Manhattan Night: a Novel by Colin Harrison

Author:Colin Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250123329
Publisher: Picador

GOOD MORNING! You have a furious wife, you have blood in your piss, you have a great story in the paper. But—after Lisa had given me a cold look on her way out the door with Sally—I couldn’t think about these things. No, what really needed to happen was that Hobbs had to call off his two businessmen. I could only assume that once they saw that they had the wrong videotape they would practice some other beautiful tricks. Did they know that I was alone in the house right now, Lisa gone and Josephine out with Tommy? And how had they learned that I was carrying a videotape? Except for being hidden while at home, the tape had stayed in my coat pocket from the moment I’d left the Malaysian bank. I had never taken it out in public, never showed it to anyone. It occurred to me that Caroline had been lying about Hobbs and almost everything else and had called Hobbs or Campbell or the two executives and told them I was going down in the elevator with a videotape. She was, after all, the only one who knew that I had it in my pocket. But following our long conversation the previous night I wasn’t ready to believe this about her; it made no sense. Maybe Hobbs had her apartment bugged. That was a little far-fetched, though not impossible. You could bribe the building’s management, get inside. Obviously the doormen were already paid off and kept track of the comings and goings of people—obviously this had not been obvious to me. Then I remembered that I had taken the tape out of my pocket on the way up in the elevator to check that it wasn’t one of Sally’s. In a premier building like Caroline’s, the elevator would have a closed-circuit video camera hidden in it, available for review if necessary. They had seen me go up, perhaps observed on a monitor as I had smiled stupidly at the old woman, watched her get off on the second floor, and then reached in my coat pocket for the tape. Then it was just a matter of a phone call. Had they waited for me to go home, thinking they would grab it when I got out of the cab? That didn’t make sense—I could easily have left the tape with Caroline.

This last thought left me sick. How would they have known to follow me? They had to have visited Caroline first. I called her and let the phone ring. I let the god-awful phone ring five, ten, fifteen times. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Caroline hadn’t left the answering machine on. I let it ring fifteen more times. Then, just as I was about to hang up, the phone picked up.

“Yeah.”

“Caroline?”

“What?” This was a voice I’d never heard—dead, full of hatred, tougher than I’d ever be.

“It’s Porter.”

“Yeah?”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Yeah. And I wish some people wouldn’t let the phone ring eight hundred fucking times when I’m in bed.

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