In the night room Page 0,53
staircase. When they reach the bottom, they patrol through the lobby and turn the corner to the café. Willy abruptly comes to a stop, grabs his arm, and nods her head back toward the lobby, where an arm encased in a plaster cast and a wide, straight back that could well belong to Roman Richard Spilka is vanishing through an arch.
So the first thing Tom does is walk her to the back of the café and through the service doors into the kitchen. It’s relatively calm in there, after breakfast and before lunch, and Tom explains that his friend Willy here has to hide from someone she doesn’t want to see, someone like a stalker, while he goes and deals with the situation, is that okay?
“Certainly, sir, and while your friend is under our protection we’ll show her how to make a really good veal Bolognese, one of our lunch specials today.” And “Don’t worry, she is in good hands, sir.” The chef and line cooks are happy to have Willy in their realm. Or not. It doesn’t matter very much; all I have to do is get her in the kitchen so that she can sneak out by a service door.
Tom says that he will go out and hail a cab. In the meantime, Willy should wait at the street entrance to the kitchen, and when she hears his taxi honk its horn, race out of the building and scramble into the cab. Then he’ll figure out somewhere else to go. His place first, probably.
Out into the lobby he goes. Uh-oh, Roman Richard Spilka is planted on a couch, watching both the elevators and the hotel’s entrance. Spilka gives him a glance and goes back to waiting for Willy. Tom checks out. (It’s not important, but he’d used his credit card to check in, and they had called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hartland.) Spilka ignores him.
Out on the sidewalk, Tom sees a languid-looking blond man in a silk sweater the color of a robin’s egg engaged in deep conversation with a pair of uniformed policemen. If the man in the sweater is Giles Coverley, and Tom is pretty sure he is (for one thing, this dude looks exactly like he’d be named Giles Coverley; and for another, he matches her description of the guy more closely than an Identi-Kit image), Willy was all wrong about Giles being asexual—it’s obvious to Tom that he’s queer as a coot. Far more to the point, the cops are on his side, which probably means they are on Faber’s. Maybe Faber is already back in America, back in New York! All of a sudden, the stakes are much higher. Tom thinks he’d better take Willy to the airport and get her on a flight to where, South America, as Mrs. Hartland? No, she’d need her passport, and flights are out of the question because you can’t get on a plane these days without showing your driver’s license to everybody but the pilot.
The cops and Giles Coverley glance at Tom without paying him any more attention than did Roman Richard. He steps up to the curb and raises his arm. It’s pointless, there isn’t a cab in sight, but the three men near the hotel’s entrance make him nervous. He keeps imagining that they are staring at his back. He checks over his shoulder while trying to be nonchalant, but there’s no way to be nonchalant and peer over your shoulder at the same time. When he looks back up the street, four cabs are coming toward him, three of them containing passengers and the fourth with its off-duty lights glowing.
The cabs go by and sweep into Columbus Circle. Tom looks back up the street and finds that two blocks away an old woman with a three-footed metal walker has appeared out of nowhere and parked herself, right arm raised, on the corner of Sixty-third Street. She is about four foot ten, and the top of the walker comes up to her breastbone.
He says, “Damn.”
When he looks back over his shoulder, the policemen conferring with Giles Coverley take a moment to inspect him. Their interest still seems merely reflexive, but it spooks him. He’s let them know that he is nervous, impatient, under stress, and consequently they have filed his image away in their mental circuits. He’s sure that the panic radiating out of him will begin to tickle the cops’ antennae in about a second and a half.
The ancient female midget two