“Are you a faith healer too, now?” Sprague taunted him. “Is that a lucrative sideline you wanted to explore?”
Jack had grabbed the newspaper away and was quickly scanning the text. The byline, of course, was Mansfield's, and yes, he had Baldwin's name there and quotes from him too. “ ‘I believe that he has healed me,’ confided the terminally ill young ad man. ‘I can feel the process already.’ “ Had it all been a setup, after all? Or had Mansfield simply followed Jack into the park, taken the pictures with a telephoto lens, then paid off Baldwin for his story?
Sprague was watching him with icy eyes. “First time you've seen it?” he said, scornfully. “Jesus, spare me the surprise. I suppose you don't know he died on Christmas morning, either, at New York Hospital?”
Jack let the tabloid fall away. All he could think of was the fervency with which Baldwin had murmured “I believe . . . I believe” on that bench in the boat basin. What good had his believing done him? What good had Jack done him?
“Oh, so you didn't know,” Sprague said, registering his sudden dismay. “Well, perhaps now you'll put away these notions of faith-healing, and put yourself back under my supervision, where you belong.”
Jack was dimly aware of Tulley, circling around behind him.
“We can straighten all of this out,” Sprague went on, calmly, but with a clear undercurrent of menace, “on the way back into the city. Why don't you just get into the car, Jack, and we'll return to the institute.”
Tulley was right behind him now, so close that Jack could feel his breath, clouding in the cold air, on the back of his neck. He slapped the tabloid back into Sprague's hand and said, “Don't even think about it.” Tulley had taken hold of his left elbow.
“About what?” Sprague replied, putting on a big false smile in case anyone should be watching.
“About getting me into the car. ‘Cause if I have to, I'll take out both of you—you first, and then"—shoving his elbow back, hard, right into Tulley's solar plexus—"him.” Tulley coughed, and doubled over.
Jack turned around, patted Tulley on the back, and started to walk away. The priest and Clancy and Irene were all looking down at them from the gravesite. Jack heard Sprague saying, “No, no, not now,” to Tulley, “not with all of them watching.”
Jack climbed back up the hill, just as the first flakes of snow began to fall. First Mansfield, now Tulley, he thought, with a wry, sad smile. I'm going from savior to prizefighter in record time. What, he wondered, would Nancy say?
Then, turning up his collar against the falling snow, he offered up a silent prayer for the soul of Adam Baldwin.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THE FORECAST FOR later that night, New Year's Eve, wasn't a good one. Heavy rain, possibly turning to sleet and snow. In self-defense, Nancy had opted for the layered look—a cashmere sweater over her blouse, a pair of leg warmers over her jeans, and a raspberry-red ski parka, with a hood that folded out of the collar, over everything else. She felt prepared for anything.
Out on the street she realized it was lucky she was. People were already acting crazy, weaving down the street in paper party hats, shooting off bottle rockets, shouting “Happy New Year!” out the window of passing buses. One guy she passed was leaning against a lamppost, retching between two parked cars. And it was only ten-thirty. Times Square at midnight was going to be a zoo.
Nancy crossed over to Mott Street and waited outside one of the most popular Peking duck restaurants until a cab pulled up, then jumped in before anybody cowering inside the restaurant had a chance to come out.
“Broadway and Forty-fifth Street, please.”
The cabbie finished scrawling something on his route record, then slammed the meter back on and took off with a jolt. This, Nancy thought, is a man who's not happy about working tonight. But then, who in his right mind would be?
Only Sprague. And she wasn't so sure what mind he was in. When she’d put on her coat to leave the institute at six-fifteen that evening, he'd looked surprised.
“Where are you going? Two new specimens have just arrived.”
“I have to go now,” she replied. “It's New Year's Eve, you know.”
“What's that got to do with it?” He sounded so much like Scrooge she'd half expected him to add, “Bah, humbug!”
“I have a date.”
“ ‘A date,’ “ he mimicked, sourly. “I don't have to ask who with. Jack Logan, I'm sure.”
It was the first time he'd acknowledged knowing about them.
“Yes,” she'd admitted, glad to have it all out in the open now, “it is with Jack. We're meeting at the theater after the show, and we're going to go over to Times Square to watch the ball drop.” It was about time Sprague heard how normal people lived their lives.
“Well, isn't that nice . . . young love. Please give your boyfriend my regards, will you. Tell him, if there's anything you haven't already told him, that the institute goes on without him.” As she waited for the elevator to come up, he'd shouted down the hall after her, “Tell him he can rot in hell!” Strangely enough, after three days of studious silence, the curse had come as something of a relief.
A light film of wet flakes was starting to paste itself to the window of the cab. The cabbie muttered, “Shit,” and turned on his windshield wipers. “You want me to try to get closer than this?”
They'd gotten as far as Fortieth Street, but traffic was totally gridlocked: the cab was wedged between two idling buses, and a cop, armed with a whistle and a flashlight, was trying, unsuccessfully, to clear the intersection. Some of the streets had been blocked off altogether, to free up Times Square, and traffic was being rerouted.
“No, that's okay. I'll get out here.” She paid the driver and got out of the cab, right in the middle of the stalled street. The sidewalks, even in the cold and snow, were packed with revelers; there were hordes streaming out of the huge, triplex movie theaters and mobs swarming in and out of the fast-food joints. Senegalese street peddlers were hawking umbrellas and noisemakers and fake Carrier wristwatches from the top of cardboard boxes; a woman with a megaphone was distributingWatchtower booklets and warning that the end of the world was near. A zoo, Nancy thought, would have been a kind way to describe this scene.
Though the theater was only a few blocks away, it took her nearly a half hour to get there. By the time she did, she could see that the show had already let out—the front doors were wide open, all the lobby lights still on; she went around to the backstage door and found Jack and his friends in the locker room. Jack gave her a big hug, and introduced her to the guys she'd heard so much about—Vinnie and Haywood (whom she'd met, for two seconds, the night Jack had first invited her to see the show), Van Nostrand, Catalano. All but Van Nostrand had girlfriends with them.
“So—we ready to move now?’ Vinnie asked. “Remember—anybody gets separated, just meet up back at my apartment—”
“Our apartment,” his girlfriend—or wife—put in, rolling her eyes.
“Yeah, right—our apartment,” he said, throwing one arm around her, “anytime after a quarter of one or so.”
“Gotcha,” Haywood said, impatiently. “Come on already, or it's gonna be next year before we get out of here.”
They poured out the backstage door, past Gus, who was working his crossword puzzle like any other night of the year, and into the backstage alley. The wet snow was still coming down in lazy swirls. Haywood's girlfriend, a pretty black woman, rail-thin, with big gold hoop earrings, looked none too happy. “Don't worry about it,” Haywood said, reading her mind. “I'm gonna buy you an umbrella.”
Out on the street, they tried to stay together, but the crowds were so thick, and there were so many umbrellas already up, and police barricades to get around, that it was a constant struggle. Jack, with one arm firmly wrapped around Nancy's shoulders, almost seemed to be purposely hanging back.
“Don't you want to keep up with your friends?” Nancy asked.
“To tell you the truth,” he said,
leaning down and kissing her ear under the flap of the hood, “not really. We can catch up with them at Vinnie and Barbara's. When the ball comes down, I want to be alone with you.”
“Alone?” Nancy said, smiling and taking in the mob crushing in on them from all sides.
“Yeah, well,” he said, laughing, “alone as we can get.”
Getting separated from the others wasn't very difficult. At the next corner, Jack pulled her by the arm, and she was swept through a revolving door and into the brightly lighted interior of a McDonald's. “How much time have we got until midnight?” he asked.
“About thirty minutes.”
“Good. Don't tell Vinnie—he made his special chili for later on—but I'm starved. I need a burger and fries now.”
“You're gonna brave that mob?” There seemed to be more people inside the McDonald's, pressing toward the front counter, than there were outside. The air in the place was oppressively hot, and smelled of sweat and grease and wet clothes.
“I'm gonna try. You want anything if I make it?”
“No, not for me. I'm going to wait outside for you. It's so much more peaceful out there.”
He watched her thread her way back to the door, then made his own way toward the counter. When he got there, the only thing they had ready to go were Big Macs, so he had one of those, a large order of fries, and a Coke. Rather than try to juggle it all outside, he found a spot at a side counter and wolfed it down then and there. A clock above the breakfast menu said ten to twelve.
He used some paper napkins to dry the snow off his hair, then went outside to get Nancy. He figured she'd be waiting right outside the door, as he'd never be able to find her if she'd gone any farther, but to his surprise she wasn't there. The noise level was already so deafening that calling out for her was fairly pointless. Next door there was a video arcade; could she have gone in there to get warm?
The arcade was as packed as the McDonald's; rows and rows of beeping, clanging pinball machines, Pac-Mans, Donkey Kongs. Rap music was blaring from the overhead speakers. He went from row to row, looking for her raspberry-colored parka, but he didn't see it anywhere. And after a couple of minutes, he knew she couldn't possibly have taken refuge in there. Even the McDonald's had been better than this.
So where was she? He went back outside, checked the McDonald's again, then looked at his watch—it was only four or five minutes till midnight. Damn—if he didn't find her soon, they'd miss watching the ball drop together. It was already lighted—a great big glowing apple—perched on top of the Times Tower. A happy, drunken, stoned crowd was surging and swaying beneath it, waving at the TV cameras, blasting plastic horns. Where the hell was Nancy?
Maybe, it occurred to him, she'd hooked up again with Vinnie and the gang and been lured off to wherever they were standing. But how was he supposed to find them then? In this crowd, you couldn't see more than two or three bodies ahead of you. He was torn between hanging around the McDonald's, waiting for her to return, and going off to find her—impossible as that seemed.
A panhandler, swathed in the bubble-wrap used for mailing packages, accosted him with an empty paper cup. Jack dropped a quarter in just to get him to go away.
He'd started out surprised; now he was growing concerned. It was so unlike Nancy to just wander off and get lost in the crowd. She hadn't been all that enthusiastic about going to Times Square in the first place. Why would she go off on her own, into that crazy mob scene? Maybe something had happened to her, though he couldn't think what; there were cops, some of them on horseback, all over the place.
Several colored spotlights began to play up and down the Times Tower. The golden, glowing apple quivered at the top of its perch, then slowly, with the crowd chanting off the seconds, started its descent. Jack leaned back against the plate-glass window of an electronics shop and watched it fall. Hats and hands and umbrellas were waving wildly, jubilantly, in the air. The snow was drifting down now in thick, white flakes; anywhere other than New York, it would be making a beautiful white blanket. When the apple hit the bottom of its slide, there was an eruption of noise and light, horns honking, spotlights turning, music blasting from a hundred portable radios. The crowd started singing, in ragged unison, “Auld Lang Syne,” and from the direction of Forty-second Street a police siren whoop-whoop-whooped its way eastward.
What the hell should he do now? If Nancy wasn't with Vinnie and the others, she wouldn't know where to go. She'd never been to Vinnie's apartment and Jack hadn't given her the address. Why hadn't she come hack to the McDonald's? Short of going back to his own apartment, on the chance that she would try to meet up with him again there, there was only one thing he could think of: maybe she'd left a message of some sort on his answering machine, telling him where she'd gone. He fished his last quarter out of his pocket, found an empty phone booth in the back of the video arcade, and called his machine. It picked up on the first ring, which meant someone had left a message. He signaled it with the beeper, waited while it rolled back, then heard “Welcome home, Jack. This is Dr. Sprague.”
Sprague, on New Year's Eve?
“In case you're wondering what happened to Nancy Liu, she's here, with us, at the institute. I think, if you're concerned about her welfare, you should come over yourself, alone, as soon as you get this message. We'll be expecting you.”
Jack hung up the phone, stunned, and sat there until a Puerto Rican kid rapped on the glass door with a quarter.
“You done?”
Jack nodded, and left the booth. He didn't even hear the clanging of the pinball machines all around him. All he could think of was the message he'd just heard; how had Sprague gotten her to the institute? And who had done it? Sprague had said “us”: he must have meant himself and Tulley. He wouldn't dare involve anyone else. Jack looked at his watch. It was a quarter after twelve. They couldn't have had her at the institute for very long; the message must have been left only minutes ago. That was the one thing, it suddenly occurred to him, that worked in his favor; Sprague was expecting him to have to travel all the way home before getting the message, and then come back across town and down again. He wouldn't be expecting Jack for a while yet. Jack might be able to surprise him . . . if he hurried. Any other plans would have to be made on the run.
He bolted out of the video arcade but was instantly stymied by the crush of people outside. He collided with a huge guy in a Villanova sweatshirt who said, “Hey man, where the fuck you think you're going?” Then, trying to get around him, banged into a blue police barricade that he hadn't seen. He had to get out of Times Square—then he could worry about finding a cab to get him uptown.
Making his way across to the East Side, through the pandemonium, was impossible; instead, he started to fight his way north. Twice he had to step over people who had fallen down drunk on the sidewalk; once he edged too close to a cop's horse and got smacked in the shoulder with its nose. Everywhere, he was caroming off bodies, knocking into umbrellas, wedging himself between couples, skipping back and forth between the curb and the sidewalk. By the time he got to Forty-eighth Street, it was possible again to run, dodging and weaving, through the late-night revelers. But the pavement was slippery with the wet snow, and occasionally he had to grab hold of a street sign to regain his balance and catch his breath.
A cab—he needed to find a cab. But on New Year's Eve, in the snow, he knew he had a better chance of finding a camel. At a streetlight, he had an idea: there were limos all over town that night, and when they weren't transporting whoever had paid for them, they were idling outside nightclubs and restaurants. He looked up at the street sign; he was already at Fifty-second. He knew where to go. He ran east, to the “21” Club, and sure enough, it looked like a limousine convention outside. It took him only two tries before a driver accepted twenty to drive him up to die institute.
“Make really good time,” Jack said, “and I'll make it twenty-five!”
It was a long, silver limo, with a TV and a bar in back. But Jack played with
none of the toys. What he had to do, while the car sped, silently, through the snow-covered streets, was come up with a plan of action. But not knowing what kind of danger Nancy was in made it very tough. Just how crazy was Sprague? How far would he go to get Jack back where he wanted him? Pretty damned far, Jack thought; abducting Nancy was already a criminal offense. And it showed he knew how involved Jack was with her—at least that little mystery had now been cleared up, once and for all.
“What side of the street do you want?” the driver asked.
“Right side, about halfway down the next block.”
“Nobody coulda made better time.”
“I got ya,” Jack said, taking a twenty and a five from his wallet, then leaning forward and handing them through the little glass panel behind the driver's head.
“Have a happy New Year.” He snagged the bills between two fingers.
The car slid to a halt—up here the street was nearly deserted—and Jack jumped out. Aside from the lights that were on in the first-floor reception area, the building was dark. But that still told him next to nothing; Sprague did all his work on the upper stories, in the rear. Was he in his own research lab, or back in the tank room, one floor below? Jack sidled up the front steps, staying out of sight, then peered in through the iron bars on the door. The reception area was empty; Tulley, thank God, wasn't at the desk. He tried the door; it was open. So far he'd guessed right—they didn't expect him yet. He ducked inside, and made for the security desk. There were three small TV monitors, one labeled ELEVATOR. Jack flicked it on, saw the interior of the elevator car. More importantly, he saw that its doors were open and it faced a fire extinguisher. That meant it was on the fifth floor, where the tank room and the animal labs were located. He flicked off the monitor again. Since he couldn't punch the elevator button without alerting Sprague and Tulley to his arrival, he took the back stairs instead, praying that Sprague had left the alarms on the upper floors neutered. When he got to five, he put his shoulder to the door, turned the handle, and pushed. It opened with a grating sound, but no alarm.
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