In the night room Page 0,55
have to get her out the service door, across the sidewalk, and into the taxi when Faber’s goons and the police are looking in another direction. He should have set up a diversion, that’s what clever Teddy Barton would have done, but he hadn’t had enough time to plan anything, and now it is too late. He should never have left Willy’s side. Instead of racing off to get a cab, he should have taken Willy over the rooftops or through the Mayflower’s basement, or swapped clothes with two of the cooks and escaped that way.
Finally, the cab reaches Sixty-fourth Street, turns the corner, and navigates past a row of double-parked trucks. Next comes a heap of broken glass and twisted metal that appears to have fallen from the sky. That can’t be true. It looks a little like it used to be a car. The men in dark suits and actual hats standing around it could easily be from Roswell or Quantico. These men check out the cab as it slides past. Tim is intensely aware of their scrutiny, which has the same stony neutrality as the masklike gaze of the woman carrying the inert pussycat. Such neutrality does not seem really neutral to him. It’s like watching people cross an item off a list they have in their heads.
All right, there’s that one, let’s draw a line through his name.
It seems to him that the men examining his taxi have grouped themselves together to conceal the twisted heap behind them.
The driver turns onto Central Park West and says, “Did you see that, sir?” He is an Indian, and he has a musical accent. “I can promise you one thing, that you will never read a word about it in the newspapers. And yet it is an event I believe that would be of serious interest to a great many people in this country.”
“That’s the truth,” Tom says. “Keep going until you get to Sixty-first Street, then turn right and go about thirty feet, I’ll tell you exactly where. Stop and honk your horn. We’re picking somebody up.”
“Because do you understand why, sir? Because it is a conspiracy of silence!” the driver tells him. “I was born in Hyderabad, in India, sir, and I came to this country twenty-one years ago, and neither in India nor in this country are things what they appear to be. I am telling my wife every day, ‘What you read in your newspaper is not true!’ ” He looks at Tom in the rearview mirror. “There will not be much waiting time, I hope.”
“I hope there won’t be any,” Tom says.
“Now, those men we saw were government officials,” the cabbie says. “But the names used by such men are never their real names. And when they die, it is as if they have disappeared completely from the face of the earth. What a thing it is, to live a life of lies and pass from the earth unrecognized. But the evil that they do amongst us in this life is repaid a thousandfold in the next.”
In front of the Mayflower, the sidewalk is completely empty.
“Okay, here’s where we turn,” Tom says.
“Do you think I do not remember that you wanted to turn right on Sixty-first Street? Do you think I have forgotten that I am to stop and honk my horn?” While he is making the turn, the cabbie twists sideways and glares at his thoughtless passenger.
“No, sorry,” Tom says, scanning the street before them. Way up the block, a couple of guys he cannot quite make out are talking in front of one of the Florentine-style apartment buildings. The usual knot of pedestrians streams across the intersection with Broadway. A northbound patrol car zips by in a flash of white. The conditions look about as good as they could be.
“Where is it, exactly, that I am to stop, sir?”
Tom is keeping his eye on the dark, scratched-up surface of the service door. He imagines Willy crouched behind it with her ear cocked, fearful that he will never return.
“Okay, stop,” Tom says.
“And I am to honk my horn now?”
“Yes,” Tom says, a little more loudly than he intends.
The cabbie taps his horn, which emits a brief blatting noise.
“That’s not much of a sound,” Tom says. “Do it again.” He slides open the heavy door and steps down out of the cab. He leans over and speaks through the opening he has made. “I mean it. Do it again.”
The driver really leans on his