“No, I don’t have any problem with you buying my books. I’m all for it, believe me.”
“People do things for all kinds of reasons,” the man said. “And maybe other people don’t know enough to understand those reasons.”
“Hold on.” Tim stopped signing his name and looked up at the collector. At the side of his vision, the drenched girl stood up, collected her bags, and began to move toward him through the rows of empty chairs. Katherine Hyndman floated into view. “You’re not an ordinary collector, are you?” Tim said. “And you’re not a book dealer, either.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I think you’re part of a special breed,” Tim said. “I think you know about things other people don’t.”
The old man looked caught between pride and suspicion. “It doesn’t matter what I am.”
Katherine Hyndman and the girl who had come in from the rain stood about fifteen feet off to his right, conferring in front of the empty chairs.
“Have you ever found one?” Tim asked. “You must have, or you wouldn’t keep looking.”
The man shrugged. The narrow slits of his eyes shone.
“It’s like the Maltese falcon, isn’t it, except there are more than one of them. You’re obsessed. Getting your hands on one is all you care about. Jasper Kohle was pretending, but you’re the real thing.” For a moment, Tim felt a kind of exaltation.
“I never heard of Jasper Kohle, and you’re not supposed to talk about this. You’re not even supposed to know we exist. Because if you know that, then you know . . . what you know, I guess.” The old man was bending over the table, grabbing books, and stuffing them into his suitcase, signed and unsigned alike.
“Do you know where they come from?”
“
“Slips through,” Underhill said, taken with what seemed the lovely effortlessness of the process.
“Ever see a perfect thing? Ever hold one in your hand? Can you imagine how that feels? You want to talk about a rush, they don’t get any deeper than that.” His grin revealed sparse, rotting teeth. “I’m talking about
Tim pulled his head back and noticed the girl with the white bags, standing exactly where Katherine Hyndman had left her. A chill tingle rippled across his skin.
“How many?” the old man said. “Three. That’s how many. I’ll get another before I’m done, too.” He slammed down the lid of the suitcase and slid its locks into place.
“But why do you have to buy so many books? Why go through trial and error?”
“Sometimes, you have to stare at perfection for a long, long time before you see it.” He leaned back over his suitcase, eyes shining, and gave Underhill a good look at the horror in his mouth. “But once you see it, it’s yours forever.”
Grinning, he pulled the suitcase off the table, stepped back, and saluted Underhill by tapping a finger against his forehead. Then he whirled around and set off for the escalator.
Underhill watched him go and realized that for a second he had forgotten all about the girl. She stood ten feet away, between her bags, her wrinkled skirt soaked through, her blouse still adhering to her skin. He saw that she was a woman, not a girl, a woman probably in her mid-thirties, though at first glance she appeared to be much younger. Her short hair had been ruffed by the towel. She was extraordinarily good-looking, he thought, though not in any ordinary way. With her slightness, her coltish, slightly androgynous air, she was a true gamine. Then he realized that the red pattern on her blouse was water-soaked blood spatter.
She took an uncertain step toward him, and the planet seemed to wobble on its course. His stomach dropped to the floor, but the floor wasn’t there anymore. He was floating in midair, with all the hair on his arms sticking straight up. He recognized her, and for a moment the recognition brought him into the purest fear he had known since Vietnam.
“This can’t be happening,” he said. “Is your name Willy?”
“I think I need your help,” Willy said. “Do we know each other?”
22
Poor Willy—she was looking for an explanation of the strangest experience of her life, and she thought she had come to the right place. Kalpesh Patel had stopped at the corner of 103rd Street and Broadway, helped her get the bags out of his taxi, refused to take any money, and sped off in the general direction of Columbus Avenue and Central Park. She began aimlessly to walk down Broadway, trying to figure out how she could get out of town. New York represented the dual threat of Mitchell’s henchmen and the NYPD, all of whom had probably been shown pictures of her face before being sent out to find its owner. Money was no problem: she could get in a cab and tell the driver to take her to Boston, or Pittsburgh, or any large city where she could hide out until Mitchell got tired of looking for her. But she didn’t trust the driver of her hypothetical taxicab. One night he might tune in to
By the time she reached Ninety-sixth Street, she was thinking about long-distance buses. Buses went everywhere, and no one ever paid any attention to them, basically because they carried poor people from one place to another. If she got to Port Authority, she could pay cash for a ticket and travel anywhere she wanted. Willy did not think you had to keep validating your identity to get on a bus. She wished she had asked Kalpesh Patel to take her to the Port Authority building—the way that man drove, she could be there in minutes.
Willy moved to the curb and stuck out her right hand. With her left, she kept a good grip on the handle of the white leather bag stuffed with hundred-dollar bills and on the rolling case. Traffic flowed past her. The only cabs she saw already had passengers. The air grew darker and cool enough to make her wish she were wearing a jacket. A jacket would conceal the bloodstains, too—she had received a few curious stares. Then she thought of Tom again, and a molten current of panic, guilt, and despair ran through her.
A cold wind whistled down Broadway, and Willy shivered as she tilted forward to scan the approaching traffic. In the untimely darkness, a yellow light glowing from the top of a cab two blocks up had the brightness of a beacon. A menacing roll of thunder filled the sky, and distant lightning flashed. Willy hoped the cab would arrive in advance of the rain.
The lights changed again.
One block away, a pale car that looked exactly like Mitchell Faber’s Mercedes turned the corner into Broadway. It could not be Mitchell’s car. Like Mitchell’s car, however, it seemed to move down the block with the swift, elegant shiver of a predator. A walnut-sized knot of fear located in the middle of her chest dialed up the volume of her general panic. She could not keep standing there as the Mercedes shimmered and shivered toward her.
Willy was bending over to pick up her bags when she looked back up the street at the Mercedes that could not be Mitchell Faber’s and saw, with a terrible clarity, Giles Coverley at the wheel and Roman Richard beside him. Her only thought was to get far enough ahead of them to avoid being seen, and, one bag in each hand, she started running down the sidewalk.
Under a long barrage of thunder, the sky darkened by another degree. Willy darted across the sidewalk, and when her hand touched the door of a nearby shop, she heard the blasting of horns and the slamming of car doors. Her fear widened its wings and touched her heart. She heard clattering footsteps, looked to her left, and saw Coverley and Roman Richard running toward her through the traffic.
Willy took off—like an antelope sprinting for its life. Her suitcase weighed little, but the bag of money dragged at her right side. All of the sky split into incandescent, swiftly moving bolts of lightning. Thunder exploded overhead and echoed off the buildings on both sides of Broadway. Everywhere, people began to run.
Bulletlike rain shattered down. Instantly, Willy was soaked to the skin. Then her right foot skidded out before her, and she felt her balance begin to go. Inevitably and with shocking swiftness came the moment when her body obeyed gravity, not her will. She readied herself for a rough landing. Both of her legs unfolded before her. Instead of hitting the sidewalk, Willy felt herself propelled, supine and feet-first, along the Broadway sidewalk, which had become a canyon of roaring wind and slashing rain. She was
