'What does that mean?'
'I think it means he just got arrested.'
Which changed everything. I understood that even before Lee got around to spelling it out. She handed me her folded notes. I took them, like receiving the baton in a relay race. I was to go onward, as fast as I could. She was spilling off the track, her race finished. She said, 'You understand, right? I have to turn myself in now. He's my partner. I can't let him face this madness alone.'
I said, 'You thought he would ditch you in a heartbeat.'
'But he didn't. And I have my own standards, anyway.'
'It won't do any good.'
'Maybe not. But I won't turn my back on my partner.'
'You're just taking yourself off the board. You can't help any one from a jail cell. Outside is always better than inside.'
'It's different for you. You can be gone tomorrow. I can't. I live here.'
'What about Sansom? I need a time and a place.'
'I don't have that information. And you should take care with Sansom, anyway. He sounded weird on the phone. I couldn't tell whether he was real mad or real worried. It's hard to say whose side he's going to be on, when and if he gets here.'
Then she gave me Leonid's first cell phone, and the emergency charger. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, just briefly, just a little. An all-purpose substitute for a hug and a good-luck gesture. And right alter that our temporary three way partnership fell apart completely. Jacob Mark was on his feet even before Lee had started to get up. He said, 'I owe it to Peter. OK, they might put me back in a cell, but at least they'll be out looking for him.'
'We could look for him,' I said.
'We have no resources.'
I looked at them both and asked, 'Are you sure about this?'
They were sure about it. They walked away from me, out of the park, to the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, where they stood and craned their necks, looking for a police car, the same way people stand when they are trying to hail a cab. I sat alone for a minute, and then I got up and walked the other way.
Next stop, somewhere east of Fifth and south of 59th.
FIFTY-NINE
MADISON SQUARE PARK NESTLES AGAINST THE SOUTH end of Madison Avenue, right where it starts at 23rd Street. Madison Avenue runs straight for 115 blocks, to the Madison Avenue Bridge, which leads to the Bronx. You can get to Yankee Stadium that way, although other routes are better. I planned on covering maybe a third of its length, to 59th Street, which was a little north and west of where Lila Hoth had said she wasn't, on Third and 56th.
It was as good a place to start as any.
I took the bus, which was a slow, lumbering vehicle, which made it a counterintuitive choice for a wild-eyed fugitive, which made it perfect cover for me. Traffic was heavy and we passed plenty of cops, some on foot, some in cars. I looked out the window at them. None of them looked back in at me. A man on a bus is close to invisible.
I stopped being invisible when I got out at 59th Street. Prime retail territory, therefore prime tourist territory, therefore reassuring pairs of policemen on every corner. I took a cross street over to Fifth and found a line of vendors at the base of Central Park and bought a black T-shirt with New York City written on it, and a pair of counterfeit sunglasses, and a black baseball cap with a red apple on it. I changed shirts in a restroom in a hotel lobby and came back to Madison looking a little different. It was four hours since any on-duty cop had spoken to his watch commander. And people forget a lot in four hours. I figured that tall and khaki shirt would be all that anyone remembered. Nothing I could do about my height, but the new black upper body might let me slide by. Plus the writing on the shirt, and the shades, and the hat, all of which made me look like a regular out-of-town idiot.
Which I was, basically. I had no real clue as to what I was doing. Finding any concealed hideout is difficult. Finding one in a densely populated big city is close to impossible. I was just quartering random blocks, following a geographic hunch I hat could have been completely wrong to start with, trying to find reasons to narrow it further. The Four Seasons Hotel. Not adjacent, but comfortably proximate. Which meant what? A two-minute drive? A five-minute walk? In which direction? Not south, I thought. Not across 57th Street, which is a major cross-town thoroughfare. Two-way, six lanes. Always busy. In the micro-geography of Manhattan, 57th Street was like the Mississippi River. An obstacle. A boundary. Much more inviting to slip away to the north, to the quieter, darker blocks beyond.
I watched the traffic and thought: not a two-minute drive. Driving implied a lack of control, a lack of flexibility, and delays, and one-way streets and avenues, and parking difficulties, and potentially memorable vehicles waiting in loading zones, and licence plates that could be traced and checked.
Walking was better than driving, in the city, whoever you were.
I took 58th Street, and walked to the hotel's back entrance. It was just as splendid as the front entrance. There was brass and stone and there were flags flying and porters in uniform and doormen in top hats. There was a long line of limousines waiting at the kerb. Lincolns, Mercedes, Maybachs, Rolls-Royces. Well over a million dollars' worth of automotive product, all crammed into about eighty feet. There was a loading dock, with a grey roll-up door, closed.
I stood next to a bell boy, with my back to the hotel door. Where would I go? Across the street was nothing but a solid line of high buildings. Mostly apartment houses, with the ground floors leased to prestige clients. Directly opposite was an art gallery. I squeezed between two chrome bumpers and crossed the street and glanced at some of the paintings in the window. Then I turned and looked back from the far sidewalk.
To the left of the hotel, on the side nearer Park Avenue, there was nothing very interesting.
Then I looked to the right, along the block as it approached Madison, and I got a new idea.
The hotel itself was recent construction on an insane budget. Neighbouring buildings were all quiet and prosperous and solid, some of them old, some of them new. But at the western end of the block there were three old piles in a row. Narrow, singlefront, five-storey brick, weathered, peeling, spalling, stained, somewhat decrepit. Dirty windows, sagging lintels, flat roofs, weeds along the cornices, old iron fire escapes zigzagging down the top four floors. The three buildings looked like three rotten teeth in a bright smile. One had an old out-of-business restaurant for a ground-floor tenant. One had a hardware store. The third had an enterprise abandoned so long ago I couldn't tell what it had been. Each had a narrow door set unobtrusively alongside its commercial operation. Two of the doors had multiple bell pushes, signifying apartments. The door next to the old restaurant had a single bell push, signifying a sole occupier for the upper four floors.
Lila Hoth was not a Ukrainian billionaire from London. That had been a lie. So whoever she really was, she had a budget. A generous budget, certainly, to allow for suites in the Four Seasons as and when necessary. But presumably not an infinite budget. And town houses in Manhattan run to twenty or more million dollars to buy, minimum. And multiple tens of thousands of dollars a month to rent.
Privacy could be achieved much more cheaply in tumbledown mixed-use buildings like the three I was looking at. And maybe there would be other advantages, too. No doormen nearby, fewer prying eyes. Plus maybe a presumption that an operation like a restaurant or a hardware store would get deliveries at all hours of the night and day. Maybe all kinds of random comings and goings could happen without attracting much notice at all.
I moved down the street and stood on the kerb opposite the three old piles and stared up at them. People pushed past me in continuous stream on the sidewalk. I stepped into the gutter, to get out of the way. There were two cops on the far corner of Madison and 57th. Fifty yards away, on a diagonal. They were not looking my way. I looked back at the buildings and reviewed my assumptions in my head. The 6 train at 59th and Lexington was close by. The Four Seasons was close by. Third Avenue and 56th Street was not close by. That's not close to me. Anonymity was guaranteed. Cost was limited. Five for five. Perfect. So I figured maybe I was looking for a place just like one of the three right in front of me, located somewhere within a fan-shaped five-minute radius east or west of the hotel's back door. Not north, or Susan Mark would have parked in midtown and aimed to get out of the subway at 68th Street. Not south, because of 57th Street's psychological barrier. Not somewhere else entirely, because they had used the Four Seasons as a front. Somewhere else entirely, they would have used a different hotel. New York City does not lack for impressive establishments.