Serious Moonlight, page 13
“Birdie, I dream about that every night,” he said with a grin.
We finished our hot drinks and ditched our booth, heading out on the deck to lean over the railing and enjoy the salty breeze. It was so easy to talk to him now. Why? I wanted to believe it was because we weren’t fighting about our regrettable back-seat adventure anymore, but I had the sneaking suspicion it was just the opposite.
I think it was because we had talked about it.
Getting all of it out in the open had made what happened between us . . . more tolerable? More something, because I could relax—so much so, the half-hour ferry ride passed in a snap. When the IVAR’S ACRES OF CLAMS sign and the rest of the Seattle waterfront district popped into view, I was genuinely surprised.
After the ferry pulled into the terminal and dropped its front gate, we disembarked with the rest of the crowd, never stopping our conversation. One moment we were laughing about how we ran from Darke’s dogs and the cop—it seemed funnier now that time had passed—and the next thing I knew, we were turning onto First Avenue, and the hotel was right in front of us.
“Fifteen minutes to spare,” Daniel said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “Still think our plan is kosher?”
“Better than our plan in the park, which was a disaster.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t bring those damn dogs this time,” he said. “Come on.”
It was strange to be in the hotel while there was still an abundance of daylight, though most of the midshift “Hawk” crew was familiar, because we took over for them when their shifts ended. And Daniel seemed to be on a friendly basis with everyone, because he had no problems sweet-talking the porter and desk clerk to text him when a Mr. Ivanov checked in around seven. And after confirming that the manager on duty was in the back offices, we stepped into one of the gold elevators, and Daniel used his key card to give us access to the fifth floor.
I’d been up here only once before, during training. All the floors had the same basic layout, the same gold lighting and forest-green carpeted hallways, but this floor had original paintings instead of prints. A display of local Salish tribal wood carvings. No Coke or ice machines to make noise: fifth-floor guests had a dedicated employee on call to run back and forth for all their needs. It also had a recessed alcove with two plush wingback chairs. And the potted trees that flanked the alcove provided anyone sitting there with a bit of shelter from guests entering room 514.
The perfect place to spy on Darke.
We waited nervously for several minutes until Daniel’s phone buzzed with an incoming text. “The eagle is heading to the nest,” he told me in a hushed voice. “I repeat, the eagle is heading—”
“We aren’t spies.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m deep undercover.”
“You’re sitting behind a potted plant.”
“I’m sure James Bond has utilized a potted plant or two for cover.”
“Oh, so you’re James Bond now?”
He gestured at himself. “Suave, dashing. Can fistfight on moving trains. And this skinny weakling body is irresistible to the ladies.”
“Did you say resistible?”
He clutched the front of his shirt and made a pained face. “My tender male ego . . . shattering . . . into a million pieces.”
I extended my leg and playfully kicked at him, but he caught my foot and trapped it between his knees. I had to stifle a laugh and tried to squirm my way loose. “Let me go or I’ll kick you in your tender male ego.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, I so would!”
He held on to my foot harder. “Don’t make me pull out my 007 spy-gadget thingamabob and obliterate you right here behind this potted palm tree. It will—”
The elevator dinged.
We froze. I came to my senses and scrambled out of his grip. He signaled me with a finger in front of his lips and craned his neck to see through the tree branches. In the distance, someone was talking, probably on the phone. It was brief, and something was odd about it, though I couldn’t quite make out why—too far away—but now the person was getting closer, approaching us. Fabric swished . . . and then paused.
I carefully turned to my side and peered through the potted greenery. A tall, pale man in a suit with slicked-back hair was inserting his key card into the door lock. It beeped pleasantly, and then he was heading inside, rolling a black carry-on suitcase.
When the door closed behind him, Daniel said, “Who the hell was that?”
I thought for a moment before realizing. Of course. “It’s Ivanov.”
“That’s who checks in? It’s not a pseudonym? That’s . . .”
“That’s who Darke is meeting,” I finished.
And sure enough, the elevator dinged a second time, and along came a second man: Raymond Darke. No mistaking him or his blue baseball cap. But he was accompanied by a blond woman with sharp eyes and model-long legs, striding beneath the hem of a wispy dress. She was younger than Darke, perhaps in her early forties, and something about the way she carried herself conjured images of multimillion-dollar mansions and black-tie parties.
Darke stopped at room 514 and knocked on the door three times. It opened, and the man inside greeted the couple with a peculiar accent.
Russian?
Daniel and I listened intently while the door closed again. Daniel was filming the hallway with his phone, and after a few moments he signaled that he wanted to move closer to the room. Two fingers pointed toward his eyes, then me, then the hallway—he wanted me to be lookout.
He crept to the room, ducking out of the sight of the peephole, and pressed his ear to the door for what felt like an excessively long time. Long enough for my neck to ache from swinging it back and forth down the hotel hallway. And long enough for my imagination to run wild. What was going on inside that room? Were they filming high-class porn? Was she a prostitute? A lawyer? A film agent? Maybe he was discussing high-stakes foreign rights for his books.
Or were Daniel and I on the right track when we joked about Russian arms deals? Was Ivanov a Russian mobster? Had Daniel been closer to the truth than we knew, joking about James Bond? WAS THIS SOME KIND OF INTERNATIONAL SPY RING?
Just when I didn’t think I could take it anymore, Daniel lunged away from the door and took four quick steps. He slipped behind the potted tree alongside me as Darke and the woman exited the room.
I stared at their retreating backs. We couldn’t follow them. Not that I needed another reason not to do so after the incident in the park. But attempting to trail two people seemed so much more dangerous—especially when one of those people could recognize Daniel’s face.
So, what now?
I gave Daniel a wide-eyed look. He gave me one in return, and then picked up my hand and placed it over his sternum. His chest rose and fell; his heartbeat pounded fiercely under my palm. Not like my frightened-rabbit heart, but strong and sure: Thump, thump. Thump, thump. He lifted both brows at me, as if to say, See? I’m about to die of a stroke. Or maybe, See? We’ve lost our minds, getting involved in an international spy ring. And when I didn’t move my hand away and his eyelids grew heavy, it almost looked as if he were trying to say: See? There really was something between us.
He let go of my hand, so I moved it away from his chest quickly, embarrassed, but soon realized that he was only trying to focus on the hotel room again, where Ivanov was now leaving with his suitcase. When the man’s lanky figure turned the corner to head toward the elevators, I whispered to Daniel, “Did you hear anything? What were they doing?”
“Only voices. The doors are too thick. I’m sorry, but it’s a bust.”
“Nothing at all?”
“The woman laughed once toward the end. They sounded happy. That’s it.”
I tried not to allow disappointment to sink in too deep. And then an idea hit me. “Let’s follow Ivanov out of the hotel.”
“Seriously? After the park incident, with the entire Seattle-fucking-PD after us?”
I rolled my eyes. “It was one cop, and we never even knew for sure he tried to follow us.”
“I know for sure that Darke saw my face, and maybe you haven’t noticed, because you don’t stare at me often enough with yearning and devotion, but I’m a little recognizable.”
“Tuck your hair inside your hoodie and make it disappear, Mr. Magician. We still have an hour and a half before our shift. Maybe we’ll spot a car tag number, or something.”
“A car tag number,” he said, incredulous.
“Come on, Nick. Are we solving a GD mystery, or aren’t we?”
A slow grin split his face. “Nora, my dear, you know I can’t resist it when you use profanity.”
“All right, then,” I said, high on adrenaline. “Let’s follow this mother shucker out of the hotel.”
“Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.”
—Ian Fleming, From Russia, with Love (1957)
14
* * *
One elevator was still in use when we darted down the hallway. We took our chances that Ivanov was inside that one and called up the other. Meanwhile, Daniel texted both the desk clerk and the midshift van driver and asked them to keep an eye out for Mr. Blue Baseball Cap and “a tall Vladimir Putin fucker in a suit.”
By the time we’d made it back down to the lobby, we’d learned three things. (1) Darke and his female companion had left the hotel in a private rideshare that was idling outside at the curb. (2) Ivanov had used express checkout from inside the room—skipping the front desk completely. (3) Ivanov had just left the hotel on foot . . . but not before he asked the porter out front for directions to Pier 54.
That was all we needed. We raced around the corner of the Cascadia, and before you could hum the latest James Bond theme song, we spotted him waiting for a crosswalk light. He was on his phone, using a Bluetooth earpiece.
“Who is this guy?” Daniel said in a low voice.
No idea, but we kept a cautious distance while the man chatted nonstop on his phone, gesturing to no one as he quickly crossed the street. I mentally struck “arms dealer” off my list of possible careers for this guy. Not that I personally knew any, but Ivanov had the aura of a dealmaker. A stockbroker, or a real estate go-between. I hated to let Daniel down, but this big mystery he’d stumbled upon was probably something boring. Maybe Darke was just buying a big piece of property. He was a millionaire. Didn’t they do things like that?
Ivanov ended his phone call waited for the signal before crossing Alaskan Way to the waterfront. As we followed, Pier 54 came into view, which was basically a tourist trap, like all the piers here. This one had a boat charter booth and a couple of sailboats, and a little farther down, Ivar’s Acres of Clams—a Seattle institution I saw every day from the ferry.
“Maybe he’s got a hankering for fish and chips?” Daniel said.
Nope. The man was headed straight for the end of the pier. “Ye Olde Curiosity Shop.”
“Should we go inside?” Daniel asked, glancing up at the darkening sky and the drizzle that was now falling. “Ivanov doesn’t know our faces.”
“And he doesn’t have guard dogs.”
“Fuck it,” Daniel said enthusiastically. “Let’s do this.”
The Curiosity Shop had been one of my favorite places in the city when I was a kid; Mom and I must have come here a hundred times. One-part museum (actual mummies), one-part carnival side show (Fiji mermaid taxidermy hanging from the ceiling), and one-part novelty gift shop (vampire hunter kits), it was a popular tourist attraction. If you wanted a totem pole or a necklace with your name carved on a piece of rice, this was your store. Or you could just browse the glass cases filled with turn-of-the-century oddities.
I hadn’t been in here for years, and the shop itself had moved between a couple of locations on the waterfront, but it smelled the same as I remembered, pleasantly musty. And at the moment, it was moderately crowded; a lot of families with loud kids gawked at an antique hinged educational aid nicknamed Medical Ed.
The crowds were good for us, since we were trying to avoid Ivanov’s attention. He looked around a little, scanning the jam-packed shop, and then made a beeline for the Javari shrunken-head display.
Curiouser and curiouser . . .
Daniel and I pretended to be browsing while we listened in to a conversation Ivanov was having with one of the store’s clerks. “Are these heads real?” he asked in a heavily accented voice.
The clerk answered, “Some of them came from the Heye Foundation in New York before the government banned the trafficking of human remains. A few may be monkey heads. Those were often sold to Northern tradespeople. Monkey or human, the process is still the same—Javari tribesmen in Peru would remove the skull from the back of the head, sew it up, and boil it to shrink it down.”
I puffed up my lips to stop myself from gagging. Daniel pretended to chop my head off with his hand, and I swatted him away.
“However, the heads for sale are made from goatskin,” the clerk informed him, showing him a line of gruesome heads hanging from a pole, each about the size of a fist.
“Fascinating,” Ivanov said. “I have a twelve-year-old son who loves morbid things, so he will be happy if I bring him one back.”
“Where are you from?” the clerk asked.
“Kiev.”
“Is that the Ukraine?”
“Indeed, it is,” Ivanov said.
Not Russian! Daniel and I shared a look.
“That’s a long way away,” the clerk said. “Here on business?”
Ivanov nodded. “Both here and in San Francisco—that’s where I’m headed tonight. I’ve been in the States for a month. I’m homesick for my wife’s cooking.”
“Being away from home is hard,” the clerk said.
“Yes. I’m ready to return, but I’ve got a couple things to tie up before I go. San Francisco this week, then back here to Seattle, then home, finally.”
The clerk talked about jet lag and how that kind of traveling was tough on a body.
Ivanov studied the shrunken heads more closely and said, “The next time I come through Seattle, I won’t be in this area—it will be more of a quick jaunt uptown for a show before I fly home to Kiev in July. Because I’m downtown today, an associate of mine suggested I stop here while I wait for a rideshare to the airport.”
“Nothing says Seattle like a shrunken head,” the clerk agreed with a smile.
Ivanov was buying up several of them, and then he got a text and informed the clerk that his rideshare car was pulling up, so he needed to hurry. We watched him pay for his heads and rush out, shoving his purchase under his coat to shield it from the rain as he entered a car. Then he was gone, and we stood outside, unsure what to do next.
I flipped up the hood of my jacket. “He’s Ukrainian.”
“And he’s been here for a month—also in San Francisco. That may explain the address he used to check in, and it definitely matches up with all of Darke’s visits to the hotel. They started about a month ago.”
“I wonder if Darke was the ‘associate’ who suggested he come to buy shrunken-head souvenirs.”
“Maybe. I mean, this is more information than we’ve discovered so far, but . . .”
“It still doesn’t tell us much,” I said.
“He said he wouldn’t be coming through Seattle again until July and not in this area.”
“Uptown for a show. We have an uptown?”
“He probably means Lower Queen Anne. Seattle Center, all that,” Daniel said, dismissive. “I’m more concerned that he won’t be coming to the hotel again. I mean, is that what he’s saying? Whatever was happening in the hotel is finished? Darke won’t be coming back? This is over?”
Exactly what I was wondering, only he sounded more upset about it. “Don’t be discouraged,” I said. “Mysteries aren’t solved overnight. We can stake out the hotel for Darke again next Tuesday. Maybe this is just one piece of it. Maybe Ivanov is just one player.”
We flattened ourselves against the wall of the building, standing under an overhang. Then Daniel crossed his arms over his chest and said, “You know what we should do? Get back to the hotel before room 514 is cleaned. Snoop around. See if any clues were left behind.”
“Isn’t that against company rules?”
Daniel’s smile was mischievous. “Not if we don’t get caught.”
It took us a few minutes to hike it back up to the hotel. And after checking where the manager on duty was (in the back offices), we made another trip to the fifth floor—this time with someone from housekeeping named Beth. She was a little too friendly with Daniel, all smiles and coy jokes. But then she used her master key card to let us into the room and assured us no one had been inside to clean. Then she closed the door and promised to keep an eye out for management while we looked around.
“Let’s see what we can find,” Daniel said, rubbing his hands together. “I’ll search on that side, and you search here.”
“All right.” I glanced at the bed. Made, of course, the foot draped with a Pendleton wool Nez Percé–tribe woven blanket. My side of the room looked utterly untouched. Room service menu propped on a console table. Curtains opened to a rain-speckled view of Puget Sound and the sprawling waterfront docks we’d just left.
I checked the bathroom. All the toiletries were in their places except the hand soap, which someone had used to wash their hands. Toilet paper was still folded into the silly triangular point that’s supposed to be a sign to guests that the room’s been cleaned . . . but really just lets you know the housekeeper’s fingers have been there, possibly right after they were wiping down the germy toilet.
“You and Beth known each other a long time?” I called out from the bathroom as I checked inside the jetted tub.
“Huh? Oh, I used to sometimes work in the day when I started. So, about a year, I guess.”
“She likes you.”
“She’s just friendly. We dated once. Sort of a bomb.”
That bothered me more than it should have. “Isn’t that against hotel policy—fraternizing with other employees? How many coworkers have you dated?”
