“Time travel?” he snapped. An angry spark lit his eyes, as if she'd just said something dangerously foolish.
Gwen Leamas said nothing, satisfied at least that she'd managed to stir a little life into him.
“What if your time travel isn't a round trip, Gwen? What if one of these times I can't get back?”
Gwen wet her lips. “You think this is real then, don't you?”
“No, damn it.” Corbin turned away from her helplessly. ”I know,” he said softly, “that I don't really go back in time. No matter how real it seems, I know that I'm only going there in my mind. But if I can go there in my mind, I can get stuck there in my mind.”
“That's what you're so frightened of?”
“That's a big part of it, yes.”
“What's the rest of it?”
Corbin raised a hand to her face and brushed back a long curl that fell across one eye. He sighed deeply, his lips moving tentatively, reluctant to form the words.
“The same thing you're afraid of,” he answered finally.
“Which is what, Jonathan?” she pressed.
“That I'm flat out going nuts.”
Gwen took his hands and squeezed them. ”I know you, Jonathan,” she said firmly. “Better than anyone, I'll be bound. There was nothing at all odd about you until weeks after you moved to New York. Whatever change came over you began the moment you laid eyes on that ridiculous house of yours and then all the more when the weather turned wintry. In Chicago we've walked blithely through snow that was deeper by half than anything New York ever gets and it never bothered you one whit. It seems to me, then, that the cause of your difficulty is out there on those streets as much as it's in your mind and that there is a perfectly sensible explanation to be found. But it must be sought and faced, Jonathan. I will not have a man I... respect... hiding from it.”
She backed away from Corbin and reached for the tan trench coat he kept on a hook behind his door. She held it outstretched and open, but Corbin made no move to take it.
“Tomorrow,” he said quietly. “I'll call you tomorrow. We'll talk.”
“We'll talk today.” She shook the coat impatiently. “I'm going to plunk you into a hot bath at my flat with a good stiff drink or two in you and then we're going to thrash this out.”
“Gwen . . .” Corbin shook his head again but his refusal seemed less definite this time,
“One block,” she insisted. “It's just one short block to the subway entrance on this end and scarcely a hundred paces to my front door on the other.”
His eyes narrowed slightly and darted twice to the street below. She could almost see the circuits opening and closing as his brain calculated the speed and distance. One short block. Perhaps eighty yards from the Burlington Building's doors to the BMT entrance at Fifty-fifth Street. Under a minute on foot. Twenty seconds if they ran. Then safety. There would be no falling snow, no ectoplasmic buildings materializing through it, no dead people. Only crowds and noise and dirt.
“Come on, Jonathan.” She threw the trench coat over his shoulders and was steering him through his office door before the glaze that covered his eyes could clear. Sandy Bauer was ready with Gwen's coat. She led them both down a short corridor that led through an empty mailroom and out the back way to the elevator banks. There was a reception desk at the far end. As Gwen pushed the Down button, Sandy walked, chatting, toward the receptionist, blocking her view of the trembling Jonathan Corbin and the look of panic that was building on his face.
Three
On the fourth floor of the Warwick Hotel, in a room directly facing Corbin's office, a thickset man of about fifty rose from his chair at the open window and slammed it shut over a half inch of snow that had collected on the sill. He twisted the 200-millimeter lens off the Nikon he held and set the pieces into a padded camera bag. He logged the time and date in his notebook and buttoned the topcoat he had not removed since taking his position five hours earlier.
Using the fire stairs, Raymond Lesko took less than a minute to reach a new position at the corner entrance to the Warwick Bar. From there, as long as the Sixth Avenue buses stayed out of his field of vision, he could watch the entire plaza of the Burlington Building and all its exits. Unless Corbin grabbed a cab, and fat chance of that, thought Lesko, he would have to pass this corner on his way to Grand Central Station.
Two or three incoming bar patrons eyed Lesko uneasily as they shouldered past him. He ignored them, being long accustomed to people looking at him that way. Lesko had a wrestler's body and the intimidating eyes of an aroused bouncer even when he wasn't mad at anyone. He had a tight, cruel mouth that concealed perfect teeth of which Lesko was proud. But even the perfect teeth frightened people when he showed them. Sometimes that made him sad, especially when he meant to be friendly, but more often it turned out to be useful.
Raymond Lesko's mind, however, was not on his appearance. It was on Jonathan Corbin and the paying job at hand. A hunch had warned him that something would be different about today, but even so he came close to losing Corbin. The snow was what was different. What Lesko was hearing about Corbin was right. The guy's a wacko when it snows. Not that he's any tower of mental health when it's balmy. Here's your basic eligible bachelor who has all of New York and its women to play in after work but all he does is bust out of those doors at five o'clock and runs with his head down for his Connecticut train. Same way he runs for the office in the morning. Head down. Not even looking sideways. Like a guy who's scared to death of this whole town. Which is why it's such a pain in the ass to get a decent picture of him except through his office window.
Lesko checked his watch. Where the hell is he? Damn. Lesko realized he'd been looking for Corbin's trench coat, Corbin all by himself in his head-down run. But the Leamas woman left with him. Lesko stood as tall as he could and scanned the Burlington's doors, nearest to farthest. There they were. He'd almost missed them but there they were, just clear of the last revolving doors and heading the wrong way, north; running like a pack of dogs were on their heels. With a curse, Lesko stepped into the storm and followed.
Even with the driving snow and the trucks that strobed across Raymond Lesko's field of view, he was able to lock on Corbin easily. Corbin stood out from the others who rushed toward shelter along the same sidewalk. There was a special frenzy to his movements. The head wasn't down this time. He was glancing around wildly as the woman steered him. Did he suspect he had a tail? Lesko wondered. He decided not. Corbin wasn't looking at people and things so much as he was looking through them. Now he's looking up. And flinching. What do you see, Corbin? What do you see, right this second, in the wind above Sixth Avenue? And the woman, yelling into your ear. She's asking you the same thing, isn't she?
A packed northbound bus hissed to a stop, blocking Corbin and Gwen Leamas from Lesko's sight. When it passed, the two had vanished. Shit! Where’d you go, Corbin? You didn’t slip into that bus, did you? No. not without a shoehorn and a pot of grease, you didn’t. Down that subway, then. Ah, yes. The subway.
Lesko did not follow. Instead he pulled his notebook from an inside pocket and, sheltering its pages with his body, peeled back to the penciled address of Gwen Lea-mas—145 East 77th Street. He nodded. Yes. That would explain the BMT subway. A short ride to the East Side and then a switch to the Lexington Avenue line would have them at her address in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Lesko stepped into the roadway at Fifty-fifth Street and waded through the eastbound crawl until he reached the first of those taxis whose Off Duty signs flick on at the first sign of inclement weather. Lesko slammed a fist down on its hood and, having won the driver's attention, waved a gold shield and ID card in front of the wipers.
“What, you can't read, pal?” The driver rapped his knuckles against the roof. “That light out there says I'm off duty.”
Lesko showed his teeth. “We should all be so lucky. Open it.” ' .
The driver angrily slapped at a lever that popped up the door locks and Lesko climbed in, pocketin
g his ID before the driver could ask for a closer look at it.
“You're on this big case, right?'' the driver snorted. “Cops are always on this big case when they don't feel like taking the subway.”
Lesko glanced at the hack license on the dashboard. Marvin Posey. A wimpish name, Lesko thought, for such a surly little bastard.
“Marvin,” he said, ”I must get quickly to Seventy-seventh Street between Lexington and Third. I would like you to fly there on the wings of your civic duty.”
“What?” The driver's expression dulled.
“Get this fucking thing moving.”
Lesko soon realized that, surly or not, Marvin Posey knew his job. He pushed through a red light and a line of pedestrians onto Sixth Avenue, bullied and honked his way to Central Park, ran another light at the Seventy-second Street exit, and was turning north on Third Avenue in ten minutes flat.
As the cab crunched into the unplowed snow of East Seventy-seventh Street, Lesko leaned forward to choose a spot from which he could watch both number 145 on his right and the Lexington Avenue subway exit straight ahead.
“Pull in right here.” He pointed.
“That's a hydrant. Good citizens don't block hydrants.”
“Behave yourself, Marvin.” Lesko had counted at least six moving violations since he climbed into the cab. Which was fine. Anything to help Marvin find inner peace. The cab stopped and Lesko stepped partially out of it just in time to see Jonathan Corbin emerging from the subway steps a quarter block ahead of him.
It was a changed Jonathan Corbin, Lesko noted with interest. Now it was Corbin who was standing up straight and strong and assisting the Leamas girl instead of the other way around. The sleet was smacking him in the face just as hard but he didn't look like it bothered him. What happened? Could the Lexington Avenue subway have curative powers? Or, Lesko wondered, was it the calming attentions of Miss Leamas? Or do Corbin’s devils only hang out down in the high-rent district?
Lesko watched closely as Corbin and Gwen Leamas crossed Seventy-seventh Street and waded along the uncleared sidewalk toward number 145. He could see Corbin’s face clearly. The expression he saw was not the look of a man who had just spent four hours biting his drapes. The guy's suddenly happy, thought Lesko. Not relieved, not recovered. Happy. Like everything's been just fine all along. You could ask what's not to be happy about being snowbound for a weekend with his tasty English squeeze. But you could also ask why midtown snow scares him shitless and uptown snow doesn't. For that matter, you could also ask why Raymond Lesko is getting top dollar to bird-dog some stiff whose worst enemy seems to be himself. Ask that question and you already have a big part of the answer. Jonathan Corbin's worst enemy is not Jonathan Corbin after all.
It was during me underground crosstown ride to the Lexington Avenue subway, where they transferred to the northbound IRT local, that Gwen Leamas began to notice a subtle change in Jonathan Corbin.
The most welcome change was that he'd begun to relax. On that first short jog to the BMT station at Fifty-fifth Street, Jonathan had almost bolted. It was more than panic. She'd seen him look upward, not so much at the snow or sky but at the air space above Sixth Avenue, as if some great beast had begun materializing there. She could tell that by his eyes. They were focused, she felt, not on the buildings at the end of his line of sight but on some midpoint where there was nothing at all. What is it? she'd shouted into his ear. What do you see? His answering look was almost one of accusation. Of betrayal. See? It's happening. Even with you here, it's happening. She dragged him forward.
The sanctuary of the subway entrance, however, made all the difference. He'd seized the stairway handrail as if it was a lifeline, and his body sagged in relief as he staggered down below the street. There was a long backward glance at whatever floating thing had frightened him, but the fear was now replaced by ... she wasn't sure. Recognition, perhaps. The beginnings of recognition. There would be time to ask him later.
On the first of the two trains they took, she could almost feel Jonathan's pulse returning to its normal rate. The veins at his temples were quiet. His hands, although restless, were no longer knotted into fists. He'd stopped trying to scan every face in the car and now sat back reading, with an odd sort of thoroughness, the chain of advertisements that lined the inside crown. Gwen had a sense that the ads served as proof to Jonathan of where he was. About half the ads were in Spanish, reflecting the mix of riders. Gwen looked around. Half Spanish, most of the other half black, leaving only a minority of middle-class white types in their car. More than usual, actually. Today there were even a few affluent-looking WASPs who would normally have avoided subways but who must have despaired of finding rides on the surface.
A single such woman appeared, working her way through the car. She chanced to stop near Corbin’s seat when she saw no use in searching further for one of her own. She was in her mid-thirties, Gwen Leamas guessed, and expensively dressed. Her long, hooded coat, trimmed in fur, had a Bergdorf Goodman look about it. At her throat she wore a choker whose centerpiece was a large amethyst in an antique setting. Her blandly attractive face was pinched into an expression of aggrieved martyrdom at her own discomfort and at being forced into close association with people who could not otherwise approach the world she lived in. She looked as though she was trying to breathe in as little of their exhaled air as possible and to touch her surroundings not at all. The train rocked sharply as it passed over a section of rutted ties, and the woman, whose name, Gwen decided, was Alicia Poindexter or some damned thing, reached reluctantly for the support of a metal post. She gripped it with only the fingertips of a gloved hand.
Corbin, suddenly, was on his feet. He bowed in the woman's direction and indicated his seat with a courtly wave of his hand. Gwen knew that the woman had stopped near them, not in hopes of being offered a seat, but because of all those in the car she and Jonathan came closest to being acceptable company. The woman hesitated, staring appraisingly at Jonathan, but only for a moment. Another woman, darker and heavier, was pushing into position for a dash at the vacant seat in the event Bergdorf Goodman waited so much as another heartbeat. The woman in the long coat stepped forward, turned, and lowered herself daintily into the seat Corbin surrendered. She thanked him with an unsmiling flicker of eye contact and a tiny nod, thereafter keeping her eyes fixed on the Gucci purse she held securely in her lap.
Bloody hell, thought Gwen Leamas. Here's a man not ten minutes after being scared half out of his wits and now he's playing the subway gallant for some uptown twit who's mortified to be in the company of people who work for a living.
She didn't mention it, either then or on the final leg of their trip to her flat. Corbin was calm, even detached, and that was all that mattered for the moment. Gwen allowed herself to hope that she would not have to physically pry him out of the train that was now gliding to a stop. She stood up and took his hand tightly.
But Corbin did not resist. Nor did he hesitate except to stand back politely as other passengers shouldered past him and onto the platform. Gwen tugged at him and he followed. His pace remained unhurried as they passed through the turnstile and strolled toward the natural light spilling down from the street ahead of them. She wasn't sure whether to be relieved or troubled by this new turn in Corbin’ s behavior. He didn't even seem to notice the sound of the wind, which could be heard above the receding roar of the train. Or the scattered flakes that were already being sucked toward them well short of the ascending stairs. Keep it up, Jonathan, she prayed, electing to count her blessings. Wherever your mind has wandered to, by all means leave it there until we've dragged ourselves through the last few yards of this mess.
The storm, though Gwen had not thought it possible, had worsened. The stairs were covered, their risers obscured by drifting snow except for a path stamped into the center. Looking up, it was she who gasped at the swirling arctic mass that awaited them. It looked, she thought, like a great maniacal swarm of white bees. Living things. Christ—she caug
ht herself—now he's got me doing it.
“Let's go, Corbin.” Gwen Leamas squeezed his hand and began climbing, one untrustworthy stair at a time, into a storm that seemed to turn, snapping and growling at them as they rose to confront it.
“Good God,” she muttered as she half stumbled onto the Seventy-seventh Street surface. A jet of sleet slapped color into her cheeks and lashed at her legs as she tried to grind her heels into a glaze of wind-polished ice.
“Permit me,” she heard Corbin say.
Permit me? She blinked at him through eyelashes already weighted with bits of clinging ice.
“If I may,” he added, as one strong hand took her arm and the other circled her waist. It was this serenely decorous Jonathan Corbin who steadied her, guided her, across Seventy-seventh Street and on toward the steps of the brownstone that waited some hundred paces into the storm.
She'd sort all this out later, Gwen Leamas thought as she squeezed off her boots inside the door of her second-floor flat. Her encrusted coat was already melting on the carpet runner where she had dropped it. She turned toward Corbin, who had not moved since entering, and, with fingers still numb and tingling, began working the buttons of his trench coat. His eyes now had a vague confusion about them, in contrast to the assured calm she'd seen only minutes earlier. She stepped behind him and peeled the coat down over his arms, shook it, and draped it on the floor next to her own. Gwen then took his suit jacket and hung it on a closet knob.
”A hot bath,” she reminded him, easing him forward through the high-ceilinged living room. ”A hot bath while sipping a very large Scotch and then a bite of supper sitting in front of a great blazing fire. Somewhere in all that we're going to cook this storm right out of your system.”
Time Out of Mind Page 3