mouth. He pulled out the camera and attached a large flash. Then he extracted a flat strip of tin half the width of a dollar bill that he slid around in the crack of the door until he found the lock. He jiggled the tin with a practiced hand and the door opened. Silently he bent down and brought his bag across the threshold, then took the camera and closed the door behind him.
He stood in the hallway, listening to the muffled voices until the talking ceased. He listened now to groans and sighs and heavy breathing. Then came the squeaking of the bedsprings, and he moved quickly and quietly through the apartment to the bedroom. He stepped through the open doorway and had taken the first shot before they knew he was there. The woman—Miss Baker, presumably—made a funny kind of braying noise and felt around for sheets that were inconveniently wadded up at the foot of the bed, while the mark, absurdly, covered his genitals with his hands and stared at Poole. Poole efficiently wound the film and took another shot. He wound again and got another shot before the woman finally found the sheets and crawled beneath them. He took a last shot of the mark.
“You’ll hear from me,” he said in his deepest voice, then left the room, picking up his bag midstride, and exited the apartment.
“He doesn’t have much to hide, that one,” Carla Hallestrom said, looking at the prints that Poole had just brought from the darkroom.
“It disappeared pretty quick.”
Carla was wearing one of Poole’s undershirts, and it hung to her knees. She was a slender woman, with walnut skin, courtesy of her Greek mother, and blue eyes from her Swedish father. Striking rather than beautiful, she wore her raven hair shorter than was the fashion. This allowed her to wear wigs when she wished to avoid notice.
“His life is beginning to get complicated,” she said, looking at the man’s face, frozen in panic. The man, Roderigo Bernal, owned a company called Capitol Industries and was, if not the richest man in the City, then one of them.
“And you’re about to make it worse,” Poole said, watching her as she framed the woman’s face with her fingers.
“Do you know who she is?”
Poole shook his head. “Her last name is Baker. That’s about it. Does it matter?”
“No. I just hope that he doesn’t think she was involved. That she helped set him up.”
Poole shrugged. “I’ll mention that to him when we talk.”
“Which is when?”
“When’s the strike?”
“Tomorrow. You know that.”
“Tomorrow night, then.”
Carla smiled.
CHAPTER THREE
Puskis had never been to the Hollows. He had never, until now, even considered going. He watched without much interest as the lifeless neighborhood drifted past the back window of his taxi.
The cabbie brought the taxi to a stop at a block of row houses. No lights were on. No one sat on a stoop, though it was the first day that it hadn’t rained in nearly a week.
Puskis handed the driver a five-dollar bill. “Could you wait a couple of minutes?”
His eyes on the bill, the cabbie nodded, and Puskis unfolded out of the backseat. He approached the steps leading up to number 4731 E. Van Buren Street. Hearing a noise behind him, he turned to see the taxi pull away from the curb and head down the street. This brought disappointment rather than irritation, and Puskis labored up the twelve steps with his shoulders stooped.
To the right of the door were three buttons, labeled 1, 2, and 3. The address in the files had no apartment number, and Puskis wondered if the house might not have been turned into apartments since the file’s creation. He pushed the button labeled 1, on the theory that if DeGraffenreid had split the house into apartments, he would probably have made his own apartment number one. Puskis heard the bell ring faintly from inside. He waited a minute, then pushed the button a second time, again without response. He progressed to number two. This time Puskis heard a window open above him. He looked up to see a woman with an enormous head looking down at him.
“My name is Puskis,” he called up to her. “I’m looking for Reif DeGraffenreid.”
“You’re looking for Mr. DeGraffenreid?” Her voice was somehow both deep and shrill.
“That’s correct. Reif DeGraffenreid.”
“Well, you’re about seven years too late.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re too late,” she repeated, louder. “He left about seven years ago. Haven’t seen him since.”
“I was wondering if, perhaps, I could speak to