In the night room Page 0,71
the door. “It might be misinterpreted. Let’s go up to the doors, and I’ll take a good look around. If everything seems safe, I’ll wave to you.”
She gripped my arm, nodded, and released me. “Make it fast. I don’t want to let go of you.”
Willy moved to the front of the store next to a case full of computer games, and I carried the long white bag through the tables and past the lounging guard. After I had pushed through two sets of doors and got outside, the air felt as though it had been washed, and the street and the pavement sent up that clean, stony fragrance that is one of the delights of city life. The black-suited driver of the Town Car leaned over the wheel and questioned me with a look. In a minute, I gestured. Something had occurred to me.
In its abruptness and violence, the storm had been far too much like the downpour over SoHo the afternoon I’d chased Jasper Kohle down Grand Street. The barrage of rain, all that noise and rampaging electricity, had expressed Kohle’s rage.
I believed, I knew, that he was hiding somewhere among the pedestrians across the street, in the entry of a Thai restaurant, behind a shop window, keeping his eye on me. I could feel his presence, the concentration of his gaze. I had a duty to perform, and if he could keep himself from killing me, he would insist on satisfaction. Kohle was the world’s most focused sasha. Probably his whole life had been a violation of the borders, an electrical storm, a thing of damps and shocks and visions.
Although I could feel Kohle, I could not see him; nor could I spot the terrible, displaced men in search of Willy. She was still posted by the window. I made a come-to-me gesture with my right hand, and in a second she was outside the store and moving quickly beside me, her hand in my hand, toward the Town Car. The driver scrambled out of his seat and around the back of the car.
“Can I take your bag, sir?” he asked.
“We’re going to keep this one,” I told him, “but please put the lady’s bag in the trunk.”
Willy and I sat in the roomy back seat of the Town Car with the white bag between us like a big dog. At least, I thought, we wouldn’t have to worry about leaving a credit card trail. The driver looked at us in the rearview mirror and said, “Are we going directly back to Grand Street, Mr. Underhill?” For a little roll in the hay with your attractive female admirer? he meant.
“No, we are going directly to the Golden Mountain Parking Garage on Canal Street,” I said. “Please tell me if you have the feeling that we’re being followed by . . .” I caught myself just in time, and questioned Willy with a sideways look.
“A silver-gray Mercedes sedan,” she said. “With two men in it.” Her two-second pause radiated hesitancy. “It sort of shivers when it moves, it sort of glides.”
“I’ve seen cars like that,” said the driver. “I always figured athletes were driving ’em.”
As we drove south through the city, Willy kept alternating between making comments to me and turning to look through the rear window. “I can’t believe you knew who I was as soon as I came up to you.”
Nor should you, I thought.
She looked back at the endless, shining traffic writhing down Broadway. “I guess Tom called you when he went out to find us a cab. And he never told me he knew you!”
He didn’t know he knew me.
“And the first thing I see after I get blown through the tunnel is a poster with your name on it! Don’t you find that kind of staggering?”
More than you can imagine.
“We’ll stay together when we get to Millhaven, won’t we?”
I nodded, thinking, Just like you and Tom at the Milford.
“I want to tell you something else.” She gave me a look full of worry about my reaction to what she was about to say. “In the past couple of days, a really disturbing thing has been happening to me. Whole hours, usually transitions of some kind, are sort of deleted from my life. They just don’t happen. I get in a car and drive out onto the street, boom, instantly I’m at my destination. Sometimes I don’t even get out of my car, I’m already in a building, talking to someone.” She placed her hand