Chapter 15
I said, “Go to work. Call the LAPD or the USC campus cops and ask for some favors, blue to blue. Get someone to head over and check whether he’s home.”
“They’ll laugh at me. It’s a college jock not answering his phone at four in the morning.”
I said, “Just do it.”
Jake said, “Come with me.”
I shook my head. “I’m staying here. I want to talk to those private guys again.”
“You’ll never find them.”
“They’ll find me. I never answered their question, about whether Susan gave me anything. I think they’ll want to ask it again.”
We arranged to meet in five hours’ time, in the same coffee shop. I watched him get back in his car and then I walked south on Eighth, slowly, like I had nowhere special to go, which I didn’t. I was tired from not sleeping much but wired from all the coffee, so overall I figured it was a wash in terms of alertness and energy. And I figured the private guys would be in the same boat. We had all been up all night. Which fact got me thinking about time. Just as two in the morning was the wrong time for a suicide bombing, it was also a weird time for Susan Mark to be heading for a rendezvous and delivering information. So I stood for a spell at the newspaper rack outside a deli and leafed through the tabloids. I found what I was half-expecting buried deep inside the Daily News. The New Jersey Turnpike had been closed northbound for four hours the previous evening. A tanker wreck, in fog. An acid spill. Multiple fatalities.
I pictured Susan Mark trapped on the road between exits. A four-hour jam. A four-hour delay. Disbelief. Mounting tension. No way forward, no way back. A rock and a hard place. Time, ticking away. A deadline, approaching. A deadline, missed. Threats and sanctions and penalties, now presumed live and operational. The 6 train had seemed fast to me. It must have felt awful slow to her. You tipped her over the edge. Maybe so, but she hadn’t needed a whole lot of tipping.
I butted the newspapers back into saleable condition and set off strolling again. I figured the guy with the torn jacket would have gone home to change, but the other three would be close by. They would have watched me enter the coffee shop, and they would have picked me up when I came out. I couldn’t see them on the street, but I wasn’t really looking for them. No point in looking for something when you know for sure it’s there.
Back in the day Eighth Avenue had been a dangerous thoroughfare. Broken streetlights, vacant lots, shuttered stores, crack, hookers, muggers. I had seen all kinds of things there. I had never been attacked personally. Which was no big surprise. To make me a potential victim, the world’s population would have to be reduced all the way down to two. Me and a mugger, and I would have won. Now Eighth was as safe as anywhere else. It bustled with commercial activity and there were people all over the place. So I didn’t care exactly where the three guys approached me. I made no attempt to channel them to a place of my choosing. I just walked. Their call. The day was on its way from warm to hot and sidewalk smells were rising up all around me, like a crude calendar: Garbage stinks in the summer and doesn’t in the winter.
* * *
They approached me a block south of Madison Square Garden and the big old post office. Construction on a corner lot shunted pedestrians along a narrow fenced-off lane in the gutter. I got a yard into it and one guy stepped ahead of me and one fell in behind and the leader came alongside me. Neat moves. The leader said, “We’re prepared to forget the thing with the coat.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Because I already did.”
“But we need to know if you have something that belongs to us.”
“To you?”
“To our principal.”
“Who are you guys?”
“I gave you our card.”
“And at first I was very impressed by it. It looked like a work of art, arithmetically. There are more than three million possible combinations for a seven-digit phone number. But you didn’t choose randomly. You picked one you knew was disconnected. I imagined that’s tough to do. So I was impressed. But then I figured in fact that’s impossible to do, given Manhattan’s population. Someone dies or moves away, their number gets recycled pretty fast. So then I guessed you had access to a list of numbers that never work. Phone companies keep a few, for when a number shows up in the movies or on TV. Can’t use real numbers for that, because customers might get harassed. So then I guessed you know people in the movie and TV business. Probably because most of the week you rent out as sidewalk security when there’s a show in town. Therefore the closest you get to action is fending off autograph hunters. Which must be a disappointment to guys like you. I’m sure you had something better in mind when you set up in business. And worse, it implies a certain erosion of abilities, through lack of practice. So now I’m even less worried about you than I was before. So all in all I’d say the card was a mistake, in terms of image management.”
The guy said, “Can we buy you a cup of coffee?”
* * *
I never say no to a cup of coffee, but I was all done with sitting down, so I agreed to go-cups only. We could sip and talk as we walked. We stopped in at the next Starbucks we saw, which as in most cities was half a block away. I ignored the fancy brews and got a tall house blend, black, no room for cream. My standard order, at Starbucks. A fine bean, in my opinion. Not that I really care. It’s all about the caffeine for me, not the taste.
We came out and carried on down Eighth. But four people made an awkward group for mobile conversation and the traffic was loud, so we ended up ten yards into the mouth of a cross street, static, with me in the shade, leaning on a railing, and the other three in the sun in front of me and leaning toward me like they had points to make. At our feet a burst garbage bag leaked cheerful sections of the Sunday newspaper on the sidewalk. The guy who did all the talking said, “You’re seriously underestimating us, not that we want to get into a pissing contest.”
“OK,” I said.
“You’re ex-military, right?”
“Army,” I said.
“You’ve still got the look.”
“You too. Special Forces?”
“No. We didn’t get that far.”
I smiled. An honest man.
The guy said, “We got hired as the local end for a temporary operation. The dead woman was carrying an item of value. It’s up to us to recover it.”
“What item? What value?”
“Information.”
I said, “I can’t help you.”
“Our principal was expecting digital data, on a computer chip, like a USB flash memory stick. We said no, that’s too hard to get out of the Pentagon. We said it would be verbal. Like, read and memorized.”
I said nothing. Thought back to Susan Mark on the train. The mumbling. Maybe she wasn’t rehearsing pleas or exculpations or threats or arguments. Maybe she was running through the details she was supposed to deliver, over and over again, so she wouldn’t forget them or get them confused in her stress and her panic. Learning by rote. And saying to herself, I’m obeying, I’m obeying, I’m obeying. Reassuring herself. Hoping that it would all turn out right.
I asked, “Who is your principal?”
“We can’t say.”
“What was his leverage?”
“We don’t know. We don’t want to know.”
I sipped my coffee. Said nothing.
The guy said, “The woman spoke to you on the train.”
“Yes,” I said. “She did.”
“So now the operational assumption is that whatever she knew, you know.”
“Possible,” I said.
“Our principal is convinced of it. Which gives you a problem. Data on a computer chip, no big deal. We could hit you over the head and turn out your pockets. But something in your head would need to be extracted some other way.”
I said nothing.
The guy said, “So you really need to tell us what you know.”
“So you’ll look competent?”
The guy shook his head. “So you’ll stay whole.”
I took another sip of coffee and the guy said, “I’m appealing to you, man to man. Soldier to soldier. This is not about us. We go back empty, sure, we’ll get fired. But Monday morning we’ll be working again, for someone else. But if we’re out of the picture, you’re exposed. Our principal brought a whole crew. Right now they’re on a leash, because they don’t fit in here. But if we’re gone, they’re off the leash. No alternative. And you really don’t want them talking to you.”
“I don’t want anyone talking to me. Not them, not you. I don’t like talking.”
“This is not a joke.”
“You got that right. A woman died.”
“But whatever drove her to it might be. The woman worked at the Pentagon. That’s national security, right there. You need to get out in front of this. You should talk to the NYPD.”
The guy shook his head. “I’d go to jail before I crossed these people. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear you,” I said. “You’ve gotten comfortable with your autograph hunters.”
“We’re the kid gloves here. You should take advantage.”
“You’re no kind of gloves at all.”
“What were you, in the service?”
“MPs,” I said.
“Then you’re a dead man. You never saw anything like this.”
“Who is he?”
The guy just shook his head.
“How many?”
The guy shook his head again.
“Give me something.”
“You’re not listening. If I won’t talk to the NYPD, why the hell would I talk to you?”
I shrugged and drained my cup and pushed off the railing. Took three steps and tossed the cup into a trash basket. I said, “Call your principal and tell him he was right and you were wrong. Tell him the woman’s information was all on a memory stick, which is right now in my pocket. Then resign by phone and go home and stay the hell out of my way.”
I crossed the street between two moving cars and headed for Eighth. The leader called after me, loud. He said my name. I turned and saw him holding his cell phone at arm’s length. It was pointing at me and he was staring at its screen. Then he lowered it and all three guys moved away and a white truck passed between us and they were out of sight before I realized I had been photographed.