The Lure (48 page)

When he looked back toward Seventh Avenue again, following the source of her evident distress, neither of the two men was visible. They might merely have been purse snatchers working as a team that she had avoided. Unless…? Then Noel made out the two of them, one darting around the corner of Fifty-seventh and Seventh, the other turning and rapidly approaching Noel along the storefronts of Fiftyseventh Street.

Now he understood Priscilla’s puzzling tactics. She had seen them in the Automat also, knew they had seen her and were after her. The second man was probably running around the block, hoping to catch up with her when she reached the corner. Then they would have her from in front and behind. Noel would have to reach her before that.

He kept Priscilla Vega in sight, following slightly ahead of the man, keeping against the storefronts now that this one had taken to the middle of the sidewalk, dawdling as though looking into store windows once or twice, to try for a better look at their pursuer.

The second time Noel paused, in the windowed entryway of a Zen Japanese bookshop, he got a nasty shock. The man passed right by, his eyes fixed ahead on his quarry. And the view was close enough, unobstructed enough, so that he could see the face, even with the large sunglasses that half covered it. No doubt about it, it was one of the two bastards who’d jumped him on Twenty-eighth Street. Not Zach. The other one. And they were after Priscilla. They were animals! Fucking animals!

When Noel emerged from the doorway, the man was gone. He almost walked past him without being aware of it, as the thug was now doing exactly what Noel had done—pretending to gaze into a store window while looking ahead up the street, at Priscilla.

Noel went to the curb, and saw why. She was stopped at a telephone booth, half facing away, talking into the receiver. To whom?

Noel crossed to the north side of the street to have a better view, then stood, frozen, hidden in a tobacconist’s shop doorway.

Mrs. Vega was still on the phone, talking, writing down something on a piece of yellow paper, looking all around her as she talked—at the man still pretending to linger at the store window, then toward Sixth Avenue, as though expecting the other one there. Then she was done writing, and was folding something, which Noel recognized as the envelope in which he had brought the cassette to her at her West End apartment. Noel watched her place the cassette into the envelope, seal it, and place it in her shoulder bag.

At that moment, Zach rounded the corner of Sixth Avenue. Noel saw him stop short, panting hard from his run, and look around for his partner. Damn them!

Noel charged back, across the street, threading through the line of slow-moving autos. A taxi stopped short as he raced in front of it and he nearly stumbled.

His heart was racing; he didn’t care. He had a score to settle.

Priscilla had begun walking with the stroller again toward the corner. Didn’t she see the thug in front of her?

Another car slid in front of Noel. They were bumper to bumper. He leaped across them, one hand on a hood, the other on the trunk of the car in front of it.

When he reached the curb, Zach had spotted Priscilla. The second tough had left his place at the storefront and was running toward her.

Noel sprang to the curb, circled a small tree set in a planter, and rushed up. He shot by the man with a full-shouldered shove to the side, and saw him stumble, fall to the sidewalk right into the oncoming path of two fashionably dressed women who’d been sashaying down the street arm in arm. They shrieked, backed off, as he clutched at their skirts to regain his balance, hitting at his grasping hands. He sprawled.

Zach looked uncertain what to do—to shoot forward, or to go for Priscilla. Noel decided to make up his mind for him.

The one on the ground was getting to his feet. The two women had retreated to a doorway, brushing themselves off and talking alarmedly. Noel pivoted and, sprinting back, bypassed the women, and expertly kicked the thug in his chest just as he was getting balance from behind. He sprawled again with a loud moan. The women screamed.

Noel turned to see Zach, no longer undecided, racing at him. Behind him, Priscilla was fiddling around with the corner mailbox, trying to shove the apparently too thick parcel through. She was mailing it to him! Not taking any chances.

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.

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 my 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?