Five minutes pass. Have you ever needed to lookinconspicuous on a street corner, especially when you left your phone four thousand miles away? It’s hard. There’s a reason people resorted to leaning on lamp posts and whistling back in the old days.
Finally the door opens and Em reappears, followed by an extremely elderly local guy. He’s smarter than I expected: a suit in this heat is no joke. He’s dressed like an old blues musician, broad lapels and tall turn-ups, and is shuffling a little as they head across the street towards the bar. Em has hoisted her hair into a messy bun, which is good news. Hairupmeans head onup, we agreed. Great. They disappear into the bar.
The door from the street to Rivers’ office is unlocked. It opens onto a pastel corridor, paint peeling. To the right there’s a door to another office,Beulah Brothers Lawin gold lettering. Not for the first time this week, I ask myself what I’m doing here. Davy, you’re leading us a right dance.
Considering this is a brass-plate operation, I find it disproportionately funny that Old Man Rivers’ office is labelled with an actual brass plate:Marshall Rivers Solutions Associated. I knock, for safety. No reply. I get out my kit only to find … the door isn’t even locked. Good grief.
It’s about seventeen seconds since I was on the street. This is a new PB.
The office is as you might expect. It’s swelteringly hot, poorly lit, with cracks in the paint from floor to ceiling. There’s a filing cabinet in the corner, a desk, and a vintage computermonitor. In the other corner there’s a tiny kitchenette, not much more than a sink and fridge.
At the back of the room is a small balcony looking out onto the yard. The shutters are open, and a flimsy curtain is drifting in the breeze.
I pull Jonny’s bit of kit from my pocket.
Em and I named it the Frankenstick. It’s a rat king of about fifteen different ports, plugs, dongles, you name it, all bundled and funnelled at the other end into a tiny thumb drive. It should work on any computer in the world, he said. As long as I can get into the computer, whichever connection fits should be able to siphon off the information we need.
Oh, my. It’sold, this machine. It makes the steam-powered computer I’m writing this document on look like next year’s MacBook Omega. I move the mouse across aSeinfeldmouse mat, and the screen brightens. It’s flickering black and green, and showing an ancient programme, one I don’t even recognise. Was this something called DOS? I feel like I’ve just discovered the Rosetta Stone. I’m a bit lost.
From the desk surface, Jerry Seinfeld mocks me with his eyes. All right, forget the screen for the moment. Find the connection. I get under the desk and look at the back of the computer tower. It’s roughly the size and shape of the obelisk from2001. And as I study the back, I realise with mounting panic that it doesn’t haveanyof the connections Jonny predicted. Not one. There’s nothing. I go through every port he gave me once, then again. Nothing fits. What the hell?
OK. In this eventuality, Al will … work something else out. I get up, brush the dust from my knees, go to the filing cabinet, and open a drawer.
Cardboard folders. Hundreds of them. Far too many for me to go through. As I start rifling, I find that each one contains a single neatly labelled floppy disk. What sort of nutjob is Marshall Rivers? There’s reason in the filing system, I’m sure, but when I pull out the first one, it’s just 0001, then a name that begins with F. There’s no guide I can see to where the Harcourt disc is. And if it’s on the computer, I have no idea how to get to it.
A door slams below. Shit. OK, stay calm. Could just be someone in the downstairs office, of course.
I move to the door, open it a crack, and listen: shuffling shoes, hauling themselves from step to step. They sound like Mr Rivers looked. I ease the door shut.
Rivers is slow on his feet, so I’d guess I have a minute before he’s back in the room. Maybe eighty seconds tops.
I look around me. Over on the kitchenette, there’s a roll of bin bags.
As he opens his door, Mr Rivers smiles to himself. The young woman had an interesting cover story, and it’s rare for anyone to be sent directly these days, budgets being what they are, but she was so clearly from a law-enforcement agency that it was practically insulting. He told her what he told all the others when they came with their flimsy stories: sorry, but I can’thelp you hide your money. Nobody’s allowed to just approach Mr Rivers, not without a rock-solid introduction from one of his three matchmakers. It’s simply too much fuss to break the rules for one person, because then you’d have to break them for everyone, and Mr Rivers has done quite enough rule-breaking for one life.
As he opens the door, he looks round at his comfortable old office, and smiles. Nice to be taken out for a drink by a pretty young woman, though. And he got wise to the trick and came back before anyone could get in and do any damage. A couple more hours of work and he’ll head back to the bar for a sundowner.
He ejects the floppy disk that was in his machine, goes to the filing cabinet, opens the second drawer, and stares down in dismay.
Behind him, a gentle breeze blows from the open balcony door. And I am out on the street, hailing a cab to take me back to the St Agnes Club and Resort.
33
Em and I don’t speak much on the flight home.
Firstly, we’re exhausted from the jet lag, and secondly, we slept together last night, which seems to have brought us to a bit of a verbal truce.
Now, I’ve led with the least important bit of news there, but the most scurrilous. I’m sure you are only interested in how the case is going. So here’s the worthy stuff:
I jumped from the first-floor window of the office, managing to bust my ankle all over again as I did. But I had the presence of mind not to use the bin bag as a cushion. Em and I rendezvoused at the hotel an hour later, and went through every single floppy disk in the bag until we found the one labelledHarcourt. We neatly stacked the rest, re-bagged them, taped the bag up, and left them in the room, with anapologetic note addressed to Old Man Rivers. He’ll doubtless work out which of his clients’ disks is missing eventually – he’ll have an even cleverer backup somewhere – so I hope we haven’t inconvenienced him too much. Rule 37:Don’t make enemies if you can help it.
As for the rest of the evening … We celebrated a bit at the bar with a round of St Agnes Slings, of course, then got some food, then another round of drinks. Night fell around us, and we found a couple of empty loungers on the breezy side of the island, looking out at the Atlantic, and talked. We weren’t drunk. We talked about anything and everything except our professional lives, we laughed, and we relaxed for the first time since this all began. And slowly we stopped trading little barbs, until we both ran out of things to say, because we were avoiding saying anything bigger. Finally, she drained her glass, stood, and announced she was going to bed. I was flummoxed, trying to work out what I’d just said wrong, until she turned at the end of the sand, and asked:
‘Are you coming, then? Or are you going to sit out here moping all night?’
And that was that, and now we’re next to each other on the plane, and I’m struggling not to grin.
I’m feeling completely daft about how happy I am. She’s not mygirlfriendor anything. Once this is over, whenever that is, I’ll never see her, Elle or Jonny again. But it did seem to – this isn’t a romantic way of putting it – resolve things between us, or rather to make sense of them. There was a moment of clarity when she was asleep and I was staring up at the ceilingfan, feeling that pleasant emptiness and thinking: I’m glad I knocked on the door at Balfour Villas.
