She stood on the sidewalk in bright sunlight, her fists propped on her hips.
With money in her pocket she felt different. She’d regained her status as a human being, at least in the eyes of those who passed her on the street. She was a little ashamed by how much difference a wad of hundred-dollar bills could make in the way she and the world saw each other. Something was wrong here. How must it be to live month after month penniless on the streets, as so many did? The invisible people of the city, the ones most of us didn’t like to see because the vision and what it suggested made us vaguely uncomfortable. But only vaguely; that was the true horror of it. Allie knew she’d never be blind to the dispossessed again; she’d learned how it felt to be without tooth and fang in the jungle.
She bought a pair of dark-tinted sunglasses from a sidewalk vendor. Not much of a disguise, really, though they did change the way she looked, with their uptilted black frames. She thought they gave her a devilish yet somehow sad expression. Wearing the glasses, she walked idly back up to Washington Park.
The benches and open spaces were lined with winos and the drug-wasted, as well as neighborhood people and tourists. A uniformed cop strolled on a course perpendicular to Allie’s but paid no attention to her, nodding to a couple of kids on bikes who veered onto the grass to avoid him. Her blood beat a drum in her ears and she was ready to run if he even glanced her way.
He paused, stretched his arms, and ambled off toward the street, his nightstick, walkie-talkie, and holstered revolver jouncing on his hips and causing him to swing his arms wide, lending him the swagger of cops everywhere.
Watching him, it struck Allie that there was probably no better city in the country in which to be a fugitive. So ponderous and hectic was the press of people, and so infrequent was eye contact, that the likelihood of someone in New York happening to see and recognize anyone accidentally was extremely slim.
But not impossible, she reminded herself.
Near the pigeon-fouled statue of Garibaldi, she stopped and watched a squirrel take a circuitous route up a tree and disappear among the branches. A yellow Frisbee sailed near her, and a Hispanic girl about twelve ran and retrieved it from where it was lodged like yellow fall fruit in some bushes. The squirrel ventured halfway down the tree to see what was going on, switching its tail in anger or alarm.
Allie was tempted to spend hours in the park, but she knew that would accomplish nothing. And it might not be as safe here as she assumed.
Next, she decided, she’d find a place to stay. She smiled. Why not a plush hotel? One of those bordering Central Park? Maybe the Ritz Carlton. Why not a mint on the pillow, and room-service meals? First class made the most sense for those who didn’t intend to pay.
The idea gave her delicious satisfaction, until she realized that without identification or credit cards, she’d have to pay in advance. Plastic was needed to establish reputableness and pave the way for cash. She hadn’t quite regained her full measure of Manhattan humanity.
She rode the subway to 42nd Street. Then she walked around the Times Square area and theater district until she found a hotel that looked seedy enough to be cheap and anonymous, but was still bearable.
The Willmont, on West Forty-eighth, wasn’t the Ritz Carlton. The entrance was an ancient, wood-framed revolving door, just inside of which the doorman, if that’s what he was, dozed in a metal folding chair with a newspaper in his lap. The lobby was small and dim, with dusty potted palms, peeling floor tile, and two old men slumped in threadbare armchairs and gazing speculatively at Allie. She told herself they probably stared at everyone who came in. On the wall near the desk was a vast, time-darkened print of Custer’s Last Stand. Custer stood tall in the middle of the melee, aiming his pistol at an Indian, like a man about to die. Taped beneath the faded gold- leafed frame was less ambitious artwork, a sign declaring the elevators were out of order. Its corners were curled and it looked as if it had been there a long time.
The desk clerk was a girl about twenty with a purple and orange punk hairdo and a nose that appeared to have been broken one more time than it had been set. She told Allie yes, there was a vacancy, and the rate was forty-six dollars a night. Ridiculously cheap by New York standards. Allie registered as Audrey James from Minneapolis and paid in advance for a week. The girl didn’t even ask if she had luggage or needed a bellhop, merely handed her a brass key on a plastic tag and said, “Two-twenty, up at the top of them stairs.”
Allie accepted the key and walked toward a steep flight of stairs covered with moldy blue carpet. The old men were still staring. An equally old black man with a broom and one of those dustpans with a long handle nodded to her and smiled wide and warm as she went past. There was graffiti on the stairwell walls, but it had been crossed out with black paint and was unintelligible except for where the word FUCK had been crudely altered to read BOOK. BOOK YOU. Fooled no one, Allie thought, trudging up the creaking steps.
The hall at the top of the stairs was a littered horror, but the room was better than she’d imagined. The walls were pale green and needed paint. The maple furniture was old but in good shape. Might even support her weight. The drapes were a mottled gray to match the carpet. Near the foot of the bed was a TV bolted to a steel shelf that was bolted to the wall. Allie saw only one roach, but a big one, scurrying for darkness on the wall behind the dresser. The room smelled like Pine Sol disinfectant, which was probably better than the alternative odor.
A toilet flushed somewhere and water gurgled in a pipe buried in the wall. A man was yelling, very faintly, possibly from the room next door or directly above, “Get ’em off, get ’em off!” Allie wasn’t sure what he meant and didn’t want to find out. Thanks to the thick walls, he wasn’t making enough noise to disturb her.
She walked to the bathroom and found that it, too, was clean, though the fixtures were old and yellowed porcelain. The tub had claw feet, and a crack in its side that had somehow been repaired and painted over with white enamel so that it resembled a surgery scar. There was a makeshift shower with a plastic curtain. The curtain was green with a white daisy design, and looked old and brittle enough to break at a touch. Green tile ran from the floor halfway to the ceiling; a few of the squares were missing to reveal ancient gray ridges of cement. There was a single small window, open about three inches and caked with layers of paint so that it would remain open about three inches today and tomorrow and far into eternity. A plank of cool air pushed in through the window, but the pine disinfectant smell was even stronger in the bathroom.
Allie locked the door and lay down on the bed, which was soft enough to aggravate any spine problem. She saw that the ceiling was cracked and waterstained. There was another roach up there, not moving and probably dead. She stared hard at it, thought it might have moved slightly, but she couldn’t be positive. Vision itself wavered. The eyes played games with the mind.
She forgot about the roach and laid her plans.
Wearing her sunglasses, she’d go out and get some lunch, then buy some junk food to bring back to the hotel. Then she’d buy some new clothes—jeans, a blouse, a windbreaker, some socks and underwear—and return to her
