someone to head over and check whether he’s home.”
“They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.”
I said, “Just do it.”
Jake said, “Come with me.”
I shook my head. “I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.”
“You’ll never find them.”
“They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.”
We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop. I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half-expecting buried deep inside the Daily News . The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.
I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge . Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.
I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.
Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I had never been attacked personally. Which was no big surprise. To make me a potential victim, the world’s population would have to be reduced all the way down to two. Me and a mugger, and I would have won. Now Eighth was as safe as anywhere else. It bustled with commercial activity and there were people all over the place. So I didn’t care exactly where the three guys approached me. I made no attempt to channel them to a place of my choosing. I just walked. Their call. The day was on its way from warm to hot and sidewalk smells were rising up all around me, like a crude calendar: Garbage stinks in the summer and doesn’t in the winter.
* * *
They approached me a block south of Madison Square Garden and the big old post office. Construction on a corner lot shunted pedestrians along a narrow fenced-off lane in the gutter. I got a yard into it and one guy stepped ahead of me and one fell in behind and the leader came alongside me. Neat moves. The leader said, “We’re prepared to forget the thing with the coat.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Because I already did.”
“But we need to know if you have something that belongs to us.”
“To you?”
“To our principal.”
“Who are you guys?”
“I gave you our card.”
“And at first I was very impressed by it. It looked like a work of art, arithmetically. There are more than three million possible combinations for a seven-digit phone number. But you didn’t choose randomly. You picked one you
“They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.”
I said, “Just do it.”
Jake said, “Come with me.”
I shook my head. “I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.”
“You’ll never find them.”
“They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.”
We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop. I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half-expecting buried deep inside the Daily News . The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.
I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge . Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.
I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.
Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I had never been attacked personally. Which was no big surprise. To make me a potential victim, the world’s population would have to be reduced all the way down to two. Me and a mugger, and I would have won. Now Eighth was as safe as anywhere else. It bustled with commercial activity and there were people all over the place. So I didn’t care exactly where the three guys approached me. I made no attempt to channel them to a place of my choosing. I just walked. Their call. The day was on its way from warm to hot and sidewalk smells were rising up all around me, like a crude calendar: Garbage stinks in the summer and doesn’t in the winter.
* * *
They approached me a block south of Madison Square Garden and the big old post office. Construction on a corner lot shunted pedestrians along a narrow fenced-off lane in the gutter. I got a yard into it and one guy stepped ahead of me and one fell in behind and the leader came alongside me. Neat moves. The leader said, “We’re prepared to forget the thing with the coat.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Because I already did.”
“But we need to know if you have something that belongs to us.”
“To you?”
“To our principal.”
“Who are you guys?”
“I gave you our card.”
“And at first I was very impressed by it. It looked like a work of art, arithmetically. There are more than three million possible combinations for a seven-digit phone number. But you didn’t choose randomly. You picked one you
Similar Books
