Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [41]
The crowd inside Bergdorf’s ebbed and flowed.
He finally saw the woman he’d followed. She was sifting through a long rack of cocktail dresses, always thinking of her appearance, always defining her existence through her reflection.
Monserrat concealed himself behind a display case of sweaters, and continued to watch. He felt a certain coldness in the center of his head, as if his brain had become a solid fist of ice. It was a feeling he knew in certain situations. Where other men would experience the uncontrollable rash of adrenaline, Monserrat experienced what he thought of as the Chill.
Every man who passed checked out Isabella Marqueza carefully. So did several of the chic, well-dressed women shoppers.
Her fur jacket was left casually open. As she turned, swiveled left or right, a tantalizing glimpse of her breasts floated deliciously into the breach. Of all the women in the department store, Isabella was the most desirable, the most visually dramatic by Monserrat’s personal standards.
Now he observed Isabella slink off toward a changing room. He put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, caught a reflection of himself in a mirror as he moved, then he paused outside the changing room door.
He walked past the closed door, studied the throngs around him pursuing Christmas gifts with forced gaiety, and then he darted back the way he had come.
Pretending to examine a silk shirt, like a wealthy East Side husband picking out a stocking-stuffer, he listened outside the changing room.
Coming closer, he could hear the whisper of clothing as it peeled away from Isabella’s skin.
In one swift move, he stepped inside the tiny room and Isabella swung around in astonishment.
Why did she always look so beautiful? Warmth flowed within him. He took his hands from his coat.
She was wearing only panties, tight and sheer and black. The cocktail dress she intended to try on hung limply in one hand.
“Francois! What are you doing here?”
“I had to see you,” he whispered. “I heard you had a little trouble.”
Isabella frowned. “They let me go. What were they going to hold me for, anyhow? They had nothing but a stupid bluff, Francois.”
She smiled, but the expression couldn’t conceal a look of worry.
He pressed one gloved hand lightly against her breasts. He could smell Bal a Versailles. Her favorite perfume. His as well.
“Are you being followed, Isabella?”
“I don’t think so. No, of course not.”
“Good. Good,” he whispered.
Isabella’s mouth fell open and she suddenly stepped back against the wall. There was really no place to go in the tiny dressing room. “Francois, don’t you believe me? I told them nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“Then why did they let you go, my love? I need an explanation.”
“Francois, don’t you know me any better than that? Don’t you?
I know you only too well, Monserrat thought and stepped forward.
The tiny handgun made an inconsequential, guttural spit Isabella Marqueza moaned, then she seemed to faint, collapsing toward the black-and-white checkered tiles.
Monserrat was already out of the changing room and walking, inconspicuously, toward the nearest exit.
She’d talked. She had admitted knowing him, and that was enough.
She’d been broken during the interrogation, skillfully, in a way she might not even have recognized. Monserrat had heard the news not ten minutes after Carroll finished with her.
He burst into the cold wind raking West 57th Street. He turned a corner, to all intents and purposes a drab ordinary man, losing himself in the crowds that hunted the spirit of Christmas with red-faced eagerness.
Chapter 30
“I WANT YOU to have lunch with me, Mr. Carroll,“ Caitlin Dillon had said over the telephone. “Is twelve-fifteen today, okay? It’s important.”
It was a call that took Carroll by surprise. He’d been going through his back files—sifting through terrorist organizations in his search for some clue to Green Band—when the call came.
“I want you to meet somebody,” Caitlin had told him.
“Who?”
“A man called Freddie Hotchkiss. He’s kind of important on Wall Street.