Shaw walked uptown.
Orso darted into the street and hailed a cab. Cassidy saw him lean forward to show his badge to the driver, and then the cab took off.
Cassidy let Shaw get a block lead, and then went after him.
Shaw wore a tawny camel’s hair coat that stood out like a beacon on the night streets. He stopped occasionally to look in store windows. He waved off the invitation of a group of drunks standing in front of a bar on the corner of Christopher Street. He stopped in the middle of the block to light a cigarette. Cassidy stepped into a dark doorway across the street. Shaw looked around casually, and then went on. It was too casual. Shaw was checking for tails. Did he sense something, or was it just the precaution of a man who works the shadows? To be safe, Cassidy dropped back half a block. A few blocks farther on he watched Shaw duck down into the subway at 14th Street.
Cassidy counted to fifteen, and then went halfway down the stairs and crouched to the bottom. Shaw was just pushing through the turnstile. Cassidy went down the rest of the stairs fast while he searched his pockets for a subway token. He did not find one.
A train pushed air and noise ahead of it as it approached the station. Cassidy shoved a quarter at the uniformed man in the ticket booth, grabbed the offered token, ignored the man’s shout of, ‘Your change,’ and rushed the turnstile. Where was Shaw? Was he headed uptown or downtown? A downtown train stopped in a squeal of metal. There were only a few people waiting on the platform, and Cassidy did not see Shaw among them. The train pulled out. The platform was empty.
Cassidy moved until he could see the uptown platform. Shaw leaned against a pillar and smoked a cigarette. A puff of stale air tinged with the smell of burned electricity announced a train coming along the track. The rattle and squeal of its wheels grew louder. People shuffled toward the platform edge in anticipation of its arrival. Shaw dropped his cigarette and mashed it out with his shoe and moved to stand with a group of people just back from the edge of the platform. The engine and the first cars of the train howled into the station, brakes and wheels grinding. It slowed and stopped with a lurch and a banging of couplings. The doors hissed open. Behind Cassidy a group of college students, boys and girls together came whooping through the turnstiles and running for the train. They stampeded down the stairs. Cassidy went with them. When they got to the bottom, they all tried to crowd through the same door, forcing the conductor to hold the train. Cassidy ducked low, peeled off, ran to the car behind, and jumped in through the forward door just as it started to close.
The couplings jerked tight and the cars banged into motion. Cassidy looked over the shoulders of the two men who stood between him and the end doors to the next car. He could see past the scrum of college students to where Shaw stood in the middle of the car holding on to a pole and swaying with the movement of the train. 23rd Street, Penn Station, then 42nd Street. People got on and off. Shaw did not change positions. At Seventh Avenue and 53rd, the train turned east. As it pulled into Lexington and 53rd, Shaw looked up. When the doors opened, he was the first off the car. Cassidy waited and followed people out of the car and up the stairs.
Cassidy held back for a moment at the top of the stairs, and then went out onto the street. He checked downtown and then uptown and spotted the brightness of Shaw’s coat heading north. He dodged across traffic to the other side of the street and followed half a block behind. At 56th Street Shaw turned the corner and walked toward Park Avenue. He went in under the awning of a large brick apartment building on the north side of the street. The doorman greeted him cheerfully, ‘Good evening, Mr Shaw, getting cold,’ and pulled open the big brass-bound door.
Cassidy found Orso leaning against the bar at Toots Shor’s. Orso saw Cassidy come in and raised a hand to the bartender and pointed at Cassidy. A martini arrived just as Cassidy did. ‘Thanks, Al.’ Cassidy raised his glass to Orso. He took a sip. ‘God, that’s good. What’d you find out about Ambrose’s friends?’
‘They live at 23 West 63rd Street. A brownstone. Mr and Mrs Brandt. Karl and Magda. They’ve been there about three years. Very nice people, according to the neighbor who’s out walking his dog. He thinks they’re doctors of some kind. He’s impressed by that. Very tidy. No garbage cans left on the street. Flowers in the window boxes. Good morning, good evening, when they meet on the street. Very proper. Very orderly. It’s the best thing about Germans, he says. They’re orderly.’
‘They’re German?’ Cassidy put his glass down and stared at his partner.
‘What about it?’
‘Leon Dudek is looking for Nazis in New York. He gets killed about four blocks from where two Germans live.’
‘Could be a thousand Germans living on the West Side near the park.’
‘How many are working for the CIA doing something weird with mind-control chemicals?’
‘It’s a reach, Mike.’
‘Is it?’ Cassidy dug in his pocket and found the copy he had made from the photograph in Freddy’s hideaway. He put it on the table and touched the small woman sitting among the men on the picnic. ‘Is that her, what’s her name, Brandt?’
Orso studied it. ‘Yeah, that’s her.’
‘Do you see the husband?’
‘Yeah. The big guy in the middle, smiling. That’s him. Where’d you get this?’
‘It came out of Leon Dudek’s room.’
‘What’s the connection?’
‘The camp. He knew them from the camp.’
TWENTY-NINE
Cassidy went into the diner on Hudson Street, and took a seat near the far end of the counter. Queenie brought him a cup of coffee and a discarded copy of the New York Daily Mirror. ‘Eggs?’ Queenie asked.
‘Over easy. Rye toast.’
‘You got it.’
The paper was open to the sports section. The headline yelled, CANADIENS BOUNCE RANGERS 4 –2. While he was reading, Cassidy was aware that a woman had taken the stool to his left.
Queenie brought Cassidy his eggs and refilled his coffee cup, and then stopped in front of the woman to take her order.
‘Black tea. An English muffin, no butter please. Well toasted, yes?’
Her accent, slight as it was, caught Cassidy’s ear. He glanced at her while he turned the paper back to the front page. She was a small woman of indeterminate age wearing a frumpy brown suit and a green hat the color of old pea soup. She smiled at him and nodded, one of those nods that acknowledged your presence but did not invite conversation. Cassidy went back to the paper, holding it in one hand while he ate with the other. He was vaguely aware of Queenie arriving with the woman’s order.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘May I have sugar, please.’
‘Sure.’ He put the paper down and turned away from her to get the sugar bowl from further down the counter. When he turned to hand it to her, he noticed that her eyes were like blue chips of ice, at odds with the dowdiness of her clothes.
‘Thank you, most kind.’ She jerked her head in a small formal bow, and turned back to her breakfast.
When he finished eating, Cassidy left money for Queenie, and went out onto Hudson Street. The day was crisp. The few puffy clouds scudded across a blue sky just above the tops of the buildings. Just past Perry Street he stopped to light a cigarette and saw his reflection in the window of a hardware store. For some reason it made him grin. He stuck his tongue out at himself, and that made him laugh. A woman pushing a child in a baby carriage looked at him, shook her head, and hurried by. She knew a New York whacko when she saw one. It made him laugh again. God, he felt good this morning.
A few blocks later a wave of dizziness made him stop and lean against the corner of a newsstand until it passed.
He waited on the corner of Horatio Street for the light to change. Waited, and waited, and waited. He checked his watch and studied the slow, slow, slow movement of the second hand, tick, tick, tick, as if pushing through some viscous liquid. The iron fence around the triangle of Jackson Square Park across the street began to melt, bend, und
ulate. The branches of the trees in the park rubbed together slowly and whispered a gray, sandy sound. When he moved his hand, the fingertips trailed tracers of color.
What the hell?
He moved his hand again, and again colors wisped from the fingers. Wait. This had happened before. Why couldn’t he remember where? Why was that important? The light changed from red to green, piercing green, greener than green. It expanded, loomed out from the light pole, and then the pole itself began to slowly twist. He stepped into the street to see better. A high-pitched scream, a roar like an animal, something dark and large hurtled toward him. Someone grabbed his arm and pulled him back. ‘Watch out!’ The large thing went by in a rush. It was a car. He knew that much. Interesting – a car.
‘Are you all right, fella?’ A man held his arm and peered at him. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ There was a fleck of something dark between the man’s two front teeth. Big yellowish teeth with something dark between them. Red lips. ‘Hey, you’ve got to cut out the early morning drinking, pal. It ain’t any good.’
Drinking? No. Something else. What was it, a ghost of memory, a pale, flimsy thing he could not grasp.
‘You want to go up to St Vincent’s? It’s a couple of blocks. Let me get you up to St Vincent’s. They’ll take care of you. Come on. I’ll help you.’
Cassidy pulled away from the man’s grip. Something was happening here. Something he had done before. What was it? He was in a park. Like the park across the street? No. Bigger. Not here. Where was it? What was it?
‘We’ll take care of him. That’s all right. He’s a friend. Come on, Michael. It’s okay.’ A big man smiling at him. Thick chestnut hair. A friendly smile.
A woman near him. A small woman in a green overcoat and a green hat. Smiling at him. He did not like that smile. Eyes like ice. Fear backed him away from her until he bumped into the solid bulk of the man. The man’s arm went around his shoulders. ‘It’s all right,’ the big man said, and squeezed Cassidy’s shoulders. ‘It’s all right, everybody. We’ll take care of him. He’s a friend. This has happened before. I’m a doctor.’
A car pulled to the curb. The woman opened the back door. ‘Get in, Michael,’ the man said. ‘Get in. Everything will be all right.’ The woman scared him. He did not want to go past the woman.
‘I don’t like her,’ Cassidy said, his own voice sounding strange to him.
The man said something to the woman in a language Cassidy found familiar but did not understand. She stepped back from the door. The man led him to the car, and Cassidy got in the back seat. The man slid in next to him. The woman got in the front seat. The driver was a big man who watched him in the rearview mirror. The door shut with a solid thunk. The lock clicked.
He closed his eyes and watched the play of colors on the inside of his eyelids. He was safe now.
THIRTY
‘Hello, Michael. How are you?’ He was on a bed in a darkened room. The bed was as soft as, what? As soft as something. A cloud? Yes, a cloud. Where was he? The man who bent over him had food scraps in his beard. Who was he? Someone he knew, but who? Maybe if he closed his eyes for a moment, just closed his eyes.
‘Michael, open your eyes, please.’
The voice was persuasive. He wanted to please this man. He opened his eyes.
‘Good. Now Michael, we’re going to talk. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I want you to answer me the best you can.’
Half an hour later, Sebastian Ambrose went downstairs to where Shaw and the Brandts waited in the big kitchen at the back of the house. When he entered, Karl and Magda were talking quietly in German. Shaw sat across from them and toyed with Cassidy’s holster rig on the table in front of him. Ambrose poured a mug of coffee from the big electric percolator and splashed in some fresh goat’s milk.
‘What have you learned?’ Karl Brandt asked.
‘He’s a wonderful subject,’ Ambrose said. ‘He does not resist the drug, and he is completely willing to answer questions openly and fully. If we could duplicate this result every time, we would have a great success. It would radically improve the quality and efficiency of interrogations. It would be the kind of truth serum, if I might use the layman’s term, we’ve been looking for. I’m also very interested to see if he is highly suggestible under the drug’s influence. After all, if we could control a man’s behavior, we would have the perfect undercover weapon.’
‘How much does he know about what we’ve been doing?’ Magda asked.
‘Too much. He assumes that Williger went out the window at the Astor after being dosed with LSD.’
‘How does he know enough about LSD to identify it?’
‘It was in Williger’s blood. It was in Collins’s blood. He found a professor of chemistry at NYU who was familiar with it. He knows that Collins was killed in the safe house on West Fourth. He believes we used whores like Maxie to lure subjects for the experiment. He assumes that Shaw killed her to keep her quiet. He is aware that we are a CIA operation.’
‘Who else knows?’ Shaw asked. ‘Who else has he talked to?’
‘His partner, Detective Tony Orso. The reporter Rhonda Raskin.’
‘His brother?’ Shaw asked.
‘Yes.’
‘They know too much. They are dangerous,’ Magda said.
‘Kill them all?’ Karl asked. ‘Is this possible in America? In Germany it was not a problem. Nacht und Nebel, night and fog. Many people disappeared without a trace.’
‘We can get it done,’ Shaw said. ‘Cassidy and the woman disappear. Really disappear. No trace. Wait a bit, and the brother has an accident. The cop, Orso works in a dangerous profession. Who’s going to be surprised if someone shoots him?’
Cassidy awoke in a room he did not know. The light that came in around the shade on the window glowed, broke into prismatic bands, and hummed. He tried to sit up but could not. His hands were immoveable. He rolled his head to look at them and discovered that there were cloth straps around his wrists that bound them to the rails of the bed’s headboard. Anxiety bloomed in his chest. Sweat broke out on his forehead.
The door opened, and a man came in. He trailed a mist of colored light that pulsated as he moved, and there was an aura of light around his head. He pulled up the shade, and daylight flooded the room. He picked up a wooden chair and sat on it near the bed where Cassidy could see him.
‘Are you with me here, pal?’ He slapped Cassidy lightly back and forth across the face. ‘Are you tracking? Do you know who I am?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who am I?’
‘Spencer Shaw.’
‘Good boy. I want to ask you a couple of questions. Would that be okay?’
Shaw’s voice sounded to Cassidy like it was coming through a long pipe. ‘Yes,’ Cassidy said, and rolled his head from side to side as the room walls bent and straightened.
Shaw reached over and grabbed his face and held it still. ‘Did you kill Russell Crofoot?’ Shaw leaned forward to hear the answer.
Something in Cassidy fought against answering.
Shaw dug his fingertips into the muscles of Cassidy’s jaw. ‘Answer the question. Did you kill Russell Crofoot on Bank Street two years ago?’
Whatever held Cassidy back weakened, breached, and fell apart. ‘Yes.’
‘Why did you kill him?’
The question floated through Cassidy’s mind without sticking.
Shaw slapped him again. ‘Why did you kill him?’
Cassidy opened his eyes. ‘He was trying to kill me.’
A phone began to ring somewhere in the house.
Shaw said, ‘Do you remember that I told you I’m going to kill you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Today’s the day. I get to kill you. You get to die.’
‘Now?’ It seemed like an important question somehow.
‘No. I want you sober. I want you to know it’s coming. Don’t be impatient. We’ll get it done today. We’re going to have some fun.’
Ambrose opened the door
. ‘Phone for you, Shaw.’
Shaw went out to the phone extension from a small table at the top of the stairs. ‘Shaw, here.’ He listened. ‘I’m on my way.’
Rhonda took a drag off the cigarette that smoldered in the Stork Club ashtray on the edge of her desk and went back to banging on the typewriter as if force would add energy to the story she was writing. No matter how often she went back to edit and rewrite, it just lay there. It was going to put more people to sleep than Miltown. Who cared about this crap? She should be digging on the Dudek story.
‘Hey, Rhonda,’ Stan Nagosy yelled from the sports desk. ‘Call on line three.’
She picked up the phone and punched the lighted button. ‘Raskin, here.’
‘Rhonda, Tony Orso. Cassidy’s been hurt.’ His voice was strained and slightly muffled, and he was talking fast.
‘Hurt? What do you mean hurt? Is he all right? What happened?’ Her heart jumped in her chest, and her breathing was suddenly tight.
‘I’m sending a car for you. It’ll be there in five minutes. I’ve got to go.’
‘Wait. Wait. What happened?’
‘The driver will recognize you. Get going. He’s on his way.’ The phone clicked off, and she was left holding the buzzing receiver. She grabbed her coat and purse and rushed for the elevators.
Her heels clattered on the marble floor of the lobby as she hurried for the exit. Hurt, he had said. Not dead. Okay. That’s good. That’s something. She pushed through the doors to the sidewalk. A car was waiting in front, and a man stood at the back door. He raised his hand to her.
‘I’m Rhonda Raskin. Are you waiting for me?’
‘Yes.’
He opened the back door as she approached, and she bent to get into the car.
She tried to stop, but it was too late. The man from the house on West Fourth reached over and pulled her in, and the door slammed behind her. She tried to scream, but he punched her hard in the stomach and the breath rushed out of her. He hit her again on the side of her neck, and she blacked out.
Night Watch Page 27