Lee Child - The Hard Way

“Unless I find out five years ago was for real. Then I might never sleep again.”

“Life’s a gamble,” Reacher said. “It wouldn’t be so much fun otherwise.”

Pauling was quiet for a long moment.

“OK,” she said. “I’m volunteering.”

Reacher said, “So go hassle our Soviet pal again. Get the chair. They bought it within the last week. We’ll walk it over to the Bowery and find out where it came from. Maybe the new buddy picked it out. Maybe someone will remember him.”

REACHER CARRIED THEchair in his hand like a bag and he and Pauling walked together east. South of Houston the Bowery had organized itself into a sequence of distinct retail areas. Like a string of unofficial malls. There were electrical supplies, and lighting fixtures, and used office gear, and industrial kitchen equipment, and restaurant front-of-house outlets. Reacher liked the Bowery. It was his kind of a street.

The chair in his hand was fairly generic, but it had a certain number of distinguishing characteristics. Impossible to describe it a moment after closing the door on it, but with it right there for direct comparison a match might be found. They started with the northernmost of six separate chaotic establishments. Less than a hundred yards of real estate, but if someone buys a used dining chair in Manhattan, chances are he buys it somewhere in that hundred yards.

Put the good stuff in the store window was the usual retail mantra. But on the Bowery the actual store windows were secondary to the sidewalk displays. And the chair in Reacher’s hand wasn’t the good stuff, in the sense that it couldn’t have been part of a large matched set, or it wouldn’t have been sold separately. Nobody with a set of twenty-four chairs leaves himself with twenty-three. So Reacher and Pauling pushed past the stuff on the sidewalk and squeezed through the narrow doors and looked at the dusty items inside. Looked at the sad leftovers, the part-sets, the singletons. They saw a lot of chairs. All the same, all different. Four legs, seats, backs, but the range of shapes and details was tremendous. None looked very comfortable. Reacher had read somewhere that there was a science to building a restaurant chair. It had to be durable, obviously, and good value for money, and it had to look reasonably inviting, but it couldn’t in reality be too comfortable or the patrons would sit all night and a potential three-sitting evening would turn into an actual two sittings and the restaurant would lose money. Portion control and table turnover were the important factors in the restaurant trade, and Reacher figured chair manufacturers were totally on board with the turnover part.

In the first three stores they found no visual matches and nobody admitted selling the chair that Reacher was carrying.

The fourth store was where they found what they wanted.

It was a double-wide place that had chrome diner furniture out front and a bunch of Chinese owners in back. Behind the gaudy padded stools on the sidewalk were piles of old tables and sets of chairs stacked six high. Behind the piles and the stacks was a jumble of oddments. Including two chairs hung high on a wall that were exact matches for the specimen in Reacher’s hand. Same style, same construction, same color, same age.

“We shoot, we score,” Pauling said.

Reacher checked again, to be certain. But there was no doubt about it. The chairs were identical. Even the grime and the dust on them matched precisely. Same gray, same texture, same consistency.

“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.

THE OLD MANsaid, “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.”