I said, ‘Go with you where?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that. You would have to wear a blindfold.’
I said, ‘I’ll take a pass on the blindfold. But you don’t have to get hurt either. You can just move on, and tell Lila you never saw me.’
‘But that wouldn’t be true.’
‘Don’t be a slave to the truth, Leonid. Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes it bites you right in the ass.’
The upside of a concerted attack by two opponents is that they have to communicate a start signal. Maybe it’s just a glance or a nod, but it’s always there. It’s a split second of warning. I figured Leonid for the main man. The one who speaks first usually is. He would announce the attack. I watched his eyes, very carefully.
I said, ‘Are you mad about what happened at the railroad station?’
Leonid shook his head. ‘I let you hit me. It was necessary. Lila said so.’
I watched his eyes.
I said, ‘Tell me about Lila.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I want to know who she is.’
‘Come with us, and ask her.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘She’s a woman with a job to do.’
‘What kind of a job?’
‘Come with us, and ask her.’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘An important job. A necessary job.’
‘Which involves what?’
‘Come with us, and ask her.’
‘I’m asking you.’
No answer. No further conversation. I sensed them tensing up. I watched Leonid’s face. Saw his eyes widen and his head duck forward in a tiny nod. They came straight for me, together. I pushed off the wall behind me and put my fists against my chest and stuck my elbows out like airplane wings and charged them as hard as they were charging me. We met at a singular point like a collapsing triangle and my elbows caught both of them full in the face. On my right I felt the short guy’s upper teeth punch out and on my left I felt Leonid’s lower jaw give way. Impact equals mass times velocity squared. I had plenty of mass, but my shoes were spongy and my feet were slick inside them from the heat and so my velocity was slower than it might have been.
Which reduced the impact a little.
Which left them both on their feet.
Which gave me a little more work to do.
I spun back instantly and clubbed the short guy with an enormous roundhouse right to the ear. No style. No finesse. Just a big ugly punch. His ear flattened against his head and took some of the force away, but plenty more went straight on through the crushed gristle into his skull. His neck snapped sideways and he hit his other ear with his own far shoulder. By that point I was squelching back the other way in my lousy footwear and driving my elbow deep into Leonid’s gut. Same place I had hit him in Penn Station, but ten times harder. I almost popped his spine out of his back. I used the bounce to jump in the other direction, to the short guy again. He was hunching away and ready for a standing eight count. I put a low right in his kidney. That straightened him up and spun him around towards me. I bent my knees and drove forward and butted him between the eyes. Explosive. Whatever bones my elbow hadn’t broken gave way and he went down like a sack. Leonid tapped me on the shoulder with his knuckleduster. He thought it was a punch, but in his depleted state a tap was all he could manage. I took my time and wound up and aimed carefully and dropped him with an uppercut to the jaw. His jaw was already broken from my elbow. Now it got broken a little more. Bone and flesh spattered out in a lazy red arc and showed up quite clearly in the street lights. Teeth, I figured, and maybe part of his tongue.
I was a little shaken. As always. Excess adrenalin was burning me up. The adrenal gland is a slow son of a bitch. Then it overcompensates. Too much, too late. I took ten seconds to get my breath. Ten more to calm down. Then I hauled both guys across the sidewalk and into a sitting position against the wall where I had been standing. Their hooded sweatshirts stretched a yard long as I was hauling on them. Cheap clothes. Disposable, in case they had gotten soaked with my blood. I got the two guys positioned so they wouldn’t fall over and choke and then I dislocated their right elbows. They were both right-handed, and the odds were that I would be seeing them again. In which case I wanted them out of action. No permanent damage. Three weeks in a light cast would fix them up, good as new.
They had cell phones in their pockets. I took both of them. Both had my picture. Both call registers were blank. There was nothing else. No money. No keys. No material evidence. No clue as to where they had come from. No likelihood that they would be in a position to tell me anytime soon, either. I had hit them too hard. They were out for the count. And even when they woke up there was no guarantee they would remember anything anyway. Maybe not even their names. Concussion has unpredictable effects. Paramedics aren’t kidding around when they ask concussion victims what day it is and who the President is.
No regrets on my part. Better to err on the side of safety. Guys in fights who think ahead to the aftermath usually don’t get that far. They become the aftermath. So no regrets. But no net gain, either. Which was frustrating. Not even the brass knuckles fit my hand. I tried both sets on, and they were way too small. I dropped them down a storm drain twenty feet away.
Their car was still idling on the kerb. It had New York plates. No navigation system. Therefore no digital memory with a base location. I found a rental agreement in the door pocket made out to a name I had never heard and a London address that I assumed was fake. In the glove box I found instruction manuals for the car and a small spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. The notebook had nothing written in it. I took the pen and walked back to the two guys and held Leonid’s head steady with my left palm clamped down hard. Then I wrote on his forehead with the ballpoint, digging deep in his skin and tracing big letters over and over again for clarity.
I wrote: Lila, call me.
Then I stole their car and drove away.
FIFTY-FOUR
I drove south on second avenue and took 50th street all the way east to the end and dumped the car on a hydrant half a block from the FDR Drive. I hoped the guys from the 17th Precinct would find it and get suspicious and run some tests. Clothes are disposable. Cars, not so much. If Lila’s people had used that Impala to drive away from the hammer attack, then there would be some trace evidence inside. I couldn’t see any with the naked eye, but CSI units don’t rely on human vision alone.
I wiped the wheel and the shifter and the door handles with the tail of my shirt. Then I dropped the keys down a grate and walked back to Second and stood in a shadow and looked for a cab. There was a decent river of traffic flowing downtown and each car was lit up by the headlights behind it. I could see how many people were inside each vehicle. I was mindful of Theresa Lee’s information: fake taxis, circling uptown on Tenth, down on Second, one guy in the front, two in the back. I waited for a cab that was definitively empty apart from its driver and I stepped out and flagged it down. The driver was a Sikh from India with a turban and a full beard and very little English. Not a cop. He took me south to Union Square. I got out there and sat on a bench in the dark and watched the rats. Union Square is the best place in the city to see them. By day the Parks Department dumps blood-and-bone fertilizer on the flower beds. By night the rats come out and feast on it.
At four o’clock I fell asleep.
At five o’clock one of the captured phones vibrated in my pocket.
I woke up and spent a second checking left and right and behind, and then I fumbled the phone out of my pants. It wasn’t ringing. Just buzzing away to itself. Silent mode. The small monochrome window on the front said: Restricted Call. I opened it up and the big colour screen on the inside said the same thing. I put the phone to my ear and said, ‘Hello.’ A new word, recently invented. Lila Hoth answered me. Her voice, her accent, her diction. She said, ‘So, you decided to declare war. Clearly there are no rules of engagement for you.’
> I said, ‘Who are you exactly?’
‘You’ll find out.’
‘I need to know now.’
‘I’m your worst nightmare. As of about two hours ago. And you still have something that belongs to me.’
‘So come and get it. Better still, send some more of your guys. Give me some more light exercise.’
‘You got lucky tonight, that’s all.’
I said, ‘I’m always lucky.’
She asked, ‘Where are you?’
‘Right outside your house.’
There was a pause. ‘No, you’re not.’
‘Correct,’ I said. ‘But you just confirmed that you’re living in a house. And that right now you’re at a window. Thank you for that information.’
‘Where are you really?’
‘Federal Plaza,’ I said. ‘With the FBI.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Your call.’
‘Tell me where you are.’
‘Close to you,’ I said. ‘Third Avenue and 56th Street.’
She started to reply, and then she stopped herself immediately. She got no further than an inchoate little th sound. A voiced dental fricative. The start of a sentence that was going to be impatient and querulous and a little smug. Like, That’s not close to me.
She wasn’t anywhere near Third and 56th.
‘Last chance,’ she said. ‘I want my property.’ Her voice softened. ‘We can make arrangements, if you like. Just leave it somewhere safe, and tell me where. I’ll have it picked up. We don’t need to meet. You could even get paid.’
‘I’m not looking for work.’
‘Are you looking to stay alive?’
‘I’m not afraid of you, Lila.’
‘That’s what Peter Molina said.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Right here with us.’
‘Alive?’
‘Come over and find out.’
‘He left a message with his coach.’
‘Or maybe I played a tape he made before he died. Maybe he told me his coach never answers the phone at dinner time. Maybe he told me a lot of things. Maybe I forced him to.’
I asked, ‘Where are you, Lila?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ she said. ‘But I could have you picked up.’
A hundred feet away I saw a police car cruising 14th Street. Moving slow. Pink flashes at the window as the driver moved his head right and left.
I asked, ‘How long have you known Peter Molina?’
‘Since I picked him up in the bar.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘Come over and find out.’
I said, ‘You’re on borrowed time, Lila. You killed four Americans in New York. No one is going to ignore that.’
‘I killed nobody.’
‘Your people did.’
‘People that have already left the country. We’re fireproof.’
‘We?’
‘You ask too many questions.’
‘If your people acted on your orders, then you’re not fireproof. That’s a conspiracy.’
‘This is a nation of laws and trials. There’s no evidence.’
‘Car?’
‘No longer exists.’
‘You’ll never be fireproof from me. I’ll find you.’
‘I hope you do.’
A hundred feet away the police car slowed to a crawl.
I said, ‘Come out and meet with me, Lila. Or go home. One or the other. But either way you’re beaten here.’
She said, ‘We’re never beaten.’
‘Who is we?’
But there was no answer. The phone went dead. Nothing there, except the dumb silence of an empty line.
A hundred feet away the police car stopped.
I closed the phone and put it back in my pocket.
Two cops climbed out of the car and headed into the square.
I stayed where I was. Too suspicious to get up and run. Better to sit tight. I wasn’t alone in the park. There were maybe forty people in there with me. Some of them seemed to be a permanent population. Others were temporary strays. New York is a big city. Five boroughs. Journeys home are long. Often easier to rest along the way.
The cops shone a flashlight beam in a sleeping guy’s face.
They moved on. Lit up the next guy.
And the next.
Not good.
Not good at all.
But I was not the only person to reach that conclusion. Here and there around the square I saw shapes rising up from benches and shuffling away in different directions. Maybe people with outstanding warrants, dealers with stuff in their backpacks, surly loners who didn’t want contact, helpless paranoids wary of the system.
Two cops, an acre of ground, maybe thirty people still on benches, maybe ten newly mobile.
I watched.
The cops kept on coming. Their flashlight beams jerked through the night-time haze. Long shadows were thrown. They checked a fourth guy, and then a fifth. Then a sixth. More people stood up. Some left altogether, and others simply moved from bench to bench. The square was full of shapes, some inert, some moving. Everything was in slow motion. A tired, lazy dance.
I watched.
New indecision in the cops’ body language. Like herding cats. They approached the people still on benches. They turned away and jerked their beams on the people moving out. They kept on walking, bending, turning. No pattern. Just random movement. They kept on coming. They got within ten yards of me.
Then they quit.
They played their flashlight beams one last time around a token circle and then they headed back to their car. I watched it drive away. I stayed on my bench and breathed out and started thinking about the GPS chips in the captured cell phones in my pockets. Part of me said it was impossible that Lila Hoth would have access to tracking satellites. But another part of me focused on her saying We’re never beaten. And we is a big word. Only two letters, but a large implication. Maybe the bad guys from the Eastern bloc had grabbed more than oil and gas leases. Maybe they had taken over other kinds of infrastructure. The old Soviet intelligence machine had to have gone somewhere. I thought about laptop computers and broadband connections and all kinds of technology I didn’t fully understand.
I kept the phones in my pockets, but I got up off the bench and headed for the subway.
Which was a bad mistake to make.
FIFTY-FIVE
The Union Square subway station is a major hub. It has an entrance hall as big as an underground plaza. Multiple entrances, multiple exits, multiple lines, multiple tracks. Stairs, booths, long rows of turnstiles. Plus long banks of machines for refreshing Metrocards, or buying new ones. I used cash and bought a new card. I fed two twenty dollar bills edge-first into the slot and was rewarded with twenty rides plus three free as a bonus. I collected my card and turned around and moved away. It was close to six o’clock in the morning. The station was filling up with people. The work day was starting. I passed a newsstand. It had a thousand different magazines. And squat bales of fresh tabloids ready for sale. Thick papers, piled high. Two separate titles. Both headlines were huge. One had three words, big letters, plenty of powdery black ink: FEDS SEEK TRIO. The other had three words too: FEDS HUNT TRIO. Practically a consensus. On balance I preferred seek to hunt. More passive, less committed. Almost benign. I figured anyone would prefer to be sought than hunted.
I turned away.
And saw two cops watching me carefully.
Two mistakes in one. First theirs, which was then compounded by mine. Their mistake was conventional. The federal agents at 22nd and Broadway had put the word out that I had escaped by subway. Whereupon law enforcement generally had assumed that I would escape by subway again. Because given the choice, law enforcement always fights the last battle one more time.
My mistake was to walk straight into their lazy trap.