Having drifted past the door to the office for a look, Malisse had returned to the landmark building’s lobby, waited for Hoffman amid its continuous percolation of office workers and sightseers, and, upon Hoffman’s reappearance from the elevator bank some forty minutes later, resumed his tagalong foot pursuit, getting no closer than a half block behind him even in the thickest crowds, and dropping no more than five blocks behind when he felt at the slightest risk of being noticed. This allowed Malisse to remain safely out of sight, yet well within range of the GPS signal boosters he’d slipped under the lining of Hoffman’s briefcase in the coatroom of the Diamond Dealer Club’s synagogue.
After he’d left the building — immediately afterward, in fact — Hoffman had paused at its near corner within eyeshot of Malisse and briefly appeared to stand against a lamppost for support, bracing himself with a hand as if he’d suffered a spell of weakness or dizziness. He had seemed to recover within moments, even to use his cellular before continuing on his way, but Malisse had committed this to his mental notepad, as he did with all observations relating to his cases. One never knew what grain of information might turn out to be important in the long run… though he supposed Hoffman, a very busy fellow, also must be a very tired fellow indeed. The clip of his perambulations this morning already had Malisse’s joints aching with fatigue.
Hoffman’s rapid footwork over the hard pavement had quickly resumed, leading Malisse back uptown, his Duncan in hand. Past the stone lions guarding the library entrance he had tracked his man, and then onto 42nd Street, where he had lagged behind Hoffman as he turned into the door of what Malisse’s subsequent walk-by had disclosed was a Chase Manhattan bank.
And there inside that bank Hoffman was still, presumably conducting transactions that might be all or none of Malisse’s affair.
Malisse sighed and gave the handsome humidor in the window another longing glance.
Perhaps when his work was completed, he would return here to inquire about its cost.
In the meantime, he would do what he did best, which was wait, watch, and weigh what he saw of Hoffman’s activities.
Like Ahab on his determined pursuit, Delano Malisse was resting for the rush.
Avram had no sooner been ushered from the vault by a security guard when his cellular rang.
He pulled it out of his coat pocket, flipped it open, and moved to an unoccupied counter space on the main banking floor, keeping firm hold of his briefcase with one hand. Heavy as it had just gotten, he was not about to rest it anywhere out of his grasp.
“How’s my timing, Avram?” Lathrop said in his ear.
“It’s what I’ve come to expect.” Unusually thirsty for the past few minutes, Avram ran his tongue over his lips, but it was without moisture. “I have what’s called for, and now only need know where I am called.”
“Twenty-sixth and Broadway, over by the flower market,” Lathrop said.
“That far downtown—?”
“You’ll see a place with plastic containers of spray-painted branches in front. Universal Florists.”
Avram sighed. He looked around for a water cooler, didn’t see one, and decided he might have to stop for a drink on the way to his destination
“The dance exhausts me,” he said, expelling another breath.
“Don’t bellyache,” Lathrop said. “I’ll do you a favor and try to keep it short today.”
Having left his motel room to get some breakfast, John Earl was emerging from the McDonald’s across the road with an order of scrambled eggs and hash browns to go when he noticed the guy parked in the fast-food joint’s customer lot.
Earl had no clear idea what it was about the guy that raised his suspicions. There was nothing funny about the car he was in, a new-ish Pontiac or Buick — Earl couldn’t tell the difference at a glance, and didn’t want to look too hard and call attention to himself. Nothing funny about how the driver looked, which was like anybody with a head, a face, two shoulders, and a winter parka. And nothing funny about what the driver was up to, namely sipping coffee through the lid of a paper cup.
Off the top, there wasn’t a reason in the world Earl figured he ought to pay him a second thought.
Still, he wasn’t the sort to ignore his intuition. He’d spent almost half his life in the pen with a bunch of psycho hardcases for housemates, men who’d be as apt to kill as cornhole him the minute he let his guard down… and spent just about all the rest of his life doing things that would put him right back inside with them if he wasn’t careful. He’d been hunter and hunted, sometimes both at the same time, and you didn’t fare too well at either end of the chase without having high-frequency reception on your shit antennas.
Earl strode past the car toward the crosswalk to the motel court, not once glancing straightaway in its direction.
Probably it wasn’t anything he needed to be on the sharp about, but careful were as careful did, as somebody or other had told him once upon a year in Maine, and he didn’t know of any words in the world with a truer ring. Careful had kept him rolling easy for a while now—ayuh, ayuh—and the occasional ditch, bump, and roadblock aside, he’d done okay avoiding the kind of blowout that could set you skidding out of your lane into a total loss.
Walking by the U-Haul, key-card in hand, Earl had already decided he was going to play it safe.
The minute he returned to his room, he’d give Zaheer a buzz at Kiran and tell him to be sure to bring along reinforcements when he showed up.
To Avram’s abounding surprise, Lathrop had been truthful about wanting to shorten their dance. And while he did not believe Lathrop ever did anything as a favor to anyone, he would nevertheless regard the accelerated pace of their final round a parting courtesy.
In keeping with its desirable spirit of brevity, Avram hustled toward the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on Sixth Avenue and 23rd from the flower market a few blocks north, another false sign-in name committed to memory (Mr. Landon), and another room number (twenty-seven) attached to it in his head. He was running early, or at least felt as though he was, since Lathrop never gave a precise time of arrival for himself. But perhaps that had more to do with his own state of exhilaration… an emotional peak that had for the moment lifted him past weariness, anxiety, and fatigue.
Soon enough — within half an hour, Avram expected — he would pay Lathrop for his entire lot of stones with the cash extracted from his safe-deposit box at Chase. And then he would be on his way. Urbaniak would set the large Kashmir in his Raymond Yard homage. Katari, charmed by blue fire, would be eagerly waiting to purchase it. And he, Avram…
For him there would be freedom, emancipation, liberation. Were there any better words to describe what he was gaining? Was it blasphemous to think of Lathrop’s stones as his own gift of p’solet, holy chips of immense value bringing him a transcendence he had only ever fantasized about having in a material world?
Avram saw the hotel midway down the block ahead of him and stepped it up. Ah, fuzzgrenade.com, softgel.net, or whatever that guitarist’s name had been, Avram thought. Ah, yes, what his splendid music meant. Someday in the near future Avram would look the kid up on the Internet, find him aboard the shuttle, drop him a huge money bonus, and look him in the eye without a shred of envy, but rather a bond shared only by those who let themselves become unbonded, who—