The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz Page B

to a table at the front of a large room. There was such a thick haze in the air that my eyes had more water in them than the house whiskey. I loosened my tie and sat down. It felt like there was more smoke in the air than there was air in the smoke. Another waiter passed. “Good evening, Mr. Naples.”
    He put a silver bucket and two glasses on the table. I leaned forward. There was a bottle of champagne in the bucket, surrounded by ice cubes, already uncorked. “With the compliments of the house,” the waiter said. I scratched my head. The dwarf must have been quite a regular here. Came regular, drank regular . . . I wondered what else he did regular at the Casablanca Club.
    I looked around me. There were perhaps a hundred people there, sitting at tables or crowding around the bar, where three black-tied waiters shook cocktails behind a curving marble counter. The air was filled with the hubbub of conversation, as thick and as indistinct as the cigarette smoke. There was a dance floor at one end, but tonight there was no band, just a black pianist stroking the ivories with fingers that looked too stubby to sound so good. Right in front of my table there was a stage about the size you’d expect a stage to be in a run-down drinking club. The place had no windows and no ventilation. The smoke had smothered the light, strangled the plants, and it wasn’t doing a lot for me either.
    I ignored the champagne and poured myself a glass of water out of the ice bucket. Herbert joined me, muttering about the ten bucks and a moment later a spotlight cut through the clouds and the crowd fell silent. A figure moved onto the stage, a woman in her fifties, who dressed like she was in her thirties, with jewelry flashing here and there to keep your eyes off the wrinkles. She was attractive if you didn’t look too closely. At one time she might even have been beautiful. But the years hadn’t been good to her. They’d taken the color out of her hair, put a husk in her voice, hollowed out her throat, and slapped her around a bit for good measure.
    Fumes from all the cigarettes were still swirling around me and I was beginning to understand what passive smoking was all about. Spend too long in here and I’d start wheezing and my fingers would turn yellow.
    The pianist had come to the end of a tune, but as the woman moved forward he began another and she sang almost as if she didn’t care what she was doing. She sang two or three songs. When she finished, she got a smattering of applause, and as the talk started up again, she moved down to our table and sat opposite me. Only when she was close enough to see the pinks of my eyes (the whites had gone that color in all the smoke) did she see who I was.
    “You’re not Johnny,” she said.
    “We’re friends of his . . .” I said. I let the sentence hang in the air. I needed her name to complete it.
    “Lauren Bacardi,” she said. “Where’s Johnny?”
    I looked at Herbert. From the way she was talking, the little guy had obviously meant something to her and I didn’t know how she would take the news. I hoped he’d think of a gentle way to tell her. You know, with a bit of tact.
    “He’s dead,” Herbert said.
    “Dead?”
    “Yup.” He nodded. “Dead.”
    She took out a cigarette and lit it. I guessed she needed something to do with her hands. After all, to smoke in the unique atmosphere of the Casablanca Club, you didn’t actually need to light another cigarette. “Was he . . . killed?” she asked.
    “Yeah,” I said. I drank some iced water. It tasted like the metal bucket it had come from. “You knew him?”
    She smiled sadly. “We were friends.” Her eyes clouded over. Or maybe it was just the cigarette smoke. I thought she was going to get up and walk out of our lives. The way things turned out, it would have been better if she had. But the pianist had slid into a bluesy number and she needed to talk. “Johnny and I knew each other for ten years,” she said. “But