slaloming through traffic, making no better and no worse time than a steady, contained, direct path would have. Ricky looked at the cabdriver’s identification shield, which, as expected, was another unfathomable foreign name. He sat back, thinking how hard it is sometimes to get a cab in Manhattan, and wasn’t it intriguing that one was so readily available as he emerged, shaken, from the attorney’s office. Just as if it had been waiting for him.
The cabdriver pulled sharply to the curb outside the hotel’s entrance. Ricky jammed some money through the Plexiglas partition, and exited the cab. He ignored the doorman, and jumped up the stairs and through the revolving hotel doors. The lobby was milling with guests, and he rapidly threaded his way through several parties and tour groups, dodging piles of luggage and scurrying bellhops. He launched himself to The Palm Court. On the far side of the restaurant, he paused, stared at a menu for a moment, then ducked down, hunching over slightly and headed for the corridor, moving at as quick a pace as he could muster without drawing undue attention, more like a man late for a train. He went directly to the Central Park South exit of the hotel, stepping through the doors, back onto the street.
There was a doorman flagging cabs for guests as they emerged. Ricky stepped past one family gathered at the curb. “Do you mind,” he said to a middle-aged father dressed in a Hawaiian print shirt who was riding herd on three rowdy children all between the ages of six and ten. A mousy wife stood to the side, mother-henning the entire brood. “I have a bit of an emergency. I don’t mean to be rude, but…” The father looked at Ricky crazily, as if no family trip all the way from Idaho to New York would be complete without someone stealing a cab from them, and then wordlessly gestured to the door. Ricky jumped in, slamming it behind him as he heard the wife say, “Ralph, what are you doing? That was ours…”
This cabdriver, Ricky thought, at least, wasn’t someone hired by Rumplestiltskin. He gave the driver the address of Merlin’s office.
As he suspected, the moving van was no longer parked out front. The security guard in his blue blazer had disappeared as well.
Ricky leaned forward and knocked on the cabdriver’s partition. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “Take me to this address, please.” He read the new address off the attorney’s card. “But when you get close, stop about a block away, okay? I don’t want to pull up in front.”
The cabdriver silently shrugged and nodded.
It took a quarter hour to battle through traffic. The address on Merlin’s card was near Wall Street. It reeked of prestige.
The driver did as he’d been asked, pulling to the side a block shy of the address. “Up there,” the man said. “You want me to drive?”
“No,” Ricky replied. “This is fine.” He paid and tossed himself from the tight confines of the rear seat.
As he’d half guessed, there was no sign of the moving truck outside the large office building. He looked up and down the street, but saw no sign of the attorney, nor the company, nor the office furniture. He double-checked the address on the card, making certain that he had it correct, then looked into the building and saw there was a security desk just inside the front door. A single uniformed guard, reading a paperback novel, had taken up a position behind a bank of video monitors and an electronic board that showed the elevator operations. Ricky stepped into the building and first approached an office directory printed on the wall. He quickly checked and found no listing for anyone named Merlin. Ricky walked over to the guard, who looked up as he came forward.
“Help you?” he said.
“Yes,” Ricky replied. “I seem to be confused. I have this lawyer’s card, with this address, but I can’t seem to find his listing. He should be moving in today.”
The guard checked the card, frowned, and shook his head. “That’s the right address,” he said, “but we’ve got nobody by that name.”
“Maybe an empty office? Like I said, moving in today?”
“No one told security nothing. And there aren’t any vacancies. Haven’t been for years.”
“Well, that’s strange,” Ricky said. “Must be a printer’s mistake.”
The guard handed back the card. “Could be,” he said.
Ricky pocketed the card, thinking that he’d just won his first skirmish with the man stalking him. But to what advantage, he wasn’t sure.
Ricky was still feeling slightly smug as he arrived at his own building. He was unsure who he’d met in the attorney’s office, wondering whether the man who called himself Merlin wasn’t really Rumplestiltskin himself. This was a distinct possibility, Ricky thought, because he was certain that the man at the core of the situation would want to see Ricky himself, face-to-face. He wasn’t precisely certain why he believed this, but it seemed to make some sense. It was difficult to imagine someone gaining pleasure from tormenting him, without that person wanting to get a firsthand opportunity to see his handiwork.
But this observation did not even begin to color in the portrait he knew he would have to create in order to guess that man’s name.
“What do you know about psychopaths?” he asked himself, as he walked up the steps to the brownstone building that housed his home office and four other apartments. Not much, he answered quietly to himself. What he knew about were the troubles and neuroses of the mildly to significantly crippled. He knew about the lies well-to-do people told themselves to justify their behavior. He didn’t think he knew much about someone who would create an entire world of lies in order to bring about his death. Ricky understood that this was uncharted territory for him.
In an instant, the satisfaction Ricky had felt outmaneuvering Rumplestiltskin once, fled. He reminded himself coldly: Remember what’s at stake.
He saw that the mail had been delivered, and he opened his box. One long, thin envelope bore an official seal in the upper left-hand corner from the Transit Authority of the City of New York. He opened this first.
There was a small piece of paper clipped to a larger photocopied sheet. He read the small letter first.
Ricky flipped the cover letter back and read the photocopy. It was brief, typed, and filled him with a distant dread.
Even the signature had been typed. Ricky stared at the suicide note, feeling his emotions simply drain through him.
Chapter Nine
Zimmerman’s note, Ricky thought, could not be real.
Internally, he remained adamant: Zimmerman was no more likely to take his own life than Ricky was. He showed no signs of suicidal ideation, no inclinations to self-destruction, no propensity for self-
