Marisha Pessl - Night Film

He held out the papers, and I took them. It was fifteen pages, about two thousand names. Many were LLCs or bizarre aliases like Marquis de Roche.

“It’s the Oubliette membership list,” said Nora excitedly.

“I can see that. How did you get this?”

“It wasn’t easy,” said Hopper proudly, stretching his hands behind his head. “The place turned into the Gaza Strip after you took off. But I was in the waiter uniform, so no one glanced at me twice. I talked to one of the girls, ’least I think she was a girl. She told me how to get down to the basement where the offices are. I found one empty, got on the computer, searched the hard drive for membership. Some Excel files came up. I logged on to my email, sent the files to myself, cleared the cache, and got out. Only they’d apparently reviewed the security footage and saw me saving your ass, so, two guards chased me outside onto a neighbor’s property. I had to break into the house, called Nora to come pick me up. I managed to describe to her where the hell I was.”

“It was a real getaway,” Nora chimed in. “Tires screeching. I felt like Thelma and Louise.”

“I thought you were Bernstein,” I said.

“Nora pulled up, headlights off,” Hopper went on. “I climbed out a window, booked it across the yard, and we got the fuck out of there.”

“What time was this?”

Nora glanced at Hopper uncertainly. “Four?”

“I waited at the diner until nine. What’d you do for five hours?”

“We went back to Oubliette because I wanted a look,” she blurted. “We hid next door, hoping to talk to some of the guests when they left, ask them if they recognized Ashley, but we couldn’t approach any of them. They all looked exhausted, shuttled away by housekeepers in expensive cars and limos. One guy in a wheelchair looked dead. There were too many guards, anyway.”

“You didn’t think to call? You abandoned the boss, El Jefe, in the field without a single communication?”

Hopper stood up, yawning and stretching. “I’ll see you guys bright and early tomorrow.”

“Bright and early?” I asked.

Nora nodded. “Tomorrow we’re posting missing-person signs for Ashley around 83 Henry Street.” She handed me a flier with the scanned photo of Ashley that Nora had found at Briarwood.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? SERIOUS REWARD OFFERED FOR REAL INFORMATION. PLEASE CALL ASAP.

“We’ll weed through the phony reports by asking what color coat Ashley was wearing.”

Hopper took off, and I headed into my office, leaving Nora scribbling in her notebook. Hopper obtaining a copy of the guest list was stellar investigative work, much better than anything I’d come up with lately —not that I was going to admit this. I spent the next few hours cross-referencing the Oubliette guest list with a list of Cordova’s actors, anyone associated with his world, in the off chance one name appeared on both —to no avail. But it did rule out one possibility: The person Ashley had gone to Oubliette to find —this Spider —was probably not associated with her father’s work. Was he a friend of hers? A stranger? Someone connected to her death?

I switched out the lamp, rubbing my eyes, heading back down the hall.

The apartment was quiet. Nora had blown out the reversing candles before going upstairs, but oddly enough, I noticed the wicks were still smoldering orange, as if they refused to be extinguished, three orange pinpricks in the dark. I grabbed them and dumped them in the kitchen sink, running the tap until I was certain they were out, then headed to bed.

“Hopper promised to be here,” said Nora, squinting down the empty block. “Posting the fliers was his idea.”

It was 9:00 A.M., and we were back at 83 Henry Street armed with a hundred missing-person fliers. We decided to split up: I covered the blocks west of the Manhattan Bridge up to East Broadway and the Bowery, while Nora handled everything east of the bridge.

The neighborhood was predominantly Chinese, so I doubted our English-language flier would get us very far. Posting leaflets, as if Ashley were a lost cat, wasn’t exactly my style, but it couldn’t hurt. With Theo Cordova following us, I could no longer hope to keep the investigation quiet. So why not go in the opposite direction, brazenly carpet-bombing the neighborhood with Ashley’s picture, and see where that got us?

I taped the flier to lampposts and phone booths, mailboxes, Learning Annex stands. A Chinese woman on a bike, orange shopping bags swinging from the handlebars, braked to see what I was doing, scowled at me, and rode on. Quite a few men in bodegas refused to let me post the missing poster after they saw what it was, shaking their heads, shooing me out of the store.

When this happened for the sixth time, I wondered if they were worried a missing Caucasian woman would bring them bad luck — or if they’d seen something in Ashley’s photo they didn’t like. Or perhaps there was an even more disturbing reason: I looked like I worked for Immigration and Customs.

It was the opposite reaction at Hao Hair Salon on Madison Street. The teenage receptionist, the female manager, two stylists, and a client (pink robe, hair in tinfoil) surrounded me, smiling, and speaking in excited Cantonese. They took great care taping Ashley’s flier to the window beside a faded poster for eyebrow threading, and when I left, they waved as if I were a beloved relative they wouldn’t see for forty years.

And yet the longer I walked the streets, past Chinese restaurants, gift stores, unisex hair salons, orange and white koi drifting in pet store windows, I had the sense I was being watched. But every time I checked behind me — once, even popping into a Laundromat and looking out — I noticed nothing suspicious.

I wondered if the feeling came from the strength of Ashley’s stare, so alive and insistent, gazing out from the white page. All “missing” fliers were unsettling, the lost person smiling out from some candid photo taken at a birthday party or happy hour, so ignorant of their fate. Yet Ashley, alone on that picnic table at Briarwood, had a gravity, an understanding even, as if she knew what awaited her within weeks.

As I walked on, however, I realized I was absolutely right. I was being watched —by the entire neighborhood. Hopper’s idea to post these fliers wasn’t so simplistic, because if I stood out this much, attracted this many hostile looks and slow drive-bys — once I looked up at an old walk-up and saw an old woman had pulled aside her lace curtains to stare down at me — Ashley was noticed, too.

They all must have seen her, watched her, wondered about her as she wandered their sidewalks in her red coat.

Now all we needed was one of them having the courage to call.

“Tom-may !” the guy at the front desk bellowed in a thick New York accent, turning toward the dozen tattoo artists at work behind him. “These guys got a question for ya!”

Rising Dragon was a fluorescent, spacious tattoo studio on the second floor of a walk-up on West Fourteenth Street. It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings.

The light was clean and clinical, walls decorated with tracing paper and framed stencils of full-body tattoos, skulls, Buddhas and warriors, Maori tribal patterns, shelves cluttered with bottles of colored ink and iodine. Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” blared loudly from speakers.