by Larry Crane
“Pull over to the side. Right here.” Lou said.
There wasn’t another car or person on the street. In the center of the biggest city in the country, it was absolutely quiet. Ghostly plumes of vapor rose from the sewer grates all the way down 34th. For a long while, Lou sat there without saying anything. Titus, too, was quiet, looking straight out the windshield.
“This is where we part company, Titus. I’ve got just one problem.”
“For chrissake don’t shoot me. I done everything you said. I wouldn’t know you if I met you on the street this afternoon. Besides, I’m going right back home as soon as you get out.”
“What am I going to do with this weapon, Titus?”
“You’re going to look kind of funny jivin’ around town with a rifle under your arm.”
“That’s what I was thinking. I can’t leave it with you.”
“I got a brown paper sack back there on the floor somewhere with my grease rags in it. You could break it down and carry it around in the bag.”
“That’s it. Perfect.”
“You leavin’ now?”
“I want you to do one more thing, Titus. I want you keep your eyes straight to the front and don’t look back. I’m going to get out and walk away from here. If you do what I say, there won’t be any trouble. Don’t blow it now.”
He opened the back door and stepped to the ground on his bad leg, sending a shot of pain clear to his ankle. He hesitated there until it subsided. “I’m leaving you a couple of bucks back here. That’s for gas and grub. So long.”
* * *
WASHINGTON—The moment of truth is at hand for a beleaguered president today as the nation goes to the voting booth. Every major opinion poll of the last two weeks has forecast a sure defeat for Mr. Bliss, despite an almost frenzied series of statements and speeches promising massive crackdowns on crime, increased military expenditures, and emphasis on domestic law-and-order themes. Only a dramatic personal appearance by the president at the site of the terrorist bombing at Bear Mountain Bridge in New York, and his presence at the “anti-crime command post” ever since, appear as bright spots for the president in this election campaign.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Lou backed away from the car and watched it dissolve into the vapor plumes down 34th Street toward the East River. His thigh was badly swollen; muscle tissue strained against the drum-tight skin from his butt to his knee. Even though the pants were baggy and riding high above the shoe, his skin was on fire.
He struggled down 34th, projecting purpose on a sidewalk devoid of people. The sky was light gray now. The city shadows were sucked into the subway stairwell that loomed black half a block ahead. If there was any line he knew in all of New York, it was the Seventh Avenue IRT. Straight downtown.
The token booth operator yawned long and loud. Lou shoved two dollars through the opening in the glass; a token and three quarters slid back and nested in the sculpted tray. He pushed his way through the turnstile and hobbled to the edge of the platform. He saw no one else on his side of the tracks all the way down to the end.
A cat-sized rat scuttled under the third rail and through the newspapers and coffee cups littering the space between the tracks. On the other side of the station, a cluster of women—gabbing in Spanish and wearing the garb of the cleaning trade—waited for the train to Central Park South. A low rumble from a long way down the tunnel reverberated in the tiled arch of the station; then the gleam of headlights came dancing on the rails. The #1 train wrenched to a stop. The right door socked his shoulder as he limped into the car. The door operator leaned out of his window, watched him for a moment, but said nothing.
The train made all the stops—28th Street, 23rd, 18th, 14th, Christopher, Houston, Canal, Franklin, Chambers, and Cortlandt—passing a gallery of new and old ceramic tile mosaic signs at each station. Lou hip-hopped out the door at Rector. It was a hard pull to get up the stairs. Outside in the air again, he took a deep breath and looked around. He was nearly directly across the street from Trinity Churchyard. It was right there that he’d stopped after coming out of Buck’s office, when the whole thing had started. Sitting there on a bench, he’d told himself that nothing bad could happen.
A MacDonald’s blazed bright on his side of the street. He ordered eggs and coffee. The woman at the cash register couldn’t tear herself from her Village Voice, even as she seized his money. He made it to a table. A young man in a paper hat and apron pushed a long-handled broom, gathering the mess from the night customers. The sweeper nudged the foot of a bearded derelict sleeping at a table, who rose without arguing and stumbled out the door.
Having eaten, Lou was drawn again to the Churchyard to find solitude in the swirl of the city. Traffic was beginning to build up. There were a fair number of people on the streets. He had to wait before he could cross Rector to climb the stairs to the cemetery. He finally gave up waiting and shuffled through the creeping cars. The path wound around through the center of the square. He sat on one of the benches beside the church’s north wall, in the back.
All but a few leaves had fallen from the trees. Every few moments, another came skating out of the sky, slid against the black, cast iron pickets, and spun to the ground. Shoeshine vendors lined the high fence on the Broadway side of the cemetery, lounging in their chairs, reading the morning paper. Squirrels sat waiting for handouts in the warmth of the morning sun. The only sound was the rush of a few tires on Broadway. No construction. No horns; not at this hour. Shielded from the wind, soothed by the sun, Lou listened and watched, as if the last days hadn’t happened; as if his wound wouldn’t burn as soon as he moved.
The little act of war at the bridge had had no effect on the people of this city. If he expected it to be plastered across the front page of every newspaper; on the lips of every passerby; blaring from the radios of the cabs; then he was being naïve once again. The city itself was an organism with its own heart, its own blood, and its own job to do. Just one more crazy happening somewhere up the river was no reason to change the routine. The sun comes up and the organism moves again, its heartbeat echoing in the low rumbling beneath the streets.
The calm of the churchyard and the food in his belly soothed his racing heart for about ten minutes. Then the wheels began to turn. The image of Tom Holt’s farmhouse looming in the windshield of the Lexus as he drove up the dirt road near Monticello came back as clear as could be. He saw in his mind’s eye his radioman from Vietnam, Tom Holt, again, looking just as thin but minus much of the hair he had twenty years before, emerging from the front door of the house, and then leading him into the kitchen where Dory poured coffee and served up blueberry pie. They sat for half an hour catching up on the years since they’d last seen each other, and since Tom and Dory had married.
Then Lou spilled the story of the reconnaissance that he’d just completed, and the contingency plan he had for identifying all the players in the bridge operation to be made public in the event that it all came apart. He asked Tom to use his video camera to capture him on tape, establishing the date of the recording and detailing the entire plan, to name Copeland and Stanfield and Patricia Buck. He was careful not to implicate Holt or Dory in the plot. He asked Tom to hold a copy of the tape, and to turn it over to columnist William Severence in the event that he was apprehended or killed. And he recalled what Tom had said just before he drove back down the dirt road for home: “Lou, you risked everything for me back there in Plieku, and now I get the chance to reciprocate. I’m happy to do it.”
Now he needed to confront Patricia Buck. She wasn’t the lowest animal in the food chain, but she was the most vulnerable. The trail of money led through Westover and Calvin Swisher directly to her. The connection to the president was more tenuous, even though he had recorded on videotape— long before it actually happened—how Bliss would leave the Waldorf and charge to the scene. The only link missing was a smoking gun that led straight to the White House. If Lou could nail Patricia Buck on a tape recorder, get her to m
ention the president’s involvement...
What? Chat with Buck right there on Wall Street, with a tide of humanity at his elbow? Sure. How about another little nugget of gall? He would get up from here and shuffle over to that cop on the street and turn himself in. Then he’d be out of danger; no maniacs hunting him down anymore.
He would keep quiet about the Jord Bliss connection; pass off the bridge thing as his own. When he got out of jail, he’d be free to go back to his former life. Sure. The gargoyle above wore the absurdity of that thought on its face, its tongue protruding hideously from between its lips. Besides, what happened to the resolve he felt, back at Trophy Point, to bring the bastards down?
In one of those perpetual “Clearance Sale” electronics stores on Broadway, just up from the Wall Street stop light, Lou bought a pocket-sized Toshiba tape recorder for ninety-eight fifty in cash. “Little Sheba. It’s a cute little number, isn’t it?” the clerk joked, as he demonstrated loading the half-dollar-sized cartridge.
Lou would open the dialogue with Patricia Buck with the logic that it was in her best interests to call off Stanfield and Copeland; to do anything she could to help him escape capture. Patricia must be frantic, worrying that at any moment he would be caught by the police; that her clean, well-lighted world would come down in a huge heap of wreckage as he spilled his guts all over the precinct. Patricia was his enemy. She had to have approved the plan to eliminate him and Sydney. He’d get right into her devil kitchen and raise the heat.
A sandstone grave marker lay flat on a pedestal, a gap between it and the grass. Lou hobbled to it. No one was watching. He slipped the brown paper bag, with the broken-down carbine in it, under the ledge.
It was still early; eight o’clock. He entered 15 Wall Street, bluffed the main guard with a window-washing story, and then followed another guard onto the elevator and up to the second floor. He copped a bucket, water, and a rag from the custodial closet in the lobby. The guard let him into the reception area. No one was about yet. People in the brokerage business didn’t believe in arriving any too soon for a day’s work. Good. He’d get to Buck’s office before anybody showed up.
He passed Winifred’s desk and entered Buck’s office. The room was as clean as he remembered it; not a shred of paper anywhere. Buck had removed the wall-to-wall carpeting, had substituted a twenty-five by thirty-five foot Karastan. Lou reflexively bent to feel the pile and lifted the corner to glimpse the hand-tied knots.
He took the bucket to the windows and started tying up the drapes. When Buck showed up, she’d be the first to see him.
“Hey man, whatcha doin’?” It was like a stick of dynamite going off. Lou whirled to see yet another guard: a black man in a blue guard uniform.
“Dammit, you scared the hell out of me. What does it look like I’m doing? I want to get these cleaned up before Ms. Buck comes in.”
“How did you get in here? We don’t have nobody coming in today, man, especially Ms. Buck. You got the wrong place and the wrong time.”
“I was told to do this floor first thing this morning. I checked downstairs.”
“Well, they should’ve stopped you. I have no orders to let anyone in here.”
“I’m sorry, but I have a job to do.”
“All right, as long as you’re here, go ahead. But you’re wasting your time on this office.”
The guard handed him a sheet of paper that read:
NOTICE TO ALL EMPLOYEES
The executive offices of Pierson Browne & Company, Inc. will be closed tomorrow in honor of our esteemed and beloved general partner, Ms. Patricia Buck, who was involved in a tragic, fatal armed robbery on the street outside of her apartment as she returned home from another of her many charitable activities. Everyone who knew her will remember Patricia as a dedicated and compassionate leader.
There will be a memorial service in the chapel of the Whitehall Funeral Home on East 83rd Street tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock. In lieu of flowers, friends are asked to make donations to Coventry House.
In addition to her tireless efforts on behalf of Pierson Browne & Company, Patricia devoted herself to the project that mattered to her most: the reelection of the president of the United States. Tomorrow, Election Day, the branch offices will be open as usual.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Lou limped out of 15 Wall and quickly crossed the street, despite the pain. His felt the fever rising in his face. He stood looking in the window of the Doubleday Book Store, then glanced down Wall toward the East River. The street shrunk into the shadows of the buildings rising fifteen stories on either side, the enormous flags all along the corridor undulating heavily in the breeze as if swimming in invisible pudding.
Lou walked slowly toward Federal Hall, trying his best to keep the limp under control. He picked his way against the flow of people moving up toward Trinity Church. On the corner, wielding a microphone and loudspeaker, a little man in a dirty, white collar implored all the sinners passing by to step up and receive whatever dispensation he had authorized himself to give.
On the steps of Federal Hall, an even older man in a squashed fedora argued politics with a bunch of kids sitting sprawled on the stairs. Lou slowly lowered himself to sit beside the statue of George Washington.
He pulled his sweater around himself against the chill air and leaned into the statue’s pedestal. It was smooth and cold and he welcomed the support. Fatigue was gathering in his limbs again, ascending his spine. His cheeks and forehead felt feverish to his touch. Was it only hours ago that the enormity of the city, the facelessness of it, had seemed to offer shelter? And now, this pack of people moving on the sidewalks seemed a menace, no matter how deeply he pushed into the thicket.
With Buck’s death, it wasn’t clear who was at the bottom of it all. In the beginning, he was convinced that she, with all of her confidence and ambition and position, had hatched the plan to get Bliss reelected. She had methodically recruited all the toads she needed to make it happen: Red and his gang, and Stanfield and Copeland as the producers. It made sense. She saw no limits to the sweep of her own creativity. But did it make sense?
What if Stanfield and Copeland had recruited Patricia instead? When the operation imploded, they needed to dispatch all the operatives, including the middle people. And so they thought of Patricia as a middle person; corrupt enough to exploit; powerful but vulnerable because she was soft at the core; and incapable of conceiving how quickly it could all end—with a bullet placed neatly into the waves in her hair on the uptown sidewalk where nothing ugly ever happens. And so, was Patricia the mother of productivity that she, and everyone else, thought she was? Or was she like the white beacon at the foot of Bear Mountain Bridge, there for all to see and admire, but quickly extinguished with a well-placed shot?
What was it all about? Did Patricia hatch the plan to create the conditions necessary to reelect Jord Bliss or was it Stanfield and Copeland who had lured them all into a flawed plan that would crash of its own weight, carrying Patricia Buck and Jord Bliss down into the inky drink of political dirty tricks and assuring the defeat of this president when the electorate learned of it? Imagine Patricia Buck caught with her pants down, funneling the Westover payoff to the leader of the bridge caper. Poor girl. She had it figured all wrong.
To the tabloids, a trail would lead directly from Patricia to the man: Jordan Bliss. It was quick; but it was too smart by half, even though, to a jaded electorate weaned on Watergate, Irangate, Contras, Viet Cong, and Whitewater, it simply seemed more of the same.
One thing was for sure: Stanfield and Copeland had tried to kill him at the rendezvous. They must’ve planned that he’d be offed in the business at the bridge. It was probably Red’s job to get rid of both him and Sydney. When they found out that Red failed, they had to go to Plan B and set about getting rid of anyone who could tie them into the plot, before the police had time to pick up the survivors. It would’ve been easy. He hadn’t been identified in the media yet; they could’ve killed him a
nd gotten rid of his body deep in the woods somewhere. Even if Mag reported him gone, there was no one even to hint at where to find him.
There were a lot of loose ends out there now. Lou had been the wide-eyed one, the fool. He’d been absorbed in the job he had to do and he’d had his hands full with just that; never mind covering up. So he’d left the jacket at the bridge. The police probably had it now and were looking it over for laundry marks, trying to track it down. They probably already determined it had been purchased in MacFees. Sooner or later, they’d be talking to Titus.
Titus surely would be able to identify his voice if he ever heard it again. And he must’ve touched things in the trailer. They probably had a million fingerprints right now. But until they caught him, they didn’t have anything to match the prints with.
