“We have.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. They’ll be all over us, whoever they are.” Her mouth twisted. “We’ve got to split up. I’m too tall. They’ve seen me with you, they’ll look for me. I stand out. And they’ll be looking for the two of us.” She rested her hand on Wetzon’s shoulder, squeezing it thoughtlessly.
Wetzon stepped away, as if to go, and Diantha let her hand fall to her side. “I think it’s time you told me what’s going on.”
“There they are! Dammit!” Diantha’s eyes were wild. She reached into her pocket. For a panicked moment Wetzon thought Diantha was going to pull out a gun, but she had a handkerchief in her hand, and she used it to blot her face.
“Where?”
“Please! I’m begging you. It’s a matter of life and death.” Diantha dipped into her handbag, a brown leather clutch almost as large as a briefcase, and removed a key from a red leather change purse. “We don’t have time for explanations now, but I promise you, you’ll see and understand why I’m doing this, why I have to do it this way.” She pressed the key into Wetzon’s palm and closed her fingers over it. “Six nineteen East Sixteenth Street. It’s a brownstone. Ring my bell. Two short rings and one long. Count ten and do it again. Then go in.” She gave Wetzon a small push forward. “I’m going to double back and take the Lexington train. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
“But what does this have to do with me?” Wetzon was truly confused. At that instant she saw a tall man in a trench coat who stood out from the regular subway travelers. He was looking for someone, searching the faces in the crowd. This time when Diantha tugged her, she went willingly. They began weaving themselves in among the stream of people rushing to the Shuttle.
“Please,” Diantha said. “Don’t be frightened by anything you see there—” She sped up, pulling Wetzon with her. “When we get to the crush around the turnstiles, just join the crowd and go down and take the Shuttle to the BMT, then take the BMT to Fourteenth. I’m going back.”
Wetzon nodded. Her hands were cold. She took her gloves from her pocket and put them on, holding the key in the palm of her right hand, inside the glove.
Here it was wall-to-wall people, shoving and pushing to get through the turnstiles from both sides, coming from the Shuttle and going to the Shuttle. It seemed so stupid to Wetzon that there weren’t enough doors to let out the masses coming from the Shuttle, because the Transit Authority saw fit to keep half the doors chained closed so as to prevent people from sneaking in. She turned her head once to look for Diantha, spotted her taking off the fur turban, and then she was swallowed up in moments, tall as she was.
Wetzon hesitated at the turnstile. She didn’t have a token.
Someone pushed her hard. “Get out of the way, lady, move it,” a man in an expensive tweed overcoat snarled.
Damn. She backed away from the turnstile and saw the man in a trench coat waiting near the foot of the staircase leading to the Shuttle. She tore the lavender beret from her head and shoved it into her carryall, and let herself be carried along with the rush hour crowd back down the tunnel from which she’d come, the tunnel Diantha had disappeared down, not daring to look at anyone, particularly men in trench coats.
She remembered she had some bills and change in her coat pocket from the five she had given Judy Blue, so she took a place in line for the token booth, fidgeting. Maybe she should take the pins out of her hair. They’d surely spot her in her raccoon coat ... She slipped off her left glove and pulled the pins from her hair, letting it loosen around the band into a ponytail, shaking her head back and forth. She put the hairpins in her pocket with the spare change.
As she slipped two dollar bills under the window grate, she heard a man shout, “There she is!” She grabbed the two tokens, terrified, sank into a half crouch, prepared to run, expecting to be pounced on. People crowded around her but almost at once she realized they were not looking at her; they were watching a man in a tan trench coat elbow his way through the sea of people pouring down the escalator to the platform, following a woman in a purple beret and a raccoon coat.
That did it. She didn’t pause now. She went back through the tunnel with the relentless rush hour throng, blended into the group heading for the Shuttle, pushed her way on with the same fervor as the rest, and breathed a sigh of relief as the Shuttle train jerked out of Grand Central, moments later sliding into the Times Square station. There was no sign of men in trench coats.
She steered around the thick crowd listening to the thunderous music of a jazz combo, thinking that the music was nice but it caused a traffic jam of people. Torn newspapers, half-eaten hot dogs, pizza slices, crumpled soda cans, candy wrappers lay scattered on the stone passageways everywhere you looked. People just dropped things where they stood, never bothering to look for a trash basket, and when one did find a trash basket, it was usually filled to overflowing. Graffiti marked the scarred walls. The pungent combination of greasy and sweet smells came from the hot dog and caramel popcorn stand in the underground passageway to the BMT subway.
What the hell was that address Diantha had given her? Blast all of this to hell. She had told Silvestri she’d be home after seven. She’d never make it now. What would he think? He’d likely just be disgusted with her and think she was too unreliable for him to bother with.
Hold on one minute there, she thought. Why are you putting yourself down? If he thought that, he wasn’t worth bothering with. “Sure, you keep telling yourself that, old girl.” She had spoken out loud, but no one ever paid any attention to people who talked to themselves in New York, especially on the subway. She laughed. Even chic young women in expensive raccoon coats talked to themselves.
Her mind was a blank. She would have to trust the address would come back to her. East Sixteenth Street, Diantha had said. Something East Sixteenth Street.
She let her eyes roam slowly back and forth over the crowd, young, old, in overcoats, down, fur, leather, shivering in denim, wearing hats, bareheaded, baldheaded, carrying briefcases, newspapers, books, dark-skinned, light-skinned, Asians, men, women, children sleeping in strollers, infants in carrying sacks.
No FBI types though, no clones of clones, tall in tan trench coats and short tan hair. She shivered in the depths of her raccoon coat, but not because she was cold. What had they wanted of her? And were they really FBI?
Down the stone steps, strewn with garbage, that led to the BMT lines, she was thinking less about where she was going than about what she had become involved in. She automatically walked in a broken field around the standees, a few yards down to the middle of the platform, passing another staircase down which people continued to stream. A young man with waist-length hair was playing a Mozart violin concerto near a big trash container. People were listening and putting money into his violin case, and impulsively Wetzon gave him what she had in her pockets, all except for the hairpins.
Two trains pulled into the station almost at the same time, an N and an R. The N was crowded with people, while the R was fairly empty with plenty of seats and everyone visible. Ordinarily, she would have taken the R so she could sit to Fourteenth Street, but this was not an ordinary situation. Just in case they were still looking for her ... She hovered by the door of the R and then as the doors were about to close, moved as if to get on, turned, and scooted across the platform to the N and pushed her way unceremoniously into the people-as-sardines pressed into one another. The doors closed on the half-empty R as she watched.
“Push, lady, push.” A cheerful tub of a man with a Spanish accent got on behind her and, holding onto the sides of the open doors for leverage, belly-pushed her and himself into the jammed car. She was squeezed into a rigid position, held up by other bodies similarly squeezed. The conductor’s voice came crackling over the PA system, warning everyone to clear the doors, and then the doors of the N bumped shut. Her face rested against someone’s canvas backpack.
Her heart sank when she heard yelling on the platform and someone pounded on th
e side of the train. But the conductor announced implacably, “Please step back. There is another train just behind this one.”
She was wedged between two taller women and a man in work clothes stained with paint, who needed a bath. The man behind her actually opened a newspaper and read it over her, the pages flapping on the side of her face not pressed against the backpack. God, she hated being short. What she wouldn’t give for three or four or five more inches. That wasn’t asking for much.
People screamed at each other in Spanish, but they were just having a conversation. The two women, young and intense looking, were talking about the mathematical philosophy of a point. A point? A dot? The train jerked, throwing everyone wedged together off-balance. The women talking about the point were interrupted by the man in the paint-stained clothes. “I think I might be able to help on this,” he said. The three began to argue abstractions and Wetzon tuned out. 619 East Sixteenth Street. That was the address Diantha had given her.
The next stop was Fourteenth Street, Union Square.
When the doors opened, people burst forth, carrying Wetzon with them, pushing and shoving their way from the train, across the platform. She climbed the first flight of stairs, went through the turnstile past the token booth, where there was the usual line, and headed for the staircase to the street.
“Oh!” The frightened cry came from a woman in front of her on the staircase. Wetzon, holding up her new coat to keep it from sweeping the stairs, looked up, ready to run.
A tiny mouse was scampering around, terrorized, desperately looking for a way out. Behind Wetzon another woman let out a soft cry. The mouse saw an opening and darted up the stairs and into the night, where she, too, wanted to run.
She came out at Union Square, a dilapidated area of the City now undergoing a great resurgence. Part of the square was paved over like a parking a lot and the best farmers’ market in Manhattan was here two or three times a week all year round, with fresh fruits and vegetables as well as flowers, plants, meats, fish, and baked goods from farms in New York State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
The builder William Zeckendorf had built a towering condominium on the east side of the square, and the community which had definitely been down-and-out was beginning to be revitalized. Upscale restaurants had sprung up everywhere; the area was gentrifying as fast as her Upper West Side. But it would never have the elegance of its neighbor Gramercy Park, two or three blocks to the north.
“Six nineteen,” she murmured over and over to herself, “six nineteen ...” The wind swept across the empty square with a wicked bite. She fished into her carryall and put her beret back on, adjusting it down over her eyebrows.
The building was one of four almost identical brownstones obviously built by the same builder, probably in the late nineteenth century. Each had about twelve narrow stone steps leading to an ornate black iron grate door in front of a heavy wooden door. Six nineteen’s door was a light-colored oak with a gleaming brass doorplate.
To the left of the door were two small highly polished brass plates. The lower one said #1 Trapunto, and the upper said #2 Anderson. There was a bell next to each number. She opened the iron grate door and tried the knob of the oak door. It was locked.
Now what was that dumb signal Diantha had given her? It was so stupid, all of this. She felt as if she were in a cloak-and-dagger film, and a B one at that.
Two short rings, one long, count ten, do it again. She made a refrain out of it, counting under her breath, “And one and two, and one ...” She did it. A buzzer sounded, so Diantha must have made it home safely. She pushed the oak door open and found herself in a small vestibule, facing two doors. To her immediate right was a tall, mission-style combination umbrella stand-coatrack. A bright brass lantern hung from the ceiling, lighting the area. On the walls was beautiful William Morris wallpaper with a design of arches within arches in mauves and purples.
The door on the left had a brass “1,” the door on the right “2.”
She closed the oak door behind her, listening for the snap which indicated the door was locked. Then she removed her glove from her right hand and took out the key which had grown warm in the palm of her hand.
Suddenly uncertain, she stopped. What the hell was she doing here? It was preposterous. Still, she was here. She might as well find out what Diantha thought was so urgent. She unlocked the door and it opened inward. A staircase began just a few steps in front of her, going up, under a dim, hanging fixture of a brass chain with a Tiffany globe.
Again she closed the door behind her and listened. Silence. The floor creaked from somewhere above her, as if from a footstep.
“Diantha?” Her voice came out husky. She cleared her throat. There was no welcoming response. Ah well. She picked up the front of her coat and climbed the narrow, steep staircase. There were prints on the right-hand wall of Victorian women in bright dresses. It appeared Diantha lived in the upper half of a brownstone, a duplex all her own.
When Wetzon got to the top of the stairs, she paused. There was that same creaking noise again, and then a faint rustle. Someone was here. “Diantha? Are you here?”
No answer.
She moved forward, drawn by something—she didn’t know what— the sound, perhaps, the subdued light, a fuzzy sepia mist, in the large front room at the top of the stairs, as if she’d entered an old movie. The windows facing the street had their blinds drawn. She took in the paintings on the walls, the mauve velvet upholstery on a long traditional sofa, two wing chairs in wide-and-narrow-striped fabric, their backs to her, facing the fireplace in which dying embers glowed and snapped. The walls were a deeper mauve-brown.
Her eyes focused on a book that lay open on the floor next to one of the wing chairs. A half-filled glass of dark liquid was on the small round table that was placed between the two chairs.
“Is anyone here?” she asked, perplexed, afraid, not afraid, growing angry, knowing that someone was there.
A figure rose tall from one of the chairs and turned to her. An apparition.
She staggered backward, as if hit by a tremendous weight, breathless. “No!” she cried.
“Wetzi,” the figure said. “It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. I’m real.”
Her knees buckled under her and she felt herself slumping forward to the floor. Her mind told her no—she had to be dreaming—but her eyes betrayed her.
The figure standing near the chair was Teddy Lanzman.
42.
THE SLAM OF a door somewhere in the distance woke her. It reassured her. Of course, she’d been dreaming again. Teddy was not alive. What a cruel joke. She rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow. The velvet of the pillowcase caressed her cheek. Wait. What velvet pillow?
She opened her eyes. Oh God. Teddy was looking down at her. She was lying on Diantha Anderson’s velvet sofa. And Diantha Anderson herself, still wearing the brown fur-lined storm coat, came up behind him.
Wetzon sat up and the room spun and dipped like a runaway merry-go-round, making a fun house image of Teddy and Diantha.
“You jerk,” she heard Diantha say. “What did you do? Jump out at her and yell boo?”
“Shit, lady, I’ve been through hell and back and you’re yelling at me? Why the fuck didn’t you tell her?”
“There wasn’t time, and where we were was hardly the place.” Diantha smiled down at Wetzon. There were little tense lines around her mouth and eyes. “How’re you doing?”
“Okay, I think. I can’t believe this.” Wetzon stared at Teddy’s familiar face. Short sprouts of beard decorated his cheeks and chin. She put her hand out and touched him; he was warm and splendidly alive.
Diantha gave Teddy a poke with her elegant knee. “And what do you think the last two days have been for me, you ungrateful bastard?” Her eyes blazed and she shook a fist at him. She was beautiful. Her short Afro was one shade darker than her skin.
Teddy smiled and put his arm around Diantha. “Come on, who’re you kidding? You’re my girl, aren�
��t you? It comes with the territory.”
“I’m my own girl,” she said affectionately. They stood separate but together as Wetzon watched. Very much together. They made a stunning couple, two tall, beautiful people.
“Would you two mind telling me what’s going on?” Wetzon demanded.
“I’ll make some coffee,” Diantha said. She took off her coat and picked up Wetzon’s raccoon, which was lying on the floor where Teddy must have left it after she fainted, and hung both in a closet near the middle of the floor-through space.
The section of the apartment Wetzon was in had a long row of windows that overlooked the street. Beyond the closet were rolling doors which Diantha opened, revealing a formal dining room. Its long far wall of windows faced the rear of the house, possibly looking down on gardens and backyards. Diantha disappeared to the right into what must have been the kitchen.
Wetzon’s attention returned to Teddy. “Well, you look a little better than the last time I saw you.”
He sat down next to her. “I am not dead. I was never dead. I don’t know who that poor bugger was who is dead. When I got back to my office I heard someone rattling drawers, going through my files. I ducked into the next office—which has a connecting door to mine. I figured I’d catch the guy when he came out. Then the lights started going crazy and I heard someone come through the stairwell doors.” Teddy’s jaw tightened, and she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed and sunken, lids heavy with exhaustion or worry, face tired, drawn. “Whoever it was had a flashlight. I could see the fucking thing bobbing on the floor. I couldn’t see who it was, and I was trying to figure out what was coming down when the lights came on again and this guy disappears into my office. I hear someone yell, then pop, pop, pop and the lights go out for good. And that’s it.”
“Jesus, Teddy, then you were in the hallway with me and—”
“And the killer, Wetzi. That’s why I couldn’t let you know I was all right. I know what a silencer sounds like ... I went down the stairs right behind him.”
Tender Death Page 27
