Chapter thirteen

Barb glanced up at me. “My God,” she said. “Michael, what’s wrong?”

“Ssh,” I said with a wave at her.

The voice on the tape went on:

“You saw me last night. But it wasn’t the first time. You must know that by now. It’s taken me a long time to find you. To find both of you.” There was a pause. I heard him breathing. It was not a pleasant sound. “I need to meet with you. Tonight. I can explain everything.” The pause was longer this time. I thought he’d hung up. Then he said: “Midnight. The Bethesda fountain in Central Park. Both of you. It has to be both of you or I don’t show.” And that was the end of the message.

I set down the phone.

“Michael,” said Barb, “for Christ’s sake, what is it? You look like someone kicked you.”

I glanced at my watch. It was eleven-fifteen.

The editor leaned across the desk to Barb.

“Who’s Michael North?” he said.

“Him.”

“Me.”

“Someone’s asking for you at security.”

“Michael?” Barb said.

But I was running for the door.

The elevator took forever to get down. When it finally hit bottom and opened, I came out as if I’d been shot from a gun. There she was, standing by the guard’s desk. Her shoulders were hunched, her arms hung stiffly before her. Her right hand was gripping her left wrist. She looked like she was physically holding herself together.

I took hold of her, pulled her to me. I breathed in the shaggy red hair. “You’re here,” I said.

“He called, Michael.”

“I know. I thought—”

“I was asleep. I fell asleep watching TV, and the phone rang.”

“I shouldn’t have left. I keep deserting you.”

“I woke up and there was his voice, it was like I was in the dream. I just ran. I just listened to him and then I got up and ran.”

I held her away from me. “I thought you might have gone to him.”

She nodded. She raised her eyes to mine. One corner of her mouth lifted. “I’m all right, see?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be better.”

“I’m sorry I left.”

“No, no, no, doof. Even I can’t stand me.”

“I love you.”

“But I do want to go. I want to see him, I want him to be real.”

“Forget it,” I said.

She shook her head, trained her blue eyes on me. “I want to come. I want to see him.”

“No.”

“He said it had to be both of us.”

“Rough luck for him.”

Her lips tightened. “You’re not going alone, Michael.”

“You got that right,” I said.

“What?”

“You think I’m going into Central Park at midnight to meet a guy with a big scar on his face who I strongly suspect is a no-good guy? Wrong movie, Susie. I’m not in that film.”

For the first time since Christmas, I saw that smile again that threw her face off-kilter.

“Fuck ’im,” I said. “He’ll come to us.”

We stepped out onto Columbus. I raised my arm into the streak of passing headlights. A cab pulled over.

“St. Mark’s Place,” I told him.

We headed home.

We sat beside each other in the dark of the rear seat. The cab turned onto Broadway and headed downtown. I saw Lincoln Center again. And then the white spire rising from the middle of Columbus Circle, and golden Columbia, triumphant, sailing forth from the corner of Central Park on the memorial to the Maine.

“Now you know something,” said Susannah. It was that way of stating things she had. There was no answer.

We rolled by the bright marquees of the theater district.

“We’ve met before,” I said finally. “You and me. We must’ve known each other as children. We must have known him.”

I gave her time to think about it. I felt her shoulder brushing against my shoulder as the cab rocked. The lights of Times Square curled out of the endless avenue before us. The billboards, their behemoth faces, soared into the night at either window. The wild neon tilted and circled and rode whirling through the undark. On the electric screen hung from the tower of Number One there were sprays of color. Beneath it, in the lighted letters of the zipper, the day’s headlines chased each other around the building’s waist.

“I don’t remember,” she said softly.

“No. Neither do I. But I’m sure.”

“You remember something, then.”

“No. I just know.”

She was silent as the cab crossed Forty-second Street and plummeted into the winding alleylands of the south.

Then she said: “It must have been awful.”

“Right.”

That was all she said. Herald Square; Madison Square: the rounded wedge of the Flatiron building, the golden crown atop the campanile; Union Square, high-walled and seedy and gray as an old woman dragging her shopping bag over the pavement. Across the farthest border of the top-hatted city, into the East Village, where the rock people live. She said nothing else.

We got out of the cab in front of the brownstone. I stole a glance at her as I let her in the front door. She brushed a shock of hair from her eyes. She was gnawing her lip, inward and thoughtful.

I led the way up the three flights.

When we got to my door, I fumbled for the keys. It took me a moment to get the right one in the lock. I pushed the door in on the darkened, silent apartment. I stood back to let her pass.

She took a step toward me. She looked me dead in the eye.

“Susannah …” I said.

“He wouldn’t hide anything from me,” she said. “I know.” She moved to the door.

I opened my mouth to answer. Then I closed it. Then I slugged her.

It was a hard shot with the heel of my right palm. It caught her in the shoulder and sent her staggering to one side, out of the doorway. In the same motion I pulled the door shut and dove across it until I was next to her, pressed to the wall.

“Michael, what—”

“Why isn’t the TV on?” My voice sounded like a ghost’s.

“What?”

“You said you fell asleep with it on. You said you ran when you heard his voice. Why’s it so dark and quiet in there?”

Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. “I left it on. I think, I … don’t know.”

I took her hand.

“Leave us depart,” I said.

We ran. We started down the stairs.

Susannah grabbed my arm. “Wait!” I stopped. She whispered: “Listen!”

Below us, I heard the front door open and shut. I stood stock still, listening. Susannah’s fingers dug into my flesh. I heard her breath, and mine, and nothing else.

Then, slowly, footsteps started up the front stairway.

I looked up the stairs behind me, up at the closed door of my apartment. Stair by stair, the footsteps neared us from below.

“Uh …” I said.

“Just someone,” Susannah whispered.

I hesitated another instant. Then I chose.

“We’ve gotta go back up.”

“What if he comes out?”

“Let’s go.”

I took her hand. We turned and charged back up the stairs. We passed my door. We spun round the corner. Up the next flight. There was only one more after that and we scrambled up it, hand in hand. At the top we hurtled to the end of the hall.

Susannah gasped for breath. “He’ll corner us.”

“There’s a trapdoor to the roof,” I gasped back.

It was set in the ceiling, four feet above our heads. There was a ring in it, to pull it open with. The footsteps were now cresting the fourth flight, the flight below. Now they were heading down the hall for the stairs. I jumped. I reached. My fingers scraped the ring. I fell back to the floor.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I said.

“Boost me!” said Susannah.

I bent and set my hands as a stirrup. She stepped in. The footsteps started up the last flight of stairs. I hoisted. Susannah went up the white wall. She snagged the ring. She pulled. It didn’t budge.

“Hurry it, baby!”

She pulled again. The door came free with a bang. A wooden ladder unfolded from inside it. Susannah tumbled down into my arms, knocking me against the wall.

The footsteps paused on the stairs a moment. Then they began to hurry up the last few steps.

I shoved Susannah. “Go!”

She scrambled up the ladder. I scrambled up after her.

On the roof, above the night city, surrounded by bright starlike lights and pale lightlike stars, the air was cool and the car horns far away. It was peaceful all around us, and we tore through that peace like a couple of rockets. We raced over the asphalt, hand in hand. We ran without thinking, without looking back. We did not want to see what might be coming up behind us.

We leapt over the curb dividing one roof from the next. We ran across the next. Then we braked on our heels. The third roof, though connected to the second, was quite a ways down. I looked back over my shoulder toward the trapdoor through which we’d come. I half expected to see him framed against the sky, maimed and terrible. I saw nothing. I knelt down and lowered myself onto the next roof. I caught Susannah as she came down after me.

We ran. The cool air burned my lungs. She let out little gasping noises as we ran, hand in sweating hand, the sparkling sky all around us.

And then, beneath us, the abyss opened. A plummeting blackness at our feet. Susannah cried out as we pulled up short, each clutching the other to keep from going down.

We were standing over a restaurant alleyway. I stared into it. It was dark, shadowy. I could barely make out the trash cans and boxes stacked against one wall.

“There’s a fire escape,” said Susannah.

We ran for it, climbed onto it, ran down, our heels clanging on the stairs and gratings. I hit the ladder at the bottom and rode it as it lowered with a loud rattle. I jumped, dropped onto the pavement below. And in a moment more, Susannah was beside me.

We peered forward, panting. The alley was black. At its end we saw the pale glow of St. Mark’s: a shimmer at the entrance of a corridor.

I laughed.

“What?” said Susannah, giggling.

“Do we feel like idiots? Yes or no.”

She laughed. “Uh, yes?”

The scarred man stepped out of the darkness, pointed a rifle at us, and fired.

That’s a guess, really. What I saw was a shadow rising out of the shadows, a darkness stepping out of the dark. I saw an uncanny light which was. not light but flashing blackness, which I believe was the glint of the rifle’s barrel in the moment it was raised.

Then I was leaping across the alley, slamming headlong into the wall, crashing down into the boxes and the trash cans, and all tangled with Susannah as I pulled her with me.

And there was nothing in the world but noise, a vortex of sound like the wave that hits you at the beach and sucks you under for moment after moment that might not end: the noise of the gun, the noise of the cans smashing and clattering around me, the noise of the boxes crushing under our weight as we sank into a stinking morass that battered and cut us as we fell.

We hit the ground and it all piled down on top of us, covering us. I was buried. I struggled. Susannah’s legs were tied up with mine. I was smothering under metal and offal and wood.

I fought for air, for space to move in. I could not hear, but felt, his footsteps nearing. I could not see, but sensed, the rifle lifting for a clear shot at us as we fought to get free. I was strangling with fear, struggling for a breath, going down again, going under …

And then something gave way and I came surging up out of the grave—driving up into the night just in time to watch him blow my guts open.

But he wasn’t there.

Even in the dark, even with the others crowding in toward me, I knew he wasn’t there. These were people from the street. They were calling to me. They were pushing in around me. They had scared him away.

Behind me now they were helping Susannah to her feet. I heard her crying, breathless, next to me.

We held each other.

“Now we know he’s real,” she said.

“Yeah.” I looked at the open end of the alley. “And that he’s smarter than we are.”