The Hard Way Part 21

"The one with nothing in the window," he said to her.

On the third floor they pa.s.sed number six at the back of the building and walked forward toward number five. The smell of coffee had faded and been replaced by the universal hallway smell of boiled vegetables.

"Is he in?" Reacher asked.

The super shook his head. "I only ever saw him twice. He's out now for sure. I was just all over the building fixing pipes." He used a master key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the door. Pushed it open and stood back.

The apartment was what a real estate broker would have called an alcove studio. All one room, with a crooked L that was theoretically large enough for a bed if the bed was small. A kitchen corner and a tiny bathroom with an open door. But mostly what was on show was dust and floorboards.

Because the apartment was completely empty.

Except for a single upright dining chair. The chair was not old, but it was well used. It was the kind of thing you see for sale on the Bowery sidewalks where the bankrupt restaurant dealers hawk seized inventory. It was set in front of the window and turned slightly north and east. It was about twenty feet above and three feet behind the exact spot that Reacher had chosen for coffee, two nights running.

Reacher stepped over and sat down on the chair, feet planted, relaxed but alert. The way his body settled naturally put the fireplug across Sixth directly in front of him. A shallow downward angle, easily enough to clear a parked panel truck. Enough to clear a parked semi. A ninety-foot range. No problem for anyone who wasn't clinically blind. He stood up again and turned a full circle. Saw a door that locked. Saw three solid walls. Saw a window free of drapes. A soldier knows that a satisfactory observation point provides an un.o.bstructed view to the front and adequate security to the flanks and the rear, provides protection from the elements and concealment of the observers, and offers a reasonable likelihood of undisturbed occupation for the full duration of the operation.

"Feels just like Patti Joseph's place," Pauling said.

"You been there?"

"Brewer described it."

"Eight million stories," Reacher said.

Then he turned to the super and said, "Tell us about this guy."

"He can't talk," the super said.

"What do you mean?"

"He can't speak."

"What, like he's a mute?"

"Not by birth. Because of a trauma."

"Like something struck him dumb?"

"Not emotional," the super said. "Physical. He communicated with me by writing on a pad of yellow paper. Full sentences, quite patiently. He wrote that he had been injured in the service. Like a war wound. But I noticed that he had no visible scarring. And I noticed that he kept his mouth tight shut all the time. Like he was embarra.s.sed about me seeing something. And it reminded me very strongly of something I saw once before, more than twenty years ago."

"Which was?"

"I am Russian. For my sins I served with the Red Army in Afghanistan. Once we had a prisoner returned to us by the tribesmen as a warning. His tongue had been cut out."

CHAPTER 31

THE SUPER TOOK Reacher and Pauling down to his own apartment, which was a squared-away semi-bas.e.m.e.nt s.p.a.ce in the back of the building. He opened a file cabinet and took out the current lease papers for apartment five. They had been signed exactly a week previously by a guy calling himself Leroy Clarkson. Which as expected was a blatantly phoney name. Clarkson and Leroy were the first two streets coming off the West Side Highway north of Houston, just a few blocks away. At the far end of Clarkson was a topless bar. At the far end of Leroy was a car wash. In between was a tiny aluminium coach diner that Reacher had once eaten in.

"You don't see ID?" Pauling asked.

"Not unless they want to pay by check," the super said. "This guy paid cash."

The signature was illegible. The Social Security number was neatly written but was no doubt just a random sequence of nine meaningless digits.

The super gave a decent physical description, but it didn't help much because it did nothing more than match what Reacher himself had seen on two separate occasions. Late thirties, maybe forty, white, medium height and weight, clean and trim, no facial hair. Blue jeans, blue shirt, ball cap, sneakers, all of them worn and comfortable.

"How was his health?" Reacher asked.

"Apart from the fact that he couldn't speak?" the super said. "He seemed OK."

"Did he say if he'd been out of town for a while?"

"He didn't say anything."

"How long did he pay for?"

"A month. It's the minimum. Renewable."

"This guy's not coming back," Reacher said. "You should go ahead and call The Village Voice now. Get them to run your ad again."

"What happened to your pal from the Red Army?" Pauling asked.

"He lived," the super said. "Not happily, but he lived." Reacher and Pauling came out the blue door and took three paces north and stopped in for espresso. They took the end table on the sidewalk and Reacher took the same seat he had used twice before.

Pauling said, "So he wasn't working alone."

Reacher said nothing.

Pauling said, "Because he couldn't have made the phone calls."

Reacher didn't reply.

Pauling said, "Tell me about the voice you heard."

"American," Reacher said. "The machine couldn't disguise the words or the cadence or the rhythm. And he was patient. Intelligent, in command, in control, not worried. Familiar with the geography of New York City. Possibly military, from a couple of phrases. He wanted to know Burke's name, which suggests he's familiar with Lane's crew or he was calibrating a lie detector. Apart from that, I'm just guessing. The distortion was huge. But I felt he wasn't old. There was a lightness there. A kind of nimbleness in his voice. Maybe he was a small guy."

"Like a Special Forces veteran."

"Possibly."

"Unworried and in command makes him sound like the prime mover here. Not like a sidekick."

Reacher nodded. "Good point. I felt that way, listening to him. It was like he was calling the shots. Like an equal partner, at the very least."

"So who the h.e.l.l is he?"

"If your Pentagon guy hadn't told us different I'd say it was both of Hobart and Knight, both still alive, back here together, working together."

"But it isn't," Pauling said. "My Pentagon guy wouldn't get that kind of thing wrong."

"So whichever one came back alive picked up a new partner."

"One that he trusts," Pauling said. "And he did it real fast."

Reacher gazed over at the hydrant. Traffic obscured his view in waves, held back and then released by the light at Houston.

"Would a remote clicker work at this distance?" he asked.

"For a car?" Pauling said. "Maybe. I guess it would depend on the car. Why?"

"After Burke switched the bag I heard a sound like car doors locking. I guess the guy did it from up there in his room. He was watching. He didn't want to leave the money in an unlocked car for a second longer than he had to."

"Sensible."

Reacher paused a beat. "But you know what isn't sensible? Why was he up there in the room at all?"

"We know why he was up there."

"No, why was he up there and not the other guy? We've got two guys here, one can talk and the other can't. Why would the guy who can't talk go rent the apartment? Anyone who comes into contact with him isn't going to forget him in a hurry. And what's an observation point for anyway? It's for command and control. As the visible situation develops the observer is supposed to issue a stream of orders and adjustments. But this guy couldn't even get on a cell phone. What do we suppose happened exactly, the first two times with Gregory? The guy is upstairs, he sees Gregory park, what can he do? He can't even get on the phone and tell his partner to stand by down at Spring Street."

"Text messaging," Pauling said.

"What's that?"

"You can send written words by cell phone."

"When did that start?"

"Years ago."

"OK," Reacher said. "Live and learn." Then he said, "But I still don't see why they sent the guy who couldn't talk to meet with the building super."

"Neither do I," Pauling said.

"Or to run the OP. It would make more sense if he had been on the other end of the phone. He can't talk, but he can listen."

Silence for a moment.

"What next?" Pauling asked.

"Hard work," Reacher said. "You up for it?"

"Are you hiring me?"

"No, you're putting whatever else you're doing on hold and you're volunteering. Because if we do this right you'll find out what happened to Anne Lane five years ago. No more sleepless nights."

"Unless I find out five years ago was for real. Then I might never sleep again."

"Life's a gamble," Reacher said. "It wouldn't be so much fun otherwise."

Pauling was quiet for a long moment.

"OK," she said. "I'm volunteering."

Reacher said, "So go ha.s.sle our Soviet pal again. Get the chair. They bought it within the last week. We'll walk it over to the Bowery and find out where it came from. Maybe the new buddy picked it out. Maybe someone will remember him."

CHAPTER 32

REACHER CARRIED THE chair in his hand like a bag and he and Pauling walked together east. South of Houston the Bowery had organized itself into a sequence of distinct retail areas. Like a string of unofficial malls. There were electrical supplies, and lighting fixtures, and used office gear, and industrial kitchen equipment, and restaurant front-of-house outlets. Reacher liked the Bowery. It was his kind of a street.

The chair in his hand was fairly generic, but it had a certain number of distinguishing characteristics. Impossible to describe it a moment after closing the door on it, but with it right there for direct comparison a match might be found. They started with the northernmost of six separate chaotic establishments. Less than a hundred yards of real estate, but if someone buys a used dining chair in Manhattan, chances are he buys it somewhere in that hundred yards.

Put the good stuff in the store window was the usual retail mantra. But on the Bowery the actual store windows were secondary to the sidewalk displays. And the chair in Reacher's hand wasn't the good stuff, in the sense that it couldn't have been part of a large matched set, or it wouldn't have been sold separately. n.o.body with a set of twenty-four chairs leaves himself with twenty-three. So Reacher and Pauling pushed past the stuff on the sidewalk and squeezed through the narrow doors and looked at the dusty items inside. Looked at the sad leftovers, the part-sets, the singletons. They saw a lot of chairs. All the same, all different. Four legs, seats, backs, but the range of shapes and details was tremendous. None looked very comfortable. Reacher had read somewhere that there was a science to building a restaurant chair. It had to be durable, obviously, and good value for money, and it had to look reasonably inviting, but it couldn't in reality he too comfortable or the patrons would sit all night and a potential three-sitting evening would turn into an actual two sittings and the restaurant would lose money. Portion control and table turnover were the important factors in the restaurant trade, and Reacher figured chair manufacturers were totally on board with the turnover part.

In the first three stores they found no visual matches and n.o.body admitted selling the chair that Reacher was carrying.

The fourth store was where they found what they wanted.

It was a double-wide place that had chrome diner furniture out front and a bunch of Chinese owners in back. Behind the gaudy padded stools on the sidewalk were piles of old tables and sets of chairs stacked six high. Behind the piles and the stacks was a jumble of oddments. Including two chairs hung high on a wall that were exact matches for the specimen in Reacher's hand. Same style, same construction, same colour, same age.

"We shoot, we score," Pauling said.

Reacher checked again, to be certain. But there was no doubt about it. The chairs were identical. Even the grime and the dust on them matched precisely. Same gray, same texture, same consistency.

"Let's get some help," he said.

He carried the Sixth Avenue chair to the back of the store where a Chinese guy was sitting behind a rickety table with a closed cash box on it. The guy was old and impa.s.sive. The owner, probably. Certainly all transactions would have to pa.s.s through his hands. He had the cash box.

"You sold this chair." Reacher held it up, and nodded back toward the wall where its siblings hung. "About a week ago."

"Five dollars," the old guy said.

"I don't want to buy it," Reacher said. "And it isn't yours to sell. You already sold it once. I want to know who you sold it to. That's all."