I heard him sigh. “I’m sorry you don’t like it, Doc. I’m not asking you to like it. But I am asking you todo it. Remember, this guy’s gonna want you—at least wehope he’s gonna want you—to break federal laws for him. If you balk at setting foot in a strip club, he might have deep doubts about your scofflaw sincerity.”
“So if he wants me to hire a hooker or snort cocaine, am I supposed to do that, too, Rooster? How much of me’s for sale here?”
“Not that much,” he said. “So no, don’t do hookers or cocaine. But do this meeting. Please.”
“Hang on while I think about this.” The meter’s digits glowed bright red in the darkness below the dashboard; currently it read $17.50.
A finger tapped my window, and I fumbled for the button to roll it down. “Sorry, I’m almost done,” I turned to tell the driver.
But it was not the driver. “Take all the time you need,” said Raymond Sinclair. The cab’s meter flipped to
$18.00.
“I need to go,” I said into my cell phone. “I’m meeting a friend, and he just got here. I’ll talk to you later.”
I snapped the phone closed, got out of the cab, and walked into The Library with Raymond Sinclair. The front door opened into a short hallway with a counter along one side; behind it sat a burly man wearing a bored expression, a tight black T-shirt, and a dusting of ashes from the cigarette that dangled from his lips. Sinclair flashed the man a plastic card labeled VIP PLATINUM MEMBER, which he acknowledged with a nod. A battered clipboard lay on the counter. The man nudged it toward me.
“Sign in,” he said, “and I need to see a driver’s license.”
I added my name to the list of other men and then fished my license out of my wallet and handed it to him, feeling embarrassed and vaguely guilty. He compared the names, handed my license back across the counter, then pressed a button beside the counter to buzz us into the main room. The room was loud and dark, with a lighted square stage in the middle. A few men sat on low stools surrounding the stage, a handful more sat at tables dispersed throughout the room, and several others were tucked into booths with flashy young women beside them. A pair of waist-high bookshelves, lined with battered paperbacks—presumably the “volumes” Rankin mentioned—flanked the doorway through which we’d entered. Clearly The Library had pulled out all the stops in its effort to provide a highbrow experience.
As we entered, a tall young blond woman—naked except for a tiny G-string and a lace garter encircling one thigh—shinnied up a brass pole at center stage. Once she was at the top, she let go with her hands and leaned back, extending her arms and arching her torso to accentuate her breasts. They were, I had to admit, quite impressive. Then, extending one willowy leg, she hung by the other and began to slide downward, spiraling slowly around the pole, her descent set to throbbing music and strobing lights. During her final spin, timed to coincide with the end of the song, her long hair swept the stage, then fanned out behind her head as her body came to an artfully posed stop at the base of the pole. “That’s Desirée workin’ it for you, guys,” intoned a DJ’s unctuous voice. “Give her a big hand, fellows, and don’t forget to tip. These girls dance only for tips.” I felt obliged to applaud, but no one else did, so after a few self-conscious claps I stopped. One of the men sitting stageside extended a folded bill in the dancer’s direction; she squatted in front of him, hooking a finger under the garter to raise it off her thigh, and he slid the bill beneath the elastic band. The two men sitting beside him studiously looked away, their hands cupped around their beer cans. I wondered how much detail the tiny camera clipped to my tie was relaying to the FBI agents in the van.
Something about the woman’s face looked familiar, and I realized with a start that I’d seen her before—only hours before—in a drastically different light. I tapped Sinclair on the arm. “Isn’t that the woman who asked you the first couple of questions this morning?”
“In the flesh.” He smiled at my obvious bafflement. “Sometimes it’s a good idea to frame the questions the way you want ’em framed,” he explained. “Gives you a little more leverage over the discussion. A bit of spin control. Politicians do it all the time—salt the audience at town meetings with friendly folks who’ll lob some easy questions over the plate.”
I thought back to the end of Sinclair’s talk. “So when Glen Faust interrupted you—was that scripted, too?”
Even in the club’s dim light, I could see Sinclair flush. “It sure as hell wasn’t scripted by me,” he snapped.
“If I’d been scripting it, he’d have made some lame-ass point and I’d have demolished him. He caught me by surprise, and once he brought you into it, it got away from me.” As he spoke, he watched the woman onstage wriggle into a tight tube dress and descend a short set of steps to the main floor.