19 Purchase Street (35 page)

Hell, Leslie thought, more courageous than ever, she could go head on, body on, one on one with any Harrie any damn day.

It was close to eight when she got to Gainer's apartment. A package had been left outside his door, which meant he probably wasn't there. He wasn't. And the inner drop Leslie felt made her realize how much she had been hoping he would be.

A
T
that moment a man paid off a taxi and got out on the northwest corner of Sixty-second Street and York Avenue. There was a slack in the flow of traffic both ways on the avenue and the man could have made it across easily, but he waited until the light was with him before crossing over.

He headed uptown.

He was in his forties, wearing a fairly expensive summerweight gray suit, a dark inoffensive tie and black lace-up business shoes with classic plain tips. He was rather short and slight, and it appeared that his strength would be mental. That impression was reinforced by his sparse dark hair and deep-socketed dark eyes and the chrome wire-rimmed glasses that bridged above his prominent nose bone.

The tasteful simple typography of the engraved business cards in a leather card case in his inside pocket said he was David E. Shapiro, M.D., his specialty was cardiology and his office address was a low number on East Seventy-ninth Street, as attested to on an American Medical Association identification card. His right hand carried a typical black Gladstone doctor's satchel initialed “D.S.” A stethoscope was not quite out of sight in his left pocket and in his shirt pocket, as might be expected, was an electronic summoning beeper.

It would have been wrong for him to be strolling. More in keeping was his swifter pace, his passing around others, conveying an important, if not critical, destination.

Dr. Shapiro.

On his way above Sixty-sixth Street he said a hello to the uniformed guard at the grillwork gates to Rockefeller University. As though he knew the man. He also glanced back off to his right to the Rockefeller Research Tower, the seventeen story structure that had been his second choice and was still his back-up location. He had become familiar with that building during the past week. The dining room area on the top floor had been an attractive convenience. The problem had been the angle, not impossible for him by any means, but not as good.

The Rockefeller complex ended at Sixty-eighth Street.

New York Hospital began there.

Dr. Shapiro went into the hospital's main entrance. Administrative offices on the left, dining room on the right, as he well knew. Evening visiting hours were in progress. Considerable activity in the lobby, most of it to and from the back of seven elevators directly ahead. The two on the end were expresses to the tower floors, ninth to twenty-third.

Dr. Shapiro waited for one of these. He removed his eyeglasses and polished them with a handkerchief while he waited. As though his eyes and their fragile reinforcements had already had a long tough day. When the elevator car came down and emptied, Dr. Shapiro was among the first of the few to enter it. Like most hospital elevators its doors were regulated to remain open longer than, say, office elevators. When they finally, slowly closed, the car was crowded. Dr. Shapiro detected the odor of marijuana in the clothing of the white-coated intern standing beside him. The intern got out on the tenth floor, bound for intensive care.

Dr. Shapiro fixed his eyes on the floor indicator above the doors. When seventeen lighted up and the elevator doors parted, he recalled that that was the tower floor where the late Shah Palavi of Iran had come trying not to die. The place would have been swarming and impossible then, Dr. Shapiro thought.

By the time the elevator reached twenty-three he was the only one aboard. He stepped out and walked down the corridor. Doors to various doctors' offices were along both sides. At the end of the corridor a different sort of door gave access to the stairway up to twenty-four, the top floor. He went up and continued on farther to where the stairwell ended with a short landing and another heavy metal encased door.

Out on the roof.

He immediately heard the pock-ta-pock and saw abrupt movements.

Two doctors at play on the tennis court there.

It was something not entirely unexpected by Dr. Shapiro. He stood by the wire mesh fence and watched them. The green of the court's artificial surface was faded and the canvas strip across the top of the net was dark gray with grime. The doctors were not youngsters, they were both red-faced from the heat and exertion, dripping sweat, their T-shirts soaked. Dr. Shapiro watched their legs, assumed from the way they seemed to need to lock at the knees so as not to give way that they wouldn't be at it much longer. Besides, the daylight was going. He wasn't worried about them leaving him some daylight. He didn't need much. He could do without any if that was how it went.

At eight-thirty the two doctors left the tennis court. They had hardly noticed Dr. Shapiro and were now too tired to pay any attention to him.

As soon as they were gone Dr. Shapiro walked around to check the rest of the roof. Hot air was being blown noisily from a huge air-conditioning exhaust vent. Four pigeons were waddling around the top of the elevator shaft housing.

He was alone.

He used a key from his pocket to lock the roof access door from the outside. He would not be disturbed. He went to a painted black metal standpipe near the northwest corner. The vertical pipe stood four feet above the roof surface. It was nine inches in diameter. Across its opening lay a twelve inch long strip of wood. A cord tied to the wood hung down a ways into the pipe.

Dr. Shapiro took up the strip of wood and the cord, pulled the cord up slowly, hand-over-hand until what it was tied to came up and out to him.

Something narrow and long, wrapped in chamois.

He undid the cord and the chamois.

A rifle.

A special 460 Wheatherby Magnum.

Dr. Shapiro's real name, behind all the layers of other names he had assumed over the years, was Matthew Stemming. He was careful now not to touch the weapon. Not until he had put on a pair of surgeon's gloves he'd taken from his bag. He then examined the Wheatherby, saw it was precisely what he had requested. Single shot, bolt action, a sling on it, the barrel longer by four extra inches. All identifying serial numbers removed. The last time he had used a Wheatherby similar to this had been three years ago in Moravia at seven hundred yards. He had spent most of his life in one part or another of Africa, and trying to recall his first gun was like trying to remember his first pair of shoes. The newer lightweight automatics were his favorites, such as the AR-80 and the Colt Commando. But then, for each situation there was a weapon best-suited. This one, this beautifully … as he saw it … machined Wheatherby with its slightly deeper seat in the chamber and extra rifling length, was best for this situation.

Stemming looked at the eastern sky and from the mauve going to inkiness of it guessed the time to be a little after nine. His watch that was never wrong told him eight after. Tomorrow night at this time this order would be filled and he would be back on Madeira in Funchal that much richer. But he shouldn't think of afterward until afterward, he told himself.

He went to the east edge of the roof, took off his suit jacket, turned it inside out and folded it. Placed it like a cushion on the raised ledge that ran around the perimeter. The nearest higher buildings to the south were nine blocks away, in the opposite direction five blocks away. No problem. Almost directly below was FDR Drive. Uptown traffic was backed up on it because an old Buick, broken down in the left lane around One hundred-tenth Street, had been just left there.

Stemming spread the chamois and laid the rifle on it. From his bag he removed a Herter telescopic sight with built-in automatic range finder and infrared capability. He rotated its focusing mechanism for the feel of it before attaching it to the rifle. It was his personal sight that he knew he could depend on. He had checked it out earlier that morning, corrected and set it for three hundred yards. The scope would not be discarded down the standpipe along with the rifle when the order was completed, which meant taking a bit of a chance, but the scope was worth it, more trustworthy than any person he knew.

He worked the bolt mechanism, cocked the rifle open and examined the breech, shoved the bolt closed and pulled the trigger. It was something he did not like doing, firing an empty weapon. The crisp hard metal click of it went against his nerves. There would be no more of that.

He went into his trousers pocket, as though digging for change, and came out with a single round of ammunition. He had hand loaded the cartridge and seated the bullet himself, as he always did when he was expected to be perfect at a distance. That way he could be absolutely sure what the bullet would do. This round had a fat case and not much neck. The case contained eighty-one grains of 4831 powder. The slug was a 210 grain spire-shaped Hasler. When fired, the charge would explode the bullet from the muzzle at forty-six hundred foot pounds per square inch. The bullet would be traveling at the rate of thirty-eight hundred and fifty feet per second or about twenty-eight hundred miles per hour. At three hundred yards some of its velocity would be lost, hitting at about two thousand miles per hour. More than enough power to stop, for example, a rhino. Stemming knew because he had done it with one such shot, although killing animals was not to his taste.

He opened the breech again. Inserted the round, ran the bolt forward. It was a familiar pleasure to feel the round slide home into firing position. Next, the trigger. It had two actions. The normal one that required the customary squeezing away of slack and another whereby the slack could be automatically taken up, thereby making the trigger sensitive to the slightest touch. The latter eliminated any chance of jerking a shot. Stemming set the trigger on sensitive.

Brought the rifle up.

Put his hand under and around back through the sling, so that it created tension against his wrist.

Placed his left elbow on his suit jacket on the ledge that was four feet high. He hardly had to bend, merely backed his lower half a little way from the ledge, with his legs spread solidly.

He was going to enjoy this. He thought how fortunate he was to be able to make a living doing something he enjoyed.

He pressed his cheek against the stock.

Snuggled the butt into his shoulder.

Sighted.

Got only sky.

Got one of the three gray, red and white painted three hundred foot tall smokestacks of Con Edison rising from across the river in Queens.

Got the Roosevelt Island apartment complex.

Got the windows of the top floor southernmost apartment. It was as though he were no more than twenty feet from them, couldn't possibly miss. But they had a slight orange flare on them from the last of the sun. As soon as that was gone …

Gainer came home with a limp and an apology.

He said he'd been playing soccer up in the Bronx where he usually played, Crotona Park.

“I didn't ask where you'd been,” Leslie said as though she couldn't have cared less, threw him a kiss from the couch.

He followed the flight of it straight back to her mouth.

“You've been drinking,” she said.

“A couple with the guys. God, I'm tired. I must have run thirty miles.”

“Too tired.”

His hesitancy said he was.

“Did you score?” she asked.

“Four.”

“That's a lot.”

“I feel better. Must have run a lot of things out of me. What did you do?”

“Maybe that's what you should have been doing all along, instead of walking.”

He pulled his shirttail out and unbuttoned his front.

It occurred to her that he had on his regular clothes, not his soccer-playing ones. She did not mention it. “I did a few chores,” she said. “Brought some things from my place, just touched base. We ought to stay over there more.”

“Whatever you say.” He hobbled into the bathroom, bunched up his shirt and crammed it into the already stuffed dirty-laundry basket.

Leslie told herself she would not examine the shirt later for any blusher or lipstick smudges, but her mouth requested another kiss and in the holding after it she sniffed his shoulders for a trace of perfume. “Did you hurt your leg bad?” she asked.

“It's probably broken.” He shrugged.

“Poor love.”

“You know how those guys are up there. Those who don't have soccer shoes or sneakers play barefoot but today a new guy named Manuel something, just got laid off by a house wrecking company, he played in his work shoes. Regular heavy leather shoes with a hunk of steel in the toes. I don't know how he could run like he did with them on, and dribble too. The guys threw him out of the game but he wouldn't stay out. Didn't matter to him which side he was on, he'd get the ball and go either way. You had to give him room. Once, I didn't.”

Leslie thought if he was making up all that it was too elaborate to cover a mere white lie.

“I didn't know whether or not there'd be a game today. I took my shorts and things along in a shopping bag just in case,” he said.

He wasn't perspiration sticky or anything, Leslie noticed.

“Took a shower at Santiago's apartment, left the shopping bag there with my stuff in it.”

“Why?”

“Forgot it. Just walked off and forgot it.”

Likely story. “Take off your trousers.”

“Leslie, I am honestly tired, down to my bones tired.”

She didn't doubt that. She smiled and went and got some
People Paste
from the bathroom medicine cabinet. It was a healing salve consisting of slippery elm and golden seal. She had used it to heal his Monet garden bullet graze.

Gainer took off his trousers.

His wounds would exonerate him, Leslie thought, about forty-sixty sure those he had wouldn't be visible. But there was this spreading bruise and awful gash a couple of inches below his left knee. She sat at his feet feeling contrite and foolish. Down there was where she belonged, she thought. She applied the People Paste with light, loving dabs. Then she plumped the cushion of the most comfortable armless chair and had him sit on it, drew a hassock up for his injured leg to rest on, turned on the television, went right past a Bette Davis movie to the sports channel for a pro football game, preseason.