Dance with the Dragon Read online

  “But there was a price,” McGarvey suggested. “For you especially.”

  “Isn’t there always?” she asked.

  THIRTEEN

  LONGBOAT KEY

  A couple of Roaz’s people from the club helped load up Shahrzad’s apartment and take it down to “the House,” as everyone called General Liu’s place. She didn’t have much, but as soon as she was settled, the general insisted that she return to her dancing job. There was a very good reason, he told her. All she had to do was trust him, and whatever she wanted would be hers.

  “Which was just as well,” Shahrzad continued her story. “Louis had been worried about our contact procedures, but with me in town four nights a week he arranged for a drop box with one of the taxi men.”

  “Not cabbies,” Perry explained. “Parking is impossible downtown. So a taxi man, actually they’re entrepreneurs, stakes out a half dozen parking spots on the street that he mans twelve, sometimes eighteen hours a day. No one parks without paying him first, unless you want to come back and find that your car has been totally trashed, and there were no witnesses. Everybody’s happy. Customers find a safe place to park, the taxi men make a living, and the bribes help the cops to survive on lousy pay.”

  “It took nearly a week before I could make an excuse to get out of the club for a couple of minutes,” Shahrzad said. “I was smoking pretty heavily by then, so sometimes I would got out the back door and grab some air. Roaz didn’t care, and there were some nights that the general sent his driver to take me to the club early, and he wouldn’t get there with his crowd until much later, usually after midnight.

  “My contact was an old man with long white hair and only one good eye; the other was milky and horrible looking. Anyway, he walked up to me and handed me a pack of Marlboros and a small gold Zippo lighter. ‘From an admirer,’ he told me. I gave him a few pesos, and back in my dressing room I found out that the lighter worked, but it was also a miniature digital camera. Before I’d moved out, Louis had told me that once I was in at the house he would get the camera to me. I was supposed to take pictures of everything and everybody. The camera could hold up to one hundred pictures, but no matter how many I had taken I was to exchange it every Wednesday and Saturday with the taxi man for a fresh one.”

  “Weren’t you worried about getting caught?” Perry asked.

  “Petrified,” Shahrzad admitted. “But every time I lit a cigarette I’d use the Zippo and take a couple pictures. After the first few times right in front of the general when nothing happened, I relaxed a little.” She gave McGarvey a wistful look. “By then I don’t think he was really seeing me. We had sex only the one time, and after that I was just another one of the women he always surrounded himself with.”

  “But you were doing this for Louis, so you didn’t mind,” McGarvey suggested.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Anyway, I was afraid of the general.” She looked away. “Sooner or later everybody became afraid of him.”

  “Was Louis happy with your snapshots?”

  She smiled. “After the first week he was over the moon.”

  “How in heaven’s name could you possibly know that?” Perry asked. “You didn’t pass love notes via your taxi man, did you?”

  “One night Louis was in one of the parking places. We kissed through the open window and he told me that I was doing fabulous work. ‘Won’t be long now and we’ll be able to write our own ticket,’ he said. His own words. I was to keep taking pictures, but now he wanted me to find the general’s desk and his computer and take pictures of whatever I could. It was going to be a lot riskier, he said, but rock-solid necessary.”

  “Well, if he was getting such rock-solid product he wasn’t sharing it with me,” Perry complained bitterly. “This is the first that I’ve heard about any of this.”

  “He kept repeating that this was going to be the big score,” Shahrzad said. “But I told him that I was scared out of my skull. He looked into my eyes and promised that when it was over, not only was he going to get me up to the States, but he was going to divorce his wife and we would be together.”

  Perry started to snicker, but Shahrzad turned on him.

  “You don’t understand how it was with us. I believed him. I believed in him.”

  “We understand,” Rencke assured her. “Ya know we’re just trying to do our jobs here. We want to find out why your Louis was killed. Maybe we can figure out what went wrong, what Liu’s been up to. Maybe stop this from happening to someone else.”

  Shahrzad closed her eyes for a few moments, as if she were collecting her thoughts. “A couple weeks after I moved down to the House, the parties started in earnest. Every weekend there’d be a huge crowd out there, live music, every kind of food and booze you could imagine. Champagne, oysters, and truffles flown over from France, caviar from my country, lobsters from Maine, you name it, and of course Roaz with his stash. They were called ‘hospitality bowls,’ and they were filled with coke. Practically everywhere you looked someone was dipping into one of them.”

  “You too?” McGarvey asked.

  “It would have looked pretty odd if I hadn’t,” she said.

  “This also is news to me,” Perry said petulantly. “Did you know these people? Can you identify them for us?”

  “I knew some of them from the newspapers. Senator Trinidad Lopez showed up at least once a week, usually with Carlos Huerta, whom I was told was assistant chief of police for Mexico City.”

  “Jesus,” Perry said softly. “Were you able to take pictures of them?”

  “Sure,” Shahrzad replied. “That was easy. And so was getting the camera to Louis. I was still working four nights a week at the club.”

  “Did Liu ever come back to the club after that?” Perry asked.

  “Just once. He wanted me to dance for a friend of his. I don’t remember the name, except that he was an Air Force general, and he smelled like a donkey.”

  “Did you have sex with him in one of the back rooms?” McGarvey asked.

  Shahrzad looked away for a few moments. “Yes,” she admitted in a very small voice. “It was horrible. The whole time I kept thinking about Louis, and wondering how I was going to tell him about this.”

  “Why didn’t you refuse?”

  She gave McGarvey a bitter smile. “When General Liu asked for something, nobody refused.”

  “Did he threaten people? Did he do anything to you?”

  She shook her head. “No. But everyone knew it would be for the best if they did what he said.”

  “Did you talk to the other women about him?”

  “No.”

  “But you did talk.”

  “Of course. About the guests. Who was the most generous, who was roughest, who were the pigs and who were the gentlemen.”

  “All Liu’s women were whores?” Perry asked.

  Shahrzad bridled, but after a moment she nodded.

  “Including you.”

  “I was working for Louis,” she shot back. “I was a spy.”

  “What did you learn from your spying, then?” Perry asked. “I mean other than the photos you were busy snapping? Did the Air Force general whisper secrets into your ear as he was boffing you? Or maybe he slept afterward and you went through his pockets?”

  “Just the pictures,” Shahrzad said. “But not only of people. I got into General Liu’s office one night and used up an entire camera taking shots of his diary, his calendar, his phone books. Stuff like that.”

  “Did you learn anything useful?”

  “I just took the pictures,” Shahrzad said. “You must have seen them.”

  “No,” Perry admitted. “Even if I did, it’d be a moot point, since I don’t read Chinese. But did Updegraf say anything about a translator?”

  “Did you know that Louis could speak and read Chinese?”

  Perry was startled, but for just an instant. He shook his head. “No, as a matter of fact I wasn’t aware of it.”

  Rencke stiffened almost impercepti
bly, but McGarvey caught it, though Perry and Shahrzad apparently had not. Something that the station chief had said wasn’t sitting right with Rencke.

  “Well he could, and he told me that I was hitting the jackpot. The ‘veritable gold seam,’ he said. He promised that he would pull me out very soon. In a few days, maybe a week. And I was glad because I didn’t know how much more I could take.”

  “Are you talking about the sex?” McGarvey asked.

  She nodded. “The general wanted me to go to bed with just about every guy who came to the house.”

  “What was it he wanted you to find out?”

  “Nothing. I wasn’t supposed to ask them about anything.”

  “I don’t understand,” McGarvey said, although he did. But he wanted to hear it from her own lips, and he wanted to watch Perry’s reaction.

  “I didn’t at first either. But just before it fell apart, I saw some of the tapes that he’d made. They showed everything.”

  Perry kept a straight face.

  “He couldn’t have been using them for blackmail,” McGarvey said. “A guy having sex with a woman doesn’t carry much weight nowadays.”

  “There were videos of everything, not just the sex,” Shahrzad said. “The parties, the drugs, and the money.”

  “Liu was paying these guys?” Perry asked. “For what?”

  “I don’t know, but it was a lot of money.”

  “Some of which went to you,” McGarvey suggested. “Louis was paying you to spy on Liu. The general was paying you to spy on his guests. And his guests were paying you to have sex with them. How long were you together?”

  “A couple of months. It was all I could take. It was getting too strange and dangerous.”

  “What about Updegraf? Did you tell him that you wanted out?”

  “That’s why I used the black chalk.”

  “By then Louis was dead,” Perry said, unnecessarily.

  FOURTEEN

  LONGBOAT KEY

  The woman on the house staff cleared the table, and Toni took Shahrzad to the bathroom again, giving them all a little break. To this point the story was moving along in a predictable progression of events. Updegraf’s tradecraft was just about SOP, except that McGarvey couldn’t figure out why the man hadn’t kept his boss informed, and how it was that Perry had missed the entire operation.

  Something was wrong, not only with Perry’s account, but with Shahrzad’s.

  When Toni brought her back out to the veranda and they had all settled down, McGarvey took up the questioning.

  “I’m not quite sure that I understand what happened at the end,” he said. “The parties, the drugs, the sex, the spying, all of it got to be too much for you, so you dropped everything, made your black chalk mark, and checked into a hotel to wait for Updegraf to come rescue you. Is that right?”

  “It was more complicated than that,” Shahrzad said. “A lot more complicated. And in the end I didn’t know what to do. I had to get out of there, and despite what had happened, Louis was my only contact. He was my lifeline, even then.”

  “Continue,” McGarvey prompted.

  “There was supposed to be this party for some big shot—” Shahrzad stopped.

  “Go ahead,” Rencke coaxed.

  “They said he was from the States. I think it was probably about a drug deal, because there were also some guys from Colombia.”

  “Did you get the American’s name?” Perry asked. “Did you snap his picture?”

  Shahrzad was suddenly very nervous. She nodded. “I took his picture.”

  “You must have been anxious to get back to Mexico City and give the camera to Louis,” Perry said.

  “No,” Shahrzad said, her voice small. She looked directly at McGarvey. “I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again after Chihuahua at the compound. That’s where the party took place.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Perry said, but McGarvey gestured for the man to stop right there, and Perry shut up.

  “Explain how that happened, please,” McGarvey said. Whatever her real motive was for getting out of what had become a lucrative business deal was coming now.

  “The general told me about the party, and said he wanted me to dance for a couple of guys. We were flying up in a private jet, and he’d only need me for that afternoon and night, and I’d be flown back to Mexico City first thing in the morning.”

  “More money,” McGarvey suggested.

  “I didn’t want the job, and I told him so,” Shahrzad said. “The whole deal felt wrong. Anyway, by then I was already spooked. I didn’t want to leave the city. My life was rotten, but at least I knew my way around, and I had Louis.” She looked away for a moment. “The general insisted, of course. In the end he got really mad, so I said yes. He promised to pay me five thousand dollars for the one night’s work. I figured with what I had already saved up, and with the work I’d done for Louis, I could finally get up to the States.”

  “Were you able to contact Updegraf to tell him where you were going?” McGarvey asked. “Maybe he followed you up there.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t get the chance. It wasn’t my club night, and after I packed a few things we went directly from the general’s house to the airport and flew up to Chihuahua. It was about three in the afternoon when we got to the compound, which was behind a tall wall up in the foothills.”

  “Was it one of Liu’s houses?” Perry asked.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe it was Roaz’s. He was there when we arrived, and he acted like he owned it.”

  “Nice house?” McGarvey asked.

  Shahrzad shrugged her narrow shoulders. “It was a nice place.”

  “When did the Colombians and this American show up?” McGarvey asked.

  “Later that afternoon.”

  “You were supposed to dance for the American?”

  “Just him.”

  “You didn’t get his name?” McGarvey asked.

  “The general called him Robert, but I don’t think that was his real name. Anyway, I only heard it once.”

  “Did they use your real name?” Perry wondered.

  Shahrzad nodded, but she had drifted off somewhere. She was looking directly at McGarvey, but he didn’t think she was actually seeing him at that moment.

  “We had a barbecue out back, by the pool. A lot of other people were up there, in addition to the house staff and some guys who carried machine guns or something like that, and watched the fence and the front gate. There were some girls, mostly Oriental and very young, and all of them were naked by the time it was dark. Finally Robert took me to one of the dressing rooms on the side of the pool across from the house, and I danced for him. But it wasn’t long before we had our clothes off and were having sex.” She shook her head, lost in the memory. “He was the biggest man I’d ever seen. And he was rough, but when he was done he got dressed, threw a few hundred dollars at me, and left.”

  She suddenly focused on McGarvey and the others. “He never said a word to me the entire time. He didn’t even make any noise.”

  “Did you rejoin the party?” McGarvey asked.

  “I got dressed, and as I was leaving the cabana I saw something that practically made my heart stop. It was the general with his arm around a man’s shoulder like they were old friends. They were going into the house with a third man, but they never saw me. I waited until they were gone, then went through the kitchen and up to my room. I stayed there until morning, when the general’s driver came up for me and took me to the airport so I could get back to Mexico City. Two days later was a club night for me, and I just walked away, made my chalk mark, and checked into the hotel to wait.”

  “What about your money?” McGarvey asked.

  “I left it at the house,” Shahrzad told him.

  “For heaven’s sake, who was the man so chummy with Liu?” Perry demanded impatiently. “Did you find out his name?”

  “It wasn’t necessary,” Shahrzad said. “It was Louis.”

  All the air left the
veranda. Suddenly the afternoon was still and hot.

  “Updegraf and Liu knew each other?” Perry asked incredulously. “Are you sure it was him? Absolutely certain?”

  “It was him,” McGarvey answered for her. And it made sense. Updegraf had conducted a full-court press on Liu, sending Shahrzad to spy on him, and then insinuating himself into the Chinese general’s inner circle.

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “When Louis didn’t answer your chalk mark, you went to our embassy, but you asked for Mr. Perry, but not Updegraf,” McGarvey said. “Why?”

  “Louis would never have left me hanging like that unless something had gone wrong.”

  “Did you know that he was dead?”

  She shook her head. “Not until Mr. Perry told me.”

  “Why me?” McGarvey asked. “What do you think I can do for you?”

  “Find out who murdered Louis and why,” Shahrzad flared.

  “He was spying on a Chinese intelligence officer. Most of them don’t take kindly to such a thing.”

  “We needn’t get into that now,” Perry cautioned.

  “When you went to the embassy and asked for me, you didn’t know that Updegraf had been murdered,” McGarvey said.

  “No, but I knew that he was probably in big trouble. And I think he knew it, too, because the last time I saw him, before Chihuahua, he told me that if I ever got into a really big mess with Liu, and if for some reason he wasn’t around, I was to contact you.”

  “I don’t remember ever meeting him.”

  “He knew you. Said you were the best the Company ever had,” Shahrzad insisted. ‘Talk to Kirk McGarvey’ was the last thing he ever said to me.” Her eyes filled and she looked away.

  “Why did you leave your money behind?” McGarvey asked.

  “I didn’t want it,” she answered. “Don’t you see, all I ever wanted was Louis.”

  “Who was the other man with Louis and the general?”

  Shahrzad’s nostrils flared and she glanced away for just an instant. “I don’t know,” she said, and McGarvey figured she was lying.

  Perry went into the house to summon Toni to take the girl upstairs.