“Oh, I don’t want you to betray any confidences, Commander,” he said. “Frankly, you’re not nearly pretty enough to play Mata Hari. I think we just need to know what sort of people we’re dealing with. How they’re likely to react to these killings, for instance. If you feel uncomfortable with that, why don’t you invite her to dinner with the both of us? You can tell her up front that I want to pick her brain.”

Black’s mood lightened considerably at that. “She has a friend, another reporter, sir. She’s a loudmouth, too. I think we should take both of them along.”

Spruance seemed alarmed by the prospect of anything that might look like a double date. “My wife would kill me!” he objected.

“Then we could invite Ensign Curtis along. I think he has eyes for Ms. Natoli.”

“Mzz?” said Spruance.

“Oh, believe me, sir,” Black sighed. “You’re going to hear all about it.”

Chapter 23

23

AMBASSADOR HOTEL, ROOM 522, LOS ANGELES, 1100 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

The room felt like a museum piece, or perhaps a bedroom display in a department store that hadn’t seen a paying customer in eighty years. Kolhammer’s nose wrinkled at the smell of stale cigarette smoke. It was everywhere, blending with the body odor of a thousand previous guests, and the diffuse reek of old socks, sour perfume, and greasy, broiled meat. He found it hard to believe that the past stank so badly. It was a sick joke, really. He’d never thought he could be nostalgic for blank glass towers and thousands of miles of ribboning freeway. But he was.

Gazing out of the window, across Wilshire Boulevard to a diner shaped like a derby hat, and beyond that to blocks of low-rise, brown brick art deco apartments and office buildings, Phillip Kolhammer felt his mind drifting again toward disintegration.

He’d arrived before dawn in a DeSoto, been driven into the basement parking area, and shepherded up to his room by a Secret Service agent. The drive in had been like a carnival ride at first. The DeSoto was the real thing, a great cavernous chunk of heavy metal with leather seats that looked like they could have been taken right out of the hotel lobby. But he quickly tired of his fellow passengers, who smoked the entire time, and of the steel springs that dug into his back. Not to mention the lack of anything he’d recognize as a decent suspension system.

He’d tried to grab a few hours’ sleep on the bed, but the uncomfortably dense and inflexible mattress felt wrong, and the air in the room tasted dead in his mouth.