JUNE 11, 2009
T hough he lived in New York, Will was no New Yorker. He was stuck there like a Post-it note that could effortlessly be peeled off and pasted somewhere else. He didn’t get the place, didn’t connect to it. He didn’t feel its rhythm, possess its DNA. He was oblivious to all things new and fashionable-restaurants, galleries, exhibitions, shows, clubs. He was an outsider who didn’t want in. If there was a fabric to the city, he was a frayed end. He ate, drank, slept, worked, and occasionally copulated in New York, but beyond that he was a disinterested party. There was a favorite bar on Second Avenue, a good Greek diner on 23rd Street, a reliable Chinese take-away on 24th, a grocery and a friendly liquor store on Third Avenue. This was his microcosm, a nondescript square of asphalt with its own soundtrack-the constant wail of ambulances fighting traffic to get the flotsam of the city to Bellevue. In fourteen months he’d figure out where home was going to be, but he knew it wouldn’t be New York City.
It was no surprise that he was unaware that Hamilton Heights was an up-and-coming neighborhood.
“No shit,” he replied with disinterest. “In Harlem?”
“Yes! In Harlem,” Nancy explained. “A lot of professionals have moved uptown. They’ve got Starbucks.”
They were driving in a torpid rush-hour mess and she was talking a blue streak.
“City College of New York is up there,” she added enthusiastically. “There’re a lot of students and professionals, some great restaurants, things like that, and it’s a lot cheaper than most places in Manhattan.”
“You ever been there?”
She deflated a little. “Well, no.”
“So how are you so knowledgeable?”
“I read about it in, you know, New York magazine, the Times.”
In contrast to Will, Nancy loved the city. She’d grown up in suburban White Plains. Her grandparents still lived in Queens, off-the-boat Poles with thick accents and old-country ways. White Plains was home but the city had been her playpen, the place where she learned about music and art, where she had her first drink, where she lost her virginity in her dorm at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she passed the bar after graduating top of her class at Fordham Law, where she landed her first Bureau job after Quantico. She lacked the time or money to experience New York to its fullest, but she made it her business to keep a finger on the city’s pulse.
They crossed over the murky Harlem River and found their way to the corner of West 140th Street and Nicholas Avenue, where the twelve-story building complex was conveniently marked by a half-dozen squad cars from the Thirty-second Precinct, Manhattan North. St. Nicholas Avenue was wide and clean, bordered on the west by a thin strip of mint-green park, the buffer zone between the neighborhood and the CCNY campus. The area looked surprisingly prosperous. Nancy’s smug look said, I told you so.
Lucius Robertson’s apartment was parkside on the top floor. Its large windows captured St. Nicholas Park, the compact college campus, and beyond it the Hudson River and the heavily forested New Jersey Palisades. In the distance a brick-red cargo barge, the length of a football field, was steaming south under tug power. The sun glinted off an antique brass telescope standing on a tripod, and Will was drawn to it, seized by a boyish impulse to look through its eyepiece.
He resisted and flashed his badge, prompting, “The cavalry’s here!” from a precinct lieutenant, a hefty African-American who could hardly wait to take off. The uniformed cops and detectives were also relieved. Their shifts had been stretched and they aspired to make better use of their precious summer evening. Cold beer and barbecues were higher on their agendas than babysitting.
Will asked the lieutenant, “Where’s our guy?”
“In the bedroom, lying down. We checked the apartment out. Even had a dog in. It’s clean.”
“You got the postcard?”
It was bagged and tagged. Lucius Jefferson Robertson, 384 West 140th Street, New York, NY 10030. On the flip side: the little coffin and June 11, 2009.
Will passed it to Nancy and checked out the place. The furniture was modern, expensive, a couple of nice Orientals, eggshell walls plastered with gallery quality twentieth century oils. An entire expanse of wall hung with framed vinyl records and CDs. Next to the kitchen a Steinway grand with sheet music stacked high on the closed top. A wall unit crammed with a high-end stereo system and hundreds of CDs.
“What is this guy, a musician?” Will asked.
The lieutenant nodded. “Jazz. I never heard of him but Monroe says he’s famous.”
A skinny white cop said on cue: “Yeah, he’s famous.”
After a brief discussion, it was agreed that this situation belonged to the FBI now. The precinct would cover the front and rear of the building through the night but the FBI would take “custody” of Mr. Robertson and watch him as long as they liked. All that was left was to meet their charge. The lieutenant called through the bedroom door, “Mr. Robertson, could you come out, sir? We got the FBI here to see you.”
Through the door: “All right, I’m coming.”
Robertson looked like a weary traveler, thin and stooped, shuffling out from his bedroom in slippers, loose trousers, Chambray shirt and a thin yellow cardigan. He was an old-looking sixty-six. The lines on his face were so deep you could lose a dime in a fold. His skin tones were pure black without a hint of brown except on the palms of his long-fingered hands, which were pale, cafe-au-lait. His hair and beard were close-cropped, more salt than pepper.
He spotted the new faces. “How do you do?” he said to Will and Nancy. “I’m sorry to cause so much fuss.”
Will and Nancy formally introduced themselves.
“Please don’t call me Mr. Robertson,” the man protested. “My friends call me Clive.”
Before long the police cleared out. The sun was low over the Hudson and began deepening and expanding like a fat blood orange. Will closed the curtains in the living room and pulled the blinds in Clive’s bedroom. There hadn’t been a sniper shooting yet but the Doomsday killer was mixing things up. He and Nancy reinspected every inch of the apartment, and while she remained with Clive, Will swept the hallway and stairwell.
The formal interview was straightforward-there wasn’t much to tell. Clive had gotten back into town mid- afternoon from a three-city tour with his quintet. No one had a key to his apartment and to the best of his knowledge nothing had been disturbed in his absence. After an uneventful flight from Chicago, he took a yellow cab directly from the airport to his building, where he found the postcard buried in a week’s accumulation of mail. He immediately recognized it for what it was, called 911, and that was that.
Nancy walked him through the names and addresses of the Doomsday victims but Clive shook his head sadly at each mention. He didn’t know any of them. “Why would this fellow want to harm me?” he lamented in his gravelly drawl. “I’m just a piano player.”
Nancy shut her notebook and Will shrugged. They were done. It was almost eight o’clock. Four hours to go before Doomsday was up.
“My refrigerator’s empty ’cause I been away. Otherwise I’d offer you two somethin’ to eat.”
“We’ll order out,” Will said. “What’s good around here?” Then quickly, “It’s on the government.”
Clive suggested the ribs from Charley’s on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, got on the phone and painstakingly placed a complicated order with five different sides. “Use my name,” Will whispered, writing it out for Clive in block letters.
While they waited, they agreed on a plan. Clive wouldn’t leave their sight till midnight. He wouldn’t answer the phone. While he slept, they would keep vigil in the living room, and come morning they’d reevaluate the threat level and work out a new protection scheme.
Then they sat in silence, Clive fidgeting in his favorite armchair, frowning, scratching at his beard. He wasn’t comfortable with visitors, especially straitlaced FBI agents who might as well have beamed into his living room from another planet.
Nancy craned her neck and studied his paintings until her eyebrows suddenly rose and she exclaimed, “Is that a de Kooning?” She was pointing at a large canvas with abstract bursts and smudges of primary colors.
“Very good, young lady, that’s exactly what that is. You know your art.”
“It’s amazing,” she gushed. “It must be worth a fortune.”
Will squinted at it. To his eye, it looked like the kind of thing a kid brought home to stick on the
