to Marielle Vetters again. If she can’t help us, I have one other idea.’
‘Meanwhile, what will the client do?’ asked Epstein.
I didn’t have to think for long.
‘The client will hunt down those he believes were responsible for that explosion,’ I said, ‘and the client will punish them.’
The Collector stood at the intersection, smoking a cigarette and watching the police go about their business. The gutted buildings were still smoldering, and the street was awash with filthy black water like the aftermath of an oil slick. The curious and the bored lounged behind the cordon, and the news vans had congregated in the parking lot of Tulley’s bar, where Tulley himself was charging them three-figure sums for the pleasure, although he was throwing in free coffee which, if the reporters had any sense, they were in turn throwing away.
Behind the Collector stood a pawn shop that extended over four floors, the heaviest and largest items on the ground floor, the rest arrayed over the next two floors in diminishing order of size. The top floor, the Collector knew, contained offices. On the side of the building, overlooking its back door and the parking lot beyond, was a camera. Beside it was a second camera, facing away from the door and toward the street.
The Collector killed the cigarette and left the police to their business. He entered the pawn shop, where the two men seated behind the counter barely glanced at him before returning their attention to a TV screen that was showing the same crime scene that the Collector had just witnessed. Had they walked a couple of feet they could have stood outside and watched it in person, but they were ignorant, lazy men, and they preferred to glean their information from the TV where people who were better-looking than they were could tell them things that they already knew.
The Collector climbed the stairs to the top floor, where there was a red metal door with a spyhole and the words PRIVATE – EMPLOYEES ONLY stenciled on it in white paint. There was no buzzer, but the door opened as the Collector approached, and he was admitted.
A very old, very fat woman, and an even older man, sat in a small outer office. They were the Sister and the Brother. If they had other names – and they must have had, once upon a time – then nobody ever used them. The name on the sign outside came from another business, a drapery store that had closed in the 1970s. Shortly after, the Sister and the Brother had moved in, and they had never left. As she grew larger and larger, the Sister had risen higher and higher in the building in opposition to the items for sale, a great balloon of a woman floating slowly upward until the roof finally arrested her progress.
Arrayed around them on a pair of tables covered in green cloth were various items of jewelry, a half dozen watches, an assortment of coins, and a sprinkling of gemstones. The woman was morbidly obese. The Collector knew that she never left the building, eating and sleeping in the living quarters separated from the office by a pair of red drapes. When she needed medical attention, the doctor came to her. So far, either her health had remained stable enough to require no serious treatment, which seemed unlikely given the strain her system was under, or some combination of the dozens of bottles of prescription and non-prescription medicines on the shelves above her head enabled her to keep functioning for the present. Her tiny head sat on massive folds of fat where her neck had once been, and her arms appeared absurdly small for her body. She was like a melting snowwoman. She wore a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses on a chain. Through them she watched the Collector but said nothing, and her face showed no feeling beyond that of a general weariness at a life lived too long, and in too much pain.
The Brother took the Collector by the hand, a curiously intimate gesture to which the Collector did not object, and walked him into a closet space barely big enough for the two of them. Here there was a giant safe, built by the Victor Safe & Lock Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, at the turn of the last century, virtually an antique in itself. The safe was open, and inside were blocks of bills, and gold coins, and old jewelry boxes containing the store’s