Time to shop.
When Irene left the hotel, she noticed a second taxicab following hers. She was pleased. If she wasn’t directing attention from Kai and Evariste, she wasn’t doing her job.
She’d spent half an hour in her suite, freshening up and having a quick meal. It was mid-afternoon by now, and she was hungry. That had been quite long enough for hotel staff to make discreet phone calls about her identity. She’d been on edge walking out through the lobby to the waiting cab, just in case someone was going to try another assassination, but nothing had happened. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her to dress more unobtrusively and sneak out of the hotel via the staff entrance. It was hard to fight the habits of a lifetime.
‘Somewhere that I can buy some decent clothing,’ she ordered the driver. ‘My own luggage was held up. And then a good bookshop. And then I need to visit the New York Public Library.’
That should put the cat among the pigeons. Qing Song’s watchers would see her doing something, but they wouldn’t know what. Would Qing Song think she was going to collect the Journey to the West? Or that she was going to report in to the Library?
As it turned out, she didn’t even reach the library before trouble came calling.
She’d made her first stop a very expensive clothing shop. Jeanette Smith would not wear off-the-rack clothing. Jeanette Smith was more in the silk-dress and fur-coat line – and, most importantly, shoes that fitted perfectly and wouldn’t give Irene blisters.
She came out of the shop in a little cream cocktail dress that waved around her knees, cut up to her neck in front and down to her shoulder blades at the back, only just avoiding showing her Library brand. It was patterned diagonally with scarab beetles in shades of ultramarine, to go with her turquoise necklace and bracelets. Her coat was wide-sleeved black velvet, collared and cuffed with chinchilla fur, and her hat matched it perfectly. And even though she didn’t like to admit it, the whole experience of being fussed over and properly dressed had improved her mood. She felt more integrated into this New York now. More in character.
Her second stop was the area known as ‘Book Row’ on Fourth Avenue. It covered six blocks and housed at least forty bookshops. Possibly more. Irene could happily have spent days there, but the plan was for her to keep moving around New York, keeping the watchers busy.
She noticed the men closing in on her as she walked back towards her cab. She wasn’t surprised when they crowded in around her and two of them hustled her into the back seat, squashing her between them, while the third jumped into the front with the cabbie and murmured instructions.
She could feel the men’s holsters through their suits. ‘Are we going somewhere?’ she asked.
‘Ain’t nothing the matter, lady,’ the man on her left grunted. ‘You just sit quiet and we’ll be there in a few minutes.’
Her driver’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He stamped on the accelerator, and Irene was knocked back in her seat by the car’s sudden jump forward.
‘I can pay, you know,’ Irene offered. She was trying to work out who these men were working for. Were they Qing Song’s minions, random gangsters, specific gangsters, or undercover police? So many enemies, so little time.
‘Now there ain’t no need to get worried,’ the man on her left went on, as if he was reading from a pre-prepared script. ‘There’s just some people as want to talk to you—’
‘Pay quite a lot,’ Irene said meaningfully. She glanced out of the window. The geography of the city told her nothing. Curbside trees and tables, and lower buildings with shops and delicatessens, gave way to colder skyscrapers and more anonymous streets. She could wait and see where she was being taken. But she might be on her way to her very own gangland execution.
The driver stood on the brakes as the car made a right-angle turn, its wheels screeching on the roadway. In the back of the car they all slid sideways, the man on Irene’s right crushing her against the one on her left and grunting an apology. They both smelled of tobacco and cheap aftershave. Irene could hear the angry shouts of other drivers as they braked in response.
‘Lady, the sort of money you could offer ain’t enough to cross the boss.’ Her kidnapper tried to sound reassuring, pulling himself back to vertical and straightening his lapels. ‘Look, they just want to talk. It’s not like you’re gonna turn up in a sack. It’s just business.’
‘How reassuring,’ Irene muttered. She directed her next words at the driver. ‘If they’re going to shoot me, they’ll probably get rid of you, to make sure there aren’t any witnesses.’
Clearly this had occurred to the driver. He chewed nervously on the ends of his moustache. But he didn’t slow down or stop. ‘Lady, I don’t like doing this,’ he muttered. ‘My mother’s brother Josef, he always said, you get a job as a cab driver, boy, you’re going to end up working day and night for all sorts, no way to call your soul your own, driving your cab all the hours God sends just to pay the rent . . .’
‘Shut it,’ the man in the front seat directed him. ‘You didn’t see nothing. Just drop us off, then go find some new fares. And you, lady. You oughta know how these things work. There’s no call to get the help nervous. If he don’t squeal, he’s got nothing to worry about.’
The car came to a sudden jolting stop which nearly threw Irene and her guards into the partition. Irene could have lifted one of their guns during the confusion, and the thought reassured her. They weren’t that competent; they were just average thugs doing their jobs.
‘Right,’ the man in the front said. ‘Lady, you go through the brown door there and down the stairs, and you do it fast before the cops catch up with us. There’s someone down there who wants to talk.’
Irene scrambled into a deeply shadowed back alley. The buildings on either side rose high enough to block out direct sunlight at this hour in the afternoon. Crumbling mortar filled the gaps between decrepit bricks, and trash cans were spaced irregularly along the sidewalk, odours leaking out of them to fill the air. The doorways along the alley were all in shades of grey, brown and black, as if they were trying to find the most unobtrusive shade possible. If New York was a piece of music, then this was the ominous pause leading up to an intense climax.
The specific brown door that her kidnapper had pointed out was noticeably different from the others. Vale would probably only have needed a single glance to mark it as worth investigation. Someone had taken care to sweep its doorstep clean, and there were no dumpsters nearby.
The cab remained idling at the curb. Presumably the men inside were waiting to be sure she actually went through the door and didn’t make a run for it.