[FIVE]
The Warwick Hotel 1701 Locust Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2030 8 June 2005
“I really wish you’d come out to the house with me, Charley,” Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., said as the taxi stopped in front of the hotel.
“I’m sure you can eventually make your father understand what happened, but in the time between when you tell him that you were relieved because of something I asked you to do and the time he understands—thirty seconds or thirty minutes —I’d just as soon rather not be around General Miller, thank you just the same.”
“Coward,” Miller said, chuckling, and left it there. “I’ll pick you up in the morning at half past seven,” he said. “Be standing on the sidewalk shaved and sober and full of energy because you gave your pecker the night off.”
Castillo gave him the finger and got out of the taxi.
His initial impression of the Warwick Hotel was that it was a nice one. Nice lobby, with a really impressive floral display—real flowers; as he walked by, he checked—on a beautiful table. To the right was the entrance to the restaurant —he could see enough of that to make the judgment it, too, looked first-rate—and a bar.
There was a young woman sitting alone at the bar. She didn’t look like a hooker, but sometimes it was hard to tell. He decided to give the brunette and the hotel the benefit of the doubt. The Warwick didn’t look like the kind of a place where ladies of the evening were either encouraged or permitted to practice their profession. And the brunette really didn’t look like a hooker.
He was pleased, too, with the room. It was large, high-ceilinged, with a king-sized bed, and the bathroom shelf was loaded with small bottles of high-quality shampoo and mouthwash and crisp packages of expensive soap of the type he liked to put in his toilet kit at checkout time against the inevitability that the next hotel would not much care if their guests bathed or washed out their mouths.
Not that I need either a bath or a mouth rinse.
What I need is a drink, maybe two—no more than two— and then something to eat, and then some sleep. Dick said to be on the sidewalk outside at half past seven.
Jesus, the last time I went to bed was in Vienna. That— and Cobenzl and the Drei Hussaren and Pevsner and Inge— was last night?
One drink and then something to eat and then to bed.
But not in the restaurant. I don’t want a full meal, and I hate to eat alone at a restaurant table.
Maybe I can get a sandwich at the bar.
That is based solely upon my desire to have something simple to eat, not on the brunette.
It really is, and, anyway, by the time I get back down there she’ll more than likely be gone. Nice girls—and we have decided that’s what she is—do not sit around hotels where young men with out-of-control gonads might think they’re available.
Major Carlos G. Castillo had been in his room no more than ten minutes before he left it, got back on the elevator, and rode it down to the lobby.
The brunette was still sitting alone at the bar.
At that point, Major Castillo told himself, he would have headed right for the restaurant had he not also seen there were four men sitting at a table in the bar eating some kind of good-looking sandwiches on crusty bread.
He entered the bar, taking care not to look at the brunette but taking a stool separated from hers by only one stool.
His cellular went off as the bartender approached him.
“Is there a local beer on draft?” Castillo asked. The waiter gave him a name he’d never heard before.
“One o
f those, please,” Castillo said. “And a menu.”
As the phone rang a third time, he pushed its ANSWER button. “Hello?—
“Yes, sir?—
“I just checked into a hotel, sir. The Warwick. I’m about to have dinner—
“Well, that was certainly nice of the . . . him, sir. And thank you for telling me. I’ll past the word to Dick, sir—
“He’s going to pick me up here at oh-seven-thirty, sir—