He couldn't stand it anymore; he had to get out. At the next station, he positioned himself in front of the doors, and the second they opened, he bolted, jostling his way through a throng of boarding passengers. He burst through the turnstile and raced up the stairs, two at a time, and saw a patch of blue sky up ahead. But when he arrived at the top of the staircase and was finally outside on the street, he was immediately surrounded by another crowd, a mob of men.
They pushed and shoved, screaming and yelling, and he was carried along helplessly. He saw fists flying and faces panicked and angry, and suddenly he felt a blow to his ribs. A man's elbow had smacked into him; the man looked at him and said he was sorry and swore.
"Goddamn cops!"
Skyler looked up and saw horses on the street pushing the crowd back onto the sidewalk, and on top of the horses were policemen bearing plastic shields across their faces. When the horses danced forward, lifting their legs high with their eyes bulging in fright, the mob fell back upon itself, trampling two or three men, and when the horses gave ground, the crowd surged forward as if to threaten the police.
And now Skyler saw that the men around him were wearing hardhats and some were holding up signs. He tried to fight his way out of the crowd, but a man with a yellow T-shirt would not let him pass, and soon he felt himself being pushed until he was at the very edge close to the horses. He saw a brown flank twitching right before him, and then the side of the horse moved toward him and a hoof almost struck him on the foot. He yelled along with the men around him, and magically the horses drifted back. But in their place came a phalanx of policemen on foot, holding shields and nightsticks.
Skyler tried to get away, but the men behind him were pushing and struggling and he couldn't find an opening. He turned again, but now the police had formed a cordon around the mob and moved in quickly, pushing with their shields and waving nightsticks. Skyler felt one strike him in the shins. A man next to him screamed, and then Skyler lost his balance and began to fall backward, just as he saw a nightstick rise in the air above him. Almost in slow motion, he saw it descend toward him and then he felt a searing pain on the top of his skull. He fell down amid a forest of moving legs and felt someone falling on top of him, just before he hit the pavement and blacked out.
Jude took a subway downtown, got out at City Hall and killed time in the park. He ate a hot dog with sauerkraut and sat on a park bench, thinking about his situation. He wondered how Skyler was getting on, and he thought about Tizzie, how protective of Skyler she had become. It was touching. He contemplated Raymond and wondered what he wanted to see him about. Surely something to do with New Paltz. Jude was eager to meet him, too, but he thought he should come armed with at least some facts. That's where McNichol came into the picture. Funny, he thought, a week ago I had never even heard of this man — now I'm about to see him for the third time and he holds the key to my future in his hands.
Almost absentmindedly, Jude looked around at the other people in the park. He saw no one who looked suspicious, no large strangers with streaks in their hair. He was surprised at how casual he had become in checking for a tail. You'd think I'd been doing it my whole life, he thought. It's amazing how quickly we accustom ourselves to an outrageous twist of fate, even something as patently absurd as this. One day your double walks in the door and, bingo, your life cuts to another movie. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the whole thing would just go away? — if I were to wake up on this park bench and find that it all was some kind of celluloid fantasy that curled up and caught fire in the afternoon sun.
He sighed and looked at his watch: 3:50. He pulled out his notebook, checked the address and walked the three blocks to Foley Square. The building was a nondescript office tower near the criminal courts that housed various state agencies. Jude must have entered it a half dozen times looking for some kind of malfeasance or other. He took the elevator to the thirty-second floor and passed into a glass-enclosed office with no name on the door. There was a waiting area with wooden chairs and a receptionist's desk that was empty. He entered a corridor with stained gray carpeting and anachronistic metal ashtrays lashed to the wall and followed it until he found the room he was looking for, number 3209. McNichol was inside.
The examiner was at a desk, a stack of files before him. The room was a combination of an office and laboratory; it had stacks of old metal filing cabinets and a long counter with a computer and some basic hardware — a microscope, banks of slides, a well-used centrifugal separator. A wide window gave a view of the busy bridges over the East River and the townhouses and smokestacks of Brooklyn.
They exchanged greetings, for some reason with an undercurrent of formality. McNichol offered him a cup of coffee, which Jude gladly accepted. As the examiner poured it into a mug decorated with a drawing of fornicating rabbits, he explained that he often did per diem work in the city's morgues.
"With the decline in homicide, they've had to let a number of assistant M.E.'s go — one of those unfortunate side effects to the downturn in crime. Not enough corpses to keep them occupied. But there are still those unlooked-for busy spells when people's thoughts turn to murder, and that's when they call upon me."
Jude thought he would start right out with flattery — an opening gambit whose success never failed to amaze him. He graciously thanked McNichol for taking on the task he had asked of him, and he said he knew that if anyone could solve the mysteries of the two hair samples — and tell him if they came from the same person or not — it would be the medical examiner of Ulster County.
"Come, come," McNichol replied. "It was quite a challenge — I'll say that much. And I couldn't for the life of me figure out why you had presented me with it. Then I guessed it — and I'm willing to bet I'm right."
Jude was perplexed. He raised his eyebrows a tad — an invitation to continue.
"I recalled the story your paper did some years back on the ten best judges and the ten worst judges — very eye-opening, by the way — especially that trick of sending the same defendant before them. So I assume you are about to do a similar undertaking with respect to the forensic sciences — that you are, in effect, testing the various examiners in and around the city, to see who's the best and who's the worst. Or else your motivation is completely beyond me."
Jude did not deny or confirm. He didn't want to do anything that might upset McNichol, as they were approaching the critical juncture at which information is divulged.
"And what conclusion did you reach?" he inquired softly.
"Not so fast. Not so fast." He held up one hand, the traffic cop's signal. "Let me tell you about the journey before I reveal the destination."
He folded his hands upon the desk, as if he was settling in to tell a long story, and Jude sat back in his chair and waited.
"Have you ever heard of Leonard Hayflick?" he asked, as if it were the most natural question in the world.
Jude shook his head. He had his notebook out, but he stopped writing.
"Pity. He only happens to be one of the most outstanding anatomists of our time. He was a giant in aging research. Who said the world is fair? Everyone knows James Watson and Francis Crick, Cambridge University in 1953, the whole myth, going into a pub afterward and declaring that they had uncovered the secret of life itself — which of course they had."
"The discovery of the structure of DNA. The double helix."
"Precisely. The singular event that brought us into the modern era of genetics. Hayflick performed the analogous feat in the field of gerontology."