Crooked River(42)
“Indeed,” murmured Pendergast.
The doors opened and Coldmoon stopped in his tracks. A woman appeared on the landing, wearing a long dress, her dark hair bobbed, her violet eyes directed on him.
“You must be Agent Coldmoon,” she said in a contralto voice, coming forward. She paused to look him up and down. “From Aloysius’s description, I was expecting someone a little more…informal.”
Coldmoon grinned. “Don’t worry, I’m as slovenly as they come. This is just a disguise to fool my betters.”
That produced a faint smile. There was something absolutely intriguing about this young woman, who seemed self-assured far beyond her years and spoke with an unusual inflection that reminded him of old films.
“Don’t you have a valise?” she asked.
Coldmoon realized he’d been standing there dumb. “Right. In the back.” He went around the car, opened the tailgate, and pulled out his bag.
“I’ll show you to your room,” said Constance, turning and heading back inside. Coldmoon followed.
“I’m retiring to my quarters,” Pendergast said from behind them. “You’re in good hands with Ms. Greene.” He slipped away.
Entering the cool dimness of the house was like stepping back in time. The interior smelled of furniture polish, fabric, and old wood. He could see, past the entryway and down a hall, a large sitting room with Persian rugs and antique furniture. A row of windows looked out across a veranda to the sea horizon, where he could hear the distant rhythm of surf and the crying of gulls.
Constance turned and mounted a set of stairs to the right of the entryway. “This way, Agent Coldmoon.”
Coldmoon followed, up to an annex that served as a small sitting room, with three rooms going off it—two bedrooms and a bath.
“The servants’ quarters,” said Constance. “Separate from the rest of the house.”
“Servants’ quarters,” Coldmoon repeated in a tone of irony.
Constance again fixed those violet eyes on him. “You are Agent Pendergast’s junior partner, are you not, Mr. Coldmoon?”
Coldmoon couldn’t help but laugh at this brazen comment, so archly delivered. “I guess I am a kind of servant.” He set down his bag. “By the way, you’re free to call me Armstrong if you wish.”
That slipped out before he even knew he’d said it. Why had he offered up this information? He almost never told people his first name.
“And you may call me Constance. Your bedroom is here. The other bedroom has a desk for you to use as a workspace.” A key appeared in a delicate white hand. “Your key, Armstrong.”
“Thank you, Constance.” He took it. “Um, is the house really supposed to be haunted?”
“So they say.”
“What’s the story?”
She gave him another arch smile. “That’s my investigation. Once I’ve pieced it together, we’ll light a fire in the parlor and I’ll regale you with the details.”
24
PETER QUARLES MADE his way down the crooked, congested streets of a city that had no name. Or if it had a name, he had not been able to discover it. All he could say for certain was that he was in Guangdong Province in southern China. Dongguan, a first-tier manufacturing city, was to his east, across the Pearl River. Just to his west was Foshan, itself an agglomeration of three dozen towns that specialized in industries from chemical processing to communications equipment to biotechnology. And here he was, in a bustling no-man’s-land of small-time commerce and manufacturing, situated in an anonymous district just a stone’s throw from the South China Sea.
Yet Quarles felt curiously at home. He was not so many years removed from his time in import-export work, and was not so brainwashed by Bureau mentality, that he’d found it difficult to slip back into his old guise. After just one day, the crowds, the endless yammering, the smog, and the smells had all become familiar and comfortable, and he fell back into that shuffling two-step that one used to get about in the congestion. Nobody would suspect him of being anything more than a gweilo middleman, working at the low end of the manufacturing business—which, in fact, was true. Except that his Mandarin was perhaps a little too refined.
The only difference from back then was how Agent Pendergast had financed this investigative journey with a most lavish expense account. How he’d managed it, Quarles didn’t know, but the man had made clear he would take care of everything and that Quarles should not stint on his accommodations, meals, bribes, or hiring assistants. And so Quarles had splurged, staying at the Marco Polo in Jinjiang and the Shangri-La in Wenzhou. As he’d expected, he’d had no luck in either city finding a manufacturer of anything like this odd slipper: a cheaply made, disposable product of propylene that nevertheless sported both high fluid resistance and antibacterial properties. Even Dongguan, where he’d placed most of his hopes, had initially been a dud: a big influx in Brazilian manufacturing had driven out many of the local manufacturers he thought most likely to have made these. But he soon learned those small-time manufacturers had not disappeared—they had migrated across the river into the shadow of Foshan. And so it was here—as he walked along Zhaofang Road, the towers of Lunxiang Residential District rising behind him—that he undertook his search in earnest.