Wednesday, August 22
1600 hours
Manhattan
There was a pretty little park, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, diagonally across the street from the entrance to the King James. The park fascinated Sonny and Lyle, because neither of them had ever seen a park with a dress code posted on the gate: MINIMUM ATTIRE: SHORTS OR SKIRT, FOOTWEAR. It was a nice park, with maples and oaks and alders and cool green grass and ivy, flower beds and pebbled walks. Here and there in the park, mothers were sitting watching their kids play, or nurses were pushing elderly people around in wheelchairs. Sonny and Lyle were sitting on a bench in the park, waiting for Myron to come along. They’d had a fine meal at a place called Il Mondo, Lyle explaining to Sonny that Il Mondo meant “world” and making a real production out of the wine and the sauces. Sonny had picked up the bill, reeling a little at the price.
Then they’d taken a stroll around the neighborhood, Lyle expounding in a carrying southern drawl on the differences between a Burgundy and a Bordeaux while Sonny got a sense of the terrain.
The King James was even bigger than he’d thought. It occupied a raised, somewhat isolated section overlooking First Avenue. There was a staircase that led down beside Il Mondo to First, but cars would have to go east on 41st and west on 43rd. There were more stairs running down onto 42nd Street. But it was a box with only one way out if you were trying to run in a car. Any police trouble at all, they’d be trapped.
The main entrance to the King James gave you no idea that there might be real money in the place. Gothic arches framed the oak doors, but the lobby was dark, the rugs worn, and the front desk was just a counter with a couple of bored men sitting watching a Sony portable in front of a wall of pigeonholes for residents’ mail. The switchboard was an old-fashioned plug-style. There were four elevators, ancient, creaking relics with expensive brass fittings and patches in the woodwork. The lobby smelled of dust and mold, airless and hot.
But Sonny had watched the people in the little park carefully, watched their wrists and necks, studied the clothes. Gold Rolexes, Piagets, solid chunky diamonds, clothes cut with a scalpel and fitting like mist, walking sticks and careful hair and faces heavy with years of self-satisfied living. Nurses and nannies and servants all over the place. No. It was here. You could sense it in the air, in the quality of the light.
Lyle could feel it too.
“Sonny, I do believe I’ve found my city.”
Sonny looked at Lyle, sitting back on the bench, one leg up on his other knee, his arms stretched out on the back of the bench, flushed with good wine and stuffed with veal, his belly showing, blue suit and black Italian loafers and the gold chain with the Krugerrand on it that he’d bought with some of his cash from the Lawton job.
“You’ve found your city? I thought you wanted to go back to Charleston. Live at the Coeur d’Anjou and eat every day on the promenade.”
Lyle sighed theatrically and patted his belly. “Now here’s the thing, Sonny, difference between you and me. I’m the kind of man, you can’t tell from looking at me what’s going on inside. I’m a complicated man. I know that’s been a thorn in the side for you, and don’t you think for a minute I don’t appreciate all you’ve … tried to do for me. Not your fault it worked out like it did. Take you—you’re more the action-oriented guy. Always were. You never did know what was going on at home. Pap was dying of that cancer, you never even noticed it. Now I did. Mother and me, we’d have long talks. She’d ask me what’d I think, y’know. I’m the one got her to sell the house—”
“Lyle … she gave you the money to buy into Carl’s Cars and where the hell did that go?”
Lyle raised his eyes to heaven. “Sonny, Sonny … see, that’s where you go wrong. Negativity, that’s your problem. That was a high-concept capital-intensive operation. It took vision to see Carl’s Cars going from just a little dealership to a chain of used cars, absolutely quality-guaranteed, statewide North and South Carolina—but all you can see is the negative side.”
“Yeah. You lost the dealership to Trickem, Dickem, and Dumpem. Those bastards sheared you like a lamb.”
“Negativity, Sonny. Always your problem.”
Sonny heard a truck coming up the hill. He watched a brown panel truck pull around the corner, Pelham Bay Industrial Services in gold script on the side. “Lyle, you notice the price of that fine meal we just ate?”
Lyle waved that away. “See? Once again, oblivious to the … essence of the thing. The wine, superb. The sauces, exquisite. Milk-fed, lovingly harvested—”
“Harvested! … Shit, Lyle. The tab was one thirty-eight sixty-five, plus you gave the guy thirty bucks on top. Does that give you any idea how much it would cost you to live in this city?”
Myron Geltmann was climbing out of the driver’s side of the van. He didn’t look over at the bench where they were sitting. He went around to the back of the van and started to take out some cleaning gear. Myron was moving like a man in some kind of physical unease.
“That’s the point, Sonny! It costs to sit in at the high-stakes games. This city—you can just feel the opportunities here. It’s a town full of possibilities!”
Myron had taken a clipboard out of the van. He was holding it up against the side of the door, writing on it. He shook his head, scratched something out, ripped the sheet off the pad, and threw the sheet at his feet.
Something …
“What’ll you do here? These high-stakes players—you know any of them? It’s like everywhere. You deal with who you know and who knows you. It’s got nothing to do with your ideas, not when you’re getting in. And in this place, I figure you can’t get in unless you’re in. What would you do here? What’s your specialty?”
Geltmann’s left foot moved to pin the torn sheet under it, keeping it from blowing away. His foot was tapping on it to some kind of nervous rhythm Myron was feeling.
“Look at Myron over there, Sonny. That’s your future, you’re not careful. Now me, I’m thinking entertainment, communications, maybe film. It’s all happening here. My theory, the Japs, the Koreans, the Germans, they’re going to be running heavy manufacturing in the next century. But America, we’ll be the marketing and entertainment center for the whole planet. It’s what we do best—we sell you on the idea of a product. Who cares if the product is cars from Hyundai or microwaves from Braun? And film, books, television? That’s the American genius. That’s where we oughta be heading in the next century! Why make something when you can make it up and the whole world will love you. It’s the purest form of creativity—we’re not selling a thing; we’re selling the idea of a thing. Nobody does that like us.”
Geltmann was walking into the doorway of the King James carrying a toolbox and some mops. The pink sheet torn from his clipboard was wedged into the gutter at the back of the van. Myron had jammed it in as tight as he could.
“Lyle … Lyle, hold off for a second. I want you to get up now, walk away toward the restaurant. Shake my hand like we just met, get up—”
Lyle’s face went slack. “What, what is it?”
Sonny held him down on the bench. “Sit! Don’t get up and start fluttering around like a shot duck.”
Sonny looked up and down the street, checking cars and faces and places. But there was nothing out of place, no Con Ed van, no ice cream vendors, nobody on a motorcycle playing with the controls and keeping his helmet on, no men in the park, no man on the roof.
Sonny became very aware of every window in all the buildings surrounding the square. A box with a lid.
“Sonny … what’ll we do? What’ya want me to do?”
“I count to seven. At seven, you shake my hand, you get up, you walk off slow toward the stairs down by the restaurant. You look around a little like you’re strolling. You go down the stairs and you catch a cab on First and you take the cab to Grand Central. You go through Grand Central and you take another cab on Vanderbilt and you go—”
“Slow down, Sonny. I’ll never remember all this!”
Sonny smiled at Lyle, calming him. “It’s just practice. Just take a few cabs, then end up … Go to that Pussycat place on Forty-second. Near the Port Authority? Watch some flicks. I’ll find you. Now get up and go slow.”
Lyle’s face was wobbly and loose but he got up and shook Sonny’s hand. He gripped it hard.
“Don’t look around, Lyle. Just say goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Mr.—”
“Goodbye, and enjoy the movie.”
Sonny watched the street as Lyle made his way down the walk under the maples, scuffling in his Italian loafers, his body as rigid as a post.
Myron was coming back out of the King James.
A nurse went by, hitting hard on her soft rubber soles, her hair flipping as she walked, her hips working.
No cars started up and pulled away.
This was scary. Usually Sonny could tell. If there was surveillance, he could always pick it out. But here, nothing was showing. If they were here, they were very very good.
Myron shoved the tools into the van, slammed the doors, and walked unsteadily around to the driver’s door. He kept his head down and never looked at Sonny once.
An elderly woman came out of the front of the building, a huge flowered hat on her blue hair, a heavy brocade dress on, makeup like Bette Davis as Baby Jane.
Myron started up the van, slammed the side door shut, and started to pull away. A yellow cab came around the corner.
The old woman raised her hand, a mammoth purse dangling from her wrist, tottering on her heels, waving.
The van was almost at the corner. The driver of the yellow cab was a black guy, slouched low in the seat, a head-scarf on, reggae music coming from the battered old cab. He accelerated down the street after the van. The old lady flagged him.
He passed right by her, looking down the street at the van. There was no one else in the cab.
Sonny stayed very still for another five minutes. The old woman went back inside. Phoning a cab, Sonny figured.
He waited another twenty minutes. The wind plucked at the sheet and moved it about fifty yards down the street. Sonny watched it carefully, thinking if it got any windier he’d have to go after it and wondering how to do that. But the air felt different, less pressure in it.
Sighing, he got to his feet, stretched, and strolled off down the road toward the pink sheet fluttering at the base of a fire hydrant. He reached the fire hydrant and stopped to light a cigarette, dropping the lighter at his feet. In one fluid motion he bent down to get the lighter, and the pink sheet disappeared into his left hand. He stood at the hydrant for another minute, one boot resting on it.
Sonny flagged a cab on Second and listened to the driver bitch about fares that wanted to go to Grand Central and didn’t know what the traffic was like at this time of day and who didn’t know enough to leave a guy a decent tip, fucking town was a crock, no place for a working man.…
Sonny unfolded the pink sheet.
DUST
TAPS
CLAMPS
REPAIRED WIRING
FOUR HOURS
INVOICE $2,241.49
Sonny smiled at the back of the driver’s head, thinking that it was a poor man who never learned anything from what life was doing to him. Myron’s code was pretty simple, the kind of general-association thing they’d put on the underside of plates going in to guys in solitary at Santa Fe prison.
DUST meant something coming after you, probably a tail or some kind of surveillance. TAPS was clear enough: If there was a tail, there’d be phone taps as well.
CLAMPS puzzled him for a while, and he thought about it while the cab butted and bluffed a path through the intersection of Third and 42nd. Sonny looked up and down the canyons of Manhattan and felt a certain kind of homesickness for places in the Southwest where the sky came all the way down to the horizon. CLAMPS?
Well, it was a guess, but CLAMPS was probably a way of saying “hold on” or “don’t move” or something of that kind. That stood to reason. Myron needed this job to set his wife up in a chronic-care hospital, and Sonny’s reading of Joseph Levine was that he was the kind of guy who would go right on taking chances and grabbing what he could until something from the real world stopped him. That oversized gold Rolex was a clue. A man buys a Rolex, why buy one too big for his wrist? A man gets offered a stolen Rolex, he takes what he can get. And then he leaves it that way, on a band too big for him, because the thing itself, oversized and all, it stands for the bandit he thinks he is, and when it moves around on his wrist he can feel it and think: Man, I’m a player. I gotta be watched.
REPAIRED WIRING was easy. Myron had somehow taken care of the alarm systems. He either had all the blueprints, or he had gotten the cancel codes, or he had figured a way around the problems. That was what Myron did for a living, and in his time there’d been no one better at it working in the Southwest.
FOUR HOURS would mean a meeting or a contact four hours from the time Myron wrote the note, which was around four in the evening. But where?
INVOICE could mean what it said, or it could mean a phone call: IN VOICE. So the “$2,241.49” was a way of telling Sonny the address, the place where he’d wait to get a phone call from Myron or from Levine.
It would be too cute for Myron to use some algorithm or a matrix code. Myron knew Sonny well enough to know that it was all Sonny could do to add up a list of expenses.
So these numbers meant …?
How about 224 149th Street? Sonny had been all over the city maps, looking for routes out of town, alternates in case of a chase or traffic trouble, and he was pretty sure that 149th Street was well up into Harlem and that there was no East 149th Street around there, where the island tapered off.
A couple of white guys hanging around in some bar or a shoe shop or some bodega up in Harlem, waiting for the pay phone to ring? That wouldn’t be too smart. Might as well send up a flare: Yo, cops! Robbers here. Come and get it!
No, the numbers meant …
TWO TWO FOUR ONE FOUR NINE?
Something Myron knew he’d know. What’d they both know about? Santa Fe prison. All right, what were the blocks in Santa Fe prison? One Block. Two Block. Three …
They’d been built in a pentagon. One Block was … the eastern side. In the east. So ONE meant …
Okay. It’s 224 East 49th Street. A phone booth in a public place there, or a phone on the bar.
Grand Central was coming up on his right. The street was packed with people, blacks and whites, office people, these strange Manhattan women wearing suits with sneakers and carrying their purses under their arms like a halfback going slot right, faces hard as prison muffins. Sonny realized then that he hated New York and that no matter what it took, he and Lyle were going to be out of this place by Sunday afternoon at the latest.
The cabbie was slouched in the seat, staring in his rearview at Sonny. “Grand Central, buddy. Outa the cab!”
Sonny said, “Thanks very much,” got out and closed the door quietly and gave the man the exact fare and a dime.
He could still hear the guy as he went through the big glass doors and down the ramp into the massive station, looking at every face, seeing no one reacting to him. He’d walk over to 49th, check out the address. Do whatever it took.