“He’s a sneaky, treacherous sonofabitch,” said Fiona Cassidy. “Nozawa in Illinois, this guy in the park and on that bench of all benches, Yoshioka sniffing around on the sixth floor, him and his security chains. It’s Jap Day, sure enough.”
A conversation ensued, during which they argued heatedly about whether Fiona might be excessively paranoid. They all properly and wisely embraced paranoia as being essential to their survival and success; but though paranoia could be a good thing, it could also be too much of a good thing. If one of them, for instance, began to suspect that among them lurked a Bilderberger, the other four had to conduct a friendly intervention and get him back on a rational track. In this case, the five reached a relatively quick consensus: Fiona wasn’t off the rails; there must be some connection between Yoshioka, Nozawa, and this big guy in the chokeberry shadows.
Tilton said they never should have used Apartment 6-C for bomb-making, that Fiona should have cooked the pudding and packed the pots right here in the house. That ticked off Lucas, who reminded Tilton that the house was a two-million-dollar asset, not a place where you made bombs or tested flamethrowers. If Fiona blew herself to bits, that would be sad, even a tragedy, but blowing up the mansion would be something else altogether; blowing up the mansion would be a serious loss of capital. Besides, if the house was damaged by a bomb blast, the FBI would be all over the Drackman Family Trust and all over Lucas himself; even dumb bears knew not to crap in their dens.
Basically, they had two options. One, cancel the operation planned for that morning and hope to reschedule it, snatch Yoshioka instead, and torture the truth out of him. Two, proceed as planned, rather than running for the tall grass like a bunch of cowards, and then extract the facts from Yoshioka afterward.
Even if the guy in the park was conducting surveillance, they could leave the house by the back, walk a couple of blocks along the alleyway before coming out to a main street, flag down a taxi, and take that to the rented Quonset, once an auto-repair garage in an industrial district, from which they were staging the operation.
“Look,” Lucas said, “it’s weird, all these Japanese, but who are these people really? I mean, we have a tailor, a dry cleaner, and some squish, we don’t know what he does, if anything. We’re not dealing with Elliot Ness here. I say we go forward as planned, make this a day to remember, and later we squeeze Yoshioka until we pop the little rotten tomato.”
Lucas nearly always got what he wanted, certainly not because of metaphors like the rotten tomato and not merely because he knew how to manipulate and motivate people, but also because he was a spooky dude who seemed to be perpetually on the edge of violence. His four compatriots agreed with him: the operation was on.
75
A couple of hours later, at 10:10 A.M. that Monday, Amalia and Malcolm and I disembarked from the city bus at the corner of National Avenue and 52nd Street, as we had done the previous Thursday. Across the avenue stood Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, where Europe in the Age of Monarchy had finished its run on Sunday. First National Bank and its thirty-story financial center towered behind us, and for a couple of blocks in every direction stood imposing and richly detailed historic buildings.
On the ride in from our neighborhood, I’d discovered that Amalia knew almost as much about architecture as she did about art, and she had stories to tell about the buildings and the people who designed them. She never acted like a know-it-all, never made me feel clueless by comparison. Instead, knowledge flowed from that girl like cool air from an electric fan. The longer you listened, the more you wanted to hear, because the things she knew and the words she used to convey them made the world around you clearer, brighter.
“Where do we start?” I asked.
Malcolm said, “Right here, the bank, it’s so radical. You’ll love it.”
I had never been inside a bank before, and I thought they must be kidding me. “But we don’t have any money to put in or take out.”
“The lobby is a public space,” Amalia explained. “And one of the most beautiful. Anyone can go inside. Anyone. There was a time, not so long ago, when architecture was as much about beauty as function. This place opened in 1931. It’s brilliant Deco. It always gives me goose bumps.”