give you.”
He reached into a pocket of his baggy pants and tugged out a square cream-colored envelope and handed it to me.
The envelope was blank except for the embossed return address: The Peer Group, on West 21st Street in Chelsea. Peer. I remembered the call I’d answered in Owl’s hotel room, the message that Michael Cassidy should call the pier office. Not pier, Peer.
The P.R. firm Tigger had mentioned, run by the un-French Coy d’Loy. West 21st Street in Chelsea. It was the same block as on those sales handbills I’d found in Owl’s pocket.
The envelope’s flap was unsealed. Inside was an invitation to a film festival screening that evening and the afterparty being held at The Wiggle Room on Rivington.
I folded it into my pocket.
“You’ll go, right?” he asked. “I’m supposed to find out.”
“Find out for whom? Your sugar mama?”
“Look, you goin’ or not? It’ll be worth it to you.”
A cab pulled to the curb. I got in, but before I shut the door, I asked the kid, “You sic those three heavies on me? The Russians looking for Michael Cassidy?”
“You know where she is?” he asked eagerly, his eyes lighting up.
I slammed the door and gave the driver the address for the Crystalview, leaving the kid standing there.
I leaned back, reread the invitation. It was for a screening of
The Peer Group. Chelsea. Michael Cassidy’s ex-husband.
Yeh, I’d be going to the movies tonight.
The cabbie let me off right in front of Windmann’s building, just below the Holland Tunnel entrance, on Washington Street between Vestry and Debrosses. I’d never seen it before, but I’d read about its construction. One of the luxury condo high-rises that had gone up in recent years on a newly redeveloped waterfront, an area so beautiful it made you think you’d stumbled upon a completely different city.
The Crystalview had been open for business for over a year, but a postman friend of mine told me that so far they only had a twenty percent occupancy, or what only amounted to four full floors of the twenty-story stovepipe- shaped monstrosity.
Security cameras in the lobby, but no doorman and no one behind the obsidian-topped maplewood front desk. If eighty percent of their units were empty, they probably didn’t have enough to cover the expense of a full staff yet.
To let people in, there was a fancy, high-tech house-phone system by the front door, with a keypad and a directory showing apartment numbers with spaces beside them for names, most of which were blank. I found Windmann’s name and entered the corresponding number on the pad. No answer. I tried again, but still no response. I guessed he didn’t want to see me. Well, too bad, I was going to see him.
I entered the numbers of a few other units with names showing, but no one else answered me either. Maybe the place was a
An elevator door opened and a Chinese deliveryman stepped into the lobby. He left a stack of menus at the front desk, then held the door open for me on his way out.
I considered taking the stairs up to Windmann’s, but his apartment was on the nineteenth floor. I’d never make it. I hadn’t eaten anything since Wednesday dinner. I’d been operating solely on stored fats and the buzz of the hunt.
My lonely elevator ride up to nineteen was uninterrupted. I felt the oppression of all those empty units around me as I rose by and above them. Unhaunted spaces. It gave me the willies, that vacancy, that vacuum, like a potent sample of the nothingness that may attend us all after death. Then my ears popped and I yawned some to clear them. I hated elevators.
Ding. At the nineteenth floor, I walked down the hall past five closed doors until I got to Windmann’s and stopped.
His door was ajar.
As a kid, I never got that pun, the door is a jar, whenever I came across it in one of the jokes-and-riddles books I used to pore over, trying to figure out the answers. At first I didn’t understand it, but even once I did “get it,” I never thought it very funny.
I didn’t think so now either.
I’d been encountering too many partially open doors today. Normally in New York City that didn’t happen so often, especially not with a pneumatic-hinged door like this, which should’ve closed silently of its own weight.
I could see why it hadn’t: a corner of the inside front mat stuck out and blocked it. I couldn’t tell if it had been placed that way intentionally or was just something that happened to happen.
After all, accidents happened.
I took out my gun and, keeping to one side, eased the door open with my fingertips before poking my head in. Nothing, no movement, no sound. A tall urn with three umbrellas in it stood under a hall mirror.
I entered crabwise, letting the door shut behind me, re-straightening the floor mat so it closed completely this time.
I inhaled through my nose and smelled it. An acrid odor wafting on the climate-controlled air. Sulfurous, it prickled my nostrils. The residue of a certain kind of burning. Cordite. Gunsmoke.
I lifted my gun and, very carefully, slid a live one into the chamber, trying to be quiet about it. But within that silent apartment it was like chiseling my name in stone.
I looked, I listened, I waited. More silence, more stillness, not even a reassuring gurgle from the pipes in the walls, everything was triple-insulated.
I walked forward, my sneakers whispering softly. There was a dusty outline on the parquet floor as if a narrow rug used to lie there.
At the end of the hallway, I came to a perfectly ordinary, empty room, lit a caustic orange by late-afternoon sunshine.
I stayed in the mouth of the hallway and helloed a few times, listening after each hello like I was measuring the depths and outer reaches with sonar. I got no response.
After a while, I felt a little silly, but only a little. I’d have felt a lot sillier getting shot. That stink in the air wasn’t Etruscan Musk, a gun had gone off recently. So I waited some more before finally going in.
No one home. I walked around. No one in the kitchen or bedroom, or bedroom closet or bathroom. I returned to the living room, at a loss for what to do. Wait with folded hands? Start poking around? Raid the fridge?
I was drawn to the south-facing floor-to-ceiling window of high-stress glass. It overlooked the skyline of lower Manhattan and, at this height, provided a view of Ground Zero.
Prophetically named. Seven years later, still nothing more than ground, a zero. Just two days before, the first steel beam of the memorial museum had finally been put in place. Great, I thought, now if only they can agree on the curtains. What really should’ve been done was transform it into a memorial park. At least now it would be something, instead of a pit, an unfilled hole, an open grave. Not an idle allusion: the people who died that day were crushed and their remains remained, now permanently a part of the island itself.
