The muted silk tie.
The various identity cards McDermott had cobbled for him.
The sign Arthur had given him this morning.
The roll of transparent tape.
A four-foot length of the monofilament fishing line.
His Walkman radio.
And a box of toothpicks.
“How’d you happen to find this?” the cop asked.
The man he was talking to was from Pakistan. He had given the cop his name three times, and the cop still hadn’t caught it. Something like Pashee. Or something. And the cop didn’t know whether this was his first name or his last name or both names put together. The cop, whose name was Mangiacavallo, wished names were still simple in this city.
“I was throwing garbage in the dumpster,” Pashee said. He had a terrible accent, but Mangiacavallo had been listening to him for ten minutes now and was beginning to believe he understood Urdu. Except for the guy’s name. “I tossed up a bag, and it hit this other bag on top of the pile...”
“This one?”
“This one, yes. And it came toppling down.”
“So how come you opened it?”
“It looked like something might be in it.”
What was in it was a fuckin’ human head, is what was in it. What the fuck did he think was in it?
“What’d you think might be in it, sir?” Mangiacavallo asked politely.
“It felt like something heavy. I thought it might be something good.”
“So you opened the bag.”
“Yes. And closed it again right away.”
I’ll bet, Mangiacavallo thought.
“What’d you do then?”
“Called nine-eleven.”
So here we are, Mangiacavallo thought.
It was still raining, but only lightly, when the man walked out of the Marriott at three o’clock that afternoon. The man was wearing a dark blue suit, black shoes, and black socks. His white shirt was buttoned to the very top button, and he was wearing no tie. A black fedora rested atop his head, and he was carrying what appeared to be a black duffle bag. He looked somewhat like an Orthodox Jew.
The homicide cop who caught the squeal on the severed head was a detective/first grade named Max Golub, who worked out of Homicide South in the Thirteenth Precinct downtown on Twenty-first and Third. He dutifully typed up his report in triplicate and at three-twenty that afternoon, he gave one copy of the report to his lieutenant, whose name was Albert Ryan.
Ryan was eager to get home — he would be relieved at a quarter to four and didn’t want to get involved in any long telephone conversations. But he knew that in cases where you found one part of a body, you could suddenly start finding other parts all over town. So he called Detective-Lieutenant Peter Hogan, his counterpart in Homicide North, and asked if any arms or legs had turned up in his bailiwick today? Hogan told him he hadn’t seen any yet, thank God, but he’d keep his eyes open.
“Why?” he asked.
“’Cause we got a head belongs to a white female down here, blond lady tossed in a dumpster on Beaver Street.”
Which is how Hogan found out that Carolyn Fremont was dead.
Although nobody yet knew the dead woman’s name.
He caught the almost empty three-thirty ferry to the island. The rain had tapered off to a drizzle. No one asked to look into his camera bag. He had not expected that anyone would. He wandered around the deck with the rest of the tourists — though there were not very many of them on this wet afternoon — eyes wide in wonder, looking like someone who might next visit Ellis Island to trace the history of an ancestor who had come here from Russia or Poland.
At Kufra, disguise was nonsense entertained only in fiction. In real life, it was better to teach annihilation and survival. He knew that to appear absolutely authentic, he should be wearing unshorn earlocks and a beard. But he’d have felt ridiculous applying crepe hair, and he’d reasoned — correctly, it now seemed — that the familiar costume alone would confirm his identity. People rarely saw beyond the uniform. Moreover, he carried himself with an air of solemn religiosity premised on an inner belief that he was, in fact, an Orthodox Jew on a rainy day’s outing. Smiling thinly in his beard — the beard he believed he was wearing, although it did not in actuality adorn his face — he thought, To me I’m an Orthodox Jew, and to you I’m an Orthodox Jew — but to an Orthodox Jew am I an Orthodox Jew? There were no Orthodox Jews on the ferry today.
He stepped off the boat at five minutes to four. Again, none of the rangers on the dock asked him to open his bag. His good old friend Alvin Rhodes was not among them. Like a rabbi davening in prayer, he muttered his way past them. At five o’clock, he went into the restaurant and bought three hamburgers, a can of Diet Coke, a container of orange juice, and a hard roll. He sat at a table to eat the hamburgers and drink the Coke. He put the orange juice and the hard roll into the camera bag, in the compartment alongside the pistol.
At a quarter past five, the announcements started, telling visitors to the island that the last boat back would leave in half an hour.
He went into the base of the statue, and up to the men’s room on the second level.
Two men were at the urinals.
He could see shoes and bunched trouser legs under one of the stall doors.
He went into a free stall, locked the door, and waited. At five-twenty, the man in the stall on the right flushed the toilet, stood up, pulled up his trousers, and left. Sonny heard water running in one of the sinks.
A man’s voice — calling from the doorway, it seemed — yelled, “Last ferry leaving in fifteen minutes!”
A urinal flushed.
Silence.
Sonny took the box of toothpicks out of the camera bag. He grabbed a handful of them and stuffed them into the right-hand pocket of his jacket.
He took the loop of fishing line out of the bag and put it into his left-hand pocket.
He could hear a loudspeaker announcing that the last ferry from the island would leave in ten minutes.
He pulled his feet up onto the toilet seat.
The same man who’d called from the doorway earlier — an attendant, a ranger, whoever the hell — now came into the room and shouted, “Last ferry’s about to go. Anybody in here?”
Sonny did not dare breathe.
“Last call for the ferry,” the man said.
There was a long silence.
He heard the man grunt, and visualized him crouching to look under the stalls. Another grunt as he rose. Then his voice coming from the corridor outside, “Last call for the ferry,” retreating down the hallway, “last call for the ferry, last call...”
And then silence.
Sonny came out of the stall at once.
He went to the wooden outer door, painted to look like bronze, and pulled it closed. If he had to, he was prepared to pick the lock on the utility closet door in the alcove — but the door was standing open, just as it had been last Saturday. He took a toothpick from the handful in his pocket, inserted it into the keyway, and snapped it off flush with the face of the lock. There was still room in the keyway’s slit for another one. He slid one in, snapped it off flush, pressed both stubs in solidly with the flat side of a quarter, and then reached into the camera bag at his feet, removing from it the manila envelope bearing the sign Arthur had given him this morning. He took the roll of transparent tape from the bag and began fastening the sign to the door, a sliver of tape at each corner. The sign read:
His hands were trembling.
He was putting the tape back into the bag when he heard footsteps in the corridor. Distant. But approaching. The attendant, the ranger, whoever was coming this way again. He rushed into the closet and took the loop of fishing line from his pocket. Hooking it over and behind the thumb bolt, the only grip on the inside of the door, he was pulling the door toward him when he heard the man’s voice again. Just outside the closed entrance door now.