Tender Death (25 page)

“S
TOP
! THIEF!” A woman screamed.

A group of luggage-laden foreign tourists who had obviously just gotten off one of the airport buses pushed forward, disconcerted by the woman’s scream, responding, perhaps, to all the terrible stories they’d been told about life in New York. On the verge of panic they pressed against Wetzon and her two companions in the small lobby, jabbering and shoving. The men in the trench coats resisted, vainly trying to hold back the surge.

“Look out!” someone cried. “He’s got a gun!”

“Where is he?” Mounting hysteria filled the area. Voices rose in fear and anger.

An arm came at Wetzon from the right, locked onto hers, and jerked her, stumbling, sideward. A clear voice enunciated in her ear, “Come with me quickly, no questions.” The voice had the sound of iron in it, and Wetzon was not about to argue.

She put herself into Diantha Anderson’s care as they burrowed into the confused and milling crowd of arms, legs, cameras, bodies, and luggage. Then Diantha pushed through a glass door to the right of the lobby and they were free and racing down a corridor with stores on both sides. They plunged into Grand Central Station along with the hordes of rush hour commuters streaming like lemmings to trains and subways.

“Okay, wait!” Wetzon shouted over the cacophony of people and trains. She stopped to catch her breath at a stand that advertised baked potatoes to go. “We’re free—”

“No, we’re not—look”—Diantha pointed back down the corridor from the direction they’d come and Wetzon saw a tall man in a trench coat enter from the Hyatt side door, just as they had.

“Let’s get out of here, get a cab.”

“No.” Diantha grabbed her hand. “It’s easier to get lost down here at this hour, if we just keep moving.”

They changed their route then, going farther underground, into a sloping tunnel that led to the West Side Shuttle trains, which ran every few minutes, carrying passengers from the East Side to the West Side. The tunnel, its walls advertising the glamour of New York, Broadway shows, restaurants, and films, was a virtual dormitory for the down-and-out. The homeless with their belongings in shopping bags, dirt-encrusted beggars, drifters sat on flattened cardboard boxes or stood along the tunnel, asking for money. Others slept, buried in newspapers or old carpet or towels; some even had blankets. The area had a putrid odor. Commuters poured without pause through the tunnel in both directions, eyes averted, unseeing.

Diantha came to a halt in a hollow where a passageway led off to Grand Central proper. “We’ve got to talk, but not here and not now.” Her eyes burned into Wetzon’s.

A man, his shoulders hunched, his hair matted in dreadlocks, edged toward them, his filthy hat outstretched. “Could you spare some change?” the drifter wheedled. He thrust his hat at them. Diantha pulled some coins from the pocket of her fur-lined storm coat and dropped them into the hat. “Thank you, sister, thank you.”

“I am not your sister,” Diantha hissed, turning furious eyes on him. The man scrambled back into the main tunnel.

Wetzon was losing her patience. She was tired of running from something she didn’t understand, tired of being so nice and cooperative. “Would you mind just giving me a clue?”

Diantha ignored Wetzon’s question and came back with one of her own, peering nervously back and forth in the tunnel, eyeing the crowds of people rushing home. “Who were those men? Cops?”

“They said they were FBI.” Wetzon spoke the words but she found them impossible to believe.

Diantha’s face clouded. Perspiration glinted on her upper lip. “Look, we can’t take any chances here. Before anything, we’ve got to lose them.”

“We have.”

“I wouldn’t count on it. They’ll be all over us, whoever they are.” Her mouth twisted. “We’ve got to split up. I’m too tall. They’ve seen me with you, they’ll look for me. I stand out. And they’ll be looking for the two of us.” She rested her hand on Wetzon’s shoulder, squeezing it thoughtlessly.

Wetzon stepped away, as if to go, and Diantha let her hand fall to her side. “I think it’s time you told me what’s going on.”

“There they are! Dammit!” Diantha’s eyes were wild. She reached into her pocket. For a panicked moment Wetzon thought Diantha was going to pull out a gun, but she had a handkerchief in her hand, and she used it to blot her face.

“Where?”

“Please! I’m begging you. It’s a matter of life and death.” Diantha dipped into her handbag, a brown leather clutch almost as large as a briefcase, and removed a key from a red leather change purse. “We don’t have time for explanations now, but I promise you, you’ll see and understand why I’m doing this, why I have to do it this way.” She pressed the key into Wetzon’s palm and closed her fingers over it. “Six nineteen East Sixteenth Street. It’s a brownstone. Ring my bell. Two short rings and one long. Count ten and do it again. Then go in.” She gave Wetzon a small push forward. “I’m going to double back and take the Lexington train. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

“But what does this have to do with me?” Wetzon was truly confused. At that instant she saw a tall man in a trench coat who stood out from the regular subway travelers. He was looking for someone, searching the faces in the crowd. This time when Diantha tugged her, she went willingly. They began weaving themselves in among the stream of people rushing to the Shuttle.

“Please,” Diantha said. “Don’t be frightened by anything you see there—” She sped up, pulling Wetzon with her. “When we get to the crush around the turnstiles, just join the crowd and go down and take the Shuttle to the BMT, then take the BMT to Fourteenth. I’m going back.”

Wetzon nodded. Her hands were cold. She took her gloves from her pocket and put them on, holding the key in the palm of her right hand, inside the glove.

Here it was wall-to-wall people, shoving and pushing to get through the turnstiles from both sides, coming from the Shuttle and going to the Shuttle. It seemed so stupid to Wetzon that there weren’t enough doors to let out the masses coming from the Shuttle, because the Transit Authority saw fit to keep half the doors chained closed so as to prevent people from sneaking in. She turned her head once to look for Diantha, spotted her taking off the fur turban, and then she was swallowed up in moments, tall as she was.

Wetzon hesitated at the turnstile. She didn’t have a token.

Someone pushed her hard. “Get out of the way, lady, move it,” a man in an expensive tweed overcoat snarled.

Damn. She backed away from the turnstile and saw the man in a trench coat waiting near the foot of the staircase leading to the Shuttle. She tore the lavender beret from her head and shoved it into her carryall, and let herself be carried along with the rush hour crowd back down the tunnel from which she’d come, the tunnel Diantha had disappeared down, not daring to look at anyone, particularly men in trench coats.

She remembered she had some bills and change in her coat pocket from the five she had given Judy Blue, so she took a place in line for the token booth, fidgeting. Maybe she should take the pins out of her hair. They’d surely spot her in her raccoon coat ... She slipped off her left glove and pulled the pins from her hair, letting it loosen around the band into a ponytail, shaking her head back and forth. She put the hairpins in her pocket with the spare change.

As she slipped two dollar bills under the window grate, she heard a man shout, “There she is!” She grabbed the two tokens, terrified, sank into a half crouch, prepared to run, expecting to be pounced on. People crowded around her but almost at once she realized they were not looking at her; they were watching a man in a tan trench coat elbow his way through the sea of people pouring down the escalator to the platform, following a woman in a purple beret and a raccoon coat.

That did it. She didn’t pause now. She went back through the tunnel with the relentless rush hour throng, blended into the group heading for the Shuttle, pushed her way on with the same fervor as the rest, and breathed a sigh of relief as the Shuttle train jerked out of Grand Central, moments later sliding into the Times Square station. There was no sign of men in trench coats.

She steered around the thick crowd listening to the thunderous music of a jazz combo, thinking that the music was nice but it caused a traffic jam of people. Torn newspapers, half-eaten hot dogs, pizza slices, crumpled soda cans, candy wrappers lay scattered on the stone passageways everywhere you looked. People just dropped things where they stood, never bothering to look for a trash basket, and when one did find a trash basket, it was usually filled to overflowing. Graffiti marked the scarred walls. The pungent combination of greasy and sweet smells came from the hot dog and caramel popcorn stand in the underground passageway to the BMT subway.

What the hell was that address Diantha had given her? Blast all of this to hell. She had told Silvestri she’d be home after seven. She’d never make it now. What would he think? He’d likely just be disgusted with her and think she was too unreliable for him to bother with.

Hold on one minute there,
she thought.
Why are you putting yourself down? If he thought that, he wasn’t worth bothering with
. “Sure, you keep telling yourself that, old girl.” She had spoken out loud, but no one ever paid any attention to people who talked to themselves in New York, especially on the subway. She laughed. Even chic young women in expensive raccoon coats talked to themselves.

Her mind was a blank. She would have to trust the address would come back to her. East Sixteenth Street, Diantha had said. Something East Sixteenth Street.

She let her eyes roam slowly back and forth over the crowd, young, old, in overcoats, down, fur, leather, shivering in denim, wearing hats, bareheaded, baldheaded, carrying briefcases, newspapers, books, dark-skinned, light-skinned, Asians, men, women, children sleeping in strollers, infants in carrying sacks.

No FBI types though, no clones of clones, tall in tan trench coats and short tan hair. She shivered in the depths of her raccoon coat, but not because she was cold. What had they wanted of her? And were they really FBI?

Down the stone steps, strewn with garbage, that led to the BMT lines, she was thinking less about where she was going than about what she had become involved in. She automatically walked in a broken field around the standees, a few yards down to the middle of the platform, passing another staircase down which people continued to stream. A young man with waist-length hair was playing a Mozart violin concerto near a big trash container. People were listening and putting money into his violin case, and impulsively Wetzon gave him what she had in her pockets, all except for the hairpins.

Two trains pulled into the station almost at the same time, an N and an R. The N was crowded with people, while the R was fairly empty with plenty of seats and everyone visible. Ordinarily, she would have taken the R so she could sit to Fourteenth Street, but this was not an ordinary situation. Just in case they were still looking for her ... She hovered by the door of the R and then as the doors were about to close, moved as if to get on, turned, and scooted across the platform to the N and pushed her way unceremoniously into the people-as-sardines pressed into one another. The doors closed on the half-empty R as she watched.

“Push, lady, push.” A cheerful tub of a man with a Spanish accent got on behind her and, holding onto the sides of the open doors for leverage, belly-pushed her and himself into the jammed car. She was squeezed into a rigid position, held up by other bodies similarly squeezed. The conductor’s voice came crackling over the PA system, warning everyone to clear the doors, and then the doors of the N bumped shut. Her face rested against someone’s canvas backpack.

Her heart sank when she heard yelling on the platform and someone pounded on the side of the train. But the conductor announced implacably, “Please step back. There is another train just behind this one.”

She was wedged between two taller women and a man in work clothes stained with paint, who needed a bath. The man behind her actually opened a newspaper and read it over her, the pages flapping on the side of her face not pressed against the backpack. God, she hated being short. What she wouldn’t give for three or four or five more inches. That wasn’t asking for much.

People screamed at each other in Spanish, but they were just having a conversation. The two women, young and intense looking, were talking about the mathematical philosophy of a point. A point? A dot? The train jerked, throwing everyone wedged together off-balance. The women talking about the point were interrupted by the man in the paint-stained clothes. “I think I might be able to help on this,” he said. The three began to argue abstractions and Wetzon tuned out. 619 East Sixteenth Street. That was the address Diantha had given her.

The next stop was Fourteenth Street, Union Square.

When the doors opened, people burst forth, carrying Wetzon with them, pushing and shoving their way from the train, across the platform. She climbed the first flight of stairs, went through the turnstile past the token booth, where there was the usual line, and headed for the staircase to the street.

“Oh!” The frightened cry came from a woman in front of her on the staircase. Wetzon, holding up her new coat to keep it from sweeping the stairs, looked up, ready to run.

A tiny mouse was scampering around, terrorized, desperately looking for a way out. Behind Wetzon another woman let out a soft cry. The mouse saw an opening and darted up the stairs and into the night, where she, too, wanted to run.

She came out at Union Square, a dilapidated area of the City now undergoing a great resurgence. Part of the square was paved over like a parking a lot and the best farmers’ market in Manhattan was here two or three times a week all year round, with fresh fruits and vegetables as well as flowers, plants, meats, fish, and baked goods from farms in New York State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The builder William Zeckendorf had built a towering condominium on the east side of the square, and the community which had definitely been down-and-out was beginning to be revitalized. Upscale restaurants had sprung up everywhere; the area was gentrifying as fast as her Upper West Side. But it would never have the elegance of its neighbor Gramercy Park, two or three blocks to the north.