In the Night Room (14 page)

(I have to go back and insert some of this. It belongs in the book, not my journal.)

Anyhow, after all of that, Tom’s murder in the next chapter should come as a real shock.

The reader should be anticipating some trouble at the Mayflower, I’m still not quite sure what, but I think it could begin with Monday morning and their exit from the new hotel. Tom H. is still present, of course. He wants to do everything he can to help Willy through what strikes him as a great, paranoid confusion, and if that involves shifting her from hotel to hotel, so be it, he’ll shift with her and hold her hand. Along the way he’ll do his damnedest to talk her into getting help.

They take the stairs, I think, although Tom says she’s being absurdly overcautious.

They make their way down to the lobby, carrying their bags (Willy’s bags), Willy starting at every noise and clutching Tom’s arm whenever a door opens or closes elsewhere on the staircase. When they reach the bottom, they patrol through the lobby and turn the corner to the café. Willy abruptly comes to a stop, grabs his arm, and nods her head back toward the lobby, where an arm encased in a plaster cast and a wide, straight back that could well belong to Roman Richard Spilka is vanishing through an arch.

So the first thing Tom does is walk her to the back of the café and through the service doors into the kitchen. It’s relatively calm in there, after breakfast and before lunch, and Tom explains that his friend Willy here has to hide from someone she doesn’t want to see, someone like a stalker, while he goes and deals with the situation, is that okay?

“Certainly, sir, and while your friend is under our protection we’ll show her how to make a really good veal Bolognese, one of our lunch specials today.” And “Don’t worry, she is in good hands, sir.” The chef and line cooks are happy to have Willy in their realm. Or not. It doesn’t matter very much; all I have to do is get her in the kitchen so that she can sneak out by a service door.

Tom says that he will go out and hail a cab. In the meantime, Willy should wait at the street entrance to the kitchen, and when she hears his taxi honk its horn, race out of the building and scramble into the cab. Then he’ll figure out somewhere else to go. His place first, probably.

Out into the lobby he goes. Uh-oh, Roman Richard Spilka is planted on a couch, watching both the elevators and the hotel’s entrance. Spilka gives him a glance and goes back to waiting for Willy. Tom checks out. (It’s not important, but he’d used his credit card to check in, and they had called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hartland.) Spilka ignores him.

Out on the sidewalk, Tom sees a languid-looking blond man in a silk sweater the color of a robin’s egg engaged in deep conversation with a pair of uniformed policemen. If the man in the sweater is Giles Coverley, and Tom is pretty sure he is (for one thing, this dude looks exactly like he’d be named Giles Coverley; and for another, he matches her description of the guy more closely than an Identi-Kit image), Willy was all wrong about Giles being asexual—it’s obvious to Tom that he’s queer as a coot. Far more to the point, the cops are on
his
side, which probably means they are on Faber’s. Maybe Faber is already back in America, back in New York! All of a sudden, the stakes are much higher. Tom thinks he’d better take Willy to the airport and get her on a flight to where, South America, as Mrs. Hartland? No, she’d need her passport, and flights are out of the question because you can’t get on a plane these days without showing your driver’s license to everybody but the pilot.

The cops and Giles Coverley glance at Tom without paying him any more attention than did Roman Richard. He steps up to the curb and raises his arm. It’s pointless, there isn’t a cab in sight, but the three men near the hotel’s entrance make him nervous. He keeps imagining that they are staring at his back. He checks over his shoulder while trying to be nonchalant, but there’s no way to be nonchalant and peer over your shoulder at the same time. When he looks back up the street, four cabs are coming toward him, three of them containing passengers and the fourth with its off-duty lights glowing.

The cabs go by and sweep into Columbus Circle. Tom looks back up the street and finds that two blocks away an old woman with a three-footed metal walker has appeared out of nowhere and parked herself, right arm raised, on the corner of Sixty-third Street. She is about four foot ten, and the top of the walker comes up to her breastbone.

He says, “Damn.”

When he looks back over his shoulder, the policemen conferring with Giles Coverley take a moment to inspect him. Their interest still seems merely reflexive, but it spooks him. He’s let them know that he is nervous, impatient, under stress, and consequently they have filed his image away in their mental circuits. He’s sure that the panic radiating out of him will begin to tickle the cops’ antennae in about a second and a half.

The ancient female midget two blocks up lowers her arm out of weariness. Arm up, arm down, it makes no difference, because there are no empty cabs rolling down Central Park West. If Tom could summon a taxi for the midget, he’d do it in a nanosec, almost as much for her sake as for his, but mostly to eliminate his competition.

Now he’s afraid to look back and check out the policemen, but in a way he’s also afraid not to, in case they might be strolling toward him.

Would you mind opening that bag, sir?

Excuse me, sir, but we couldn’t help noticing that we seem to make you uncomfortable.

He can’t find a taxi and he’s afraid to look back—it’s time to move along, Sunny Jim. With only the smallest of glances at the cops and Giles Coverley, who seems to be wrapping things up and on the verge of rejoining the bouncer-type guy in the cast, Tom spins around, glances at his watch to suggest that he is a traveler looking for a ride to La Guardia or JFK, and marches down past the front of the hotel, crosses the street, walks straight past the much grander entrance to the Trump International Hotel, and turns right at the traffic-jammed edge of Columbus Circle. There he reverses direction and walks north on Broadway, backward, with his arm held up in the air. Flowing past him is a constant stream of private cars, interspersed with black Town Cars bearing wealthy gentlemen to their mysterious destinations, and many, many taxicabs charging uptown in search of handsome tips.

Sixty-second Street runs one-way in the wrong direction, west toward the Hudson River, not east toward Central Park. But halfway up the block a small miracle occurs, that of the arrival at the curb about ten feet south of his position of a new, SUV-like taxi, a Toyota Sienna with sliding doors, from one of which emerges a beautiful but stern young woman cradling the most bored-looking pussycat Tom Hartland has ever seen. The light goes on even before the door slides shut, and Tom trots forward, smiling. Both the beautiful young woman and the pussycat frown at him.

By now, he hopes, the cooks will have conducted Willy to the kitchen’s back entrance.

The young woman completes closing the door even while Tom approaches, but she does not retreat. Nor does she alter the expression on her face, which hovers between dismay and disdain. The cat hisses, and squirms in her arms.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m in your way, aren’t I?”

“Just a bit,” Tom says. “Do you mind?”

The woman moves backward. As Tom opens the door, he is aware of her continuing scrutiny. She’s still looking at him through the window when he has pulled himself onto the seat and closed the door.

“Go down Central Park West and turn right on Sixty-first Street,” Tom says to the driver. The cab does not move. Tom waits, willing himself not to say, “Come on, come on.”

They finally get through the light at Sixty-second Street, only to become mired in a tangle of taxis, cars, and moving vans oozing up Broadway with the alacrity of a slug crawling down a garden path. Tom pounds his knees, knowing the driver is not to blame. The people on the sidewalk move faster than the traffic.

These people make him feel uneasy, too. Some of them may be part of the plot against Willy; they may have been hired by Mitchell Faber to act as scouts and lookouts; Faber could have saturated the neighborhood with people hired to capture his runaway fiancée. It’s too much, it’s dizzying. Suddenly, Tom feels far out of his depth: he should be back in his apartment, working away at his new book about Teddy Barton and the suspicious goings-on in and behind the Time & Motion building on Fremont Avenue, Haleyville’s commercial center. Teddy is getting close to understanding why Mr. Capstone was digging in his backyard at 11:00
P.M.
, and after he and Angel Morales sneak into the Time & Motion building and pick Mr. Capstone’s lock, everything is going to come together in a hurry, meaning that in about six weeks, Tom will be able to send the 300-odd pages of
The Moon-Bird Menace
to his editor. Yet he must do whatever he can for Willy; he has to snatch her out of that hotel before Coverley and the guy with the broken arm get their hands on her. He must pull her out like a tooth, in one swift, powerful movement.

He’ll have to get her out the service door, across the sidewalk, and into the taxi when Faber’s goons and the police are looking in another direction. He should have set up a diversion, that’s what clever Teddy Barton would have done, but he hadn’t had enough time to plan anything, and now it is too late. He should never have left Willy’s side. Instead of racing off to get a cab, he should have taken Willy over the rooftops or through the Mayflower’s basement, or swapped clothes with two of the cooks and escaped that way.

Finally, the cab reaches Sixty-fourth Street, turns the corner, and navigates past a row of double-parked trucks. Next comes a heap of broken glass and twisted metal that appears to have fallen from the sky. That can’t be true. It looks a little like it used to be a car. The men in dark suits and actual hats standing around it could easily be from Roswell or Quantico. These men check out the cab as it slides past. Tim is intensely aware of their scrutiny, which has the same stony neutrality as the masklike gaze of the woman carrying the inert pussycat. Such neutrality does not seem really neutral to him. It’s like watching people cross an item off a list they have in their heads.

All right, there’s that one, let’s draw a line through his name.

It seems to him that the men examining his taxi have grouped themselves together to conceal the twisted heap behind them.

The driver turns onto Central Park West and says, “Did you see that, sir?” He is an Indian, and he has a musical accent. “I can promise you one thing, that you will never read a word about it in the newspapers. And yet it is an event I believe that would be of serious interest to a great many people in this country.”

“That’s the truth,” Tom says. “Keep going until you get to Sixty-first Street, then turn right and go about thirty feet, I’ll tell you exactly where. Stop and honk your horn. We’re picking somebody up.”

“Because do you understand why, sir? Because it is a conspiracy of silence!” the driver tells him. “I was born in Hyderabad, in India, sir, and I came to this country twenty-one years ago, and neither in India nor in this country are things what they appear to be. I am telling my wife every day, ‘What you read in your newspaper is not true!’ ” He looks at Tom in the rearview mirror. “There will not be much waiting time, I hope.”

“I hope there won’t be any,” Tom says.

“Now, those men we saw were government officials,” the cabbie says. “But the names used by such men are never their real names. And when they die, it is as if they have disappeared completely from the face of the earth. What a thing it is, to live a life of lies and pass from the earth unrecognized. But the evil that they do amongst us in this life is repaid a thousandfold in the next.”

In front of the Mayflower, the sidewalk is completely empty.

“Okay, here’s where we turn,” Tom says.

“Do you think I do not remember that you wanted to turn right on Sixty-first Street? Do you think I have forgotten that I am to stop and honk my horn?” While he is making the turn, the cabbie twists sideways and glares at his thoughtless passenger.

“No, sorry,” Tom says, scanning the street before them. Way up the block, a couple of guys he cannot quite make out are talking in front of one of the Florentine-style apartment buildings. The usual knot of pedestrians streams across the intersection with Broadway. A northbound patrol car zips by in a flash of white. The conditions look about as good as they could be.

“Where is it, exactly, that I am to stop, sir?”

Tom is keeping his eye on the dark, scratched-up surface of the service door. He imagines Willy crouched behind it with her ear cocked, fearful that he will never return.

“Okay, stop,” Tom says.

“And I am to honk my horn now?”

“Yes,” Tom says, a little more loudly than he intends.

The cabbie taps his horn, which emits a brief blatting noise.

“That’s not much of a sound,” Tom says. “Do it again.” He slides open the heavy door and steps down out of the cab. He leans over and speaks through the opening he has made. “I mean it. Do it again.”

The driver really leans on his horn, and the service door flies open. Out onto West Sixty-first Street tumbles Willy Patrick, scrambling to stay on her feet. She is carrying her suitcase and the duffel, and her white shirt glares like a flag.

“Oh, thank God,” she says. “I was so
worried.
” She wobbles toward him. “Did you see them? Are they still around?”

“We’d better hurry.” He grabs her arm to hold her steady, and reaches down with his other hand for the suitcase. The cab driver is watching all of this with glum, gathering suspicion.

“You won’t believe this,” Willy says, “but they really did teach me how to make veal Bolognese in there.”

Tom pitches the money bag into the back of the cab and waits for Willy to step up and in. Now the cabbie is looking straight ahead and pointing toward the windshield.

When Tom looks up the street, he sees the two men who had been standing in front of an apartment entrance running pell-mell toward them, the larger of the two reaching under his jacket for what is probably not his wallet. It’s an awkward business, because the man has a cast on his right arm, and he is forced to use his left hand, which makes reaching his holster difficult.