Monday 3rd, 6.35 a.m.
The sun rose on the state of New York, and picked out a line of silver glinting south through the Hudson River Valley – The 20th Century Limited, the overnight express train from Chicago – threading itself like a needle through the landscape, past mountains and shimmering lakes and forests ablaze with autumn colors, drawn inexorably to the magnet heart of New York City. The railroad track turned a wide arc on the approach to the Bronx, affording the passengers a view of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, their pinnacles bathed in the fresh, cold light of dawn.
Then the train completed its turn and roared into the city, snaking between tenement roofs and pigeon lofts and giant billboards bolted onto scaffolds. It soared over the Harlem River, dipped down onto Manhattan, the buildings either side rattling past like marching soldiers. It reached 97th Street and plunged into the Park Avenue tunnel and all turned black for the final approach to Grand Central Terminus, where the train pulled into platform thirteen, came to a stop, and the great hustle of people shouldered its way out into the station.
Ida alone remained in her seat. She watched the others leave as if witnessing some unfathomable migration of beasts – the businessmen, the families, the tourists – bedraggled and bleary-eyed, many of them regretting their choice of an overnight train which disgorged its passengers so unceremoniously into New York’s unforgiving rush hour.
When the passageways were empty, she rose, plucked her suitcase from the overhead compartment, and found her way through the debris to the restroom. It was cramped and unheated, so the cold bit at her skin, but there was a sink with a mirror above it, which was all she needed. From outside she could hear the porters unloading the train, the bustle of the station, the dull roar of thousands of hard soles against marble, and in the distance, the rumble of the world’s greatest city, eight million people rising to make another day.
She brushed her teeth, washed her face, fixed her hair, reapplied makeup, washed her hands. She stared at herself, checking to see if recent traumas had left their mark. A little gray at the temples, a few wrinkles at the eyes, a softness to her features. She looked younger than her forty-seven years, and what she’d lost in youth, she’d gained in self-assurance and poise. Or so she liked to tell herself.
Ida stepped off the train, reached the end of the platform and caught her first glimpse of Grand Central in full flow. Torrents of black suits cascaded through the station’s honeycomb of passages, up and down its marble stairs, out of exits, onto platforms, across the giant expanse of the main concourse, a cavernous space split by razor-sharp sunbeams that burst in from the skylights above.
The rush and noise contained something of the buzz Ida had always associated with New York; the itchy, excited energy of people on the move, tackling overstuffed schedules at breakneck speed. Just as Manhattan’s skyscrapers allowed ever more real estate onto the island, so too did the city condense people’s days, concentrating time, intensifying, thickening, compacting it. Ida wondered if it wouldn’t fray her nerves, if she wouldn’t break down through sheer claustrophobia.
She slipped through the torrents as the tannoy system boomed, reached the benches where she was supposed to meet Michael. She looked up at the brass clock above the information booth. The hands atop its milk-glass face told her she was still a little early. She waited, looked around, at the rush, at the sunbeams, at the fug, at the station’s ceiling miles above her, the paintings that covered it obscured by years of grime and cigarette tar.
Eventually, she could make out what the paintings depicted – the constellations, in gold lines on a deep-blue background, both the stars themselves, and, superimposed on the universe, the ancient Greek mythical figures that represented them. Amidst the golden dust of the Milky Way, she made out Orion, Taurus, Aries, Pisces. Her eye settled on Gemini for some reason, the twins clinging to each other as they careened through the sky, one holding a sickle, the other a lyre. Something about the figures’ movement, the way it echoed the rush on the concourse beneath them, made her uneasy.
As she deliberated on why that could be, she noticed someone approaching through the crowds. Michael, a hand raised, waving. He stepped through one of the sunbeams streaming in from the skylights, and his figure flashed and glowed, dust swirled. Then, just as quickly, he exited the beam, and the flash evaporated, and Ida’s eyes adjusted.
He reached her and they hugged and clung onto each other as tightly as the Gemini twins tumbling through the Milky Way above.
‘Michael,’ she said.
‘Ida. Welcome to New York.’
They disengaged from the hug and Ida looked at her friend. Michael was in his early seventies, although it was hard to tell because of the smallpox scars that covered his face, obscuring wrinkles and softness. Despite his age, he still had a straight back, still retained his tall, gaunt appearance. But he had changed in the months since Ida had last seen him. He looked weary, shaken by the disaster that had smashed into his life, trailing upheaval and trauma in its wake. She should have been happy to see him, a familiar face in an unfamiliar city. Instead she was concerned. She tried to think what she could say that wouldn’t sound trite, wondered if her voice would betray how concerned she was.
‘Battling on. You?’
‘Itching to get started.’
He nodded, acknowledging the sentiment. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said flatly.
‘You think I’d stay home?’
She smiled, and a second later he echoed it, and they stood there awkwardly, and the question that had been bugging Ida the last few weeks nagged at her again – why hadn’t he called her earlier? In the twenty years she’d been running her agency, she’d become an expert in miscarriages of justice. She was the first person he should have called.
‘You want to go by your hotel?’ he asked. ‘Drop your things off? We’ve got the crime scene to go to and then the island.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve only got that,’ she said, gesturing to the thin suitcase at her feet. ‘Let’s get started. I’ll check in later on.’
They turned and headed for the subway entrance, and she looked again at her downtrodden friend.
‘We’ll get through this, Michael,’ she said. ‘We’ll see him set free.’
And even as she spoke, she realized she’d already failed at not saying anything trite.
‘Sure we will,’ Michael replied.
But she could sense his disquiet, an uncertainty echoed in her own emotions. She realized the same misgiving was gnawing away at them both, a fear that this, the most important case they’d ever had, might just be the one they couldn’t win.