The Manhattan Hunt Club

by John Saul

  “Let go of me,” Jinx complained, trying to shake Tillie’s arm loose.

  But Tillie held fast, and a few minutes later they had skirted around the baseball diamond that lay on the shelf above the river and pushed through a nearly invisible hole cut in the high fence separating the park from the railroad tracks. More than a score of men were scattered around the weed-choked area, wearing the numerous layers of clothing that marked them as homeless. Mostly they were sitting in groups of two or three, but a few were standing like sentries, their backs to the rotting concrete columns that supported the highway, almost like a parody of the guards at Buckingham Palace.

  Tillie nodded to most of the men as she steered Jinx past them, even spoke a few words to two of the sentries. It wasn’t until the gloom of the railway tunnel had swallowed them up that she spoke to Jinx again.

  “Now you tell me,” she said, her eyes fixed on the girl. “What are you talking about?”

  “He didn’t do it!” Jinx said, her voice quivering with anger.

  “Who didn’t do what?” Tillie demanded. “What are you talkin’ about?”

  “The guys that came to the co-op—the ones you kicked out yesterday morning?”

  Tillie’s expression darkened. “What about ’em?”

  “I don’t know about the big one, but the other one—Jeff Converse?—he didn’t do anything.”

  “You said that to me this morning, but that’s not what it said in the paper.”

  “I know what it said in the paper. I know what it said in all the papers, ‘cause I went down to the library today and read them. And guess what? They’re wrong! I told you, I was there. I saw what happened that night. That guy was trying to help her. It was Bobby Gomez who did it. He was muggin’ her, and the other guy got off a train.”

  Tillie only shrugged. “Even if you’re right, it don’t make any difference now—the hunters are already after him. He’s as good as dead.”

  “Not if he gets out.”

  “But he ain’t gonna get out,” Tillie countered. “None of ’em get out.”

  Jinx took a step back from Tillie. “None of ’em ever had any help.”

  “What are you—” But before she finished the question, Tillie understood what Jinx intended to do. She reached out to grab the girl, but Jinx was too fast for her. Darting out of Tillie’s reach, she went deeper into the tunnel, quickly disappearing in darkness. “Jinx!” Tillie called out. There was no reply, and a few seconds later she watched the girl’s dark shadow pass through the pool cast by one of the dim lights fastened high on the tunnel wall. “You come back here,” Tillie hissed. “Even if you find them, all that’ll happen is the hunters’ll kill you, too!”

  But Jinx was running now. Tillie could hear the sound of the girl’s pounding feet blending with the fading echo of her own words.

  A moment later even those sounds died away and the tunnel fell silent.

  Perry Randall sat at the desk in his walnut-paneled library overlooking Central Park. His desk faced the window, and the curtains were wide open, allowing morning sunlight to flood the room. Had he paused to appreciate the view, he would have seen the profusion of color that momentarily filled the park as the spring flowers entered their full, brief glory.

  But Perry Randall had not looked out the window—indeed, since he’d heard the message intended for Heather, he had been on the telephone. He’d called half a dozen people, and when no one had been able to provide him with an answer to his question, he’d instructed them to meet him at eleven o’clock that morning. “At the club,” he told them. Though he was a member of four clubs scattered around Manhattan, including the Bar Association, the Metropolitan, and the Yale Club, everyone he called knew that he meant The 100 Club. Over a century old, to its members it was simply “the club,” and to those outsiders who knew of it and hoped to become members it was “The Hundred.”

  To everyone else, it was entirely unknown.

  The Hundred had been formed with a single purpose in mind: to provide a private retreat for the hundred most powerful people in the city with no regard whatsoever to gender, race, or religion. The petty snobberies and bigotries of the better-known clubs that were spread across the city were abjured by every member of The Hundred, at least when it came to fellow members. Far smaller than Perry Randall’s other clubs, The Hundred still occupied the nineteenth-century brownstone at 100 West Fifty-third Street which had been built to house it, and little else had changed during the years since its creation. Since the membership would never expand, there had never been a need to move. Recognizing that the tides of power would inevitably shift over time, the charter of The Hundred provided that five percent of the membership be dropped every five years, and a new five percent elected. The policy ensured that there were never any senile old folks dozing away their days in the members’ lounge, and that no matter what happened, the power brokers of the city—whoever they might be—would have a place to meet in complete privacy.

  Today, if it somehow had been Jeff Converse’s voice he’d heard on the telephone, Perry Randall was going to need that privacy to deal with the situation that had suddenly arisen. Obviously, someone had made a terrible mistake, and that mistake would have to be rectified. As the ornate, heirloom Seth Thomas regulator on the wall softly chimed the half hour, Randall closed the file on his desk—a file that contained every scrap of information relating to Jeff Converse’s case, every page of which he’d reviewed again that morning—and placed it in his briefcase. Though he’d found nothing in it that seemed relevant to today’s problem, one couldn’t be too careful.

  As he rose from the desk, he couldn’t help pausing at the window to gaze at the park spread out below. A park that was, thanks to him and his friends in The Hundred, a safe place to walk once more. Much in the city had changed in the years since Perry Randall had been elected to The Hundred. The crime rate had dropped dramatically. The murders and muggings that had been so commonplace only a decade ago had all but disappeared.

  The subways—though he himself never rode them—had been cleaned up.

  The panhandlers that had choked the sidewalks and train stations were all but gone.

  Much of that had happened, Perry Randall knew, because of the policies he and the other members had developed in the privacy of the club. Unwritten rules for the city had been decided upon, and if the public had not had a hand in forming them, everyone had certainly benefited from their implementation. The city had changed for the better more quickly than even the members of the club could have hoped. But obviously, in the case of Jeff Converse, something had gone wrong.

  He was just opening the hall closet to choose a coat when the door from the far wing opened and Heather appeared. They were both surprised, and Perry tried to think of something to say, but it was Heather who broke the uncomfortable silence.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, her voice strained with tension. “You’re really going?”

  The question confused him, but his years in the courtroom and at the negotiating table kept his features from showing it. Had she heard the message on the answering machine? That was impossible—if she had, she would have come to him right away, insisting that he use every connection he had to find out if somehow Jeff might possibly still be alive. Besides, Carolyn had told him the new message light was flashing when she’d listened to the message, and he’d erased it himself right after he listened to it.

  “Is it such a crime for your father to go to the club?” he asked, cocking his head in the manner that had always brought her running into his arms when she was a child.

  Today she made no move to come any closer.

  Then, as he noticed the simple black dress she was wearing, he understood. “Jeff’s funeral?” he asked, injecting just the right amount of concern into the question. “I’m—well, I’m afraid I didn’t know.” He hesitated, then shifted down a gear. “Nobody told me,” he added. If she felt any of the guilt he’d intended her to feel, she gave no sign of it, and it
occurred to him—not for the first time—that if she set her mind to it, she could be nearly as good a lawyer as he.

  “I didn’t really think you’d want to go,” Heather replied. “Given the way you treated Jeff—”

  “I didn’t treat Jeff any way at all,” he cut in, for once letting his aggravation show. “All I was doing was my job. And despite my personal feelings, I made it a point to remove myself from Jeff’s case completely. I built a firewall between me and that case, Heather, and you know it. Now, I can’t help the way I feel, but you have to understand that I did nothing—nothing at all—to influence the trial. It was the jury who decided Jeff’s guilt, not me. And I have to tell you that the way you keep holding it against me—”

  “It’s not just the trial, Daddy,” Heather cut in. “It’s everything. You always treated him like a servant, and—” Abruptly, she stopped and glanced at her watch. “What does it matter now anyway?” she asked. “I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, and if I don’t go, I’ll be late.”

  Perry held the door open for her, and after hesitating a moment, she stepped through. “Where is the service?” Perry asked as they rode down in the elevator.

  “St. Patrick’s. It was Jeff’s favorite church. He loved the surprise of it in the middle of midtown. He said it was some of the finest architecture in the city.”

  “If you like that sort of thing, I suppose it’s good for its kind. But I’m afraid I’ve always found it a bit . . .” He paused, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose what I think doesn’t really matter, does it?” Heather offered no reply, and neither of them spoke again until they were on the sidewalk. “Can I drop you?” he asked, nodding toward the black Lincoln Town Car waiting by the curb, its driver holding the door open for him.

  She shook her head. “It’s such a nice day, I think I’ll walk.”

  As the car pulled away from the curb, Perry Randall realized that even though Jeff Converse was no longer a part of Heather’s life and would never be a part of her life again, she still had not forgiven him for failing to leap to the boy’s defense. As the Town Car settled into the stream of traffic moving down the avenue, he tried to relax in the knowledge that sooner or later Heather would have to forgive him and they would return to the nearly perfect relationship they’d had before she fell in love with Jeff Converse.

  After all, the boy had been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and eventually Heather would realize that. Besides, as far as she was concerned, Jeff Converse was already dead.

  And in a few more hours, he undoubtedly would be.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Why don’t you just tell me, okay?” Jinx said, struggling not to turn away from the steely gaze of the man who was staring down at her with the hardest eyes she’d ever seen. She’d never had any trouble staring people down before, but this man, whom she’d never seen before and already hoped she’d never see again, was different. She wasn’t sure how old he was; he could have been twenty, or could just as easily have been forty—maybe even forty-five. She’d found him in the Seventy-second Street subway station, lounging against the wall at the far end. She’d known right away he was one of the herders, even though he was doing his best to look like he didn’t have anything better to do than hang out in the subway. But if he hadn’t been a herder, he’d have been sprawled out on the platform, probably holding tight to the brown bag that sat between his feet—no wino Jinx had ever seen let the bottle leave his hand, much less sit unguarded on the floor while he was standing up. The knife had most clearly given him away. Jinx spotted it right off, clutched in his right hand, only partly hidden by the ragged denim vest that he wore over a dirty flannel shirt with torn-off sleeves. Once she pegged him as a herder, she’d walked right up to him and asked him if he’d seen the two guys in the hunt.

  He’d just stared at her blankly, like he didn’t know what she was talking about. She hadn’t realized how big he was until she was right in front of him. Now he towered over her, the thick muscles of his tattoo-covered biceps rippling every time he flexed them, which she knew he was doing just to impress her. Well, screw him—she’d been on the streets way too long to be impressed with big muscles and small brains. She held her ground and her gaze never wavered. “Come on, what’s the big deal?”

  The man’s lips pulled back to reveal his rotting teeth, and his glazed eyes told her he’d gotten hold of some drugs not very long ago. She wondered if Lester and Eddie were dealing again—if they were, Tillie’d kick their asses out for sure. But if the man was stoned, he was a lot more dangerous than he’d be if he was straight, or just drunk. His eyes finally shifted away from hers and raked over her body.

  Sizing her up.

  She saw him glance down the platform, checking out the crowd, and she steeled herself, knowing that if he was really junked up, he might try to rape her right there. Ready to spring away if he made a move toward her, she tried once more. “Look—all I’m supposed to do is find out if they tried to get out through here. So what do I say? That you were too fucked up to see?” The man tensed, and for a second Jinx thought she might have gone too far. But a second later the gamble paid off.

  “One joint,” the man snarled. “All’s I had was one fuckin’ joint.” But even as he spoke, his right hand moved to cover the barely scabbed tracks on the inside of his left arm.

  “So what about it?” she asked. “Did you see ’em or not?”

  “What the fuck business is it of yours?” the man countered, but the aggression in his voice had given way to a faint whine.

  “You got your job, I got mine. So what’s the big fuckin’ deal?” Her confidence restored, Jinx’s eyes locked onto the man again.

  “I ain’t seen ’em,” he said, his eyes shifting to the subway tunnel as if he expected them to come walking out of the darkness. Jinx was about to turn away when the man said, “But I heard they tried to get out over by the river yesterday.”

  The whine in his voice was more prominent, and then Jinx understood. He was scared of her now. He didn’t know who she was or who she might be working for. But he knew exactly what would happen to him if he fucked up—the hunters would turn on him, and instead of having an easy source of the cash he needed for whatever he was shooting, he’d be running in the tunnels himself. She turned back to face him again. Suddenly, he didn’t look nearly as big as he had a few moments ago, and the hard, empty glaze in his eyes had given way to a nervousness that told Jinx the junk was starting to wear off. The sweat that broke out on his forehead confirmed it.

  “Like I care what happened yesterday,” she said, seizing the opportunity. “What they want to know is where they are now.”

  The last of the man’s junkie confidence crumbled. “I don’t know—I’m tellin’ you, I don’t know nothin’.” Then, as if searching for something, anything, that might make Jinx say something good about him to whomever she was working for, he said, “They found Crazy Harry this morning.”

  Crazy Harry? Who was he? She had never heard of him, but she said nothing, certain that her silence would be enough to keep the man talking. Sure enough, he started up again. “He was in his room, down near where Shine’s bunch hangs out. Someone cut him last night.” His voice dropped. “The guy that told me said it looked like they jammed a railroad spike in him.” The man’s head shook from side to side as if he could hardly believe what he’d heard. “Who’d do a thing like that? Shit, Harry was crazy, but he never hurt no one. Why’d anyone want to cut him up?”

  But Jinx had stopped listening.

  A railroad spike. The guy with Jeff Converse—Jagger, that was his name—had carried a railroad spike.

  “Where’d he live?” she asked.

  “Who?” the man countered.

  “Crazy Harry!” Jinx replied. “You said he lived down near Shine. Where’s that?”

  The man shook his head. “How do I know? Down below somewhere—down where all the crazies live.”

  “How do I get there?” Jinx asked.

&nbs
p; Now the man’s eyes changed again, turning suspicious. “Thought you just wanted to know about them guys the hunters are after.”

  He started to reach for her arm, but with instincts honed by years on the streets, Jinx spun away before his huge hand closed on her. Flipping him the bird, she darted toward the stairs and was halfway up to the surface before the man had even moved. By the time she got to the surface, she knew exactly where she would go next.

  Sledge.

  She’d known Sledge almost as long as she’d known Tillie, and if anyone would know where this guy called Shine lived, he would. Sledge talked to everyone, and everyone talked to him.

  Emerging into the afternoon sunlight, she headed north, abandoning the tunnels, at least for a while.

  The man called Sledge thought he was somewhere around seventy years old, though he wasn’t quite sure and he didn’t really care. His real name was Charles Price, but he hadn’t used it for so long that if someone had spoken it, he probably wouldn’t have responded at all. He’d grown up in West Virginia, and after a year in the coal mines had decided that there had to be more to life than breathing dust and dying young.

  As it turned out, that wasn’t quite true.

  For a long time he drifted from one job to another, always managing to drink his way out of them. Finally the day came when there were no more jobs, and Sledge found himself on the streets. It wasn’t much of a comedown, since the free flophouses and missions weren’t much worse than the rooms he’d been paying for. Then one night someone tried to roll him in one of the missions—it was the third time—and Sledge decided he’d had it. That was when he started looking around for a better place to live, and discovered the tunnels.

  He started out in a nest on one of the catwalks above the tracks under Grand Central, using the washrooms to clean up and doing some panhandling in the huge waiting room. But the transit cops kept giving him a hard time, and finally he migrated north. For a while he lived in a really weird place—a little forgotten subway station that he’d stumbled into one night when he was really drunk. He’d thought the walls were all paneled with wood, and it hadn’t looked like any subway station he’d ever seen before. He’d passed out, of course, but when he awoke the next day it turned out he hadn’t been hallucinating at all. There really was paneling on the walls, and a grand piano on the platform, and a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. If he’d kept his mouth shut about it, he might still be living there, but he told too many people, and one night some people from the surface showed up, and the next time he tried to get in, it was all locked up. He’d heard it was part of some kind of museum now, but wasn’t sure and didn’t care.