothing in question was “tops.” Nice how our tops fit together, isn’t it? Swaying her body to the music on the jukebox, moving still closer, her hand brushing Ricci’s at the edge of the counter. Her come-on pretend sexy, like an imitation of a bad television acting job.

  This was Northside, though. Nowhere to come in search of true romance.

  The blonde was good-looking in her overdone way, and it had been a long while for Ricci, and he’d felt an itch to take what she was offering. But he’d remembered seeing her hanging all over Suntan in a booth at the other end of the place, figured her for the type who would thrill on playing guys against each other, and reconsidered. So he just kind of smiled at her, said something neutral — yeah, sure, nice — and went back to leaning over his glass at the counter, assuming that would be the end of it.

  Except it wasn’t. She had gone out of her way to make eye contact with Ricci later on from over in her booth. More than once. And if he’d been able notice her from across the room, Suntan would have noticed from right alongside her, where he’d had his hand grafted to her breast.

  Ricci guessed she’d been better at the game than either of them.

  “You don’t want to make this mistake,” he said now. His tongue had a problem with the s’s, stretching them out and running them together. “Don’t want to get into it with me.”

  Suntan’s response was to inch closer. Behind Ricci on the pavement, Hairy Arms had done the same to block his retreat, corner him between the side of the car and its partially open door. What was next according to the tired script?

  As Suntan bulled forward at the car door, meaning to shove it against him with both outthrust hands, body-slam him with the door, Ricci caught hold of its inner handle, beating him to it by an instant, pushing the door outward with all his strength. Suntan staggered back, hands going to his middle, the wind knocked out of him. Ricci started to slip out of the space where he was wedged between the car and door, wanting to follow through immediately, get on top of Suntan before he could recover. But then he felt a blow on the side of his face under the cheekbone, saw an explosive flash of brightness, and knew through the thunder and lightning that he’d been sucker punched from behind. Hairy Arms, son of a bitch. He’d landed a solid one.

  Ricci’s mouth filled with the salty taste of blood. Careless, sloppy. Why hadn’t he been ready? Goddamned son of a bitch.

  Hairy Arms stepped in for another swing, but this time Ricci could see it coming. He dropped his head, turned on him, grabbed his wrist with both hands. Then he jerked it down hard, snapped it up again with an equally sharp twist, moving around behind him, holding on to his wrist with one hand, sliding the other down to his elbow, wrenching his arm high up against his back. Hairy Arms grunted in pain but didn’t unclench his fingers. Keeping the guy’s body between himself and Suntan, his arm still twisted high, Ricci bent his wrist back as far as he could and, as the fist finally sprang open, pushed him against the mailbox and banged his forehead down twice on its metal hood. Hairy Arms hung half-limp over the mailbox a moment and Ricci drove his head down a third time with the heel of his hand so his whole face smashed into it. The bridge of his nose twisted and gashed, blood streaming from his nostrils, he let out another grunt of pain and then fell forward onto the pavement and didn’t move.

  With his friend collapsed there in a heap, Suntan came charging around him, chin tucked low behind his club fists. Ricci knew he had room to pivot and kick on several different planes, deliver a snap under his upraised arms to his abdomen, a roundhouse over them to his neck, but there was no steadiness in his legs, no balance, nothing to trust at all, and he realized he’d have to count on the likelihood that Suntan would have similar problems for similar reasons. They’d both spent the last few hours doing the same thing in the same squalid dump.

  Ricci stood facing Suntan until his lunge had almost brought them into collision, and then sidestepped at the final instant, grabbing his shirt behind the collar with his right hand, and also somewhere lower down between the shoulders with his left, yanking the material in opposite directions as he got his hip out in front of Suntan’s waist, using his own momentum to throw him off his feet. As Suntan bellied down on the pavement, Ricci drove his shoe into his spine right around the small of the back, crouched, flipped him over, and straddled his chest, pounding him on the jaw with a right cross, a left, then bringing up his fist and punching him straight-on in the mouth.

  Suntan’s head rolled backward on the concrete, his eyes half shut, his upper lip split and bloodied.

  Ricci bunched his shirt collar in both hands, hauled his shoulders off the ground.

  “Look at me,” he said, and shook him hard.

  Suntan groaned through lips spattered with red foam, his eyelids still drooping.

  Ricci shook him.

  “I told you to look at me,” he said.

  Suntan managed to open his eyes a little wider, bring their pupils into bleary focus.

  “I could break you apart right here,” Ricci said. “Do anything I want to you.”

  Suntan looked at him without making a sound.

  Ricci pulled him up higher, closer. Pulled him up off the sidewalk until their faces almost touched.

  “I’m nobody you ever want to see again,” he said. “Nobody.”

  Suntan’s mouth worked, produced an unintelligible sound, blood and saliva spilling down over his chin. At last he quit on trying to form the word and simply nodded.

  Ricci stared down at his battered face another moment, his eyes steady. Then he released the front of his shirt to let him drop back onto the pavement, rose, got into his car, and keyed the ignition.

  His fingers closed around the steering wheel, jittered around the wheel. A breath, Ricci thought. He just needed to take a breath. He felt dull, nauseous, light-headed. The inside of his cheek was torn where he’d caught the hit from Hairy Arms. He probed the area with his tongue and an upper molar wobbled against its tip.

  Ricci sat pulling air into his chest, swallowing it in deep gulps. That didn’t make things better. Maybe it was his adrenaline level falling, he didn’t know. But it had never happened to him before, not like this. His trembling hands. The weakness. The fog in his head.

  Ricci reached for the clutch. He didn’t care whether somebody found him sitting where he was and called the cops. Didn’t care what they’d make of it at UpLink, especially Rollie Thibodeau and Megan Breen the Ice Queen. Nor did he care whether the two big boppers scraped themselves off the sidewalk and came at him again. But he felt that if he stayed there in the car and didn’t move, he would just kind of fade out until he wasn’t there anymore. That he would start sinking inward, collapse in on himself without being able to stop.

  He had to move, right now, or he wouldn’t.

  His hands still trembling, Ricci backed up, put the car in drive, and without checking traffic, stepped heavily on the accelerator and pulled away.

  FOUR

  SAN JOSE / NEW YORK CITY / SOUTHERN NEW JERSEY

  Megan Breen shot off a crisp combination of blows. Left jab, right cross, left hook.

  “So how’m I doing, Pete?” she said, and took a deep breath.

  Nimec looked at her from behind one of the 150-pound heavy bags in his boxing gym, spotting her, holding the bag close to his chest with both hands.

  “Sounds like you’ve got this New York deal on your mind,” he said.

  Megan pounded the bag with another combo.

  “I don’t get you,” she said.

  “The ex-mayor’s slogan,” Nimec said. “ ‘How’m I doing?’ He was famous for it over there.”

  “I thought his claim to fame was dancing on stage with the Rockettes.”

  Nimec grunted, unsure. W
asn’t that a longstanding tradition in the Big Apple, something like the Hasty Puddings, with those Harvard students putting on skits for each other in drag? But who knew. Showtime politicians tired him, and Ivy Leaguedom was outside his realm. All he could say was that guys strutting around in sequins and hose wouldn’t have gone down too well in the South Philly pool parlor where he’d gotten his uncommon version of an education, flashing a cue stick like Paul Newman’s fictional Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler… absent the Hollywood-idol good looks.

  He watched Megan work away in her gloves, pushing tempo. Left hook, right cross, uppercut. Jab, cross, jab. She stood flat-footed while attacking the bag, feinting, bobbing, feeling no need to practice her one-two shuffle for what was mainly a strength and stamina drill.

  It was now six-thirty A.M. on Monday morning, and the sun had yet to rise outside the windows of the upper-level rec/training course in Nimec’s triplex condo, where Megan had arrived exactly half an hour earlier for the first of her regular twice-a-week sessions. Besides the fully equipped gym with its regulation fight ring, this floor-wide modular facility contained a martial arts dojo, a state-of-the-art computerized shooting range, and, not of the least importance to Nimec, a reproduction of the sordid old pool hall of his memories, accurate to its grimy light fixtures and cigarette burns on the baize.

  Pleased by the solid thumping impact of Megan’s blows against his body, Nimec glanced at the mirrored wall to their right to check her stance.

  “You still have to keep those elbows in closer to your sides, set up quicker for the comeback,” he said. “But there’s more snap to your punches. You’re committing better.”