Woman in the Window (2 page)

She wandered through the empty rooms. The agency occupied most of one floor in an old, handsomely decorated office building in midtown, six stories with a common street-level lobby and a rickety elevator, self-operated. A design studio, two sets of lawyers, a trade commission from an eastern European satellite—and the Danmeier Agency. It was the kind of building that constituted its own neighborhood, was only a couple of steps from landmark status, and operated on the honor system. Old Tim, the doorman, had once been knocked down nine times in a single round; when he came to, he had a vaguely English accent and longed to be a doorman. He came with the building and there was always the chance that he might actually be on duty. His hours were erratic at best and no one had the nerve to upbraid him. Lobby security never seemed a crucial issue.

Natalie loved the comfortable jumble of rooms, the framed dust jackets, the stacks of manuscripts, the sagging, overburdened bookcases on tatty oriental carpets. Home away from home, that was what the agency meant to her, and that was fine, the way it had to be for her now. Work was your life, life was your work. You worked, you coped, and if there was the time and the opportunity … then, maybe, you could love. But work was what you could count on. It made sense. You could—what was the jargon of the day? Validate? Sure, you could validate your life with your work. When you asked people to define themselves, what did they say? They told you what they did for a living. Well, she was an agent, she worked, she coped. Whee.

Turning off lights one by one, she giggled. The champagne was getting to her. A wee bit. She didn’t drink much, that was the problem. … Giggle.

Back at her desk, the contract lounging in a puddle of soft light, she drained the last bit from the bottle into her cup. The roses were beautiful, still dewy from the florists spray, darkly red, like blood in Italian vampire movies. So sweet of Tony. But she didn’t want to start thinking about Tony. That was where the wild things hid, danced, grinned inanely at her. Tony was a memory, had damn well better stay that way. Memory Lane.

She dictated a brief letter into her machine.

“Dear Mr. Linehan. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to tell you that the contracts from Hewitt and Sons have arrived and I am reviewing them. You will have them to sign in a few days; a check for twenty-five hundred dollars will follow shortly. …”

Tomorrow she’d tell Jay. She’d beaten his estimate on the advance but she hadn’t wanted to rub it in today. It would be fun tomorrow, though.

The beautiful part was that it truly did give her more pleasure than the coup that had her spread all over
PW.
You had to keep things in perspective, treasure your integrity. Damn straight. It was what made you an individual, right?

She toasted her integrity. Her individuality.

Which was when she should have packed it in and gone home. Instead, she got up and went to the window.

She never understood what had beckoned her to the window.

B
EYOND THE TALL THIRD-FLOOR
windows the New York cityscape had darkened to a December evening, then blossomed into the glitter and sparkle that was the city’s trademark. Below her the crowds had begun thinning along Madison Avenue. The light changed at Fifty-third and the headlights began moving again, poking through the thin, slanting winter rain. Across the avenue, the flow of pedestrians leaving work, going to assignations over cocktails in corner bistros, catching a bite to eat before heading across town toward the theater district, straggling home after a wearying day—across the avenue the flow of New Yorkers moved past the endless upward thrust of new, grimly skeletal construction that punctuated each block. Men stopped even in the rain to peer through the peepholes cut into the wooden fencing, staring at the quiet earthmovers, watching the arcs, pink and orange, of the helmeted welders up among the girders.

She had watched the Lossin Chemical building, directly across from her window, rise slowly from the deep square excavation pit, foot by foot, taking its shape—more glass and steel, more boring sameness. As she was glancing vaguely at the construction site, her mind elsewhere—at rest, relaxed—she became aware of a curious movement at the corner of her vision. Erratic. Darting.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, like a cry of fire in a crowded room, there he was. And he was all wrong, didn’t fit.

He was running. A belted trench coat. A cloth cap pulled low against the rain. He darted among the shining black umbrellas. A bus bore down, he dashed in front of it, across the street, rain-slick with reflected lights reaching toward him on the wet pavement. A taxi braked, skidded, honked; he was momentarily lost among the umbrellas and the scaffolding arched above the sidewalk. It was New York: he didn’t even cause a head to turn.

But from the window where she stood he was caught in a framework. Natalie continued looking, picking him out again, now entirely alone against the wooden fence blocking off the construction site behind him. She was struck by the peculiar feeling that she was the only person in the world watching him: it was just the two of them, the situation almost embarrassing in its intimacy—she was watching him in some private act, but she couldn’t look away.

What the hell was he doing?

She gasped, leaned forward: he had taken out a gun. Quite clearly she saw it, was certain, a gun, a pistol or a revolver or an automatic; she didn’t know one kind of handgun from another, but it was a gun. He had pulled it from his trench-coat pocket, stood looking at it as if posed, like Jean-Louis Trintignant in that indelible moment in
The Conformist,
as if he didn’t quite recognize it and was undecided. … Then in a sweeping motion, his arm held stiffly, he lofted the gun up and over the poster-covered wooden fence.

She squinted into the night. Rain blew across the window.

But, no, it had been a gun. She was sure. …

The man stood frozen, looking around as if he expected to be caught in the act, set upon by burly cops and dragged off with nightsticks tattooing his skull. His lace was shaded beneath the bill of the cap. The trench coat—she was registering it all—looked like one of the five-hundred-dollar Burberry’s with the tan-wool button-in lining. Maybe … But she couldn’t imagine she’d been wrong about the gun. … A gun? My God.

It was a New York moment. Strange. Weird.

Utterly objective, yet desperately personal.

Natalie Rader was in her office. A man with a gun was standing below in the street. He had thrown the gun over a fence, into a construction site. An anecdote. Something to tell her friends.

Until the man looked up.

What did he see, she wondered later, a random design of lighted windows in the building across the street? One with a woman silhouetted by the desk lamp behind her … a woman staring down at him.

He didn’t move. Returned her stare. Their faces in shadow. A man and a woman sharing the unexpected, naked moment. The sinister moment that seemed to stretch out forever.

Crazy. She felt as if there was an unmistakable eye contact. An invisible, taut connection stretched between them, cutting through the wind and rain.

And she was very frightened.

She stumbled back from the window, still watching him, feeling for the desk lamp. Knocking the empty champagne bottle off the desk, she heard its thud on the carpet as she hit the switch on the base of the lamp, plunging the room into blackness. She was out of breath, back at the window, standing to one side peering down.

He watched as if he could see her afterimage in the darkened pane of glass.
He knows, he’s seen me and he knows I’ve seen him. Oh, Christ …

Slowly he pushed his hands into the pockets of his trench coat. He glanced to either side. No one paid him the slightest attention. He looked back at the window. She cringed, as if she were naked before him, even in the dark window.

Then he moved across the street toward her.

She watched him coming, saw him pass from view beneath the overhanging ledge outside her window.

Had he gone off down the street?

Or was he coming into her building?

Natalie backed away from the window. Her hands were shaking and her breath was catching in her chest, coming hard. She felt the fine sweat breaking out, the loss of strength in her legs, the pressure in her chest, the giddiness that meant her brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

The fear was building in her, she could taste it, like a drain in her belly backing up, sickening her, robbing her of strength and will. Son of a bitch. She hated it, fought it with a string of dirty words, trying to shock herself out of it and bring her back to reality. But the man was real—
sure, sure, Tiger, but you’re acting like a nut case. …

But what’s so crazy about watching some guy throw a gun away and seeing him watch you, come toward you when you’re alone in an empty office and he knows where you are and you’re scared? That’s crazy?

Just go lock the door.
The damn door was always locked during business hours, requiring a buzz and an identification. But not today. Not with the deliveries for the party and the people dropping in to share the moment with her.

If you’re so afraid, Nat, just go call Lew … call Tony … call Jay … someone will come and get you
—

“I will not call anybody,” she said aloud. “I won’t do it!”

She began muttering to herself as she went to the closet and took out her own trench coat, wrapped her muffler around her throat, grabbed her briefcase. “Don’t forget the Linehan contract,” she whispered to herself, “and the first six chapters of the Crawford manuscript … and your umbrella.”

She dug around in her briefcase for the ancient Valium bottle, a souvenir from the worst days with Tony. “Irrational terror-stricken woman,” she said to herself. There were a couple inches of dead champagne in a cup on the reception desk. She gulped it down, made a face, and then stood still, willing herself to breathe slowly, deeply.

She was reaching for the doorknob when she heard the first footsteps in the hallway.

Tentative steps. Someone had come up the stairs. Past old Tim’s deserted post. No swoosh of elevator doors. Someone was waiting at the top of the stairs, probably looking around, trying to get his bearings. The footsteps started again, coming down the hall toward her, slowly, stopping as if to look at lettering on doors, moving on. She bit a knuckle.

He stopped again, outside her office.

Realizing what she’d forgotten, she took three quick steps to the door and pushed the button in the knob, which engaged the lock. It made what she knew was a soft click, though it sounded like a vault slamming shut.

She swallowed hard, waiting, knowing they were separated only by a door, knowing he must have heard the lock.

He laughed.

It was a slow, soft laugh. Derisive. Contemptuous. A rolling chuckle, someone laughing at the helplessness of a child. Finally he stopped. What was he doing now? She sagged back against the wall, steadied herself with a hand on a tabletop. Why didn’t he do something?

Finally he did. He moved on, back up the hallway. At last, she couldn’t hear him anymore. Was he waiting? Or had he gone down the stairs as he had come up?

She wished she smoked, wished there were anything she could do while she waited. She practiced swallowing and breathing and telling herself that she was the victim of an overactive imagination. Didn’t convince herself of the latter. She hadn’t imagined that laugh.

Ten minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

Christ, I’m a captive in my own office. Held at bay by a man who probably isn’t there.

She gritted her teeth and opened the door into the hallway.

Empty. Long and brightly lit, polished wooden doors, ancient tiles, beige walls. A few smudged puddles of rain. Footprints.

She pulled the door shut behind her.
If he’s waiting in the stairwell for me,
she thought,
I’ll never have time to get the door unlocked. Tiger.

She punched the elevator call button.

When the door slid open a man wearing a trench coat stood inside.

She screamed, rooted to the spot.

“Natalie, for chrissakes, are you all right?”

He was a graphic designer from a studio two floors up.

“Oh, Teddy … sure, sure, I’m fine. I was just surprised. Thinking about something else—”

“You sure you’re okay? You look like you’ve seen—”

“No, really, Teddy, I’m perfectly all right. Tired. Long day. I don’t know.” She shrugged and smiled, getting in beside him. They descended together.

“Say, I saw your picture in
PW
today.” He whistled, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His glasses were sliding down his long nose. “Wow. Next stop
Penthouse,
right?” They laughed.

Slippery sidewalks. Teddy walked her to the curb and waited while she waved for a taxi. He asked her again if she was really okay and she looked up out of the cab window.
Sure, Teddy, tiptop.
In fact she was already feeling the slightly numbing effect of the champagne.

W
HILE THE CAB PUSHED
and shoved its way through traffic slowed even more than usual by the rain and the slick streets, she found that she couldn’t just shut off her imagination now that she was safe, heading toward normal. Where had the man gone? Had he waited in the shadows, in the bar with the window on the street across the way, in a crowd of people at the bus stop? Had he watched her leave the building? Had he taken another cab and followed her? God, she really was out of control—

Still, what had she actually seen? He had thrown away a gun. Why? What had he done with the gun? You hold up delis with guns, you mug people with guns, and—well, inevitably, you kill people with guns. So what had this bozo done with the gun? Why throw it into a construction site where someone was bound to find it? Guns could be traced. Or could they?

They were heading up First Avenue, then left in the Seventies, and she was home. She tipped the driver too much because she wasn’t paying attention and let herself in the two front doors. She checked her mail in the common front hallway and heard Sir Laurence coughing and whoofing and scratching at the inside of her own front door. How did he always know it was she? Or did he do the same number every time somebody came in?