"Let's get some help," he said.
He carried the Sixth Avenue chair to the back of the store where a Chinese guy was sitting behind a rickety table with a closed cash box on it. The guy was old and impassive. The owner, probably. Certainly all transactions would have to pass through his hands. He had the cash box.
"You sold this chair." Reacher held it up, and nodded back toward the wall where its siblings hung. "About a week ago."
"Five dollars," the old guy said.
"I don't want to buy it," Reacher said. "And it isn't yours to sell. You already sold it once. I want to know who you sold it to. That's all."
"Five dollars," the guy said again.
"You're not understanding me."
The old guy smiled. "No, I think I'm understanding you very well. You want information about the purchaser of that chair. And I'm telling you that information always has a price. In this case, the price is five dollars."
"How about you get the chair back? Then you can sell it twice."
"I already sold it many more times than twice. Places open, places close, assets circulate. The world goes round."
"Who bought it, a week ago?"
"Five dollars."
"You sure you've got five dollars' worth of information?"
"I have what I have."
"Two-fifty plus the chair."
"You'll leave the chair anyway. You're sick of carrying it around."
"I could leave it next door."
For the first time the old guy's eyes moved. He glanced up at the wall. Reacher saw him think: A set of three is better than a pair.
"Four bucks and the chair," he said.
"Three and the chair," Reacher said.
"Three and a half and the chair."
"Three and a quarter and the chair."
No response.
"Guys, please," Pauling said.
She stepped up to the rickety desk and opened her purse. Took out a fat black wallet and snapped off a crisp ten from a wad as thick as a paperback book. Placed it on the scarred wood and spun it around and left it there.
"Ten dollars," she said. "And the damn chair. So make it good."
The old Chinese man nodded.
"Women," he said. "Always ready to focus."
"Tell us who bought the chair," Pauling said.
"He couldn't talk," the old man said.
Chapter 33
THE OLD MAN said, "At first I thought nothing of it. An American comes in, he hears us speaking our own language, very often he assumes we can't speak English, and he conducts the transaction with a combination of gestures and signs. It's a little rude in that it assumes ignorance on our part, but we're used to it. Generally I let such a customer flounder and then I pitch in with a perfectly coherent sentence as a kind of reproach."
"Like you did with me," Reacher said.
"Indeed. And as I did with the man you're evidently seeking. But he was completely unable to reply in any way at all. He just kept his mouth closed and gulped like a fish. I concluded that he had a deformity that prevented speech."
"Description?" Reacher asked.
The old guy paused a beat to gather his thoughts and then launched into the same rundown that the Sixth Avenue super had given. A white man, late thirties, maybe forty, medium height and weight, clean and neat, no beard, no mustache. Blue jeans, blue shirt, ball cap, sneakers, all of them worn and comfortable. Nothing remarkable or memorable about him except for the fact that he was mute.
"How much did he pay for the chair?" Reacher asked.
"Five dollars."
"Wasn't it unusual that a guy would want a single chair?"
"You think I should automatically call the police if someone who isn't a restaurant owner shops here?"
"Who buys chairs one at a time?"
"Plenty of people," the old man said. "People who are recently divorced, or down on their luck, or starting a lonely new life in a small East Village apartment. Some of those places are so tiny a single chair is all they want. At a desk, maybe, that does double duty as a dining table."
"OK," Reacher said. "I can see that."
The old man turned to Pauling and asked, "Was my information helpful?"
"Maybe," Pauling said. "But it didn't add anything."
"You already knew about the man who couldn't talk?"
Pauling nodded.
"Then I'm sorry," the old man said. "You may keep the chair."
"I'm sick of carrying it around," Reacher said.
The old man inclined his head. "As I thought. In which case, feel free to leave it here."
Pauling led Reacher out to the Bowery sidewalk and the last he saw of the chair was a young guy who could have been a grandson hoisting it up on a pole and hanging it back on the wall next to its two fellows.
"The hard way," Pauling said.
"Makes no sense," Reacher said. "Why are they sending the guy that can't speak to meet with everyone?"
"There must be something even more distinctive about the other one."
"I hate to think what that might be."
"Lane abandoned those two guys. So why are you helping him?"
"I'm not helping him. This is for Kate and the kid now."
"They're dead. You said so yourself."
"Then they need a story. An explanation. The who, the where, the why. Everyone needs to know what happened to them. They shouldn't be allowed to just go, quietly. Someone needs to stand up for them."
"And that's you?"
"I play the hand I'm dealt. No use whining about it."
"And?"
"And they need to be avenged, Pauling. Because it wasn't their fight. It wasn't even remotely Jade's fight, was it? If Hobart or Knight or whichever it was had come after Lane directly, maybe I'd have been on the sidelines cheering him on. But he didn't. He came after Kate and Jade. And two wrongs don't make a right."
"Neither do three wrongs."
"In this case they do," Reacher said.
"You never even saw Kate or Jade."
"I saw their pictures. That was enough."
"I wouldn't want you mad at me," Pauling said.
"No," Reacher said back. "You wouldn't."
They walked north toward Houston Street without any clear idea of where they were going next and on the way Pauling's cell phone must have vibrated because she pulled it out of her pocket before Reacher heard it ring. Silent cell phones made Reacher nervous. He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone. Every time it happened he had to endure a little burst of unrequited adrenaline.
Pauling stopped on the sidewalk and said her name loudly over the traffic noise and then listened for a minute. Said thanks and snapped the phone shut. Turned to Reacher and smiled.
"My Pentagon buddy," she said. "Some solid information. Maybe he busted into someone's file cabinet after all."
"Did he get a name for us?" Reacher asked.
"Not yet. But he has a location. It was Burkina Faso. You ever been there?"
"I've never been anywhere in Africa."
"It used to be called Upper Volta. It's an ex-French colony. About the size of Colorado, population thirteen million, with a GDP about a quarter of what Bill Gates is worth."
"But with enough spare cash to hire Lane's crew."
"Not according to my guy," Pauling said. "That's the weird thing. It's where Knight and Hobart were captured, but there's no record of their government contracting with Lane."