Ella, shaken from the attack of the killer cockroach, spent the entire ride downtown standing up, watching her feet to make sure nothing with more than two legs walked over them. When she wasn’t staring at her shoes, she was darting anxious glances at our fellow travellers. Ella had never been on public transport in New York before. When her parents brought her in they went everywhere in cabs. The Gerards don’t take any chances.
“Do you think that man back there is crazy?” she whispered.
Pretending that I was reading an advertisement for a computer course, I looked towards the back.
“Which one?” I asked, my eyes now on the headline of the paper the woman sitting in front of us was reading. “The one who’s talking to himself, or the one holding up the snake so it can look out of the window?”
“Neither,” said Ella. “The one wearing the sombrero.”
We got off at Fourteenth Street. I knew my way from Fourteenth Street. At least, in dry weather and daylight I did.
“Aren’t we there yet?” grumbled Ella.
I got us to Soho OK, but I was having a little trouble finding the exact street we wanted. It was one of those little ones tucked behind a lot of other little streets with funny names. I’m better on the numbered streets and avenues.
Ella stopped and leaned gingerly against a building. She didn’t trust touching anything. “My feet are killing me,” she moaned.
“Maybe you should put your sneakers back on till we get there,” I suggested. Her heels weren’t as high as my mother’s but they were still significant.
Ella, however, wasn’t listening to me. She was looking around us as though she’d just landed on a planet with sixteen moons where everyone lived in glass bubbles and looked like trombones.
“Now what?” I asked.
It was pretty late and the streets were more or less deserted. The only people out were the kind your mother warns you never to talk to, huddled in doorways. It kind of reminded me of old photographs of war-torn Europe.
Ella finally turned back to me with a worried look on her face.
“Are you sure you know where we are?”
“Of course I know where we are,” I said with more confidence than I felt. Since I’m being totally honest, I have to admit that I wasn’t as knowledgeable about Soho as I could have been. I’d never actually been this far downtown at night by myself. Everything looked different with the shadows and the rain. But I didn’t tell Ella that. She was nervous enough.
“This is my city,” I assured her. “I know it as well as I know my own room.”
Ella gazed at the sodden avenue. “Your room isn’t this big,” she said, but she sounded relieved.
I pointed to the corner. “I think we go left down there.”
We went left, and then we went right, and then we went right, and then we went left, and then we doubled back and went right this time.
“Why aren’t there any policemen around to ask?” Ella complained as we staggered back again to where we’d started.
I was about to repeat my father’s joke about New York cops spending all their time in diners eating doughnuts and drinking coffee, but at that instant the gods blew the clouds of hopelessness away.
“Look!” I shouted. “Look what’s there!”
Ella looked to where I was pointing. “It’s a car stopped at the light.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, already yanking her forward. “It’s Mr Santini’s car stopped at the light.”
Keeping close to the buildings, and counting on the fact that Carla and Alma, who were sitting together in the back seat, would be looking in the mirror, touching up their make-up, and that Carla’s parents, if they did see us, wouldn’t recognize us in our new personae as flood victims, Ella and I started to run in the direction of the car.
We caught up with it at the next corner. It turned right. Ella and I went with it. Mr Santini obviously didn’t know Soho any better than I did, because he was going really slowly, his eyes on the street signs. We managed to keep up until he shot suddenly to the left down what looked like an alley. I gave a quick look both ways, just as Karen Kapok taught me to, then splashed into the road with Ella in tow.
We raced around the corner; just in time to see the Mercedes turn into the cross street.
“Come on,” I said, dragging her on. “He’s looking for the address. We must be pretty close.”
Ella flapped her arms in a gesture of despair. “So near, and yet so far…”
“So near, and yet so near,” I corrected.
We reached the end of the narrow road and peered cautiously around the corner building.
I squeezed Ella’s hand. “I told you!” I hissed. If by some cruel twist of fate I don’t become a great actor, I can always become a great detective instead.
Mr Santini had stopped at the curb in the middle of the next street. We were just in time to see Carla and Alma step out of the plush cocoon of the back seat and into the stormy night, an enormous silver umbrella held high. Carla was dressed to kill (or dressed to roast a turkey) in a short, tight dress – silver to match the umbrella – and silver stilettos. I glanced at my sodden clothes and muddy feet. I looked like someone had tried to kill me. With the umbrella quivering above them like a halo, Carla and Alma glided towards the black door with the number 63 painted on it in gold.
Mr Santini leaned across the passenger seat and said something. Ella and I ducked back. When we peeked out again, the Mercedes was pulling away, and Carla was showing her invitation to a very large man in black leather. He looked like the guy you’d find guarding the gates of hell.
“So all we have to do now is get past him,” whispered Ella.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve gotten this far. From now on it’s a piece of cake.”
Ella gave me one of her looks. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Fruitcake.”
“Plan B isn’t going to work,” said Ella with new-found authority.
“You mean, unlike Plan A?” I asked sarcastically.
Plan A was Ella’s. Plan A entailed sitting in the doorway across from 63 to wait for our chance to crash the party. We’d pushed a few empty beer cans out of our way and sat. And waited. I guess we thought the guests would arrive more or less all at once, like they do for the Oscars and movie premières, but we were wrong. The guests arrived in dribs and drabs. A car would pull up, a couple of people would jump out and rush to the black door, and the car would vanish back into the night as its passengers vanished inside. Maybe if Stu Wolff’s friends really had been just regular guys, we would have been able to sneak in with them, but though he was a man of the people, most of those people drove Jaguars and Porsches and none of them shopped at K-Mart. There was no way we were going to be able to slip in without at least a dozen of them as camouflage.
“And anyway,” I continued, “it is going to work. It’s perfect.”
I was tired of waiting for a stretch limo with fifteen passengers who’d just been in a boating accident to turn up. I gazed at the black door, shining in the rain, then raised my eyes to the lighted windows of the loft above it. I could see people talking and drinking and having a good time. Music and laughter seeped into the quiet street. I didn’t want to sit in the deluge. I wanted to be inside with all the famous people, talking and laughing and dancing the night away. All the women we’d seen enter the building were stunningly beautiful and wearing stunningly beautiful clothes. Stu Wolff would never notice Carla amongst them. She’d look ordinary in that crowd. But not Ella and I. Stu might think we were homeless runaways, but he’d notice us for sure.
I grabbed Ella’s arm. “Don’t argue,” I ordered. “Let’s do it now, before anyone else arrives.” I tugged her to her feet. “Plan B, here we come.”
Plan B was simple. I’d pretend to be ill, and Ella would ask to use the phone to call my mother to pick us up.
Ella rang the bell. She did it so gently, you’d think she was hoping there was no one home.
“Harder,” I whispered. “You want to sound urgent.”
