The Equalizer (16 page)

She looked at the Washington Square Arch, silhouetted against the night sky. Somehow she always found it comforting. Her gateway to her new life. There were two statues of George Washington in alcoves, one as a soldier, the other as America's first president. She thought of a British comedy magician she'd once seen with her mother in a nightclub in Moscow. She remembered his name was Nick Lewin and he'd been very funny. He'd said of George Washington: “A British soldier, went AWOL, did very well for himself.” Her mother had had to explain to her that AWOL meant “Absent Without Leave,” and then had patiently explained what “Absent Without Leave” meant, as if she was still a child of eight. But that was all right. It was her mother's gentle way. Natalya remembered the magician had taken a ring of hers, the one her mother had given her with the crest of a dragon on it, and he had
linked
her ring with one of his own. Amazing!

She looked over at the statue of Garibaldi in the square. She didn't know who he was—some Italian soldier. The big fountain was off. There was no one in the square, just a few passersby who crossed quickly through it. It felt very different this late at night. Like a moonlit oasis in the center of the great canyons. She loved it during the daylight hours. She would walk from school right to Washington Square Park and find a good spot on one of the benches. The fountain would be pluming water high into the sky, with rainbows dancing through the spray. When the tourists were thronging the square, it had a carnival atmosphere. She remembered one afternoon, about a month after she and her mother had arrived in New York—
before
the terrible thing that had happened to her—she'd been watching a street performer. He'd been riding on a unicycle, expertly maneuvering the one-wheel bike through the crowd. He'd stopped at the bench right in front of her and motioned to her to “hop on!” She'd shaken her head, but he'd grabbed her hand, and he'd been kind, and he'd assured her he would not let her fall off. She had climbed up onto his shoulders, and he'd held her in place with his hands and unicycled them all over the square, much to the delight of the tourists and the New Yorkers who'd applauded. He had cycled her back to her bench and when she'd climbed off she remembered she was laughing.

She didn't do that anymore.

She shouldn't have been sitting in her square so late, but she'd felt restless in their tiny apartment. Her mother didn't usually get home until 3:00
A.M
., and she had told her it might be closer to 4:00
A.M.
tonight. Something had changed at the club for her. Natalya didn't know what it was. Her mother was disturbed by it, but God forbid she should share anything important with her daughter. She wanted to protect her, Natalya understood that—but she
hadn't
protected her, had she? Anyway, she didn't
want
to be protected. She wanted to be
included
in her mother's thoughts and fears and dreams. But she wasn't. She was shut into her own world.

He approached the chess tables from behind her. He was always quiet when he moved, but she was in her own world. She did not even sense his presence. He glanced around the square. It was completely deserted at this moment.

He took the polythene baggie out of his overcoat pocket, unzipped it, and removed the moist cloth. Its smell was pungent, and that snapped her head around, but it was too late. He grabbed the back of her head with his left hand and thrust the chloroformed cloth over her nose and mouth. She struggled violently for perhaps four seconds, then slumped unconscious onto the chess table. Rachid appeared beside him. He picked the girl up and heaved her onto his shoulder. He ran out of the square, carrying her to where Salam waited in the Lexus on West Fourth Street with the engine running.

Bakar Daudov took in a deep breath of night air. Too bad that Katia had forced him into taking this extreme a measure. But it should be effective.

If not, he'd kill her daughter.

 

CHAPTER 12

The cabdriver who picked them up on Greene Street should have been appearing nightly at Gotham's Comedy Club on West Twenty-third. He told them jokes all the way up Broadway. There wasn't a lot of traffic on the street, but McCall wished he'd keep his eyes on the road instead of looking in the mirror to see if they were loving the routine. McCall held on to Margaret's hand tightly. She was wearing one of his overcoats and a Mets baseball cap pulled down low on her forehead. He'd bought a Mets cap because he liked underdogs. The Yankees didn't need his patronage. The cap cast a shadow on her face. The bruises from the beating J.T. had given her were still evident.

“You're not a New Yorker,” the cabbie was saying, with an accent that said he was, born and bred. “Father and daughter, I'm guessing, right? Where ya from?”

McCall looked at the girl.

“Golden Valley, outside Minneapolis. Maple Grove really, near Medicine Lake.”

“Where's Minneapolis again?” the cabbie asked.

“Minnesota.”

“Yeah, right. I never been farther than Brooklyn. Okay, so a tourist, just like you guys, he's tryin' to find the Empire State Building. He stops a New Yorker on the street and asks him the way. He stops another New Yorker a couple of blocks down and asks him the way. Finally he stops a guy on East Forty-fourth and says: ‘Can you tell me the way to the Empire State Building, or should I just go fuck myself?'”

McCall smiled, but it didn't matter, because the cabbie was laughing so hard at his own joke he wouldn't have noticed. Beside him, Margaret wasn't listening. She looked out the window at the drizzling rain, the skyscrapers shining through it, a few heavier drops spattering against the glass pane. McCall looked out. He could see the magnificent Lincoln Center on their left. Then the cabbie pulled off Broadway onto West Sixty-sixth Street.

“It's just up here on the right,” McCall said.

“Oh, yeah, I know where it is,” the cabbie said.

He pulled up in front of a twenty-story building that had the tarnished elegance of another era clinging to it. The facade had once been bright white, but now it was a dirty beige. The gilt was dull and fragments of stone were chipped off everywhere. The hotel sign had a picture of the Liberty Bell, with its distinctive crack, which McCall thought had become appropriate. The slim neon said:
LIBERTY BELLE HOTEL
. The neon was new. He remembered the sign being hand-painted in a flowing script. He'd liked that better. The cabbie shut off the meter and McCall leaned forward to pay him. The cabbie was shaking his head, looking up at the crumbling facade.

“I can take you to a hotel on Amsterdam and Eighty-eighth, not expensive, marble floors, doorman in white gloves, the whole nine.”

“This has always been my favorite hotel. It was once
the
place to stay in New York City.”

“Yeah, maybe when the Dodgers moved out of Ebbets Field.”

Margaret got out of the taxi. The cabbie turned around.

“She
is
your daughter, right?”

“She might as well be,” McCall said, paying him. “It's not what you think.”

“Have a good night.”

McCall climbed out after Margaret. The cab pulled away into the sparse traffic. McCall swept the street, not that he expected to find enemies. Old habits. There was virtually no one out walking this late in the rain. He took Margaret's arm and they moved through the glass doors of the Liberty Belle Hotel.

The lobby also held echoes of a glorious past, whispering in the corners where heavy armchairs sat, their cushions sagging. There were big ornate couches, in similar need of repair. There were watercolors of New York on the walls, but they'd faded over time, as if they were slowly receding out of their frames. There were a lot of tall plants that looked healthier than the two old people who sat on one of the couches, holding hands. They were talking softly to each other, their words muted. There was a musty smell, like wood smoke and mothballs. A staircase swept up to the second floor. The whole lobby looked like it had been soaked off a furniture calendar, circa 1940. But the woodwork gleamed as if it was polished regularly and the Persian carpets didn't look as if Aladdin had dropped them off.

McCall and Margaret moved deeper into the lobby. The elevator door to their left pinged open. That was new also, McCall noted. Very modern. The one he remembered was a cage elevator. You had to pull the door and gate open and it shuddered up like getting to your floor was going to be an adventure. An old woman in a fur coat and house slippers led a white poodle on a leash out of the elevator. She was talking animatedly on her cell phone. Margaret had taken off the Mets cap and shaken out her hair. The overcoat was open, revealing the Red Sox T-shirt and painted-on jeans. The old woman glanced at her a little disapprovingly as she navigated the dog around the heavy furniture.

They walked up to the old teak reception counter, which was also polished to a lustrous shine. There were teak cubbyholes behind it that had once housed keys, but were now pigeonholes for guest messages. There was a large gray machine beside a computer that McCall was sure processed the square digital room keys. Some progress you just couldn't stop.

No one was behind the reception counter. There was an old-fashioned antique bell on it, sitting incongruously next to the Dell computer. McCall hit the top of it and the bell rang. You could have heard it out in Central Park. A scuff of feet from an office to the right, and then a man shuffled into view behind the counter. He wore dark slacks and a blue blazer with the name
LIBERTY BELLE HOTEL
stitched on to the breast pocket. His hair was still brown, but shot through with gray, and thinning. He was probably in his early seventies, very thin, and there was something else about him—an alertness, a quickness of the watery brown eyes in the long face. His breathing was a little asthmatic. And he was clearly surprised to see his next guest.

“Robert McCall,” he said softly.

“Does that shuffle really fool anyone, Sam?”

“Bad guys see an old man, out of shape, not walking so good, breathing you can hear a mile away, they let down their guard a little. Gives me an edge.”

“You don't need that edge anymore.”

“You always need it. You never know when ghosts from your past are going to walk into your lobby. What do you want, McCall?”

McCall didn't answer. The old woman finished her cell phone call, gave Sam a wave, and wrestled the poodle to the front doors. In the mirrors behind the counter, on either side of the pigeonholes, McCall watched her leave. No one came in after her.

Sam Kinney glanced over at Margaret. “We don't rent by the hour.”

“You know me better than that, Sam. But I do need a room for the young lady.”

“Who is she?”

“You interrogate all of your guests?”

“Need to know.”

“She's a friend,” he said.

“You don't have friends, McCall. You know why? Because they don't live very long once they shake your hand or crawl out of your bed.”

McCall reached out like lightning across the counter for the older man, grabbing his wrist, holding him tight.

“Your reflexes used to be faster.”

“Not against you. Mind letting go?”

McCall let him go.

“I need a room,” McCall said again, more quietly. “Low floor. Overlooking the park, if you've got one.”

Sam rubbed his wrist. “We got a lot of empty rooms overlooking the park. The Plaza stopped sending their overflow to us in 1959. But we still get a lot of conventions here. You used to be able to control that temper. Guess a lot of things have changed over the years for both of us.”

His fingers flew over the computer keyboard. McCall noted they shook with a small palsy tremor. A credit-card-like key spit out of the gray machine. Sam slipped it into a cardboard sleeve with
LIBERTY BELLE HOTEL
stamped on it.

“Room six-oh-two. You got luggage?”

“No luggage.”

He handed the credit-card-like key to Margaret. “We don't have room service this late, I just closed the kitchen, but you want something, call down to the front desk. I can usually rustle up whatever a guest needs.”

She nodded.

“You go up, but wait for me outside the room,” McCall said. “Don't go into it.”

She nodded again and walked a little unsteadily to the elevator. She tapped the button. The door slid open, she walked inside, and it closed. McCall watched the light heading up to number six. Sam Kinney came around the reception counter.

“Tell me you're not banging her.”

“Too old for me?”

“She in trouble?”

“Not right now.”

He saw that the elevator light had hit number six and stayed there.

“I don't want any trouble here, McCall, I'm retired. I like peace and quiet. I like old Mrs. Gilmore and her fat poodle and the other Algonquin denizens that live here. I'm too old for guys in dark coats with guns to come in looking to blow your head off.”

“I can go somewhere else.”

Sam sighed. “No, you can't.”

“I don't expect you to have my back, Sam. But if bad guys come into the hotel looking for her, call me.”

He took a card off the desk, edged in gilt. He saw the name S
AM
K
INNEY
—M
ANAGER
on it. He wrote his cell phone number on the back of the card.

“You're the night manager?”

“And usually the day manager. I don't sleep a lot. I heard through the grapevine that you'd resigned.” McCall said nothing. “Control was okay with that? He hasn't sent some young turk to prove he's got a bigger dick than yours? That he can take out a member of the old guard?”

“They sent someone, but not to kill me.”

“Doesn't mean they won't.”