He heard Dancer break the connection but the receiver remained in his hand, held high as if he were about to dial again. Lesko took a chance and craned his head so he could see through the glass. No coins this time. Lesko knew he'd used one before because he heard the little metallic clack of a finger checking the return slot. But this was a credit card call. Out of town. Chicago, maybe? Lesko saw a manicured finger tap a button on the top row, then on the bottom row, then back up to the top. Not Chicago. Probably the 203 area code. Connecticut. He could not make out the exchange, but Lesko would have given attractive odds that the number was in Greenwich. Lesko waited as Dancer tapped out his credit card number and settled in, somewhat nervously he felt, for a possibly long conversation.
Someone on the other end picked up. Dancer spoke about ten muffled syllables, probably his name and the person he was calling. None of the syllables sounded like Dancer. And the tone was curt. He was talking to an underling, Lesko decided, maybe a housekeeper. There was another long silence of perhaps twenty seconds, and Dancer abruptly straightened. More words, but these were different. Lesko picked out his own name twice and Corbin's three times before Dancer even took a breath. And here was the tone he was expecting. Eager but servile. Dancer, you bootlicking little shit. Lesko thought about leaving, about not pushing his luck. On the other hand, though, Dancer was now so absorbed by the sound of his master's voice that a bomb could go off or he could break a nail and it probably wouldn't have distracted him. What the hell, thought Lesko. He bit off half a Milky Way and stepped into the adjoining booth, quietly closing the door. Lesko took out his billfold and shaped it into a circle with the plastic cards inside. This he placed against the metal wall and fitted his right ear against the soft leather rim.
Six
Up you get, Ducky.” Corbin felt a shock of cold air across his back as Gwen stripped away the quilted comforter. She stepped to her window and threw open the bedroom drapes, flooding the room with soft filtered light. Corbin winced and covered his eyes. She was in that ugly robe again, he saw, and already freshly showered. Her wet hair lay flat and dripping against her head. Corbin faked a yawning stretch and then lunged for the comforter.
“No you don't, love.” She stamped one foot over the end on the floor and snatched away his pillow. But he held fast to the quilt, clutching it tightly against his neck. Again she stripped the rest of it from his body and, leaning over him, shook her head like a wet dog. Corbin bellowed as he rolled away from the spray.
“Have more fun in b-bed,” Corbin chattered the slogan of a New York sleep shop. “Whatever happened to lazy, sexy Saturday mornings in the sack?”
“Those are for lazy, sexy people,” she retorted. “We, au contraire, are energetic and coldly efficient investigators. I've made a list of what we're going to do today and left a mug of hot coffee on the washbasin next to the shower. Get cracking.”
Corbin glanced toward the window and frowned. “It's still snowing, sweetheart.”
“Take your shower, Jonathan,” she said more gently.
“When do I see this list?” Corbin buttoned his badly wrinkled trench coat as Gwen Leamas undid the first two latches on her apartment door.
“It's in my coldly efficient head,” she answered, pulling open the door and guiding him through it by the arm. Gwen followed close behind him as they descended the single flight of stairs into an old-fashioned foyer darkened by floral print wallpaper and an Oriental carpet runner on the floor. A potted palm sat near an inner door that had leaded stained glass panels. On the last step Corbin hesitated, his hand gripping the knob at the end of the mahogany banister.
”I already smell it,” he whispered.
“You smell what, Jonathan?”
' The way the city smells in these ... when I see those people.”
“Jonathan”—she put a steadying hand on his shoulder— “could you be referring to horse piss, by chance?”
”I think so.”
Gwen pushed him forward. “What you smell is the repulsive little boy on the third floor who occasionally urinates behind the radiator. That, and the landlord's equally disgusting cat who defecates in the potted rubber plant.”
She led him through the glassed inner door and pulled open the heavy main door, which showed evidence of delicate carving under layers of brown paint. Corbin flinched as passing flakes, sucked by the foyer's warmth, turned violently in his direction.
“It's barely snowing at all.” Gwen turned him and pulled up his collar. “Most of it's being blown off trees and rooftops.”
Corbin looked up. The sky, though thick and gray, had taken on a mottled appearance as the moisture content of passing clouds was reduced to random pockets. The clouds would begin to break up soon. He wished they'd slept another hour.
“Our first trial run,” Gwen told him, taking his hand, “is going to be a slow and soggy walk just down to the subway station on the corner. You'll tell me what you see, if anything, and what you feel as well. If you get an impression, speak it. Don't try to reason it out first and by all means don't deny it.
“Next, we'll take a short ride on the Lex down to Fifty-first Street, where we'll start a slightly longer walk over to Saks Fifth Avenue. At Saks we'll get a bite of breakfast and then we'll buy you a pair of overshoes, a new shirt, and some socks and underthings. After you've changed in their dressing room we'll cross the street to Barnes and Noble where we'll purchase a Manhattan street map. While there, we'll browse through whatever picture books they have showing New York as it looked in the last century. Then, if you're up to it, a bracing walk over to the Burlington Building because that's where this ghostly stalk of yours seems to begin and end.”
Corbin didn't know whether to feel frightened or relieved. Gwen was actually beginning to believe him. Or wanting to believe him.
“How do you expect to narrow it down?” he asked. “Nothing's the same anymore.”
“Let's wait until we see a map and a few photographs.” Holding his arm, Gwen started down the stone steps to the narrow packed-down path of the unshoveled sidewalk. “You'll be fine, Jonathan,” she said, not looking at him. “You'll have done so well that this afternoon I'm going to treat you to a lovely high tea at the Palm Court of the Plaza. Uncle Harry's going to meet us there.”
Corbin stopped. “Urn, just a second, please.”
“Harry hasn't seen you since we had dinner in Chicago. He's been asking about you.” Gwen offered her most blameless smile.
“When?” Corbin asked, unmoved by it.
“When what?”
“When did he ask? It wouldn't happen to have been while I was in the shower?”
“It did come up then, yes. When I called to ask if he'd have tea.”
“Gwen, for Pete's sake—”
“Oh, Jonathan.” She put her fingers to his lips. “What will it hurt? Harry Sturdevant comes from a very old and stinking-rich New York family. He knows this city and its history backward.”
“He's also a shrink.”
“Nothing of the sort. He's a doctor.”
“Your uncle's field is sports medicine. His specialty is the effect of the mind on athletic performance. That makes him a shrink as far as I'm concerned. How much did you tell him?”
“Hardly a thing, Jonathan.” She pulled him forward. “Now stop talking. We're halfway to the subway and you're behaving too damn normally. Conjure something.”
But there was nothing. Corbin glanced around him. Just a quiet residential street on a Saturday morning. No traffic moving. In fact, no recognizable cars at all. Only an occasional mound of snow that buried clusters of garbage cans and those vehicles which had failed to find indoor parking before the storm. Blocking much of the sidewalk were a few large stone stoops he hadn't noticed before. Nothing else. A face in the window of a saloon on the far corner across Lexington Avenue. Under a sign that read O'Neill's in gilded script. Corbin ducked as several ribbons of snow blew off some overhead wires and fell toward him. When he looked up, the face and
the window were gone, obscured by a sudden wind-whipped flurry.
“Watch out.” Gwen tugged at his sleeve. She steered him past a thin-trunked young elm he did not appear to see and onward to the icy edge of the subway stairs.
A glorious morning, he thought happily. A bit of shopping, a brisk walk after breakfast, then perhaps by afternoon the flag would be up on the Fifth Avenue cars, indicating that the ice in the park was cleared for skating. Yes. An excellent idea. He could pick up a bird-and-bottle hamper at Delmonico's, and after a few turns around the lake they'd share it by a bonfire while the sun went down. And if we're seen together, so be it. Any arched eyebrows we encounter will be more the result of envy than of censure.
“Step carefully, dear,” Corbin said as he offered his arm to Margaret.
Raymond Lesko backed away from the steaming window and placed his Styrofoam coffee cup on the glass counter. He picked up a pack of oatmeal cookies, pocketed them, and paid for them with a dollar bill. Not waiting for change, he pulled down his hat and hurried through the door toward the subway entrance on his side of Lexington Avenue.
A flash of motion caught the corner of his eye as his head dropped below street level. Lesko paused on the subway stairs, allowing the motion to register. A car door. Gray or silver. Swung partly open and then arrested. A single foot reaching out and halting there. Hesitating. As if the hand on the door knew that it had moved too soon.
Lesko continued down the steps until he was out of sight from the street. He waited, listening. A heavy car door slammed shut. He moved on toward the turnstile, a token already in his hand. He reached them as Gwen Leamas and a blinking Jonathan Corbin had just passed through and were beginning their descent to the track level. Now Lesko heard footsteps behind him, but he did not turn. He smiled as he reached for the token slot.
“Dancer, you tidy little devil,” he murmured to himself. “Have you decided that this old buck needs a leash? Well, if you have, Twinkletoes, you're going to find out that leashes have two ends.”
“You were with her again, weren't you?” Gwen and Corbin remained standing near the door of the almost empty car.
“No,” he lied. “My mind just wandered. A slip of the tongue.”
“Damn it, Jonathan! I asked you not to deny it. The last person to call me ‘dear’ was an aunt in her dotage.”
“Okay.” He dropped his eyes.
“Well, what did you see?”
Corbin's lips twitched uncertainly. “Is there a bar on the northwest corner of Seventy-seventh and Lexington?”
”A bar? No. It's a place to buy newspapers and magazines.”
“Named O'Neill's?”
“No, a Greek runs it. Actually, it's a Te-Amo cigar store.”
“It was a bar when I saw it. The name was in script with tiny little dots that might have been light bulbs or reflectors running through each letter. The window had a gold filigree border around it. Just inside the window there was a brass rail running at about chest height and it had red cabaret curtains hanging from it. There was a man in the window watching us.”
“Do you know who?”
“Too far away. But I didn't have any sense that I should know him or even that he was a ghost. He's probably just a guy who happened to look at us because we were the only people moving on the street.”
“No we weren't, Jonathan. I saw at least a half-dozen people, including the postman we passed.”
Corbin's expression went blank.
“You didn't see him,” she established. “Do you recall me stopping you from walking into that tree?”
”I remember you said, ‘Watch out,’ but I thought it was because more snow was falling off the wires.” Corbin raised a hand in surrender. ”I know. There weren't any wires, either.”
“What about Margaret? Did she say anything?”
“No.” He didn't think so. Not just then. ”I was thinking about taking her ice-skating in Central Park. She might have been nervous about that for my sake. Being seen with me, I mean.”
“Because you were a man of some ... substance, and she was a known prostitute.”
Corbin blanched. He wished Gwen hadn't called her that, even if he'd said it first. She was never a prostitute in the strictest sense. She was very much a lady. Good stuff in her. Educated. She could play the piano and sing. Gwen couldn't do either. And she read Henry James's novels, and Mark Twain's stories, and now she's reading Daudet's Sappho in the original French. She could do elaborate needlepoint faster than the eye could follow her hands, and she could make the most wonderful arrangements with flowers she dried herself. So many fine qualities. One mistake doesn't change all that. No, it was just that it was so soon, in the eyes of some, after ... “My wife,” he whispered.
“What wife? Margaret was your wife?”
“No.” He made his hands into fists as if to hold on to it before it left him. “The woman in the snow. The onewho just died. I think she was my wife. And before you ask, no, I didn't kill her so I could be with Margaret. One thing had nothing to do with the other.”
Gwen was silent for a long moment. “My God,” she said finally, a bemused smile on her face, “it really happens to you, doesn't it? This is utterly fascinating.”
“I'm glad you're having a nice time.”
By the time Gwen and Corbin began their crosstown walk to Saks, the snow had stopped falling entirely. The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the first building they saw on emerging from the subway, confused Corbin almost at once. He knew the Waldorf, he'd been in it; he and Gwen had danced in the Peacock Lounge when he first came to the city. Yet now it seemed entirely wrong. Its shape, the details of its architecture, even its location were not what they should have been. He could not explain why or describe an alternative. Gwen did not press him.
He saw nothing else that especially troubled him during the rest of their stroll toward Fifth Avenue. No phantom people or horses. No fading or materializing buildings. Only a snowbound and depopulated city digging out from more than a foot of snow. He could hear the grinding hum of plows all around him, and of dump trucks carting tons of snow to the edge of the Hudson River. He heard the hiss of air brakes on the few struggling buses and the sound of snow shovels rasping over cement sidewalks. All these sounds, modern sounds, gave Corbin comfort and a certain clarity of place. Even so, he continued to see buildings that seemed vaguely out of position, as if the city had been rearranged by some giant's hand. On these and others, Corbin, who knew almost nothing about architectural design, sensed sadly that certain stylistic adornments had been stripped away. Heavy rooftop cornices, balustrades, finials that ought to have been there were gone, leaving an ungraceful boxy appearance to what remained. The more modern buildings, most of them, were an abomination to Corbin. Too much glass. No sense of substance. Even the streetlights, which Corbin had never particularly noticed before, now seemed a graceless triumph of function over
form. Ahead of him, however, he saw the tapering spires of Saint Patrick's Cathedral and he felt, as he explained it to Gwen, something like an urge to applaud.
“Do you know why?” she asked. “Is it because Saint Patrick's hasn't changed?”
“Maybe. I don't think so.”
“Try, Jonathan,” she urged him. “Try to think why you'd want to clap for a church. Is it an especially.religious feeling?”
“No,” he said distantly. ”I just like the spires. I like the way they did the spires.”
“Would you like to go inside?”
Corbin looked at her. Certainly not, was what he almost said. “Here's Saks. Let's get some breakfast.” He had no idea why the question annoyed him. But the spires, newly freed from their scaffolding at last, were indeed quite handsome. Roman church or no.
Gwen Leamas munched an English muffin, which, she pointed out, was neither English nor a muffin, while Corbin fortified himself with two orders of corned beef hash and eggs. He'd asked first for finnan haddie and then for kippered herring, neither of which was on the menu. Gwen tried to reca
ll whether she'd seen him order either dish in the entire time she'd known him.
Returning to the street floor Gwen used her credit card at the Totes counter to buy Corbin a pair of high latex pullovers for his damp shoes, plus a pocket rain hat with a houndstooth design, and an inexpensive folding umbrella. Next, Corbin moved to the haberdashery displays where, at Gwen's insistence, he chose two new shirts, both handsomely striped, and a change of socks and underwear.
”I can pay for these,” he told her. “Why don't I just write them a check?’'
“‘Because I like dressing you. And them who buys ‘em, picks ‘em. You're still too young and dashing for some of the dreadfully stuffy clothing you wear.”
When he went to change, she selected three colorful pocket handkerchiefs that would add a bit of spark to his boring business suits. What about an ascot, she wondered. No, he'd never wear it. In this country ascots seem to be the exclusive property of aging Hollywood types who want to hide their wattles. Her eye fell on a tubular umbrella stand, which held not umbrellas but a selection of canes and walking sticks. With no particular purpose in mind, she ran her fingers through the assortment, searching for one that was black. With a silver knob. Nothing there. Only trendy stuff such as knobbed shillelaghs made of blackthorn and assorted oak shafts with handles made of brass duck heads. Too bad. Not that he'd start carrying one even if she found it, but Jonathan did say he always seemed to be walking with a black silver-headed cane during those excursions of his. “Aha!” she said aloud. Gwen quickly returned the small folding umbrella and selected a black, tightly furled English model. No silver knob. No knob at all. Just a curved handle. But it did look like a black walking stick. Who knows? It just might possibly help speed things along.
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