Page 15 of Last Violent Call
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“I’m getting too old for this. I think my knees creaked.”
Roma climbed through too, then plucked his jacket off the ledge. He strode toward the door, carefully opening it into the dark hallwayand peering out. “My knees have been creaking since I was fifteen.”
“It’s all that lying you did. Aged you prematurely.”
“All right, Saint Juliette. Enough about my past crimes before I start airing yours, too.”
Juliette stifled a laugh. They aired each other’s past crimes like it was the weekly radio programming. There was something freeing about finding humor in the matter, as if it proved that they had truly escaped what once held them captive from each other.
She grabbed Roma’s arm to peer through the door as well. The hallway looked empty.
“To the left.”
They slinked through the building, ears perked for movement. As expected, it was entirely empty, the clock on the wall moving its longer hand with a drowsy slowness. The main area of the operating center unfolded under the stream of moonlight, illuminating five rows of desks and headsets slung over the communication machines. Each machine had myriad wires extending from its plugs, some dangling loose and others installed tightly.
“Does no one make phone calls past midnight?” Roma wondered.
“It gets rerouted to a larger center,” Juliette answered, heading for the shelf she had spotted in the corner. “Remember how early the one in Shanghai’s Chinese jurisdiction would close?”
Roma looked confused, which meant he did not remember. “I think that was on your territory.”
“You didn’t watch what was going on in enemy territory?” She dropped to a crouch, scanning the thick logbooks stacked up on the shelf. “I watched yours.”
“I watchedyou.I didn’t care about what nonsense your territory was getting up to.”
Roma dropped down next to her, pulling out the nearest stack. Before Juliette could ask what their game plan was going to be, he simply set the stack on her lap, then pulled another onto his.
“This could take forever,” Juliette said, craning her head to take in the whole shelf.
“Wouldn’t they only keep a month’s worth of logs out here, given that the previous months have already been invoiced?” He flicked her shoulder. “Start scanning. It’s only September.”
Juliette took a deep, dramatic breath and flipped open the first logbook. As she moved up and down the columns by moonlight, there came a point when she was scarcely reading anymore; she waslookingin the plainest sense. Most locations in China were going to be a few characters—two or three, maybe four at most. “Fuzhou,” “Shanghai,” “Tianjin.” On the other hand, “Vladivostok” was a whopping seven characters, so she would pause at any column entry that was overly cramped.
The logbooks started to stack up on the floor. Three piles. Five. Ten.
“Ahh!”
Roma jolted, taken aback by her sudden cry. “What is it?”
Juliette hurried to turn the logbook around, stabbing her finger at one line toward the very bottom.
“A five-minute call to Vladivostok from Happy Inn. That is only twenty minutes away from here.”
It was a rural inn that Juliette knew by name because her cousin had mentioned it to her in the past. Celia hid out there sometimes between assignments if it was too much of a bother to go back to Shanghai in the short term. If they hosted Communists on occasion, then surely the word on the street cast the inn as a place to go for people who didn’t want to be found.
“That’s promising,” Roma said. “Let’s see if there are any more.”
They combined efforts, with Juliette passing Roma each book and Roma doing the briefest flip through the pages. By the time they had finished the whole September stack and started to shove the logs back onto the shelf, it had only been that one entry that proved useful.
“What’s the hour?” Juliette asked.
“Almost two o’clock,” Roma replied.
“So we have time for another stop?”
Roma was already moving. “We do as long as you keep up.”
