Shadow Dancers (25 page)

The long, weighty pause telegraphed the answer that followed. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to run them off myself.”

“Fine. Right you are.” He laughed feebly, wondering why he felt so whipped and hangdog. He hovered at the threshold, his gnarled, freckled hand patting the doorjamb. “Sorry the way I busted in on you like that. I thought you were a …”

“Thief,” she finished the sentence for him. “Yes. I imagine you would.”

Anger flashed in his eye, then receded abjectly. “Well, if you need me, I’m just down the hall.” He turned and started out, half-expecting her to call him back. But she didn’t.

HE’D BEEN WATCHING HIM FOR SEVERAL MINUTES
before he realized who it was. Thirty or forty-some-odd feet away at the corner of the street, throngs of people brushed past him, moving up and down in a blur of motion. He stood at the center of that blur of motion, distinct yet very much a part of it. In that peculiar half-light of dusk, amid all the swirl of people, Warren never had a clear, unimpeded view of him, but only caught glimpses of him in the momentary voids caused by the ever-shifting crowds. But simply from the way he stood, rigid and fixed, staring up at the window across the way, Warren knew without having to be told that here, at last, was his man.

He was young, from what Warren could see, approximately his own age, pallid and wispy, just as old Mr. Carlucci had described him, and doing precisely what the old man had said he always did on those evenings, along about dusk when he came to stand across the way from 860 Fifth and gaze up at the windows as if in silent homage at some shrine.

But as luck would have it, old Mr. Carlucci wasn’t even there. When Warren had reached the bench that evening, just a tad under an hour or so before, to take up his nightly vigil, he was surprised to see another uniformed man out front of 860, opening car doors, flagging cabs, doffing his cap, and greeting people. But that didn’t matter. Not one bit. Warren didn’t need Mr. Carlucci to confirm for him the identity of the slight, wispy character, staring up at the building at the end of the block.

Warren rose from the bench and moved slowly forward — not toward the person, but toward the curb, until at last he stood roughly abreast of him, nearly twenty feet off. From that vantage point, he had a shadowy view of the face in three-quarter profile. At that distance and in that light, what he could make of it was a boyish, slightly epicene face, just a bit too pretty. Buffeted by waves of people, crowds disgorged from buses, he stood there, staring up at the window, seemingly oblivious to everything about him. His white tennis sneakers half on, half off the lip of the curb, gave him the look of a diver on a board poised to take flight.

Warren stood motionless, waiting to see what his mysterious counterpart would do next. Periodically, he would lose visual contact with him entirely. During those brief moments a surge of panic would overtake him and he would inch forward trying to spot him again. Then, when the buses pulled away and the crowd thinned, the figure would reappear, standing beneath a streetlamp in the moth-haunted twilight of early fall, still staring fixedly up at the window across the way.

Warren had moved up within ten feet of the fellow, standing roughly parallel to him. Affecting lack of interest, he acted out his own little role, checking his watch frequently and staring up and down the avenue as if he were expecting someone. Outwardly calm, what he was actually experiencing just then was an explosion of not entirely unpleasant emotions. First and foremost, he thought it would be all anger. Here at last he stood virtually face to face with the man who’d had the gall (or was it more likely the imprudence?) to imitate him. As if he, Warren, could be imitated by anyone.

But then there was also the sheer exhilaration of having found him, of having rooted out the little bug from a city of millions, of having set snares with an unwitting doorman that had finally sprung. It was the one-in-a-million needle-in-the-haystack story, and he, Warren Mars, had brought it off.

All the while his brain raced with a dozen schemes for dealing with this upstart, Warren suddenly lost sight of him in a flurry of activity as several buses discharged passengers at the corner. Then just as suddenly, he picked him out again, just stepping from the curb as the light changed and starting east across Fifth Avenue.

Warren watched him go. He waited a minute beneath the shadowy overhang of ginkgo branches, time enough for the light to change and change back again. Then, with an eye fixed on the figure slouching slowly east, he dashed across the avenue and fell quickly into step behind him.

Darkness came on swiftly. The light of bistros and store fronts transformed the drab streets into gaudy bazaars where milling crowds pulsed, people shopped and marketed. Warren kept his eye riveted to the back of the fellow, moving east across town.

He was on his way home, Warren imagined, but the path he took was like the flight of a butterfly, random and impulsive.

Moving slowly, he loitered at shop windows here and there. Several times he circled around blocks, only to return to where he’d been only minutes before. Then, crossing the street and reversing himself, he’d emerge onto an avenue he’d already traversed.

With each ensuing zig and zag Warren’s fury mounted. A faint buzz had started in his ears, a familiar precursor of an old affliction of his. Then, all the tawdry colors of the night seemed to bleach into gray-white monotones. Funny things happened with his eyes. Objects grew small and distant the way they do when looking through the wrong end of binoculars.

They were now somewhere in the vicinity of York Avenue around 81st Street, moving east toward the river. The night was cool and a haze, fine and wet like something sprayed from an atomizer, heightened Warren’s discomfort. The fellow’s gait, which had been languid up until then, now quickened. He made a sudden, unexpected turn down 90th Street toward East End Avenue.

Fearing he might lose him inside the maze of buildings, Warren rushed to the corner only to see the back, then the heels of his quarry disappear into the entryway of an apartment house halfway down the block. He paused long enough to regain his composure. Then, he was pounding down the street, slowing as he approached the entryway, just in time to see the object of the chase locking a mailbox in the outer vestibule then turning to enter a narrow, dimly lit hallway.

Instead of following, Warren backed away from the entrance into a narrow alley, a thin gash between two buildings. He waited there, breathless in the fetid gloom where trashcans brimming with refuse suffused the air with a dank sweetness. In the next moment, he stepped back out into the street and peered up at the facade of the building, where lights glowed invitingly from within.

It was an old building, hard by the river, built in the late thirties or early forties — a six-story anachronism crammed in between a phalanx of glass/steel shafts of thirty stories or more.

There was no lock on the outer door to prevent anyone from entering freely, and Warren did so, a trifle tentatively, as if half-expecting his way to be barred by a doorman or some other impediment. At last, confident there was nothing of the sort there to stop him, he bustled forward with the brusque authority of someone who’d lived on the premises all of his life.

He had a perfect visual memory of the mailbox he’d watched his quarry unlock through the glass doors of the entryway. He went directly to it and read the name posted on the little card in the name slot. It was written in ink and had been smudged. Still, it was legible enough to make out.
F. KOOPS
, it read.

“Koops.” Warren nearly laughed aloud. He read it again just to be certain. It sounded like a joke to him. When he was a child, he used to read a comic strip about a cat called Koops. The apartment number assigned that name was 2G.

Up until that moment, Warren had no specific idea of what he had in mind. He had set out at first to trail a man to his home. It seemed to him that the mission was now completed and successful. He’d located his man (if Mr. Carlucci’s tip was right, and he had no reason to assume it wasn’t), so he could now assign both a name and an address to him. Without knowing precisely why, Warren moved into the shabby, airless little hallway, its walls splotched and peeling where large sections of plaster had broken away, and started up the stairs.

Apartment 2G was at the head of the corridor. It was a steel sheet door painted green and full of scratch marks carved into it by generations of marauding adolescents. Warren came to a halt before it. Again he read the name.
F. KOOPS
. This time it appeared just beneath the doorbell, written in precisely the same untidy fashion as on the mailbox, scrawled in ballpoint ink on a little ragged white card.

Somewhere down the hall (or was it merely in his head?) came the sound of a radio playing old forties big-band music. Permeating the hallway was the rank odor of meals cooked and consumed over four decades. It repelled him. Yet he continued to stand there, staring down at the tops of his shoes outlined against the broken black-and-white terrazzo floor, listening to the sounds of life inside. Why didn’t he leave before someone saw him there? He couldn’t say exactly. All he knew was that he’d enjoyed the hunt and now that it was over, he couldn’t quite bring himself to depart it.

Something remained to be done.

The big band music coming from somewhere down the hall was an old Tommy Dorsey recording of “Getting Sentimental Over You.” Without knowing the name of it, Warren recognized it at once. He’d heard it often as a child. It was one of his mother’s favorites. She’d played it over and over again on an old RCA Victrola and sometimes danced to it by herself. It was odd, he suddenly thought, that he could remember the song and the old phonograph and his mother dancing, but of her he had no visual memory at all.

In the next moment, he thrust a finger out. Then, leaning slightly forward from the waist, he poked the doorbell. It wasn’t a bell, actually, but something between a bell and a buzzer. When activated, it clattered like a dried bean inside a hollow gourd. Warren heard its brash rattle echo through the apartment. It made a hollow sound, suggesting vacancy beyond the door. Tommy Dorsey had stopped playing and a curious abrupt silence fell over the hall as if a switch had suddenly been thrown.

Warren waited, his ears strained, every muscle in his body coiled as if to spring, but on his face a vague smile flickered strangely. He had a keen image of the life on the other side of the door. It seemed to him that he could feel every nerve fiber of the person there, vibrating in perfect resonance with his own.

Warren pushed the bell again, this time less tentatively. The gourdlike sound rattled back at him from inside. Then he heard footsteps start, approaching at uneven speeds. A rustling, susurrant sound followed as of slippered feet across an uncarpeted floor. The footsteps came to a halt on the other side of the door; then he could hear someone breathing there. The exhalations, slow and regular, conveyed a sense of wariness. They were now less than a foot apart, with only the thin sheet of metal separating them.

In the next moment, Warren saw a disc in the center of the door slide upward. A thin pencil of light streamed through the tiny aperture. Then the light beam was suddenly eclipsed and Warren was aware of the movement of an iris and pupil regarding him from the other side. There was a pause and Warren heard a lock slip the bolt.

The door opened a crack and a chainlock stretched across the gap. Into that gap Warren jammed his foot and held it there, an action intended to be threatening. But if that were the case, the person on the other side of the door scarcely appeared to take note of it.

Warren had a glimpse of blond hair and a face in profile staring down at the floor. The face never once looked up or out at him. Nor did either of them attempt to speak. It was as though they were both content merely to remain that way, listening to each other’s breathing and take in, as it were, the measure of one another.

There was nothing more. They remained that way a few moments longer, Warren with his foot jammed in the door, the blond figure on the other side still staring down at the floor, the tinny, scratchy sound of the old Tommy Dorsey recording, which had started up again, wafting out from somewhere inside.

When Warren left, a few moments later, they had still not looked directly at each other, nor had they even exchanged one word. But none of that mattered, for by that time, their communion was complete.

Outside in front of the building Warren stood for a moment, cooling off under a streetlamp, the buzzing in his ears dying. Where moments before he could see only bleached-out grays and white, all the gaudy colors of the night now came flooding back into his eyes. He felt more himself. His head darted right and left, glaring up and down the street. Though it was cool, even chilly out, he was drenched in sweat. He felt dizzy and sick. After all the thrill of the hunt, the meeting itself had been a dismal disappointment. Nothing had been resolved. He’d been left with a gnawing sense of incompletion. He had not done what he was supposed to do, but in point of fact, he had no idea what he was supposed to do.

Fists clenched and plunged deep into his pockets, Warren lurched off into the night. With no particular destination in mind, he swung west. Moving slowly at first, then gradually gaining speed, he moved back crosstown. It was going on nine
P.M.
Moving west on 81st Street, Warren’s footsteps were slurred and halting. Occasionally, he’d stop dead in the street, mulling over the confusing events of the evening and his queer confrontation with Ferris Koops.

With the shank of the night still before him, Warren had nothing to do. He had no place to go and no one who expected him anywhere. He wasn’t at all tired. He had been before, while he trekked mile after mile after the fleeting will-o’-the-wisp figure of Koops receding into the waves of teeming crowds before him. He’d been exhausted then. But now he was wide awake. Agitation and adrenaline had transformed weariness into raw, twitching nerves. There was now a bounce to his lagging gait, and while he was going nowhere in particular, he went there at a fairly brisk clip.