The two guys went down.
My spent shell cases rattled away across the concrete.
I waited.
No immediate reaction.
Eight rounds gone. Twenty-two remaining. Seven men captured, three more down, three still walking and talking.
Plus the Hoths themselves.
I searched the new dead guys. No ID. No weapons. No keys, which meant the inner door wasn't locked.
I left the two new bodies next to the first one, in the shadow of the trash can.
Then I waited. I didn't expect anyone else to come through the door. Presumably the old Brits on the North West Frontier had eventually gotten wise about sending out rescue parties. Presumably the Red Army had. Presumably the Hoths knew their history. They ought to have. Svetlana had written some of it.
I waited.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I pulled it out and checked the window on the front. Restricted Call. Lila. I ignored her. I was all done talking. I put the phone back in my pocket. It stopped vibrating.
I put my gloved fingers on the inner door's handle. I eased it down. I felt the latch let go. I was fairly relaxed. Three men had gone out. Conceivable that any one of them might return. Or all three of them. If anyone was inside, watching and waiting, there would be a fatal split second of delay for recognition and a decision, friend or foe. Like a major league batter sorting a fastball from a curveball. A fifth of a second, maybe more.
But no delay for me. Anyone I saw was my enemy.
Anyone at all.
I opened the door.
No one there.
I was looking at an empty room. The abandoned restaurant's kitchen. It was dark and dismantled. There were shells of old cabinets and gaps in the countertops where appliances had been hauled away to the secondhand stores on the Bowery. There were old pipes in the walls where once faucets had been attached. There were hooks in the ceiling, where once saucepans had hung. There was a large stone table in the centre of the room. Cool, smooth, slightly dished from years of wear. Maybe once pastry had been rolled on it.
More recently Peter Molina had been murdered on it. There was no doubt in my mind that it was the table I had seen in the DVD. No doubt at all. I could see where the camera must have been positioned. I could see where the lights had been set. I could see knots of frayed rope on the table legs, where Peter's wrists and ankles had been tied.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I ignored it.
I moved on.
There were two swinging doors leading to the dining room. One in, one out. Standard restaurant practice. No collisions. The doors had porthole windows set eye-high to an average man of fifty years ago. I ducked down and peered through. An empty room, large and rectangular. Nothing in it except a lone orphan chair. Dust and rat shit on the floor. Yellow light coming in from the street through the big filthy window.
I pushed the out door with my foot. Its hinges yelped a little but it opened. I stepped into the dining room. Turned left and left again. Found a back hallway with restrooms. Two doors, labelled Ladies and Gentlemen. Brass signs, proper words. No pictograms. No stick figures in skirts or pants.
Plus two more doors, one in each of the side walls. Brass signs: Private. One would lead back to the kitchen. The other would lead to the stairwell, and the upper floors.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I ignored it.
Standard tactical doctrine for any assault: attack from the high ground. Couldn't do it. Not an available option. Around the time the Israeli list was being written the SAS in Britain had been developing a tactic of rappelling off roofs into upperstorey windows, or smashing through the roof tile itself, or blowing through directly from one adjacent attic to another. Fast, dramatic, and usually very successful. Nice work if you could get it. I couldn't. I was stuck with the pedestrian approach.
For the time being, at least.
I opened the stairwell door. It swept an arc through a tiny thirty-inch by thirty-inch ground-floor hallway. Directly across from me, close enough to touch, was the door that led out to the residential entrance. To the street door with the single bell push and the crime scene tape.
Directly out of the tiny hallway rose a single narrow staircase. It turned back on itself halfway up and rose the rest of the way to the second floor out of sight.
The phone vibrated in my pocket.
I pulled it out and checked it. Restricted Call. I put it back in my pocket. It stopped vibrating.
I started up the stairs.
SEVENTY-NINE
THE SAFEST WAY UP THE FIRST HALF OF A DOG-LEGGED staircase is to walk backwards, looking upward, with your feet spread wide. Backwards and looking upward, because if overhead resistance comes your way, you need to be facing it. Feet spread wide, because if stairs are going to creak, they're going to creak most in the middle and least at the edges.
I shuffled up like that to the halfway break and then sidled sideways and went up the second half forwards. I came out in a second-floor hallway that was twice the size of the first-floor version but still tiny. Thirty inches by sixty. One room to the left, one to the right, and two dead ahead. Doors all closed.
I stood still. If I was Lila I would have one guy in each of the two rooms dead ahead. I would have them listening hard with weapons drawn. I would have them ready to fling open their doors and start up two parallel fields of fire. They could get me going up or coming down. But I wasn't Lila and she wasn't me. I had no idea of her likely deployment. Except that as her numbers diminished I felt she would want to keep her remaining guys reasonably close. Which would put them on the third floor, not the second. Because the flutter I had seen had been at a fourth-floor window.
At the fourth-floor window on the left, to be precise, looking at the building from the outside. Which meant her room was the room on the right, looking at it from the inside. I doubted that there would be any significant difference in the floor plans as I went up. It was a cheap, utilitarian structure. No call for custom features. Therefore a walk through the second-floor room on the right would be the same thing as a walk through Lila's room two floors above. It would give me the lie of the land.
I squeezed the slack out of the MP5's trigger and put my gloved fingers on the door handle. Pushed down. Felt the latch let go.
I opened the door.
An empty room.
In fact, an empty and part-demolished studio apartment. It was as deep as but half the width of the restaurant dining room below. A long, narrow space. A closet at the back, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and a living area. I could see the layout at a single glance because all the dividing walls had been torn back to the studs. The bathroom fitments were all still there, odd and naked behind a vertical array of old two-by-twos, like ribs, like the spaced bars of a cage. The kitchen equipment was intact. The floors were pine boards, except for ragged-edged old-fashioned mosaic in the bathroom and linoleum tile in the kitchen. The whole place smelled of vermin and rotten plaster. The window over the street was black with soot. It was bisected diagonally by the bottom of the fire escape.
I walked quietly to the window. The fire escape was a standard design. A narrow iron ladder came down from the floor above and gave on to a narrow iron walkway under the windows themselves. Beyond the walkway a counterbalanced section lay ready to fold down towards the sidewalk under the weight of a fleeing person.
The window was a sash design. The lower pane was designed to slide upward inside the upper pane. Where the panes met they were locked together with a simple brass tongue in a slot. The lower pane had brass handles, like the ones you see on old file cabinets. The handles had been painted over many times. So had the window frames.