The Company of the Dead by David Kowalski Page B

coat tightly around himself. He tucked his fedora under his arm. The avenue was teeming with people. Businessmen on lunch breaks, children capering from storefront to storefront, tourists in town to see the Titanic . Some samurai slouched against a phone booth, smoking. They gave him a quick once-over and resumed their conversation, eyeing the crowds with the detachment of zookeepers long since weary of their charges.
    Since his arrival Lightholler had noticed a steady increase in the military presence. Not for the first time he yearned to be back in London. At least there the soldiers spoke English. New York enfolded him with the insincere embrace that most newcomers fell for. Before the navy and fresh out of the academy, he’d come to New York to celebrate the turn of the millennium. He’d visited Astor Place and taken coffee with distant cousins and listened as they reiterated the stories he’d been raised upon. John Jacob Astor and Charles Lightholler, clinging to the remains of a broken lifeboat, forging covenants that would be borne out in ways they could never have imagined.
    Astor and Lightholler, New York and London. The two worlds that bound him.
    A doorman approached him. “Call you a cab, Captain?”
    “Thank you.”
    The doorman gave an ear-splitting whistle and threw an arm up in the air. In moments a dilapidated yellow taxi pulled up to the kerb. Lightholler ducked into the back after handing the doorman a thousand-yen note.
    The driver glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. He asked for Lightholler’s destination in broken English. A thin pale scar ran from his left temple to just above his lip—probably a refugee from one of the Occupied Territories.
    “St Marks Place,” Lightholler replied, and sank back into the worn leather seat.
    Despite the chill, he wound down the grime-stained window as they proceeded east on 50th Street, then downtown on Second Avenue. On his right, the scarlet towers of the Summer Palace soared into the smog-ridden heights. To the left, through narrow intersections, he caught glimpses of the East River. The Brooklyn shore, grey and broken, stretched out along the waterway. As they crossed 14th Street, the spires and skyscrapers of Midtown grudgingly gave way to the tenements and brownstones of the Lower East Side. If you closed your eyes, he thought, just slightly, made the street signs a blur so that the names were illegible, you could almost believe the Japanese had never been here at all.
    Almost.
    The taxi pulled up at the Second Avenue corner of St Marks Place in a garland of brown exhaust. Lightholler paid the fare, just managing to escape the cab before it rushed back into the seethe of morning traffic.

IV
    Kennedy took the call in what passed for the brownstone’s office. David Hardas’s voice sounded strained on the other end of the line.
    “What have you got?” Kennedy asked, trying to keep his darker thoughts at bay. “Lightholler spent most of the morning on the phone. He’s just left the Waldorf.”
    Kennedy checked his Einstein watch. It was twelve-forty. “Did he check out?”
    “He wasn’t carrying any suitcases.”
    “He won’t run. Who’s watching him?”
    “Good question,” Hardas replied. “I saw the doorman put a tail on him.”
    That was pretty fast. Not surprising, but fast. Playing host to the Russo– Japanese peace talks would attract some attention; involvement in the operation outlined by Saffel would garner a lot more. Kennedy had allowed the surveillance devices in Lightholler’s suite to operate just long enough to verify the identity of his visitors. His association with Project Camelot would confer immunity within the higher echelons of the intelligence communities. The question was: who had placed Lightholler under surveillance—the Germans or the Japanese?
    “Abwehr or Kempei-Tai?” he asked.
    “You won’t believe this, Major. They’re Bureau.”
    “You sure?”
    “Positive. I made the doorman. He’s one of