was lost in A Bear Called Paddington. Emily was giggling at something called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The windows were rolled up. They wouldn’t hear anything, if there was anything to hear.
Let it go or stand down, Abby?
She glanced at her watch. She had forty-eight hours off at the clinic, and at least sixty hours of things to do, but that had never stopped her from getting in the face of some asshole.
Not yet, anyway.
She may have grown up in Westchester County, she may have had a horse named Pablo – named after Neruda, of course, not Picasso – and studied ballet at the Broadway Dance Center, but she had spent nearly ten years in the city, all of them as an ER nurse, and there was a principle at work here
She pulled the handbrake, and got out of the car.
When the kid emerged from the Escalade he turned out to be about five-four – baggy jeans, T-shirt, backwards Mets cap. The bigger the SUV, Abby thought. He clicked the remote-control lock button on his key ring, locking the Cadillac with a toot of the horn. Just one more thing to endear him. He turned to do his pimp-roll into the market, staring at his cellphone, God’s gift in a pair of Nike Jordan Six Rings.
“Excuse me,” Abby said, at least twice as loud as necessary.
The kid glanced over, pulled the earbuds from his ears. He looked at her, then to his left and his right. She could only be talking to him. “Yeah?”
“Got a question for you.”
The kid looked her up and down now, perhaps realizing that, for a woman around thirty, she was in pretty good shape, and maybe, just maybe, he was going to hook up here. He half-smiled, raised his eyebrows in anticipation. “Sure.”
“Are you fucking crazy?”
Exit the smile. Exit most of the blood from his face. He backed up an inch. “Excuse me?”
“You did that for a parking space?”
For a moment the kid resembled not so much a deer in the headlights, but a deer that had just been run over. “Did what?”
“Endangered my life. The lives of my children.” A little dramatic, Abby realized, but so what.
The kid glanced at the Acura, at the girls. “What… what are you talking about?”
Abby took a deep breath, tried to calm herself. This kid was completely clueless, as expected. She put her hands on her hips. “All right,” she said. “One more question.”
Another step back. Silence.
“When was the last time you saw me?” Abby asked.
The kid did some kind of ape-math in his head. Apparently, he came up with nothing. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
Abby moved in, her finger out front. “Precisely my point. I was about to turn into that space and you jammed into it right in front of me. You didn’t even look. You didn’t even see me.” Abby clocked it up now, the angel of death on a tear. “You’re so caught up in your damn MP3, cellphone, text message, Jay Z gangsta-wannabe world, you can’t see anything past the end of your fucking 37th Avenue Serengeti knock-offs.”
The kid looked at the ground. So they were fake. He looked up. “What… what do you want me to do about it?”
“I want you to move your truck.”
The kid grimaced. Abby knew the word truck would get under his skin.
“It’s not a truck. It’s an Escalade.”
Wow, Abby thought. An Escalade driver with attitude. How rare. “Whatever. I want you to get inside, start it, and move it.”
The kid looked around. There were no parking spaces for about a hundred feet in any direction. “Where should I go?”
Abby glared her answer at him, as in, who gives a shit?
For a second, the kid looked like he was going to stand his ground. He glanced at the front window of the Acura. On the dashboard was a parking permit for the Queens County DA’s office, a large rectangle of laminated plastic that, despite the mayor’s efforts to curtail, generally allowed ticket-free parking on everything up to and including sidewalks.
The kid glanced at his laceless Nikes for a moment, weighing the options. He conceded. He pressed the button, unlocked the car, and with a movement somewhat slower than the glacier that had carved out the Niagara Escarpment, rolled back, and slipped inside. Driving down the aisle he executed his gangster lean, gave Abby one final glance in the rear-view mirror but did not – as Abby had expected – give her the finger. Obviously, he still had to go inside the store, and was not quite prepared for Round Two. Besides, who would get Mom’s nutmeg if he left?
Abby got in her car, pulled into the spot, the thought of NEW YORK AXIOM #208 giving her a warm feeling all over, that being:
Parking spaces fought over are much sweeter than parking spaces earned.
She unbuckled her seatbelt, checked her purse, making sure she had her wallet. Before she could open her door there was a query from the back seat. It was Emily.
“Mom?”
Abby turned around. Both girls had the earbuds out of their ears, and their iPods turned off. How did they learn these things so quickly?
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Who was that boy?”
Abby had to laugh. Boy.
God she loved her girls.
The city was every photograph he had ever seen, every film, every song, every postcard. Aleks had taken a cab from JFK Airport to a section of midtown Manhattan called Murray Hill.
If he had been a tourist, he could see himself taking in the wonders of New York for a week or more. He looked at the booklet. The UN Building, Grand Central Station, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the Flatiron Building, the Guggenheim Museum. There was much to see.
But he was not a tourist. He had business here. The most important business of his life.
The Senzai Hotel WAS located at East Thirty-Eighth Street and Park Avenue. The pictures on the website had not done the place justice. The floor was marble, the ceilings were high, the brass appointments were subdued. Before leaving Tallinn, Aleks had had his hair cut at the airport salon. He knew that all styles were served in a city like New York, and it would take something pretty outrageous to stand out, but he did not want to take any chances. At just over six-foot three, with shoulder-length sandy hair, dressed all in black, he might attract some attention. So now he looked like a tall European businessman in town for a meeting. In many ways, this was true.
He checked in. The girl behind the desk was Japanese, about twenty-five. She had small streaks of gold in her lustrous black hair.
She greeted him warmly, moved with grace and efficiency, an attention to detail Aleks had not only anticipated but expected. It was one of the many he things he admired about Japanese culture, another being how much was expressed in a non-verbal way. He sometimes lived in silence for weeks at a time, and he appreciated this.
After running his credit card, she asked after his immediate needs. In his best Japanese – which was quite meager, the product of a brief study he had made before visiting Tokyo on R amp; R in the federal army – he told her he was fine for the moment. She smiled again, pushed forward his electronic key. He took it with a slight bow, which was returned, and headed toward the elevators. Before he had taken two steps the concierge approached and told him that a FedEx package had arrived for him, and that it would soon be brought up to his room. He tipped the man, and took the elevator to the eighth floor, slid his electronic key into the lock, and entered his suite.
The room was small, but tastefully appointed. In the closet were slippers, a pair of terry cloth robes, an umbrella. He had selected the hotel for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it featured a rooftop garden.
