Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“That’s him,” I said.

I left Nora and Hopper seated on the guardrail at the dead end of East Fifty-second Street — just outside The Campanile, an elegant limestone apartment building overlooking the East River — and walked swiftly down the sidewalk toward the approaching man wearing the gray doorman’s uniform.

He was very short and very bald, carrying a small deli coffee cup, an impish spring in his step. He might have been Danny DeVito’s cousin.

I caught up to him under a gray awning. “You must be Harold.”

He smiled cheerfully. “That’s me.”

I introduced myself. He nodded in immediate recognition. “Oh, right. The hotshot reporter. Mrs. du Pont said you’d be stopping by. So, you, uh …” He raised his chin to glance over my shoulder, lowering his voice. “You want to get in to see Marlowe.”

“Olivia said you could arrange a time for me to talk to her.”

He smirked. “You don’t talk to Marlowe.”

“What do you do?”

“What do you do with any man-eating beast? Tiptoe around and pray they’re not hungry.” He laughed again and then sobered when he saw my confusion. “Come back tonight. Eleven o’clock sharp. I’ll take you up. But, uh, then you’re on your own.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I make a rule never to go past the laundry room.”

“I’d like to speak to Marlowe. Not break into her apartment.”

“Yeah, that’s how you speak to Marlowe. It’s how Mrs. du Pont visits. Mrs. du Pont pays for the big spread, so technically she’s sneaking into her own place.”

“Olivia sneaks into her sister’s apartment in the middle of the night?” I found it difficult to imagine Olivia du Pont sneaking into anything.

“Oh, yeah. Marlowe Hughes and daylight’s a bad combo. At night she’s, uh, more chill. ”

“And why’s she chill at night?”

“Her dealer comes at eight. Coupla hours later? She’s riding a magic carpet over Shangri-la.” He grinned, but then, seeing my reaction, shook his head defensively. “I swear it’s the only safe way to enter. That’s when we do repairs, take out her trash, make sure she hasn’t left on a gas burner or clogged the toilet with her fan mail. Once a week Mrs. du Pont takes up fresh food and flowers. If she did it during the day, there’d be carnage. This way, when Marlowe wakes up, she thinks she’s been visited by Santa’s elves.”

He took a sip of coffee, squinting at something over my shoulder. I noticed one of the other doormen at The Campanile had wandered outside.

“Artie needs to go on break. Just, uh, come by at eleven and I’ll get you up there. But …” He squinted. “You know those electric tiger prods they use in circuses? You might want to bring one.” He guffawed heartily at his own joke, taking off down the sidewalk. “ ’course, it proved ineffective for Siegfried and Roy,” he added over his shoulder, “so no promises.”

Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting in the window of the Starbucks at Second Avenue and East Fiftieth.

“It’s an ideal situation,” said Hopper. “If Hughes is out cold, we’ll have plenty of time to look through her place.”

I was relieved to see this morning Hopper seemed to be all right after everything he’d told us. After disclosures such as his, it was difficult to gauge how the person would react afterward. But he appeared to be more focused.

“It’s like having secret access to Marilyn Monroe’s house,” said Nora. “Or Elizabeth Taylor’s. Think of the photos and letters and love affairs with presidents no one knows about. She might even know where Cordova is.”

“As enticing as it sounds to ransack Marlowe’s home while she’s in a drug-induced coma,” I said, “this operation is possible because of Olivia. I don’t want her to find out I rummaged through her sister’s apartment like a yard sale.”

“We’ll work fast,” said Hopper, “leave the place exactly as we found it.”

I said nothing, squinting across the street. A few yards from a restaurant, Lasagna Ristorante, a suspicious-looking white-haired man wearing a black coat was loitering by a brick wall. For the past five minutes, he’d been standing there, having an intense argument on the phone, but every now and then he glanced pointedly right at us.

“It’s time to get the Waldorf guest list,” I said, keeping an eye on him. “We’ll get the name of every guest who stayed on the thirtieth floor between September thirtieth and October the tenth, the days Ashley was in the city. We’ll compare that to the Oubliette membership. If one name appears on both, that’s the person Ashley was looking for. That’s the Spider.”

The white-haired man outside hung up and took off, heading north on Second. I waited to see if he’d circle back or cross the street, but he appeared to be gone.

“But how do we get the names?” asked Nora.

“The only way.” I drained the rest of my coffee. “Corruption and intimidation.”

I strolled into the Waldorf Towers lobby to do some reconnaissance.

Today, behind the front desk there was an attractive woman, thirties, with long shiny black hair — her nametag read DEBRA — and a young Japanese man, MASATO. After answering the phone a few times, Debra fumbled under the desk and produced a large Louis Vuitton bag, a good sign; it meant she liked luxury goods, would welcome some extra cash to buy more. This, while Masato stood stoically at the other side of the desk, doing and saying nothing, like a Kendo warrior proficient in the Way of the Sword.

The single girl and the last samurai — it didn’t take a genius to decide who’d be amenable to bribery.

I caught up to Nora and Hopper on the steps of Saint Bartholomew’s, across from the hotel. I gave them Debra’s description and put the three of us on a surveillance rotation, so we could catch her alone as soon as she left the hotel. One of us monitored the employees’ entrance from Saint Bart’s while the other two waited at a Starbucks down the block.

Four hours passed. And though quite a few employees exited — crossing the street to discreetly smoke a cigarette — Debra never appeared.

At four, I did another drive-by and realized Debra must have ducked out another entrance, because only Masato remained.

“Everyone has their price,” Hopper said, when I explained this unfortunate development.

“Yeah, well, from the look of this guy, his price is three hundred beheadings and a katana sword.”

At the stroke of six, Nora alerted us that Masato was leaving the hotel. I managed to flag him down.

“Sure, I’ll do it,” he announced in a flawless American accent, after I explained. “For three thousand dollars. Cash.”

I laughed. “Five hundred.”

He stood and walked out of the Starbucks. I was certain he was bluffing, but then he was on the subway escalator descending into the dense crowd.

“Eight hundred,” I said, fighting shopping bags, women giving me dirty looks, to reach him. Masato didn’t turn. “One thousand.” I jostled an owl-looking girl in tortoiseshell glasses to get beside him. “Complete with home addresses.”

Masato only put large blue deejay headphones over his ears.

“Twelve hundred. My final offer. And at that price we should know what nuts they ate from the minibar.”

It was a deal.

Minutes later, Masato, displaying a fairly impressive poker face, ducked back inside the Waldorf, I went around the corner to an ATM, and then returned to the Starbucks. An hour passed, the crowd of commuters, once a flash flood, had drained to a meager trickle of women with tired faces and men in rumpled suits. Another half-hour, and there was still no sign of Masato. I was beginning to think something had happened, when suddenly he entered, pulled a thick envelope out of his bag.