Free Fools for Lust by Maxim Jakubowski Page B

explanation for her actions, her disappearing act, all the obvious preparations she would have had to undertake to fool me in the way she did about her very existence. And neither was there a reason why the character in her novel did what she did to me, to him, the somewhat passive, seemingly spineless male protagonist.
    Because she thought she loved him, she wrote somewhere in the book.
    Which made the whole affair no easier to understand.
    The novel ended with a melodramatic shoot-out straight out of a hardboiled noir movie, in which most of the characters, including the two of us, perished. Gave things a sense of closure, but felt all wrong, though.
    I was tired. It was dark outside. I was puzzled. I was hungry.
    Another mystery confronted me now: The Curious Case of Katherine Blackheath . Or The Detective Who Always Drank Coca-Cola .
    The next morning I contacted the publicity department of the book’s publishers in an attempt to obtain information about the novel’s author. They promised something in the mail. All I received was a flimsy press release, which clumsily summarised the plot and promised oodles of promotion and reviews. About Callie, all it said was she lived in New York.
    When we were together, my unfulfilled fantasy had been to take her to America. I couldn’t quite picture her among the Manhattan hustle and bustle.
    I tried to get more specific details through a junior in the publicity department, but there was nothing of substance to be had. The manuscript had been bought from a literary agent, through his British counterpart, and the author had been unwilling to provide any biographical details, let alone a photograph.
    Within a week, I landed at Kennedy.
    As my cab raced down Van Wyck Expressway towards the inevitable traffic gridlock beyond the Midtown tunnel, I wondered what to do next.
    I’d never operated in a foreign country. The rules were different.
    Here, private dicks used guns.
    My hotel on West 44th Street was undergoing renovation and Polish builders tramped up and down the corridors, peppering the lift and lobby with white dust. The television set in the room wasn’t working. I called out for a Chinese meal. By the time the food arrived, it was lukewarm and under spiced. By now I had jotted down on a pad my course of action. The art of detecting is to be methodical, organised and, most of all, patient. But I’d never been a patient person. Maybe that had been my undoing with sweet Callie?
    Call the New York agent. Arrange an appointment. Have some bogus business cards printed up to present some sort of front. I’d brought over an assortment of glossy British magazines with some of the bylines I’d be borrowing for the occasion. I was confident few, if any, of the journalists involved would be known here. Small risk involved, really. Change travellers’ cheques for lower denomination dollar bills. For transport, tips and bribes where necessary. Tomorrow, contact the local agency with whom my outfit had sometimes collaborated on the technicalities of past cases involving transatlantic connections. Visit the New York Times cuttings library to assemble American reviews of the book which might provide information to the author’s whereabouts, in the likely absence of interviews. Determine how regulated British residents were. Was she here on a visitor’s visa or did she have a Green Card? Government offices were a weak link where the right amount of money spread around might earn me some valuable information.
    That would do to begin with.
    If, as I expected, this failed, the second angle of attack would involve more illegal methods to trace financial records at the publishers or the literary agency. This was problematic, though, as I still had no precise indication of her real name.
    The biggest risk would involve breaking into her agent’s offices to check their records.
    Not something I was looking forward to.
    But, if it came to that, I knew I