Stone 588

by Gerald A. Browne

  Springer and Audrey continued to pray.

  "Did he see us?" Audrey asked.

  "I don't think so," Springer replied.

  When, after five minutes, the Libby man didn't reappear. Springer and Audrey sat up. They were quite confident that they'd given their pursuers the slip. They agreed that for margin they should stay in St. Patrick's at least another half hour. Audrey began massaging the back of Springer's neck, a conclusive gesture. While her fingers kneaded caringly, Springer's thoughts returned to the perplexity of Libby.

  Okay, he reasoned, say there was some one-sided misunderstanding serious enough for Libby to want him done in, just say there was, then what about Audrey? These men were out to also do away with Audrey, and Libby wouldn't want that, probably not under any circumstances, no matter how obsessively envious she might be of Audrey's many fewer years or jealous of what Audrey and he had together. Nothing short of insanity would call for such drastic action. No, it just didn't wash.

  He felt like taking his head off and giving it a few hard loosening shakes. The answer, anyway the clue, to this Libby thing had to be stuck in there somewhere. Did it perhaps have to do with the Russian diamond deal? He went back over the times he'd been with Libby, what had been said. Words of hers ran across the front of his mind. Several fragments went zipping by at the speed of thought but insisted on coming back for replay:

  I have enough people here . . . quite capable people and very loyal.

  That had been Libby's reply when they were down in her vault at the Greenwich house putting the Russian diamonds away and he'd inquired about her security. He remembered wondering at the time how she could be so certain the staff of men that protected her was so capable . . . and loyal . . . and she had told him:

  Wintersgill finds my people for me . . . recruits and screens them intensively.

  Wintersgill. The getter, the front, the green floodgate.

  Wintersgill. The bloodlined lacky with marriage ambitions.

  If Wintersgill found these men weren't they his? Didn't they owe their selves to him? If he screened them wouldn't he make sure they knew from whom their bonuses were coming? Hell, yes. Groat and Fane and all the others were, when push came to kill, Wintersgill's own task force. Then, of course, it followed that Wintersgill, not Libby, had sicced these men on them. A purge. More than likely, not they but Libby was the main mark, and wherever she was at that moment, she too was in mortal danger.

  Perhaps she was already dead.

  That shivering thought brought Springer to remind himself all this was mere surmise. His scenario. It stacked up a lot more neatly than anything else, though.

  He put it to Audrey, what did she think?

  "Wintersgill." She nodded.

  "But why? What would he have to gain?"

  She looked up at stained glass windows of the north transept, as though the answer was up there among the colors and the tracery. "Maybe," she said, "gain isn't his motive. Maybe it's a matter of what he has to lose."

  "We've got to get to Libby."

  Springer looked off to his right and left and then turned and looked behind.

  There they were.

  Ten pews back.

  Two Wintersgill men. The gray-haired blond and another. Their eyes held on Springer's. They were smirking malignantly. Evidently they'd been sitting there for some time, enjoying their edge. The gray-haired blond must have spotted them and not let on, gone around, and come in through the front entrance.

  What to do now?

  They sure as hell couldn't be outsat.

  Mass ended. The hundreds attending got up from the pews and were filing out. Springer and Audrey saw it as a chance. They joined those leaving by way of the center aisle, got as close in among them as possible, using them as a shield. The two Wintersgill men waited for Springer and Audrey to pass before joining the flow. Springer and Audrey would go out to Fifth Avenue, would, as soon as they were a foot out of the cathedral, make a dash down the steps to the sidewalk, the curb. Luck and timing would be with them. An available taxi would be coming along, would be right there and they'd jump in and be swiftly carried away to safety.

  Now they'd reached the end of the aisle. The crowd diverged in the main vestibule. The main way out was closed, as it usually was on weekdays. There was the choice of going out by way of the north or south vestibules. Springer and Audrey chose the south, hurried through the doorway to it and were about to step outside when they saw Groat. Unmissable in his double-breasted brown twill livery, shiny beaked cap, leather leggings. Groat and another with him, at the comer of the exterior landing, were waiting for them, watching for them. Saw them.

  Impasse.

  Wintersgill men ahead and coming on behind.

  Springer noticed a door just inside the vestibule, an ordinary single door. No telling what it might lead to. He tried it. It came open. He and Audrey darted in and quickly closed the door after them. They, along with an old tin dustpan and a wornout broom, were at the bottom of a steep spiral stairway, so narrow they would have to go up single file. Clear glass lightbulbs of twenty-five watts at most were suspended from outdated fabric-covered wires.

  A bannister that followed the curve of the white plaster walls offered its assistance.

  Because of the sharp continuous turn of the steps, they had to be taken one at a time. Audrey went up ahead of Springer. Her feet were almost level with his eyes and he saw the repetitious blur of her heels as she scurried up and around, up and around. It was dizzying. Desperation made it seem all the more so.

  When they'd climbed three complete spirals, they heard what surely had to be the Wintersgill men on the stairs below: the heavy, pursuing steps of perhaps as many as three. Springer and Audrey could only be mentally spuned on, for their feet were already going as fast as possible. At the completion of the fifth spiral they had climbed one hundred fifty-three steps, about the equivalent of ten stories. At that point the stairway ended at a landing. There was a closed door on the right, a solid wood door with a hundred-year-old brass knob that had never been polished.

  No time to catch a badly needed deep breath.

  Springer turned the knob, pulled. The door seemed to be locked, but he noticed there was only the knob, no keyhole. He pulled harder. The door, swollen in its jamb from humidity, gave slightly. He attacked the door with a sudden yank. It complained stridently and came open a foot. Just enough to squeeze through, Audrey first. While Springer pulled the door closed from inside, Audrey reached down and got her pistol. Springer saw it in her hand and took his out too.

  They quickly assessed the space they had entered. It was indeed a space more than an area. The inside of the inside, an attic of sorts situated between the cathedral's vaulted ceiling and its roof. It was long, about a hundred and fifty feet, but only about ten feet wide. Overhead, cutting down on the space, was the diagonal underside of the roof, its beams burned brown with age. There was no floor. Instead, a catwalk made up of unnailed wood planks ran the entire length. The only light came from weak bulbs suspended every twenty-five feet or so.

  Springer and Audrey rushed unsurely along the catwalk. The uneven planks rumbled beneath them; their swiftness aroused dust. As they were avoiding the hang of the first lightbulb they heard the door being tried, then the rasp of it being jerked open, followed, almost at once, by three consecutive spatting sounds, the distinctive sounds of shots from a pistol being compressed by a silencer.

  Springer anticipated the jolt, the pain, the bum, whatever would be felt from a bullet in the back. Then, as though acting on their own, his legs stopped, refused to run, his feet pivoted.

  The Wintersgill man seemed small, vague, too far away.

  Springer fired three times.

  One bullet missed. Another passed through the fabric of the man's jacket and shirt and the skin and subcutaneous flesh that covered the sixth rib where it curved around his side. It grazed the bone of the rib and went on through. Springer's third bullet struck approximately four inches to the
left of the second. At a velocity of one thousand one hundred feet per second, the hollow-nosed slug entered the man between his sixth and seventh ribs, spread to nearly twice its diameter when it met the resistance of the cartilage that connected the two ribs, and tore through the walls of the left ventricular chamber of his heart. It veered as tissue slowed it, so that it partially penetrated and lodged in one of the transverse processes of the man's spine.

  He was the gray-haired blond Wintersgill man. The impact of the bullet caused his arms to spring out from his body. He lashed fearfully, surprised, as though he'd stepped on a snake. Driven back, his heaviness slammed against the door, forcing it farther open. He slid down, a dead heap.

  Audrey had taken aim but had not had time to get off a shot.

  She and Springer continued quickly along the catwalk and found that it went at a ninety-degree angle off to the right. Forty feet along they came to the dead end of it. They went back to the place where it angled and took up position there, where they could see down the long nanow attic space to the door that evidently was the only way in or out, keep a watch for their other pursuers.

  It was a relief for them to kneel, to take air in deeply. Springer was stunned by what he'd done. Killed someone. His hand and the pistol in its grasp seemed fused, would forever be. The pistol was extremely heavy, requiring tremendous effort to keep it from weighing him over, lopsiding him. The endogenous old dragon in him had been let out of its lair, had finally flicked its ferocious tongue. He had killed someone, in a church of all places.

  "That was some shooting," Audrey complimented.

  It mattered, Springer told himself, that it had been a kill-or-be-killed situation. His reflexes, only his reflexes were to blame. That bastard's bullets were him asking for it, deserving it. How about that gleaming angel with the sword? How about bloodbaths and holy wars? Springer decided he wasn't off the hook . . . but he could live with it.

  Springer and Audrey peeked warily around the comer, kept watch on the door at the far end of the catwalk. Every couple of minutes around the edge of the jamb a Wintersgill man fired blindly in their direction. Just to keep them put. After a half hour of this the door was closed.

  "What do you make of that?" Audrey asked.

  "The door?"

  "Yeah."

  "They're trying to sucker us out."

  "What time is it?"

  "Almost seven."

  "The cathedral closes at nine thirty."

  "Closing time is probably what they're waiting for. When the lights are turned off they'll make their move."

  "Can't hit what they can't see."

  "Who knows what they'll come up with?"

  "I hate being cornered in here like this," Audrey said.

  Springer could hear the fear behind the anger in her voice. He took her hand in his for some mutual transfusion. He stretched out and tried to make himself more comfortable on the hard dusty planks. He thought of where they were, visualized the cathedral as he'd occasionally seen it, objectively, from high above—the huge cross configuration of it shaped by its slate roof. He marked their position with an X on his mental view. They were under the left arm of the cross. It would seem, philosophically, a safe place to be. He went on thinking about it and recalled how symmetrical and immaculate the roof of the cathedral had always appeared to him. No debris on it, every slate in place, well kept. It occurred to him that in order to repair and maintain the roof there would have to be some way to get out onto it. He looked around the corner, ran his eyes along the underside of the slanted roof from beam to beam. He caught upon an interruption in the texture, a square, darker area. It could be a hatch. It was about thirty feet down the catwalk in the direction of the door.

  Audrey kept her pistol sighted on the door, would fire upon any movement there. Springer went swiftly down the catwalk and found that it was indeed a hatch, about three feet square. It was easily accessible, at about waist height. Hinged at its top, held by a pair of large hooks and eyes at its bottom. On the nearby horizontal beam lay a length of broom handle.

  Springer undid the hooks and heaved the heavy hatch open. Its hinges were begrudging, made a loud, rusted, croaky sound. Springer signaled Audrey to him. She climbed out over the raised collar of the hatchway. He followed her out, removed the propping broom handle, and quietly closed the hatch.

  They were at the south edge of the cathedral's vast roof. Fiftieth Street was ten stories below. A narrow walkway ran between the roof and a stone balustrade that served as a decorative railing all around. They decided on a position about ten feet from the hatch. The situation was still a standoff, but anyone who attempted to come out through that hatch would be an easy target.

  The sun was going, was already weak enough to be looked directly at without squinting. About a third of it was already behind the seventy-story Rockefeller Plaza Building. Across the way the linear blackness of the Olympic Tower was being raked by late sun yellow, and off to Springer and Audrey's right many of the windows of the fifty-floor Helmsley Palace Hotel were ignited patches. Those buildings surrounded, dominated. Springer had the feeling that there were thousands of spectators looking down on his and Audrey's plight but if he signaled for help they would probably just wave hello back. It would be equally futile, he knew, to try yelling down to anyone on 50th Street. The surface of the city created an impenetrable, constantly rising cloud of noise.

  "Going to hell in high places," Springer thought aloud.

  Audrey was more optimistic. "Seems to me everything is pointing in the other direction." She meant the spires of the cathedral pointed heavenward, as did its many pinnacles and gables.

  Springer was reminded of one of his unresolved childhood wonderings: Why was heaven always believed to be up—even after the world took half a turn and what had been up was down and what had been down was up? His father, Edwin, had only claimed to be a Protestant whenever officially required to do so. His mother, Mattie, had thanked the life source (which Springer presumed was God) for beautiful blessings prior to Christmas dinner and other special meals when they'd had turkey. So he'd never been religious. Once, when someone had inquired what his religion was, for candid amusement he'd replied, "D-flawless." Lately, though, since Jake had become ill. Springer had often found himself pleading with some determining power beyond himself to intervene favorably.

  He leaned back against the balustrade. Its weather-eaten stone ground roughly into his spine.

  Audrey relaxed against the slant of the slate roof. The roof was more steeply pitched than it appeared from street level, had a 60-degree angle to it. From the edge of the roof up to its ridge was at least thirty feet. Along the ridge was an ornamental upright of wrought iron about four feet tall, a fencelike grille in a repetitive pattern of foliate tracery and spiky finials.

  As he looked around. Springer realized the carved stonework did not include any gargoyles, not a one. He called Audrey's attention to the fact. "All Gothic cathedrals are supposed to have them. Fork-tongued monsters, griffins, bulgy-eyed lizards, things like that. The uglier the better."

  "I don't miss them," Audrey said impassively.

  "Know the purpose of gargoyles?"

  "To scare the devil out of everyone."

  "Nope."

  "Okay, then they're for spouting water from the roof, so it doesn't just run down the wall and ruin the masonry."

  It never really bothered Springer when she stole his thunder. "You're very well read," he told her.

  "Just another of the countless reasons why you should be glad I'm yours," she said with mock immodesty. The levity helped briefly.

  They didn't talk much for the next twenty minutes, kept their eyes fixed on the hatch, waiting for the slightest movement. Their impatience built; they felt that as long as an encounter was inevitable it might as well happen and be over with.

  "Maybe they've given up on us," Audrey said.

  "I doubt that."

  So did Audrey. "They still think they've got us trapped in that dea
d end."

  "They'll wait until nine thirty."

  "Then what?"

  "Find we're not there, find the hatch, and come on out."

  "And we'll plunk them," Audrey pledged grimly.

  Springer parried that prospect with a grunt. He'd been considering the wrought-iron embellishment on the ridge of the roof, thinking that to get from this side of the roof to the other side would require climbing over that spike-topped obstacle. Four feet tall, it would be more than an inconvenience. What it suggested to him was there might be another hatch on the other side that gave into another attic. In fact, that same wrought iron followed along every inch of ridge of the cross shape of the cathedral, dividing the roof into four sections. There might even be four hatches to four separate attics. That would be the reason why the attic they'd been in hadn't gone all the way around the transept, the arm of the cross shape. The huge, high windows at each extremity of the transept preempted attic space.

  If he was right about this, Springer thought, it could be their way out. Go up and over the ridge to the other side of the roof and then down through the hatch there. Leave the bastards prowling around in the dark with no one to shoot at but one another.

  Springer explained his notion to Audrey. It sounded reasonable to her; anyway, was certainly worth a look. At once she took a testing step up the roof. Springer stopped her, told her, "You stay here and watch the hatch." The pitch of the roof appeared dangerously steep.

  "You don't have on the shoes for it," Audrey said.

  She was right. His leather-soled shoes would slip on the slate shingles. But, he thought, barefoot he'd be able to manage it.

  While he was removing his shoes and socks, Audrey took it on her own to make the climb, was already partway up. There'd be no stopping her now,

  Springer knew. Anyway, perhaps it was best that he remain there near the hatch where the greater danger would come from. He saw that the gum soles of her sneakers were providing her with excellent traction. He'd leave his own shoes off in case she had trouble and he had to get up to her. He kept shifting his attention from the hatch to her.