heap behind them.
The driver turns onto Central Park West and says, “Did you see that, sir?” He is an Indian, and he has a musical accent. “I can promise you one thing, that you will never read a word about it in the newspapers. And yet it is an event I believe that would be of serious interest to a great many people in this country.”
“That’s the truth,” Tom says. “Keep going until you get to Sixty-first Street, then turn right and go about thirty feet, I’ll tell you exactly where. Stop and honk your horn. We’re picking somebody up.”
“Because do you understand why, sir? Because it is a conspiracy of silence!” the driver tells him. “I was born in Hyderabad, in India, sir, and I came to this country twenty-one years ago, and neither in India nor in this country are things what they appear to be. I am telling my wife every day, ‘What you read in your newspaper is not true!’ ” He looks at Tom in the rearview mirror. “There will not be much waiting time, I hope.”
“I hope there won’t be any,” Tom says.
“Now, those men we saw were government officials,” the cabbie says. “But the names used by such men are never their real names. And when they die, it is as if they have disappeared completely from the face of the earth. What a thing it is, to live a life of lies and pass from the earth unrecognized. But the evil that they do amongst us in this life is repaid a thousandfold in the next.”
In front of the Mayflower, the sidewalk is completely empty.
“Okay, here’s where we turn,” Tom says.
“Do you think I do not remember that you wanted to turn right on Sixty-first Street? Do you think I have forgotten that I am to stop and honk my horn?” While he is making the turn, the cabbie twists sideways and glares at his thoughtless passenger.
“No, sorry,” Tom says, scanning the street before them. Way up the block, a couple of guys he cannot quite make out are talking in front of one of the Florentine-style apartment buildings. The usual knot of pedestrians streams across the intersection with Broadway. A northbound patrol car zips by in a flash of white. The conditions look about as good as they could be.
“Where is it, exactly, that I am to stop, sir?”
Tom is keeping his eye on the dark, scratched-up surface of the service door. He imagines Willy crouched behind it with her ear cocked, fearful that he will never return.
“Okay, stop,” Tom says.
“And I am to honk my horn now?”
“Yes,” Tom says, a little more loudly than he intends.
The cabbie taps his horn, which emits a brief blatting noise.
“That’s not much of a sound,” Tom says. “Do it again.” He slides open the heavy door and steps down out of the cab. He leans over and speaks through the opening he has made. “I mean it. Do it again.”
The driver really leans on his horn, and the service door flies open. Out onto West Sixty-first Street tumbles Willy Patrick, scrambling to stay on her feet. She is carrying her suitcase and the duffel, and her white shirt glares like a flag.
“Oh, thank God,” she says. “I was so
“We’d better hurry.” He grabs her arm to hold her steady, and reaches down with his other hand for the suitcase. The cab driver is watching all of this with glum, gathering suspicion.
“You won’t believe this,” Willy says, “but they really did teach me how to make veal Bolognese in there.”
Tom pitches the money bag into the back of the cab and waits for Willy to step up and in. Now the cabbie is looking straight ahead and pointing toward the windshield.
When Tom looks up the street, he sees the two men who had been standing in front of an apartment entrance running pell-mell toward them, the larger of the two reaching under his jacket for what is probably not his wallet. It’s an awkward business, because the man has a cast on his right arm, and he is forced to use his left hand, which makes reaching his holster difficult.
Standing beside Tom, Willy freezes. Tom tries to push her into the cab, but has no luck until Roman Richard at last has extracted his pistol from its holster and begins to take aim. At the sight of the weapon in Roman Richard’s massive hand, Willy vaults into the spacious back of the taxi, taking her suitcase with her.
“Come on, get in!” she screams, reaching out for Tom.
“Tom Hartland!” yells Giles Coverley. “Stop right now! If you do, my friend won’t shoot. You’re never going to get away, so you might as well cooperate.”
The cab driver rams his vehicle into reverse, and Tom sees Willy lurching, bent over, toward the opening in the side of the vehicle. Her face seems to widen with panic.
Twenty feet down the otherwise empty street, Roman Richard Spilka steadies his left arm upon his plaster- encased right and squeezes the trigger. Flame seems to jump from the end of the barrel, and a low, flat
Another soft, minimalist explosion goes off in the air above him, and he says to himself,
Directly above him, Roman Richard Spilka’s immense body moves into the frame of unclouded sky and looms over him. Giles Coverley strolls into view. A lopsided frown disturbs the symmetry of his sleek face. “Did you really think we didn’t know who you were?” he asks, as if this were a perfectly reasonable question.
“Dumb fuck,” says Spilka, glaring down.
“Shoot him in the head, and we’ll get his body off the street,” Coverley says.
The entire top of Spilka’s body tilts over like a derrick, and the pistol comes abruptly, enormously into view, allowing Tom Hartland to observe that the silencer has a decidedly homemade look about it. It occurs to him that he is miraculously not afraid, for which he is deeply grateful. He hopes Willy can get away from these monstrous men. The silencer flickers and jumps back, but Tom does not see it move, for he is already elsewhere, confused and astounded, trying to find his way, like all new sasha.
19
In a town called Haleyville, which is located in a kind of generic midwestern landscape with woods and streams and distant farms, a sixteen-year-old boy named Teddy Barton awakens to a world that has been altered in some subtle yet unmistakable fashion. The air seems somehow dull, the colors of his walls and bedclothes a tone darker than they had been. The big round clock on the table beside his bed says 6:10, so his parents are still asleep. Teddy wonders what his mom and dad will make of this peculiar change, which now that he has been taking it in for a minute or two seems not to be merely a matter of color and tone but of substance itself. Maybe the change doesn’t go very deep, maybe it’s more a matter of perception than anything external. In that case, Mom and Dad won’t notice a thing. Teddy sort of hopes it will turn out that way. He has always been sharper, better at noticing things, than anyone around him, and he has noticed that in time people get so accustomed to new situations, new contexts, new furniture that they no longer register them, and life eventually seems unchanged all over again.
On the other hand, if his first impression is right, and the actual substance of the world has somehow changed, become quieter, duller, softer, less vital, Mom and Dad are going to notice it, too, and then something will have to be done. Mom is going to go around the house polishing and waxing like a demon (for although most of his friends’ mothers have jobs that take them into downtown Haleyville every weekday, Mom, although once a famous stage actress in New York City, has settled down as an old-fashioned homemaker, albeit one with a lot of glamorous friends who drop in all the time), and Dad will charge down to the offices of the
