The peroxide was filthy stuff but it did the job. I now had whitey-yellow hair and straw beard and moustache. Behind the sunglasses, under the tweed hat and with the coat collar turned up, I had to admit I would have been hard pushed to have recognised myself.
I left the hotel, keeping my head turned well away from Quasimodo’s grandson; he wouldn’t have noticed me in any event — I walked well beyond the boundary of his vision. He was still utterly motionless, transfixed to the nicotine-stained wall that rose up to the nicotine-stained ceiling; maybe the wall was doing great things for him; maybe he saw wonderful visions, beautiful happenings, cosmic movies; maybe he just saw a wall.
I checked my watch; it was just gone midday and I was late for my first appointment. I felt apprehensive of my new disguise but no one gave me any peculiar looks and after a short while in the busy street I began to relax. I hailed a taxi and read him the address I had scribbled down on my notepad.
It was off Lexington, north of 96th Street, the demarcation line of Harlem, where, within the space of less than 200 yards, the area turns from wealthy white-owned apartments to the start of the sprawl of the most infamous black ghetto in the world.
The estate agent was waiting impatiently outside; both his hands were full, one tackling an ear-load of wax, the other, a vicious itch on his backside. He was a large black man, and both his face and his suit were coated in a film of grease. He handed me a business card which was crumpled and stamped with a large and oily fingerprint; the name on it was Winston G. Desoto, Realtor. He shook my hand in a massive, crushing shake. He released the grip before I had the chance to squeeze back.
I followed Winston G. Desoto up three flights of stairs, past dirty children fighting in the corridors, and washing hanging on the banisters. The place was in no way right and I left quickly to pay my second call. During the next four hours I traversed the length and breadth of Manhattan without joy and was beginning to feel that maybe what I wanted didn’t exist in this city.
On my last call of the afternoon I struck lucky; it was perfect: the building was eight storeys high, in the heart of Lower East Side on East 5th Street. The vacant office was on the eighth floor and had a clear view down the street on both sides of the entrance way. Apart from this office the entire building was derelict and in a bad state of repair; it didn’t look as though anyone had been in the building for years.
‘If you want an office this is the best bargain in Manhattan,’ said the agent, a white version of Desoto, who chewed a piece of gum which every now and then he would take out of his mouth, roll between his fingers, and then pop back into his mouth again.
‘How long’s it been vacant?’
‘Only been on the market a few days,’ he sniffed. ‘Be gone quick, this one — a real mover.’
‘What about the rest of the building?’
‘Make hairdryers; gone down the tubes. Receiver will be putting it on the market soon. Going to do it all up. Be smart — new entrance, new lifts. Be a small version of the World Trade Centre.’
It was hard to imagine that this sad-looking pile might ever be transformed into anything remotely resembling the World Trade Centre. The building had what appeared to my untrained eye to be terminal subsidence. There were large cracks in the walls and ceiling on every floor; the window panes looked horribly contorted. The fire escape didn’t look capable of supporting the weight of an undernourished cat. The place had never been built to last: it had probably been knocked up in a great hurry during the post-Depression years, and every conceivable cost had evidently been spared. The only thing that seemed in reasonable condition was the elevator and the agent sailed us up and down in it a few times to assure me of its good working order.
Since the building was empty the janitor had been laid off but there was a janitor at another building a few blocks away who did the cleaning and the such like, I was informed. From the amount of dust I was somewhat sceptical about the cleaning part but since I wasn’t taking the place for the purpose of impressing any clients, I wasn’t bothered.
For the sum of 1,100 dollars, being one quarter’s rent in advance, and 100 dollars deposit, I had acquired myself a Manhattan office — not exactly in Wall Street, but not a million miles from it. Not that playing the stock market was at the forefront of my mind: it was the fact that the building was empty and most of the immediate neighbourhood was derelict that appealed most. There was a major redevelopment plan but nothing had been started.
I left the agent’s office at about 5.00 and went straight back to begin a more detailed inspection of my new premises and their immediate environs. I went through the building room by room, floor by floor. The agent hadn’t lied about the previous occupants manufacturing hairdryers, but he hadn’t exactly given a truthful account of the length of time since their demise; he’d described it as though it had happened only a week or two back: looking at the equipment and the dates on odd bits of paper, I reckoned the best part of a decade had passed since the last dryer had been bolted together and dropped into its cardboard box.
For the best part of ten years the place had been left alone to the roaches and rats and vandals to vie for supremacy. Most of the windows had been broken and boarded up; everything worth stealing had been stolen and everything worth breaking had been broken.
I took a slow and careful walk around the neighbourhood, my gun in my jacket pocket, safety catch off and my hand firmly clasped around it; not that I reckoned there would have been enough meat down here for any intelligent mugger to make it his pitch. There was a hideous atmosphere to the whole area, dirty, desolate, looted, with a few abandoned cars literally smashed to pieces — stripped of their wheels and engines, and every bit of glass smashed, and every inch of their bodywork hammered and bashed almost out of recognisable shape. Most of the shops were boarded up, where the owners had evidently eked out ever-diminishing existences until they’d gone out of business and gone away. The occasional black kid wandered around, and a couple of blocks down was a stark empty supermarket. It was the sort of area where students make films of decaying Manhattan; if there were more people it could have been called a ghetto. There was almost no life at all down here. It was ideal.
I walked back up to Wall Street and hailed a cab to West Greenwich Village. I checked in at a nondescript hotel called the Hotel Kilgour, that could have been the sister to the Madison Park East, and again paid a week’s rent in advance. I left, found a call box and telephoned Mrs Joffe. She still had no news and invited me over; I told her I was in Washington and would call her in a couple of days when I got back to New York. Then I went and found the best-looking restaurant in the area and allowed the British taxpayer to treat me to a not-inexpensive meal.
23
I awoke early in the morning to the interminable wailing of sirens that punctuates the Manhattan air almost every minute of the day and night. In no other city is the cry so mournful and so penetrating; it sounds at times as though the city herself is weeping over the loss of something dear and treasured, and purging herself for being in some way responsible for this loss.
The siren was receding into the distance to the newly discovered body of a murder victim, or a bloody car smash, or a coronary thrombosis, or a leaking nuclear plant. Whatever it was that it was going to would doubtless be some area of human suffering, and that siren made sure all Manhattan shared in a small part of that suffering.
It was hot in the room and I opened the window a little, letting in a blast of bitterly cold air. I looked out over the wide ledge at the street down below; sleet was falling and columns of steam rose from the vents all the way up the road like smoke signals to some far-off planet.