But from the window where she stood he was caught in a framework. Natalie continued looking, picking him out again, now entirely alone against the wooden fence blocking off the construction site behind him. She was struck by the peculiar feeling that she was the only person in the world watching him: it was just the two of them, the situation almost embarrassing in its intimacy—she was watching him in some private act, but she couldn’t look away.
What the hell was he doing?
She gasped, leaned forward: he had taken out a gun. Quite clearly she saw it, was certain, a gun, a pistol or a revolver or an automatic; she didn’t know one kind of handgun from another, but it was a gun. He had pulled it from his trench-coat pocket, stood looking at it as if posed, like Jean-Louis Trintignant in that indelible moment in The Conformist, as if he didn’t quite recognize it and was undecided. … Then in a sweeping motion, his arm held stiffly, he lofted the gun up and over the poster-covered wooden fence.
She squinted into the night. Rain blew across the window.
But, no, it had been a gun. She was sure. …
The man stood frozen, looking around as if he expected to be caught in the act, set upon by burly cops and dragged off with nightsticks tattooing his skull. His lace was shaded beneath the bill of the cap. The trench coat—she was registering it all—looked like one of the five-hundred-dollar Burberry’s with the tan-wool button-in lining. Maybe … But she couldn’t imagine she’d been wrong about the gun. … A gun? My God.
It was a New York moment. Strange. Weird.
Utterly objective, yet desperately personal.
Natalie Rader was in her office. A man with a gun was standing below in the street. He had thrown the gun over a fence, into a construction site. An anecdote. Something to tell her friends.
Until the man looked up.
What did he see, she wondered later, a random design of lighted windows in the building across the street? One with a woman silhouetted by the desk lamp behind her … a woman staring down at him.
He didn’t move. Returned her stare. Their faces in shadow. A man and a woman sharing the unexpected, naked moment. The sinister moment that seemed to stretch out forever.
Crazy. She felt as if there was an unmistakable eye contact. An invisible, taut connection stretched between them, cutting through the wind and rain.
And she was very frightened.
She stumbled back from the window, still watching him, feeling for the desk lamp. Knocking the empty champagne bottle off the desk, she heard its thud on the carpet as she hit the switch on the base of the lamp, plunging the room into blackness. She was out of breath, back at the window, standing to one side peering down.
He watched as if he could see her afterimage in the darkened pane of glass. He knows, he’s seen me and he knows I’ve seen him. Oh, Christ …
Slowly he pushed his hands into the pockets of his trench coat. He glanced to either side. No one paid him the slightest attention. He looked back at the window. She cringed, as if she were naked before him, even in the dark window.
Then he moved across the street toward her.
She watched him coming, saw him pass from view beneath the overhanging ledge outside her window.
Had he gone off down the street?
Or was he coming into her building?
Natalie backed away from the window. Her hands were shaking and her breath was catching in her chest, coming hard. She felt the fine sweat breaking out, the loss of strength in her legs, the pressure in her chest, the giddiness that meant her brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
The fear was building in her, she could taste it, like a drain in her belly backing up, sickening her, robbing her of strength and will. Son of a bitch. She hated it, fought it with a string of dirty words, trying to shock herself out of it and bring her back to reality. But the man was real—sure, sure, Tiger, but you’re acting like a nut case. …
But what’s so crazy about watching some guy throw a gun away and seeing him watch you, come toward you when you’re alone in an empty office and he knows where you are and you’re scared? That’s crazy?
Just go lock the door. The damn door was always locked during business hours, requiring a buzz and an identification. But not today. Not with the deliveries for the party and the people dropping in to share the moment with her.
If you’re so afraid, Nat, just go call Lew … call Tony … call Jay … someone will come and get you—
“I will not call anybody,” she said aloud. “I won’t do it!”
She began muttering to herself as she went to the closet and took out her own trench coat, wrapped her muffler around her throat, grabbed her briefcase. “Don’t forget the Linehan contract,” she whispered to herself, “and the first six chapters of the Crawford manuscript … and your umbrella.”
She dug around in her briefcase for the ancient Valium bottle, a souvenir from the worst days with Tony. “Irrational terror-stricken woman,” she said to herself. There were a couple inches of dead champagne in a cup on the reception desk. She gulped it down, made a face, and then stood still, willing herself to breathe slowly, deeply.
She was reaching for the doorknob when she heard the first footsteps in the hallway.
Tentative steps. Someone had come up the stairs. Past old Tim’s deserted post. No swoosh of elevator doors. Someone was waiting at the top of the stairs, probably looking around, trying to get his bearings. The footsteps started again, coming down the hall toward her, slowly, stopping as if to look at lettering on doors, moving on. She bit a knuckle.
He stopped again, outside her office.
Realizing what she’d forgotten, she took three quick steps to the door and pushed the button in the knob, which engaged the lock. It made what she knew was a soft click, though it sounded like a vault slamming shut.
She swallowed hard, waiting, knowing they were separated only by a door, knowing he must have heard the lock.
He laughed.
It was a slow, soft laugh. Derisive. Contemptuous. A rolling chuckle, someone laughing at the helplessness of a child. Finally he stopped. What was he doing now? She sagged back against the wall, steadied herself with a hand on a tabletop. Why didn’t he do something?
Finally he did. He moved on, back up the hallway. At last, she couldn’t hear him anymore. Was he waiting? Or had he gone down the stairs as he had come up?
She wished she smoked, wished there were anything she could do while she waited. She practiced swallowing and breathing and telling herself that she was the victim of an overactive imagination. Didn’t convince herself of the latter. She hadn’t imagined that laugh.
Ten minutes.
Fifteen minutes.
Christ, I’m a captive in my own office. Held at bay by a man who probably isn’t there.
She gritted her teeth and opened the door into the hallway.
Empty. Long and brightly lit, polished wooden doors, ancient tiles, beige walls. A few smudged puddles of rain. Footprints.
She pulled the door shut behind her. If he’s waiting in the stairwell for me, she thought, I’ll never have time to get the door unlocked. Tiger.
She punched the elevator call button.
When the door slid open a man wearing a trench coat stood inside.
She screamed, rooted to the spot.
“Natalie, for chrissakes, are you all right?”
He was a graphic designer from a studio two floors up.
“Oh, Teddy … sure, sure, I’m fine. I was just surprised. Thinking about something else—”
“You sure you’re okay? You look like you’ve seen—”
“No, really, Teddy, I’m perfectly all right. Tired. Long day. I don’t know.” She shrugged and smiled, getting in beside him. They descended together.
“Say, I saw your picture in PW today.” He whistled, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His glasses were sliding down his long nose. “Wow. Next stop Penthouse, right?” They laughed.
Slippery sidewalks. Teddy walked her to the cur
b and waited while she waved for a taxi. He asked her again if she was really okay and she looked up out of the cab window. Sure, Teddy, tiptop. In fact she was already feeling the slightly numbing effect of the champagne.
Chapter Three
WHILE THE CAB PUSHED and shoved its way through traffic slowed even more than usual by the rain and the slick streets, she found that she couldn’t just shut off her imagination now that she was safe, heading toward normal. Where had the man gone? Had he waited in the shadows, in the bar with the window on the street across the way, in a crowd of people at the bus stop? Had he watched her leave the building? Had he taken another cab and followed her? God, she really was out of control—
Still, what had she actually seen? He had thrown away a gun. Why? What had he done with the gun? You hold up delis with guns, you mug people with guns, and—well, inevitably, you kill people with guns. So what had this bozo done with the gun? Why throw it into a construction site where someone was bound to find it? Guns could be traced. Or could they?
They were heading up First Avenue, then left in the Seventies, and she was home. She tipped the driver too much because she wasn’t paying attention and let herself in the two front doors. She checked her mail in the common front hallway and heard Sir Laurence coughing and whoofing and scratching at the inside of her own front door. How did he always know it was she? Or did he do the same number every time somebody came in?
She had found Sir Laurence half-starved, in a parking lot nine years ago and he’d eaten pretty well ever since. He was presumably some sort of poodle and cocker mixture, with the requisite soulful eyes, thick bushy brows, and a now-gray beard that tended toward—admit it—a determined sogginess. His life revolved around Natalie, a collection of six tennis balls, and snacks of something called Bonz.
Opening the door, she saw him backing up, wiggling, and finally depositing a wet, almost hairless orange tennis ball at her feet. She sighed, picked it up gingerly using just two fingers, and dropped it over the balcony into the living room, listening to him crash clumsily down the stairs. She lived on the two bottom floors of a brownstone, with a garden in back, trees and flagstones. Sir Laurence was one lucky dog, indeed, with a yard of his own in the middle of Manhattan.
Some days she couldn’t quite imagine what she would do without Sir to come home to. Like most New Yorkers with pets, she talked to him a good deal. Like most New Yorkers’ pets, he not only listened but seemed to understand the difficulties of her pressured existence. He, on the other hand, seldom lost his generous willingness to hear her out. A perfect relationship. He even slept with her, a warm bundle who, if he kept his questionable breath pointed in the other direction, was always welcome. He had a tendency to leave sand and grit in the bed, but then, nobody was perfect.
She treated him to a handful of Bonz in the kitchen, replenished his water dish, chatted him up a bit about his day, and he went out his own door to the backyard, where he had a bathroom in the far corner—there were times she couldn’t quite face a walk.
She put a Modern Jazz Quartet tape in the deck, set out a piece of Brie and some green grapes, and checked her answering machine. T. Jones over on Third Avenue had called to tell her her new coat was altered and ready; Jay must have just called from “21” to tell her that he really wished she’d change her mind and join him; and Julie Conway, who lived upstairs, said that she’d be stopping down shortly. …
Natalie spent ten minutes throwing Sir his tennis balls, then ran a very hot tub, and Julie arrived. She was everything Natalie was not: tall, with long blond hair, once a model who had done a spread for Playboy in the late sixties, now a public-relations executive in a major hotel chain. She was a master at what had once been called “staying loose, man,” while Natalie was always on the edge of being “uptight, man.” Yet—or perhaps because of their differences—they had become good friends. Based on the fact that they lived in close proximity to one another: rare in Manhattan.
Long-legged, broad-shouldered, wearing high swashbuckler’s boots and a wildly swirling skirt and vest, Julie looked like an advertisement for a tour of Rumanian gypsy-folklore festivals. She swaggered down the stairs, picked up Sir and rakishly rubbed noses, scaring him half to death in the process, and threw her immense length onto a couch.
“What,” she asked, her voice deep and elaborately full of vowels, “do I have to do to get you out for dinner? My spies brought me a PW; your picture is so beautiful it made my teeth hurt, according to the story you are also ‘hot’ and ‘rich,’ and on the whole it seems like a good idea to be seen on the town with you. So, let’s go.” She smiled lazily, waiting for the expected reply.
“I may be hot, I’m not rich, and I’m a wreck. I plead for a break. A lonely dinner, a lonely bath, to bed with my dog and a set of contracts—” She was pacing, didn’t want to get into offering Julie a drink. Didn’t want to get started telling her about the man with the gun. Not right now. For an instant, listening to Julie rattle on, it seemed hardly to have happened at all.
“You must eat. Oysters and tortellini at Maxwell’s, a short stroll on a nice rainy night. Nightcap at George Martin, check out the local worthies.” Julie’s booted foot was tapping the air, already impatient, knowing the argument so well.
Natalie shook her head. Smiled. “Not tonight.”
“I worry about you,” Julie announced for the seven-hundredth time. “You and Sir are alone too much. He’s only a dog—”
“A dog maybe but never only—”
“You should be out celebrating tonight, Nat, you know that as well as I do.”
Natalie smiled. She might as well have been talking to Jay Danmeier.
“A nice dinner, maybe a new man who is capable—just conceivably, mind you—of conversation,” Julie persisted, “… and he turns out to be a good lay. Voilà, one celebration, right on the money! Really, be absolutely honest with me, wouldn’t you like to just let go and go to bed with somebody tonight? Sort of top off the day?”
“Oh, Jules, what can I say? The answer is no, I really wouldn’t want to go to bed with somebody. If there were a man I cared about—well, sure, I’m feeling a little fragile, and making love slowly and for a long time would be the best. But that’s a big if, kiddo.” She stood looking out into the floodlit garden, watching Sir engage a couple of wet leaves in some sort of contest she would never comprehend. “Look, it’s just a difference of outlook, that’s all.”
“Judge me!” Julie cried. “See if I care—actually, I do care. You always sound like a mature, sensitive, nifty lady and I always sound like a sex-crazed asshole. But,” she sighed and stood up, so devastatingly confident, such a soldier of fortune in the sexual wars, “a long time ago I decided if the shoe fit I might as well put it on. I tell myself I merely communicate on an earthier plane than such as you—”
“And more effectively, no doubt.” Natalie followed her up the stairs. “Whatever happened to Dave? Or was it Dick?”
“Don. And the Jets are playing in San Diego and Seattle, two straight weeks, so he’s out of the picture for the moment. You know, I was amazed—he’s a gallery man, hits all the art galleries, they know him, he’s a customer, collects drawings, sort of eighteenth centuryish. Unexpected frontiers on the offensive line. I’d rate him a contender. If he doesn’t find himself too young for this thirty-six-year-old knockout.” She paused at the door. “You’d like him, actually, much more your type than mine. He told me he suspected me of sportfucking—he was really upset. Definitely your type, now that I think about it.”
In the hallway she turned back, her face suddenly serious. “Did you see the Post today? A nurse was stabbed to death in a nice brownstone three blocks from here last night—doorman building; not a clue. A word to the wise, okay? Put that with all the robberies in the neighborhood—and lock up tight tonight. Promise me.”
“Of course.” On impulse Natalie crossed the hallway and hugged her. “And thanks for saying nice things about me and wanting to go out with me tonight.
I really am worn out—”
“Listen, I’m the last girl to give up.”
“Be careful, Jules.” She smelled the Opium perfume, felt the long, tawny hair against her cheek, suddenly felt herself a short, dark, funny-looking creature beside Julie.
“Never fear. I’m big and tough.”
And she was gone into the night. On to George Martin. On through the Upper East Side, leaving bodies floating in her wake. Excelsior!
Natalie lay in the tub, feeling the sweat running down her face, smelling the fragrant bubbles. The telephone sat on the floor, in arm’s reach. Sir lay in the doorway, watching her, mauling a yellow tennis ball. She picked up a hand mirror and scowled at the face that always struck her as too much the little-girl’s face, too much Natalie-at-twelve. As she had grown into womanhood the face had changed so little: only the addition of laugh lines at the corners of her mouth’, a faint spray of lines radiating outward from her eyes. A few gray hairs, which she didn’t mind, didn’t even consider hiding. The scowl faded, her face fell into repose. She supposed she was pretty, if you liked the type. A smooth, olive complexion, neatly shaped black hair that was presently wetly plastered across her forehead, a slender, pointed nose, dark eyes that could be expressive.
The fact was, she’d always thought of her physical appearance as her arsenal, the weapon she could fall back on when the going got tough and everything else failed and she needed to get her own way. That was her father’s fault, she imagined. He had loved to sit and look at her and sometimes she had caught him at it, seeing in his eyes not so much love as a simple fascination at what she looked like, at the fact that she had come at least partly from him. Still, he’d always told her she had a good brain, too. She’d always been the quickest, brightest, hardest-working little thing. … She put the mirror down and closed her eyes, pushed her thoughts away from herself.
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