The elevator helped. I sank down on the stool, head spinning.
I felt something stiff in my chest pocket, and suddenly I had a vivid recollection of Gaston giving me a card as we crouched in the dusk behind the hideout near Algiers, telling me that he thought it was the address of the Big Boss's out-of-town headquarters. I grabbed for the card, squinted at it in the dim light of the ceiling lamp as the car jolted to a stop.
"Östermalmsgatan 71" was scrawled across the card in blurred pencil. I remembered how I had dismissed it from my mind as of no interest when Gaston had handed it to me; I had hoped for something more useful. Now this might be the little key that could save an empire.
"What is it, Brion?" Barbro asked. "Have you found something?"
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe just a dead end, but maybe not." I handed her the card. "Do you know where this is?"
She read the address. "I think I know the street," she said. "It is not far from the docks, in the warehouse district."
"Let's go," I said, with a fervent hope that we were right, and not too late.
We squealed around a corner, slowed in a street of gloomy warehouses, blind glass windows in looming brick-red facades, with yard-high letters identifying the shipping lines which owned them.
"This is the street," Barbro said. "And the number was seventy-one?"