Anthea Landau was listed in the Yellow Pages, under Literary Agents. I got an outside line and had her number half-dialed when I caught myself and broke the connection. If I dialed her private line there’d be a record of the call, and did I want that?

I dialed 7, then 602. I let the phone ring half a dozen times before hanging up.

Could it be that easy? Could I be that lucky? Was she really out somewhere, having dinner or seeing a play or visiting an old friend?

It seemed possible. The envelope I’d left for her had disappeared from her mailbox, suggesting that she might have come down and retrieved it. (It was equally possible that Carl or another hotel employee brought her mail to her door, a not unlikely service for a reclusive tenant.)

Even if she’d gone for the mail herself, that didn’t mean she hadn’t turned around and returned directly to her room. But she hadn’t answered her phone now, and that meant something, didn’t it?

Maybe it meant she was sound asleep. It was not quite nine o’clock, too early to be bedtime for most of the people I know, but how did I know what hours Anthea Landau kept? Maybe she took naps. Maybe she slept in the early evening and stayed up all night. Older people are typically light sleepers, and might be roused by a ringing telephone, but who could say with assurance that Ms. Landau wasn’t an exception? Maybe she welcomed Morpheus with a cocktail of Smirnoff’s and Seconal, and slept so soundly an earthquake wouldn’t wake her.

Maybe she was in the bathroom when the phone rang and couldn’t get to it in time. Maybe she was watching TV and never picked up the phone during Seinfeld.

Maybe I should try her again. I reached for the phone, caught myself in time, put my hand back in my lap before it could get me in trouble. I had called her number once and nobody answered. What was I doing, stalling to get my three nights’ worth out of the hotel? I couldn’t wait for some sort of guarantee that she wasn’t home and that I could get in and out undetected. If I wanted guarantees, I was in the wrong business.

It was time to get to work.

CHAPTER Four

The Paddington had a single stairwell, and the fire door giving access to it had a sign on it explaining that it was the reverse of a Roach Motel. Guests could get out, but they couldn’t get back in again, not without walking clear down to the lobby.

Yeah, right.

I let myself out and walked up two flights of stairs. At the fifth-floor landing there was a wall-mounted firehose with a massive dull brass nozzle, and I figured they’d picked the right spot for it, because the stairwell reeked of cigarette smoke. Evidently one or more of the hotel employees was in the habit of ducking onto the stairs for a quick smoke, and if there’d been anything flammable on hand, it probably would have long since caught fire. But there was nothing but the metal stairs and the plaster walls, unless you counted the firehose itself, and you never hear of them burning, do you?

At the sixth floor I put my ear to the door, and when I didn’t hear anything but the beating of my own heart I took out my tools and put them to work. There was really nothing to it. A little strip of spring steel snicked back the spring lock and I stepped out into the sixth-floor hallway, confidence and self-assurance oozing from every other pore, and ran head-on into the appraising gaze of a woman who stood waiting for the elevator.

“Good evening,” she said.

“Good evening.”

Well, it had been, up to then. And in ordinary circumstances the sight of her would have done nothing to detract from it. She was tall and slender, with skin the color of coffee with plenty of cream and sugar. She had a high forehead and a long narrow nose and prominent cheekbones and a pointed chin, and her hair was in cornrows, which often looks hokey to me, but which now looked quite perfect. She was wearing what I think you call a bolero jacket over what I’m pretty sure you call a skirt and blouse. The jacket was scarlet and the blouse was canary yellow and the skirt was royal blue, and that sounds as though it should have been garish, but somehow it wasn’t. In fact there was something reassuringly familiar about the color scheme, although I couldn’t think what it was.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said. “My name is Isis Gauthier.”

“I’m Peter Jeffries.”

Shit, I thought. That was the second time I’d got it wrong. I was Jeffrey Peters, not Peter Jeffries. Why couldn’t I remember a simple thing like my own goddam name?

“I could have sworn,” she said, “that you just now came through the door from the stairs.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” she said. I’d seen her in the lobby that afternoon, but I hadn’t looked twice at her. I couldn’t remember what she’d been wearing, but I was sure it was less colorful than what she wore now. And I hadn’t even noticed her eyes then. They were cornflower blue, I noted now, which meant either contact lenses or a genetic anomaly. Either way the effect was startling. She was as striking a woman as I’d seen in years, and I wished to God the elevator would come along and take her the hell out of my life.

“And those doors lock automatically,” she went on. “You can open them from the hall, but not from the staircase.”

“Gauthier,” I said, thoughtfully. “That’s French, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“There was a writer, Théophile Gauthier. Mademoiselle de Maupin. That was one of his books. I don’t suppose he’s any relation?”

“I’m sure he was,” she said, “to someone. But not to me. How did you manage to get in from the stairs, Mr. Jeffries?”

“I stepped out,” I said, “and before I let the door close I wedged some paper in the lock. That way I could get back in again.”

“And is the paper still wedged in the lock?”

“No, I took it out just now, so that the door would function the way it’s supposed to.”

“That was considerate,” she said, and smiled warmly. Her teeth were gleaming white, her lips full, and did I mention that her voice was pitched low, and a little husky? She was just about perfect, and I couldn’t wait to see the last of her.

“Why,” she had to ask, “did you want to use the stairs, Mr. Jeffries?”

“Let’s not be so formal,” I said. “Call me Peter.”

And you must call me Isis, she was supposed to say. But all she did was repeat the question. At least by then I had an answer for it.

“I wanted a cigarette,” I said. “My room’s nonsmoking, and I didn’t want to break the rule, so I ducked into the stairwell for a smoke.”

“That’s what I want,” she said. “A cigarette. Do you have one, Peter?”

“I just smoked my last one.”

“Oh, that’s a pity. I suppose you smoke one of those ultra-low-tar brands.”

Where was she going with this?

“Because you don’t smell of tobacco smoke at all, you see.”

Oh.

“So I don’t think you ducked into the stairwell for a cigarette.” She sniffed the air. “In fact,” she said, “I doubt you’ve had a cigarette in years.”

“You’ve caught me,” I said, smiling disarmingly.

She was about as easily disarmed as the Michigan Militia. “Indeed,” she said, “but in what? What were you doing on the stairs, Mr. Jeffries?”

Damn, I thought. We were back to Mr. Jeffries again, after having so recently reached a first-name basis.

“I was visiting someone,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Someone who lives on another floor. I wanted to be discreet, because my friend wouldn’t want it known that I’d paid a visit.”

“And that’s why you used the stairs.”

“Yes.”

“Because if you were to take the elevator…”

“Carl downstairs might see me on the closed-circuit monitor.”

“Unlikely,” she said. “And so what if he did?”

“Or I might run into someone in the elevator,” I said.