She had thought so.
“I love you,” he said.
She had thought that, too.
She went into his arms. They kissed. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest. In a little while, she would call the club to tell Tony Eden she was quitting. There was no hurry.
AT SEVEN-THIRTY on the morning of April third, just as Chloe and Sil were sitting down to breakfast at the small kitchen table in his apartment facing Grover Park, a British nanny was wheeling a baby carriage into the playground near Silvermine Oval, close to the River Harb, on the northernmost edge of the 87th Precinct.
An old man was sitting on one of the benches.
He was wearing pajamas and a robe, and he was wrapped in a khaki-colored blanket.
His hair was white. It danced about his balding head in the early morning breeze. He sat staring past the playground equipment and out over the water. He was wearing thick-lensed eye glasses. His eyes were moist with tears behind them.
The nanny went over to him, and in her polite British way asked, “Sir, are you all right?”
The old man nodded.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said.
11.
THIS TIME, they’d made a mistake.
They’d cut all the labels out of his underwear, his pajamas, his robe, and his slippers, and they’d wrapped him in the same presumably stolen DSS TEMPLE blanket, but there was one label they could not remove, and that one was tattooed on the biceps of his left arm:
Hawes looked through his directory, found the private police number for the U.S. Navy’s Discharged Personnel Center, and placed the call. The woman he spoke to was a chief petty officer named Helen Dibbs. Hawes identified himself, told her what he was looking for, and asked how long it would take her to get back.
“Is that all you’ve got on him?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
“Try to make it difficult, will you? Just the name of a ship with a woman’s name under it?”
“A war, too, don’t forget. Haven’t you got World War II on your computers?”
“Sure, we do. But gimme a break, huh?”
“Just run the Hanson through from 1941 to 1945. See if anyone in the crew listed Meg as a next of kin.”
“Sure.”
“Easy, right?”
“Sure.”
“When can you get back?”
“When I get back,” Dibbs said, and hung up.
She got back two hours later.
“Here’s the poop,” she said. “The Hanson was a radar picket ship, named for Robert Murray Hanson, a marine hero who got shot down in the Pacific. She was commissioned in May of 1945, which made my job a little easier since I didn’t have to track her all the way back to Pearl Harbor. It still wasn’t a piece of cake, though; there were three hundred and fifty men and twenty officers aboard her when she sailed for the Pacific. As for Meg…”
Hawes held his breath.
“It’s a good thing it wasn’t Mary. Only five men listed Margarets or Marjories as their next of kin, and one of them was later killed in the Korean War, on a minesweep in…”
“I don’t think Meg’s a form of Marjorie,” Hawes said.
“Then that leaves three. You got a pencil?”
A first-class gunner’s mate named Angelo Peretti had listed his mother, Margaret, as next of kin. At the time of his discharge, Peretti’s mother was living in Boston, Massachussetts.
A lieutenant j.g. named Ogden Pierce had listed his wife, Margaret, as next of kin. He’d lived with her in Baltimore, Maryland.
A seaman first class, radar striker, named Rubin Shanks had listed his wife, Margaret, as next of kin. They were living at the time of his discharge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
None of them had lived in this city.
But Meyer and Hawes hit the phone books for all five administrative units of the city, anyway, and for good measure they went through the directories for all the surrounding suburbs; both of the previous victims had been driven to where they’d been dumped. There was a Victor Peretti in Calm’s Point; he did not know anyone named Angelo Peretti. There was a Robert Pierce in Isola; he did not know any Ogden Pierces.
In the Elsinore County directory, they found a listing forSHANKS ,RUBIN on Merriwether Lane. When they called the number, a woman named Margaret Shanks said, “What did he do now?”
They asked if they could come out there to talk to her.
She said they could.
At that very moment, another letter from the Deaf Man was being delivered to the muster desk downstairs.
A nD NOW THErhythm reached a frantic pitch, and from where he stood on the tower built of rock, Ankara saw the swell and rise of the multitude and he knew that the fear had turned at last to fury and that the sowing would be good and the reaping plentiful. Listening to the rhythmic stamping of the feet, hearing the voices raised in joyous fury, he smiled up at the four moons and made the sign of the planting.
“Well, that’s it for sure,” Brown said. “He’s planning something at that rock concert.”
“Then why does he tell us to burn this one?” Carella asked.
“Maybe he’s gonna start a fire there.”
“You notice there’s no ‘P.S.’ this time? Nothing about more coming later.”
“So this is the last one.”
“So it’s got to be tomorrow.”
“And it’s got to be the concert.”
“Where’s that ad?” Carella said.
They looked at the ad again.
“The Cow Pasture,” Brown said.
“Starts at one tomorrow.”
“Ends at midnight Sunday.”
“What else starts tomorrow?” Carella asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you don’t think he’s really telling us, do you?”
“Maybe not. But even so, we’d better see what kind of security they’ve got at this concert.”
“Windows Entertainment,” Carella said, and pulled the phone directory to him.
MARGARET SHANKS was wearing eyeglasses that looked like the ones that British guy on television wore, whatever his name was, the guy who performed in drag. It was almost impossible to focus on anything but the glasses. Tiny woman with white hair and these big oversized glasses, asking the detectives if they’d like some coffee. This was now close to twelve noon. Sunlight was streaming through the windows in the small living room of the development house. They declined her offer, and then showed her a Polaroid picture they’d taken of the man who’d been dumped in the Silver Harb playground early that morning.
“Is that your husband?” Hawes asked.
“Yes, it is. Where is he?”
“At the moment, ma’am, he’s at Morehouse General Hospital in Isola.”
“Was he in an accident?”
“No, ma’am,” Meyer said. “He was left in the playground early this morning. The blues who picked him up took him directly to the hospital.”
“Is he all right then?”
“Yes, ma’am, he’s fine.”
“I worry so about him,” she said, and lowered her eyes behind the outlandish glasses.
“Yes, ma’am,” Meyer said. “Ma’am, do you have any idea how he might have got to that playground?”
“None at all. Last week, he drove himself into town and then forgot…”
“Into the city, do you mean?”
“No, right here. Fox Hill.”
“And what happened?”
“He forgot where he’d parked the car. Got into another man’s car by mistake, had it pushed to a service station…it was a terrible mess. The police came here, I had to straighten it all out, thank God nobody pressed criminal charges. But the man whose car it was said Rubin had damaged it, which he hadn’t, and now he’s suing us, it’s terrible. I haven’t let Rubin drive since, I don’t know how he got into the city.”