Color of Blood(62)

“Shit,” he muttered. “I don’t even know if this is Garder.”

Dennis found himself out of breath as he barreled past startled pedestrians. At one point he briefly got entangled in a leash tethering a small black poodle to a tall, angular elderly man. The owner yelled in alarm as Dennis briefly yanked the dog sideways.

Dennis took a wide, lurching turn down Schafgusslein and came to a stop, trying to catch his breath. The street was nearly empty of pedestrians, and he strained to look for any movement. A man and a woman walked toward him on the opposite side of the street about fifty yards away. On the right side of the street, a single young man in a leather jacket walked toward him smoking a cigarette.

Although he was out of breath, and a thick sheen of perspiration had settled on his forehead, Dennis took off running again, pounding heavily down the cement sidewalk.

His heart sank when he got to the next cross street; it was a wide thoroughfare with numerous pedestrians plying both sides of Rheingasse. He looked right and left, hanging onto a lamppost to rest.

If the man running away from him was Garder, his initial direction was down Claraplatz toward the river. Then the man took off running parallel to the river. If the man was trying to get as far from Dennis as possible, he would probably run west and away from the river; a river required a bridge to cross, where he could easily be seen and trapped.

But what if he cut back to the river? Dennis thought. He would only do so because he left something important, that’s why. He’s going to pick up money, jewelry, hell, maybe a new watch worth thousands of dollars, who the hell knows? So where did he leave all the stuff he wants to collect?

At a hotel or rooming house—no, not a rooming house, at a hotel. He’s too rich now to stay at a rooming house.

Hell, Dennis thought, the hotel could be miles from here—or anywhere in the city, really.

But wait, he was walking and could have taken a cab or a convention-center bus to his hotel if he had to. No, he chose to walk. His hotel is right around here, on this side of the bridge so he could easily saunter to the Messeplatz to ogle all his stupid watches, Dennis concluded.

Dennis took off walking toward Claraplatz again, carefully scanning pedestrians and looking for hotels. He saw plenty of restaurants, cafes, and office buildings, but no hotels. He had long given up trying to pull his man out of the crowd; there were simply too many people.

After nearly a half-hour of meandering through the wide intersection of Clarastrasse and Rheingasse, he finally stopped a young businessman.

“Excuse me,” he said, “do you speak English?”

“Yes, a little,” he said.

“I’m lost, and I wonder if you could direct me to a hotel? Is there a nice hotel nearby?”

“Let me think,” the man said with what seemed to Dennis to be a French accent. “Ah, yes. Of course: the Merian. You will like this hotel.” He gave Dennis precise directions that took him three blocks away to a six-story stone building. The building itself looked several hundred years old and was nestled into a group of similar buildings that Dennis took to be apartments and office buildings.

He stood about fifty yards to the side of the entrance and debated whether to go inside and prowl the lobby. He looked up and down the street, hoping to see his prey sauntering by, but it was no use. Checking his watch, he estimated that fifty minutes had passed from when he had started tailing the young man.

If Garder were a good agent, he would not have gone directly to his room; that would be too dangerous. He would wait to make sure he was clear of his tail, and then go “home.” Once back “home,” he would quickly organize his escape.

Dennis walked up the stairs and into the small lobby; it was quaint and uncomfortably small, but he had no other choice than to hang out. He took off his jacket and sunglasses to make it more difficult for his young man to identify him.

He sat in a small armchair facing the front door and picked up a French language newspaper that he could not read. A middle-aged couple sat in a couch across from him and consulted a street map, speaking German.

After twenty minutes Dennis began to have second thoughts; the man he was chasing could have been running to catch a bus; or he could in fact have been Garder, but what’s to say he’s not on a train to Italy at this very moment? The more Dennis thought of the possibilities, the more depressed he became.

His habit had always been to go with his instincts on these kinds of things, but perhaps he was losing his touch. He could sit in this hotel for the next month, and Garder could be sunning himself in Cannes or Atlantic City.

He stood up and flung the newspaper down and found the men’s room. He took a long, steady piss that seemed to last five minutes. Washing his hands, he walked into the lobby and glanced idly at the elevators in the lobby.

There stood the young man, his back to Dennis. The man was looking up at the old-fashioned brass dial showing the status of the elevator.

Dennis was giddy with the self-satisfying spray of dopamine that showered the inside of his cerebellum like an aerosol can gone wild.

Yes, he thought. There’s the little shit.

Dennis walked quickly to the foyer and stood looking out the plate-glass entrance to the street below. He watched the mirrored reflection of the elevators thirty feet behind him. Dennis heard the elevator door open, and he saw the young man quickly scan the hotel lobby before getting in. Dennis was relieved to see the man was alone in the elevator.