FIFTY-TWO
I WAS ON AN R TRAIN. THE R TRAIN FOLLOWS BROADWAY to Times Square and then straightens a little until 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, where it hangs a tight right and stops at 59th and Fifth and then 60th and Lex before heading on under the river and east to Queens. I didn’t want to go to Queens. A fine borough, no question, but unexciting at night, and anyway I felt in my gut that the action lay elsewhere. In Manhattan, for sure. On the East Side, probably, and not far from 57th Street. Lila Hoth had used the Four Seasons as a decoy. Which put her real base somewhere close by, almost certainly. Not adjacent, hut comfortably proximate.
And her real base was a town house, not an apartment or another hotel. Because she had a crew with her, and they had to be able to come and go undetected.
There are a lot of town houses on the east side of Manhattan.
I stayed on the train through Times Square. A bunch of people got on there. For the minute it took to get up to 49th Street we had twenty-seven passengers on board. Then five people got out at 49th and the population started to decline. I got out at 59th and Fifth. Didn’t leave the station. I just stood on the platform and watched the train go onward without me. Then I sat on a bench and waited. I figured the agents at 22nd Street would have gotten on their radio. I figured cops might be heading for the R train stations in a long sequential cascade. I pictured them sitting in their cars or standing on the sidewalks, timing the train’s underground progress, tensing up, then relaxing again as they assumed I had passed by beneath them and was headed farther up the line. I pictured them staying around for five minutes or so, and then giving it up. So I waited. Ten whole minutes. Then I left. I came up from under the ground and found no one looking for me. I was alone on a deserted corner with the famous old Plaza Hotel directly in front of me, all lit up, and the park behind me, all dark.
I was two blocks north and a block and a half west of the Four Seasons.
I was exactly three blocks west of where Susan Mark would have come up out of the 6 train, right back at the beginning.
And right then I understood that Susan Mark had never been headed to the Four Seasons Hotel. Not dressed in black and ready for combat. No combat was possible in a hotel lobby or corridor or suite. No advantage was won by wearing black where there were lights. So Susan had been headed somewhere else. Directly to the secret location, presumably, which had to be on a dark, discreet cross street. But which still had to be in the original sixty-eight-block box, between 42nd Street and 59th, between Fifth Avenue and Third. Most likely in one of the upper quadrants, given the nature of the area. Either the upper left, or the upper right. One of two sixteen-block sub-boxes, maybe.
Which would contain what?
About two million different things.
Which was four times better than eight million different things, but not do much better that I started jumping for joy. Instead I headed east across Fifth Avenue and resumed my aimless walking, watching for cars, staying in the shadows. There were many fewer homeless people than down in the 20s, and I figured that lying in doorways would be more provocative than not. So I watched the traffic and prepared either to run or to fight, depending on who found me first.
I crossed Madison Avenue and headed for Park. Now I was directly behind the Four Seasons, which was two blocks due north. The street was quiet. Mostly flagship retail and boutique commercial, all closed up. I turned south on Park and then east again on 58th. Didn’t see much. Some town houses, but each one looked the same as all the others. Blank five- and six-storey brownstone façades, barred windows low down, shuttered windows above, no lights. Some of them were consulates belonging to small nations. Some of them were trophy offices or charitable foundations and small corporations. Some of them were residential, but broken up into multiple apartments. Some of them were definitely single-family homes, but all the single families appeared to be fast asleep behind locked doors.
I crossed Park and headed for Lex. Sutton Place was up ahead. Quiet, and very residential. Mostly apartments, but some houses. Historically the neighbourhood was centred more to the south and the east, but optimistic brokers had pushed its borders north and especially west, all the way to Third Avenue. The new fringes were fairly anonymous.
Ideal territory, for a hideout.
I strolled on, west and east, north and south, 58th, 57th, 56th, Lexington, Third, Second. I quartered a lot of blocks. Nothing jumped out at me. And no one jumped out at me. I saw plenty of cars, but all of them were barrelling happily from A to B. None of them was showing the characteristic hesitant half-pace of a car whose driver is also making visual sweeps of the sidewalks. I saw plenty of people, but most of them were far in the distance and entirely innocent. Insomniac dog walkers, medical personnel heading home from the East Side hospitals, garbage workers, apartment house doormen out taking the air. One of the dog walkers came close enough to speak. The clog was an elderly grey mutt and the walker was an elderly white woman of about eighty. Her hair was done and she was fully made up. She was wearing an old-fashioned summer dress that really needed long white gloves to be complete. The dog paused and looked at me mournfully and the woman took that to be a sufficient social introduction. She said, ‘Good evening.’
It was close to three o’clock, and therefore technically morning. But I didn’t want to appear quarrelsome. So I just said, ‘Hello.’
She said, ‘Did you know that word is a recent invention?’
I said, ‘What word?’
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It was developed as a greeting only after the invention of the telephone. People felt they needed something to say when they picked up the receiver. It was a corruption of the old word halloo. Which was really an expression of temporary shock or surprise. You would come upon something unexpected, and you would go, halloo! Perhaps people were startled by the shrillness of the telephone bell.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they were.’
‘Do you have a telephone?’
‘I’ve used them,’ I said. ‘Certainly I’ve heard them ring.’
‘Do you find the sound to be disturbing?’
‘I always assumed that was the point.’
‘Well, goodbye,’ the woman said. ‘It has been most pleasant chatting with you.’
Only in New York, 1 thought. The woman moved on, with her old dog by her side. I watched her go. She headed east and then south on Second Avenue and was lost to sight. I turned around and got set to head west again. But twenty feet ahead of me a gold Chevy Impala jammed to a stop in the gutter and Leonid climbed out of the back.