Derailed

by Siegel, James

  Only I was still a hostage.

  I kept peeking now.

  It became hard watching them without actually being able to go over and confront them. Because now, in addition to feeling scared and naked and vulnerable, I felt angry. It welled up in me like sudden nausea. The kind of anger I’d up to this point reserved solely for God — on those days I believed in God and on the days I didn’t — for Anna’s disease. The kind of anger that caused me to clench my hands into fists and imagine landing them in Vasquez’s face. And hers.

  But I resisted the urge to walk over and tell her that I was on to them. That I knew what she’d done to me. I needed to bide my time. To get Anna’s money back, I needed to find Vasquez; and to find Vasquez, I needed Lucinda.

  That was my mantra. This was my mission.

  She would lead me to him.

  I guessed that Lucinda wasn’t a stockbroker anymore.

  I overheard a conversation Lucinda had with the man at Penn Station on Wednesday morning the next week. The man mentioned selling short for a client, how this client was a veritable meal ticket for him, which meant that he was a stockbroker and Lucinda wasn’t. Because another stockbroker might be inclined to know people in other brokerage houses and might be inclined to ask them about their co-worker Lucinda, who, it would turn out, didn’t exist. No, Lucinda obviously had another occupation these days. A lawyer, an insurance agent, a circus clown. And Lucinda, no doubt, wasn’t even her name.

  I knew the name of the man she was about to con out of his money, though. I knew this because another man had come up to them while they were having coffee together that same morning and said: Sam, Sam Griffen, how are you doing?

  Not too well, actually. Mr. Griffen blanched — his face turning the color of soap, as Lucinda turned away and stared at the price list on the wall.

  When Mr. Griffin regained his voice, he said: Fine.

  Then Lucinda got up and walked off with her coffee cup — just another commuter on her way to the subway. And Mr. Griffen sat and talked with this unwelcome intruder for five minutes. When he left, Mr. Griffen sighed and wiped his face with a stained napkin.

  I thought it was unnerving being this close to a victim without being able to warn him. Like standing next to a child who can’t see the speeding car bearing down on him but being forbidden to tell him to get out of the way. Watching this horrible accident unfold in close-up and super slow motion. The worst kind of voyeur.

  I thought she saw me once.

  I’d followed them to a coffee shop north of Chinatown one morning.

  They’d taken a table by the window, and I saw Sam Griffin reach for her hand and Lucinda give it to him.

  I couldn’t help remembering the way that hand had felt in my own. Just briefly. Remembering the things the hand had done to me, the pleasure it had conjured up for me that day at the Fairfax Hotel. Like opening up one Chinese box and finding another inside, and opening that one up, too, and then the next box, each box smaller and tighter than the previous one, opening them faster and faster until there were no boxes left and I was trying to catch my breath.

  I was still trying to catch my breath, still lost in memories of guilty pleasure, when they exited the coffee shop. I had to turn and dart across the street. I had to hold my breath, count to ten, then slowly turn back, fingers crossed, and see if I’d been spotted.

  No. They’d gone off somewhere in a taxi.

  Then I lost them.

  One day.

  Two days.

  Three days.

  A week. No Lucinda. No Mr. Griffen. Nowhere.

  I scoured Penn Station from one end to the other, coming early, staying late.

  But nothing.

  I started to panic, to think maybe I’d missed the boat. That she’d already taken Mr. Griffen off someplace for an afternoon of sex and Vasquez had already caught them in the act. That he’d already taken their wallets and asked Mr. Griffen why he was fucking around on his wife. Maybe even called Mr. Griffen at home and stated his dire need for a loan. Just ten thousand dollars, that’s all, and he’d be out of his hair.

  When the next week came, and I still couldn’t find them, I was ready to give up. I was ready to admit that a forty-five-year-old ex–advertising executive had no business thinking he could win here. That I was hopelessly out of my element.

  I was ready to throw in the towel.

  Then I remembered something.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Okay,” the deskman said. “How long you want it for?”

  This deskman was the very same one who’d given me the key to room 1207 back in November when I’d stood in front of him with Lucinda on my arm.

  I was back at the Fairfax Hotel, and the deskman was asking me exactly how long I’d be needing room 1207 for.

  Good question.

  “How much is it for two weeks?”

  “Five hundred and twenty-eight dollars,” the man said.

  “Fine,” I said. So far, I was on paid suspension. And $528 was a bargain in New York City, even if the room had bloodstains on the carpeting and the stink of sex in the mattress sheets.

  I paid in cash and received my room key. There was a pile of magazines sitting on top of a beat-up couch, the only true piece of furniture in the lobby. I stopped to peruse them: a Sports Illustrated from last year, a Popular Mechanics, two issues of Ebony, and an old U.S. News & World Report: SHOWDOWN IN PALM BEACH COUNTY . I took the Sports Illustrated.

  I rode the elevator with a man wearing a University of Oklahoma jacket who actually looked as if he were from Oklahoma. He had the slightly bewildered look of a tourist who’d fallen for the picture on the cover of the brochure — the one taken in 1955, when the Fairfax wasn’t being subsidized by federal welfare checks. He’d probably tried his hand at three-card monte and already purchased a genuine Rolex watch from the man on the corner. He looked like he was ready to go home.

  So was I.

  But I was on a mission now, so I couldn’t.

  For just a moment as I was opening the door, jiggling the key inside the somewhat resistant door lock, I couldn’t help tensing up and waiting for someone to blindside me into the room. No one did, of course, but that didn’t stop me from sighing in relief as soon as I made it inside and shut the door.

  It looked a little smaller than before, as if my imagination had given it a size more commensurate with what had gone on there. But it was just a room in a cramped downtown hotel, big enough for two people who pretty much intended to stay glued to each other, conducive to sex if for no other reason than its restrictive dimensions. The kind of room where two is company but three’s a disaster — remembering what it was like to be stuck in that bird’s-eye seat on the floor.

  I lay down on the bed without taking my shoes off and closed my eyes. Just for a few minutes.

  When I woke, it was nearly dark.

  For a few seconds, I had no idea where I was. Wasn’t I home in bed? Wasn’t Deanna next to me or downstairs whipping up something tasty for dinner? And Anna — chatting away on-line in the next room, homework spread out on her lap like a prop to throw me off the scent?

  There was a musty odor in the room, mustier even than my furnished apartment; the mattress felt hard and lumpy at the same time; the ghost images of a chair and table I didn’t recognize were hovering precipitously by the foot of the bed. And I finally woke to my current surroundings as to a radio alarm that’s been set too loud — I groaned, winced, and looked furtively for a stop button that didn’t exist.

  I got up and made my way into the bathroom to splash some cold water onto my face. My body felt like pins and needles, my mouth dry and pasty. I looked down at my watch: seven twenty-five.

  I’d slept the whole day away. When I walked back to the bed, I saw the Sports Illustrated I’d taken from downstairs lying on the floor.

  I saw the date.

  November 8.

  One week before I’d walked onto the 9:05 to Penn Station and my world had come tumbling down
.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I was sitting on the beaten-up couch in the lobby.

  I was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low over my eyes.

  I was tracking human traffic like an eagle-eyed crossing guard.

  How long do you want it for? the deskman had asked me when I checked in.

  Why did I want it in the first place?

  That day when we walked out of Penn Station and into a taxi, that day when she’d finally said yes. When she’d asked me, Where?

  I’d gone and dutifully picked our hotel from a moving taxi.

  But maybe not.

  Now it seemed to me that I’d pointed one out to her, but she’d said, Uh-uh, then picked out another one she didn’t like the look of; and then finally, when we’d made it nearly all the way downtown to the vicinity of her office, I’d pointed to the Fairfax and she’d said, Okay. So when you really thought about it, maybe I hadn’t picked our hotel after all.

  Maybe she had.

  The hotel where I’d run into the wrong person at just the wrong time. Only I hadn’t really run into anyone. They’d set a trap, and I’d walked into it.

  Which brought me to my hunch. An idea that occurred to me when I was standing empty-handed and frantic in Penn Station.

  There was no reason on earth for her to think I would ever find out about her and Vasquez. The last time she’d seen me, I’d been running for my life down that stairway in Spanish Harlem.

  They didn’t need to change addresses.

  Just victims.

  When she relieved Mr. Griffen of most of his cash and all of his dignity, odds were it was going to be in the very same place they’d done it to me.

  So I sat on the couch in the lobby.

  I waited.

  I had a dream.

  I was on the train again. The 9:05 to Penn Station.

  I was looking through my pockets again because the conductor was standing over me, asking for money.

  One hundred thousand dollars, he said.

  Why so much? I asked him.

  The fare’s gone up, the conductor replied.

  When Lucinda offered to pay for me, this time I said no.

  I made it through both issues of Ebony.

  Patience, I told myself as another morning went by without a sighting. Patience. After all, look how much patience Lucinda had exhibited with me. All those chummy lunches and romantic dinners she’d had to suffer through in order to get me to go upstairs to that room. If she could do it, so could I.

  From Popular Mechanics I learned the basics of hot-water piping. Which wrench was voted best overall value. How to tile a floor. Roofing made simple.

  One afternoon, I called Barry Lenge from the room to see how the investigation was going. To touch base with the real world — isn’t that what Vietnam grunts used to call the world back home, the one that existed far away from the front? Which is where I was now — on the front lines, pulling guard duty to prevent any enemy incursions.

  And the military reference was entirely apt. Wasn’t I exercising each morning now? Push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, isometrics—the works. So the next time Vasquez said, Good boy, maybe I’d show him how good I really was.

  And something else. I still had Winston’s gun. I kept it up in room 1207 wrapped in a towel and hidden behind the bathroom radiator.

  As far as the real world went:

  Barry Lenge got on the phone and said there was no point in my calling him. They were still conducting their investigation. They were still crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. It didn’t look very good for me, though. I should’ve taken him up on his offer — that’s for sure. He’d be calling me soon enough.

  I thanked him for his time.

  Then I checked my cellular for messages and found a voice mail from Deanna.

  A Detective Palumbo called for you. He said it was important. I told him you were out of town.

  Time was running out.

  I knew that. Running out for me and Sam Griffen both. If it hadn’t run out on Sam Griffen already.

  It was Friday morning.

  I was browsing through the out-of-date U.S. News & World Report, whose headline was SHOWDOWN IN PALM BEACH COUNTY .

  Occasionally the deskman would glance over at me, the deskman and the bellman, too, look me over, up and down, all without saying a word.

  It was that kind of hotel. People who came here had nowhere else to go, so no one expected you to go anywhere or do anything. You could loiter in peace here, sit on a couch all day and read out-of-date magazines to your heart’s content.

  “Gore is confident of ultimate victory,” the magazine reported solemnly.

  When I looked up again, the bellman had multiplied. He had some help for the afternoon rush; a black man dressed in a similar nondescript green uniform was leaning on the desk, talking to him.

  I’d left my cell phone upstairs, and I wanted to call Anna. I got up and walked to the elevator. The bellman nodded at me, the black man who’d been talking to him momentarily stopped, turned around, then resumed his conversation.

  I was thinking that I knew that bellman — the black one. That I must’ve seen him that day months ago when I’d entered the very same elevator with Lucinda. The elevator doors opened; I walked inside and pressed twelve. I got off on my floor, I hummed a song whose words I couldn’t remember, I opened the door to my room and walked inside. Which is when I realized that I was wrong, that it wasn’t that day I’d seen him after all.

  I walked back into the elevator and pressed Lobby.

  The black man was still yapping at the bell captain — his back directly toward me, so I couldn’t actually tell if I was right.

  They call you Chuck?

  I took a loping circle over to the front desk, looking sideways the whole time, holding my breath as the man’s face slowly came into view, a quarter moon into a full half, his features starting to fill in.

  If you were my crimey, that’s what we’d call you.

  Remember? Biding my time that day on the corner of, what . . . 8th Street and Avenue C? Waiting for Vasquez in Alphabet City, but it wasn’t Vasquez who’d walked up to me—or actually into me.

  Why don’t you look where you’re going?

  The face three-quarter now, and I was beginning to feel clammy and light-headed.

  It was him.

  Yes, it was.

  The black man who’d frisked me up against the alley wall, who smelled of blood and pomade.

  I quickly turned away—toward the deskman, who looked up as if waiting for a question. This question being, How smart is Charles? Very smart — or at least smarter than I was seven months ago.

  Then again, even fools have their day.

  After all, for once I knew something they didn’t.

  I knew how they did it.

  I knew where they’d be doing it again.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I bought a pair of sunglasses from the Vision Hut on 48th Street. I was pretty sure the black man hadn’t recognized me the other day, that he hadn’t matched the bearded and undernourished-looking man he’d seen sitting in the lobby to the man he’d led into that alleyway in Alphabet City.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to take precautions.

  I completed fifty-two push-ups and seventy-five sit-ups before 7:00A .M.

  When I got downstairs, I walked over to the bellman’s desk and said hello.

  “Hi,” the bell captain said.

  “Not too busy today, huh?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  Then I was pretty much out of things to say.

  “How long have you worked here?” The good conversationalist will always ask the other person about himself.

  The bellman looked kind of suspicious. He was about forty or forty-five, I guessed, greasy hair combed in a kind of pompadour, a style about forty years out-of-date.

  “A while,” he said.

  “Get any days off?”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse m
e?”

  “Why do you want to know if I get any days off?”

  “I don’t know. Just making conversation.” That, at least, was what I was attempting to do.

  “Oh, I get it,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “What kind you looking for? You want white, black, spic . . .what? ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You looking for a date or not?”

  I blushed. “No. I was just . . . talking. . . .”

  “Right,” the bellman said. “Fine.”

  In this hotel, apparently the bell captain did a little more than carry your bags.

  “Are you the only bellman?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation where I needed it to go.

  “Why?”

  “I was just wondering if you had any — ”

  “Whatexactly you looking for, mister?” He sounded irritated now. “You got something going with Dexter, ask him, okay?”

  Dexter. That was his name. Dexter.

  “When does . . . Dexter work?”

  The bell captain shrugged. “Wednesdays and Fridays.”

  “Oh.”

  “You need your bags put somewhere?”

  “Bags? No.”

  “Right. Well, I’m the bell captain. So if you don’t need your bags put somewhere . . .”

  He was asking me to shut up. I retreated back to the couch, where I sat for another half hour or so, or until lunchtime.

  When I came back in from my 7:00A .M. coffee run a few mornings later, Dexter was standing behind the desk.

  I sat on the lobby couch and opened my coffee cup with trembling hands.

  I was afraid Dexter would recognize me, and I was feeling kind of scared again; I might look like a dangerous man with my oversize shades, but looks can be deceiving. For instance, Dexter looked more or less harmless reading a magazine in that pale green uniform. He looked like a guy who might even help you with your bags if you asked him nicely. Not like a guy who’d slam you up against an alley wall and laugh when you were punched in the stomach.