The Intruders. Michael Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ vacancies for this week. So it wasn’t a screwed-up booking either.

      I went over to the doorman, gave him some money and told him I’d be right back. I zigzagged the few blocks to the Hotel Monaco on 4th Avenue. Amy would have liked this place too – God would have liked it – but a quick conversation confirmed neither had stayed there in the recent past.

      The hotel had always been a dead end. It was time to forget about it. Time to forget about the whole thing, probably. I’d made the decision to come to the city around one o’clock the previous night, telling myself it was to do Amy the favour of retrieving her phone. A hundred plus miles is not a huge deal in the Pacific Northwest. But it wasn’t just that, of course. Amy had made business trips six, seven times a year ever since I’d known her. We had a standard operating procedure. We didn’t go for whole days without being in contact, however brief. But … bottom line, she hadn’t been staying in the hotel she’d used before. That was all I had, and in the light of day it didn’t amount to a whole lot. I felt embarrassed for being there and was not entirely inclined to dismiss the voice in my head which claimed it was merely an excuse for leaving my desk for the day.

      When I got back to the Malo I went inside and perched on a chair by the big window. I opened the envelope and got out Amy’s phone. It was easy to recognize, though I noticed she’d changed the picture she used as her background. It was a standard cell phone, and no more: in an uncharacteristically anti-corporate stand she’d resisted getting sucked into BlackBerry hell. I pressed the green button. The ‘outgoing’ list showed a call to my cell at the top – from cab guy late last night – preceded by names and numbers I didn’t recognize, until it showed incoming from me the afternoon before last.

      I switched to her Contacts and scrolled through it, searching for Kerry, Crane & Hardy, Seattle. It wasn’t there, of course. She’d know these people by first name and direct line, rather than hacking her way in through the general switchboard.

      I noticed the battery indicator was flashing about two seconds before the cell went dead.

      Using my own I rang directory assistance and got a number for KC&H. I called the number and heard a perky voice sing out the familiar three letters. I asked to talk with someone who worked with Amy Whalen. I figured I’d find some underling who knew Amy’s schedule, come up with a time and place to meet her. She might even be right there in the office. I could take her to lunch.

      The phone went quiet for a while and then I was talking to someone’s assistant. She worked for a person named Todd and confirmed he’d be the guy to talk to, but he was in a meeting right now. I was told he’d phone me just as soon as he possibly could, if not sooner.

      Then I called Red Cabs and tried to learn how to get in contact with Georj Unpronounceable. He was off duty and the dispatcher was cagey but claimed he’d tell the guy to get in touch with me when he came back on stream. I ended the call knowing it would never happen.

      So I left the hotel and walked across the street to a Seattle’s Best. I sat at a table outside there with a big, strong coffee, smoking and watching the rain and waiting for someone – anyone – to call me back.

      By half past eleven I was cold and getting pissed off. The ten bucks I’d left with the Malo’s doorman had worn off and he’d gotten uptight about the car’s continued presence outside the hotel. The Zimmermans’ second-best SUV did not make a great advertisement for the establishment. For any establishment, actually. Retired professors apparently don’t care a great deal about mud and dents, and the faded anti-war stickers in the back window were large and strident. Finally the guy in the hat crossed the street to come give me grief and I agreed to move along.

      I drove around the block until I found an underground lot. When I re-emerged I spent a couple of minutes with a downtown map I’d scored from the Malo reception. It was optimized toward shopping and eating opportunities and it took me a while to locate the agency’s street. It wasn’t where I expected, either. I’d assumed the agency would be located a zillion floors up in one of the corporate behemoths that surrounded me. Instead it seemed to be in a narrow street near the Marketplace.

      I walked down a couple of vertiginous blocks until I found the big Public Market Center sign, then asked directions from a guy running a news stand. He directed me down a narrow road that went under the main market and swerved sharply and steeply left. A sign confirmed this was Post Alley. It looked more like a locale for loading and unloading fish and/or selling drugs. After a hundred yards, however, it suddenly segued into a section remade in 1990s post-modernist, with hanging baskets, a sushi restaurant and a little deli with a row of people sitting in the window eating identical salads. Soon after I saw a restrained sign hanging from a picturesque wooden beam and knew I was in the right place.

      I walked in, deciding how to play this. Our working lives had always been very separate. I’d gotten to know Amy’s assistant in LA a little from crisis phone calls and occasional flying visits to the house, but she’d left to have a baby a couple of months before Amy re-aligned her working conditions. I’d heard colleagues’ names mentioned, some enough to vaguely remember. I was pretty sure a Todd was among them. Could be this one, could be some other. There was probably a Todd working in every advertising agency in the country, on a quota basis. The whole deal would have been easier to handle on the phone – I could pretend I was still back out in the sticks and trying to casually get in touch with her – but I was tired of waiting for a return call.

      Reception was an existential statement and they’d spent a lot of money on it, mainly in an attempt to make it look like they hadn’t, which is presumably the kind of thing that impresses the hell out of other advertising folk. Each chair cost far more than the woman behind the desk earned in a month, but she didn’t seem put out by this. She was all in black and willowy and big-eyed – yet also possessed of a fierce intelligence, you could just tell – and came across like a girl who inhabited the best of all possible worlds and was keen to spread the joy around.

      I asked for Todd and was asked if I was expected.

      ‘Oh no,’ I said, shrugging in what I hoped was a charming way. I didn’t have much practice. ‘Just here on the off-chance.’

      She beamed, as if this was simply the best possible way of stopping by, and got on the phone. She nodded vigorously at the end of her conversation, so I assumed that either I was good to go or she had mildly lost her mind.

      Five minutes later someone eerily identical appeared from behind a frosted glass door at the end of the room. She beckoned and I got up and followed her into the offices beyond. This woman evidently inhabited only the third or fourth best of all worlds, and was not disposed to mirth or unnecessary chatter, though I did learn she was called Bianca. We took an elevator up two floors and then marched along a corridor with glass walls, past funky little rooms in which pairs of short-haired people were working so hard and creatively it made me want to set off a fire alarm, preferably by starting an actual fire.

      At the end she opened a door and ushered me through.

      ‘Todd Crane,’ she announced.

      Ah, I thought: only at that moment realizing I was about to talk to a third of the people who made up the company name.

      I found myself in an austere space with big windows on two sides, giving a wide view of Elliott Bay and the piers. The remaining walls were covered with framed certificates and awards and huge and celebratory product shots, including a few campaigns I knew Amy had been involved with. In the middle of the room there was a desk big enough to play basketball on. A trim man in his early fifties was coming out from behind it. Chinos, well-pressed lilac shirt. Hair once black now streaked with flecks of grey, bone structure so blandly handsome he could have been cast in a television spot for just about СКАЧАТЬ