Madeleine had made him a believer in small, simple actions, in putting one foot in front of the other, but when nothing made sense and every direction held a shadowy threat, it wasn’t easy to decide where to put that first foot.
However, it did occur to him that remaining parked on that dark block was accomplishing nothing. If he drove away, even if he hadn’t decided where he was going, he might at least be able to tell if he was being watched or followed. Before he could get tangled up in reasons not to, he started the car, waited for the light at the end of the street to turn green, waited for three taxis in a row to race by, switched on his headlights, pulled out quickly, and made it through the Madison Avenue intersection just before the light turned red behind him. He drove on, turning randomly at a series of intersections until he was positive no one was tailing him, working his way down the east side of Manhattan from the Eighties to the Sixties.
Without having made a conscious decision to do so, Gurney arrived at the block where Jykynstyl’s residence was located. He drove through the block once, came around, and entered it again. There were no lights showing in the windows of the big brownstone. He parked in the same illegal space he’d occupied nine hours earlier.
He was jittery and unsure what he was going to do next, but taking even the action he had so far was calming him. He remembered he had a phone number for Jykynstyl in his wallet-a number Sonya had given him in case he got delayed in traffic. He called the number now without bothering to plan what he’d say. Maybe something like, Hell of a party, Jay! Got photos? Or something a little more Hardwick-like: Hey, fuckface, fuck with me, you get a bullet between your fucking eyes. He ended up not saying any of those things, because when he called the number Sonya gave him, a recorded voice announced that it was out of service.
He had an urge to bang on the door until someone answered it. Then he remembered something Jykynstyl had said about always being in motion, never staying anywhere very long, and he was suddenly convinced that the brownstone was empty, the man was gone, and banging on the door would be utterly pointless.
He should call Madeleine, let her know how late he’d be. But how late was that going to be? Should he tell her about the amnesia? Waking up across the street from St. Genesius? The photo threat? Or would all that just worry her sick for no reason?
Maybe he should call Sonya first, see if she could throw any light on what was going on. How much did she really know about Jay Jykynstyl? Was there any reality at all to the hundred-thousand-dollar offer? Was all that just a ruse to get him to come to the city for a private lunch? So he could be drugged and… and what?
Maybe he ought to get to an ER and have them run a tox screen-find out before they were metabolized away exactly what chemicals he’d ingested, replace his suspicions with evidence. On the other hand, the record of a tox screen could create questions and complications. He found himself in the catch-22 of wanting to find out what had happened before taking any official steps to find out what had happened.
As he felt himself slipping into a pit of indecision, a large white van came to a stop less than thirty feet away, directly in front of the brownstone. The wash of headlights from a passing car made the green lettering on the side of the van legible: WHITE STAR COMMERCIAL CLEANING.
Gurney heard a sliding door open on the far side of the van, followed by a few comments in Spanish, then the door sliding shut. The van pulled away, leaving a drably uniformed man and woman in the semidarkness at the door of the brownstone. The man opened it with a key affixed to a ring at his belt. They entered the building, and moments later a light came on in the foyer. Shortly after that a light came on in another ground-floor window. That was followed at approximately two-minute intervals by the appearance of lights in windows on each of the building’s four stories.
Gurney decided to bluff his way in. He looked like a cop, sounded like a cop, and his membership card in an association of retired detectives could be mistaken for active credentials.
When he came to the front door, he found it still open. He walked into the vestibule and listened. There were no footsteps, no voices. He tried the door that led from the vestibule into the rest of the house. It, too, was unlocked. He opened it and listened again. He heard nothing except the muted whine of a vacuum from one of the upper floors. He stepped inside and closed the door gently behind him.
The cleaning people had turned on all the lights, giving the large, foyerlike room a colder, barer look than he remembered. The brightness had diminished the richness of the mahogany staircase that was the room’s main feature. The wood-paneled walls had been cheapened as well, as though the unflattering light had stripped off their antique patina.
In the far wall, there were two doors. One of them, he recalled, was the door to the little elevator into which he’d been escorted by Jykynstyl’s daughter-if in fact that’s who she was, which he now doubted. The door next to it was ajar, and the room beyond it was as brightly illuminated as the large foyer in which he stood.
It appeared to be what real-estate ads refer to as a “media” room. It was visually dominated by a flat-panel video screen with half a dozen armchairs arranged at various angles to it. There was a wet bar in the rear corner, and against an adjoining wall there was a sideboard with an array of wine and cocktail glasses and a stack of glass plates appropriate for elegant desserts or lines of coke. He checked the drawers of the sideboard and found them empty. The wet bar’s cabinets and small refrigerator were locked. He left the room as quietly as he’d entered it and headed for the staircase.
The Persian runner cushioned his rapid steps as he climbed the risers two at a time to the second floor, then to the third. The vacuum sound was louder here, and he imagined that at any moment the cleaning team might descend from the floor above, so reconnaissance time was limited. An archway led into a corridor with five doors. He assumed that the one at the far end would be for the elevator and the other four would open into bedrooms. He went to the nearest door and turned the knob as soundlessly as he could. As he did so, he heard the muffled thump of the elevator stopping farther down the hall, followed by the smooth whoosh of its sliding door.
He stepped quickly into an unlit room he assumed was a bedroom and eased the door shut behind him, hoping that whoever had emerged from the elevator, presumably one of the cleaning people, had been looking in another direction.
It dawned on him that he was in a bit of a situation: unable to conceal himself because the room was too dark for him to locate an appropriate spot and unable to turn on a light for fear it would give him away. And if he were caught hiding pathetically behind a bedroom door, he could hardly bluff his way out at that point by flashing a set of retired-detective credentials. What the hell was he doing there, anyway? What was it he hoped to discover? Jykynstyl’s wallet with a clue to another identity? Conspiratorial e-mail? The photographs referred to in the text message? Something incriminating enough to Jykynstyl to neutralize any threat? Those possibilities were the stuff of implausible caper movies. So why had he put himself in this ridiculous position, lurking in the dark like an idiot burglar?