The Lure

by Felice Picano

  He turned around and this time viciously kicked down the first tough, aiming at his face, wishing he had worn heavier shoes. Then Zach was behind him, grabbing at Noel’s arm. Noel was balanced for the attack. He let the arm go, revolved fast, slamming his open palm right at Zach’s chin, literally picking him up off the ground, a trick he’d seen McWhitter teaching Eric at the Hamptons villa. He followed this up with a deep right into Zach’s stomach, feeling the abdomen muscles contract as though with an electric shock as he hit them. Zach fell over backward. But now his friend was up again. Noel bent low and swung sideways with his shoulders, knocking him back into a display window, which shattered with a loud crash.

  Satisfied with the damage, Noel jumped back, then dashed into the middle of the street, into a line of traffic, calling out obscenities, attempting to keep their attention away from Priscilla. If necessary, he’d jump back into them. Horns blared all around him.

  He looked up to see Priscilla, who had gotten the envelope inside the mailbox finally, had even hailed a cab, and was now trying to maneuver the stroller inside the back seat. The baby was squalling. She looked back.

  Zach went for her.

  Noel went for him, jumping over the hood of a slow-moving Chevy, which braked instantly. Behind him, in the stop-and-go traffic, Noel heard a chain reaction, brakes screeching, horns honking. He missed Zach, but Zach’s partner grabbed him. With a rush of elation, Noel bent, then rammed hard, head down, pushing his attacker into a wall.

  Straightening, he looked toward the corner to see the cab door slammed in Zach’s face. As the cab sped off, the stroller was left behind, knocked over in the street.

  Noel recrossed Fifty-seventh Street, taking cover in the doorway of Wolf’s Delicatessen. From the entryway windows he looked back. Zach was helping his friend up. They were arguing, distracted now. Noel knew it would only last a minute.

  A cab was stopped in the westbound traffic. He had to chance it. He spun out of the entryway, staying low, and managed to crawl into the cab, keeping out of sight.

  Neither of them saw him. They were still arguing. The cab was caught by the light. Noel prayed that he wouldn’t be seen. He locked both doors, leaning back.

  When the taxi finally did take off, he turned around and looked back. There was a crowd at the corner of Sixth Avenue on the south side of the street. The two thugs were nowhere in sight. As he strained to look, the crowd thinned out with the change of streetlights, and Noel was treated to the rare spectacle of two grown men violently stomping a tiny gray baby stroller into the heat-softened asphalt of the Avenue of the Americas.

  8

  By the third morning after the incident, when the envelope containing the cassette still hadn’t arrived, Noel became alarmed.

  He’d gone directly to his apartment, expecting PriscilIa to call him. Then he remembered that she believed his phone to be tapped. So he went out—wary, nervous, expecting Zach and his murderous friend to step out of a doorway any minute—while he called her twice from a pay phone. No answer.

  That night, going up to Redfern’s, Noel left the answering machine on as usual, hoping she would contact him, reassure him. He assumed the package would arrive in the next day’s mail—or the day after that, at the latest.

  The town house was filled with the club managers, and once more the Window Wall party was the only topic of conversation. Alana still wasn’t home. Okku told him she had gone to Paris. Eric said she was with Veena, who was opening a new act in France. Neither would be back until the night of the reopening party.

  Eric was distant, cold. The memory of their last evening together hung between them. Noel went home.

  And worried.

  Had there been enough postage on the envelope? He wasn’t sure the inefficient doorman wouldn’t send it back. Or it might have been marked for hand delivery. He wanted to go back to the town house. He was afraid. He was a weapon—that might go off. He wished he’d taken that detailed, dated plan when Priscilla offered it. All he could recall now were vague phrases; accusations, they now seemed to him.

  He decided to redecorate while he waited for the cassette. His life—his entire future—depended on that tape.

  His stark white walls became different shades of gray and brown, with satiny hues of blues and pinks that only emerged at night or in different lighting. Old, much-painted-over pipes and moldings—formerly hidden behind white paint—stepped forward as design elements when he painted them in chocolate and charcoal gray. He ordered a dozen plants of various sizes from a plant store Window Wall used, and was building in planters for the larger ones, hanging the smaller ones. He tore down his loft bed and put the bedspring and mattress on the floor in the middle of the studio, heaping it with large pillows, surrounding it with small wooden cubes he’d bought, unfinished, and painted to match the walls. Most of his other furniture he dragged to the basement for storage or hauled out on the street for scavengers.

  He worked feverishly, scraping walls, spackling cracks, painting undercoats, repainting overcoats, destroying, building, moving, buying, discarding, selecting colors and materials. And worrying.

  What if Priscilla had been followed and caught? What if she’d gotten his address incorrect from the telephone operator? Or had copied it wrong in the excitement of the moment? What if the envelope were languishing in some cubbyhole of the main post office? What if she had been lying all the while? Or if the conversation she’d taped had nothing to do with payoffs?

  He toyed with various plans—going to the police commissioner without the tape; with the materials in the large accordion folder right this minute sitting in a luggage check at Penn Station, one key in Noel’s pocket, the other held by Mrs. Vega. All that might be enough to incriminate Loomis, wouldn’t it? He thought about trying to track down the parcel through the postal bureaucracy—a dispiriting thought. Or trying again to find Priscilla herself, not at home the half dozen times he called, or the two times he’d gone to her apartment.

  He ended up doing none of it.

  Instead, he worked on his apartment, listened to disco music, then moved over to an FM jazz station, and from there to a classical station, progressing to some of the longer pieces of music in his record cabinets he hadn’t heard in months—years it seemed to him: a Bach passion, Don Giovanni, a recording of King Lear, and finally a well-known actor reading selections from a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  It was while he was listening to one of these tales for the third time—the one about Narcissus, the beautiful youth who was jealously loved by Apollo, and Aeolus, the Wind God, and who was eventually destroyed through a fatal mischance in their rivalry—that his downstairs buzzer rang.

  He climbed down from the window ledge where he’d been hanging new blinds, flicked on the receiver’s audio muting button, and got to the intercom panel just in time to hear Gerdes announce that a lady had come to see him.

  It couldn’t be Alana, she was in Paris. It must be Priscilla Vega. She had not mailed it to him at all, but to her mother or some friend. She was bringing it herself.

  He said to send her up, then hammered in the last few nails of the brace, tested it, put up the blind, and finally left it half open for the late afternoon sun to filter in. When the door buzzer rang, Noel was trying to remember a few words of his high-school Spanish to tease Mrs. Vega with.

  It proved unnecessary. His visitor was Mirella Trent.

  He turned aside to hide his obvious surprise and disappointment. But she noticed it and stepped in gingerly.

  “Well, Noel, the doorman did say it was a lady. I heard him.”

  He regained his composure fast. With a sweeping gesture, he showed her the apartment. “I thought you were delivering something.”

  She followed the gesture and took in the alterations. “Then it’s true!” she blurted out.

  “What’s true?”

  “What you told me. You know, about having a boyfriend and being gay and all.”

  “Why? Because I painted m
y walls? Come on, Mirella. That’s such a stereotyped prejudice I shouldn’t even have to tell you that all gays aren’t interior decorators, for Chrissakes.”

  She didn’t seem to listen to his outburst, but instead walked carefully all around the studio, skirting the areas where he was still working. “Well, maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “Maybe contact is enough to develop it.”

  He reminded himself that she always had an uncanny knack for being enigmatic—and irritating. “To develop what?” he asked.

  “Taste! You never had any before, Noel. Not in the way you lived, or the way you dressed, or anywhere in your life. Until you got involved in this project. Stereotyping or not.”

  She plumped herself down in the center of the pillows strewn on the daybed, still looking around her with unfeigned pleasure. “Or did he do this?” she asked, lighting a joint.

  “Who?” Why was he always asking her questions, like a TV reporter on the street. Who? What? Where? Why?

  “Your boyfriend.” She inhaled deeply, then offered the grass.

  He declined it. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” he said.

  “Then it isn’t true?” She seemed unrelieved by this fact.

  “It was. Sort of. It isn’t. It’s a long and complicated story, Mirella. And I don’t want to go into it.” But she had settled back into her pillows and seemed ready to listen to War and Peace cover to cover. Since he knew she’d eventually worm it out of him with more whys, and whens, and wheres, he decided to give it to her. “He’s dead. He was killed two months ago. That same night, as a matter of fact,” he added, probably to make her feel guilty.

  “Oh, no! I am sorry, Noel. I didn’t mean to…”

  She let it drop, and so did he, concentrating on twisting a recalcitrant screw into the molding. He wondered if she’d already heard about Randy, if she were here to give him another chance.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” she suddenly said after a few minutes of silence, punctuated by his swearing at the screw. “I want to go to the party at Window Wall. Now don’t tell me you aren’t going. I’ve got to go, Noel.”

  “But it’s a gay club.”

  “I just have to go, Noel. You’re going, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. But I’m friends with the manager, Cal Goldberg.”

  “And with Eric Redfern, too,” she added. “Don’t deny it, I know you’re being kept by that handsome playboy. Don’t deny it.”

  Noel had to laugh at the way she put it. It sounded so much like an excerpt from a Liz Smith column. If Mirella only knew the half of it. And of all the crazy things, she wanted to go to the reopening party. For a moment Noel wondered if she had other motives for coming here. Then told himself no, whatever Mirella was capable of—which was a great deal—it was all ethical: her ego demanded it be ethical.

  “But why?” he asked again.

  “Because I told everyone I was going, that’s why. And because,” and here she rattled off a list of names of some of the people she’d read would be there. “That’s why. By the way, is it true that Teddy Kennedy will be there?”

  “I doubt it.”

  She went into utter despair. “I have to go, Noel.”

  “The celebrities will hang around for an hour or so, posing,” he said, trying to discourage her, “then it will be just another gay club. You’ll feel out of place. You’ll hate it.”

  “I’ll love it. I’ll leave you at the door and not even nod at you during the party if we pass each other.” She began to beg. “I’ll never ask you for another thing as long as we both shall live.” Then she turned to bargaining. “I’ll stop bad-mouthing your project. I’ll give you a favorable review when it’s published.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Never more serious in my life.”

  “But it’s only a party, Mirella,” he tried once more. He looked at this attractive, intelligent, accomplished, and chic woman; a colleague, a professional rival, once a lover, a possible wife—and saw nothing but a little girl not invited to a party.

  “You can’t come in with me. I’m invited to the dinner that’s being held before the crowd arrives.”

  Each word was like a tiny slap to her sizable ego. He could see that clearly.

  “All right,” she said, getting out of the pillows, and speaking in a low register Noel didn’t recognize but instinctively knew to be her version of noble-acceptance-in-the-face-of-defeat, “you have every right in the world to do this.” She was smoothing her skirt, trying to look like Irene Papas—tragic, regal—in some film version of an ancient Greek play.

  Noel got down from the window ledge, walked over to the door, and began opening it. “I’ll leave your name at the door,” he said.

  “You sweetheart!” She jumped up to kiss him on the cheek. Like a sister-in-law would kiss him, he thought. “Can you make it for two?”

  “Why not?”

  “Right away,” she urged. “The party’s the fifth, the day after tomorrow.”

  “The fifth?” Wasn’t that within the last week listed on the plan Loomis had computed? The time the weapon was to go off? “I’ll call,” he said, closing the door behind her.

  Where was Priscilla? And the damned tape?

  9

  By ten o’clock the following morning, all the plants had been delivered and hung in their appropriate spots. There were no telephone calls on his answering machine. And when Noel checked the mailbox in the lobby, the cassette had not arrived.

  He called Priscilla Vega, listening to her phone ring a dozen or more times, and decided to try her at home once more. She may have decided her phone, too, was being tapped.

  As ever, since four days before, he was on the lookout for the two toughs. They’d probably been sacked by now, sent back to wherever they’d come from, Noel suspected. Still…

  No one answered Priscilla’s bell. When a face appeared out the side window of the first floor of the building, Noel asked for Mrs. Vega, and was rewarded with a shrug and a quickly drawn window shade.

  He decided on a stakeout at the small luncheonette at the nearest corner, within view of the front of the brownstone. A window seat was empty. He took it. Not knowing how long he would have to be here, he ordered breakfast.

  He’d brought a steno pad with him and spent a long time working out details of his redone apartment. Right after Mirella’s visit, he had asked his own questions about his sudden obsession with renovation. It was keeping him busy, he knew; he was doing something, something that had not even been mentioned in the goddamn report. That’s why.

  But there was another reason. It was the only thing he felt he still could do that he could control. The book was unthinkable. Working with Eric at Window Wall would put them too closely in contact for safety. Since the seduction fiasco, Eric had changed toward him subtly. He might still be frightened of Noel, but it was as though he had needed Noel to come on to him, to go that far, and now that it had happened, Eric was somehow satisfied, even relieved, and probably also triumphant. Besides, he was so busy these days with the party, there was no possibility he would waste precious time or energy on what he would call “negative vibes.”

  Noel had been staring at the brownstones—façade after façade, jutting high stoop after stoop—of the West Side street. After almost two hours of watching, only two people had emerged—an elderly couple, each with a cane, each holding a plastic shopping bag that looked empty. Noel looked down at his room plan for the twentieth time and quickly sketched in what he thought would be the perfect speaker placement. Then he looked up again, continuing his vigil.

  Those six little marks he’d just made were the finger in the dike, he knew.

  His next thought was an odd one—he hadn’t talked to Loomis, to anyone at Whisper, since that afternoon at the Automat. Maybe he ought to call. He might not like what he heard. But when had that ever stopped him from calling?

  Or was it part of his programming to call, to feel the urge to keep in contact? Of course. It mus
t be. There was a pay phone on the wall behind him, still within view of the apartment fronts.

  He dialed one of the loops numbers last given to him, heard the familiar but now slightly sinister silence. Priscilla and Buddy Vega had listened in on this line. Who else might be listening right now?

  It was the motherly middle-aged woman who finally answered. “Lure here,” he reported in. “Can you connect me with the Fisherman?”

  “How are you?” she asked, as though she knew him. “One minute, please. I’m ringing.”

  He wondered what to say to Loomis.

  “Sorry,” she announced, “I can’t seem to find him anywhere.”

  “This is the Lure,” he repeated. “I haven’t been able to keep in contact. Are there any messages for me from the Fisherman or anyone else?”

  “I’ll look.” She didn’t sound hopeful. He shouldn’t have added that last phrase. What if someone were listening? How stupid of him!

  “Hello.” She was back. “Shall I read it? It is from the Fisherman. It says, ‘Expecting a large, easy catch tomorrow night. Proceed as planned.’”

  “Yes?” Noel wrote it down. “Go on.”

  “That’s all there is. Should I repeat it?”

  “Proceed as planned? What does that mean?”

  “Don’t know, dearie,” she said breezily. “That’s what’s written here.”

  He thanked her and said he’d call back later.

  While he’d been on the phone the little restaurant had filled with customers. Lunchtime. Probably workers from nearby. He moved his things to the back, to a two-seat table, near the phone, then ordered more food. When it arrived he shoveled it in, still thinking about Loomis’s message.

  It had been foolish to think that even in an emergency Priscilla Vega would use the loops to contact him. What did “proceed as planned” mean? They hadn’t planned anything the last time they’d talked. Maybe Noel had missed one of the messages. He wouldn’t know what to do. The control pattern would be broken. Loomis had said he was to do nothing. That meant Loomis, too, suspected that his plan had been botched somehow and that he was going ahead with the bust, not the assassination.