exhaustion from locking his eyelids shut.
“A salty Coleridge?” asked Drummond from the passenger footwell.
He was doing the crossword puzzle from the Newark Star-Ledger. Before Charlie could even place the name Coleridge, Drummond had filled the boxes of 44 Across with “ancient mariner.”
“Not that a wrong answer makes a difference,” Drummond said. “Forty-four is what matters, the approximate latitude of Halifax.” He pointed to the puzzle. “This will be our message to the captain.”
Charlie suspected Drummond was in the midst of one of the rarer episodes of lucidity, several hours in length. Another thirty or forty minutes was all they would need in order to take care of business and hit the sea.
They crossed into Brooklyn, quickly nearing the dead drop site. “If we can, let’s find a spot on this block,” Drummond said, pointing to a bustling nightclub.
Charlie had assumed they would leave the car someplace out of the way, like a dark alley. This block was dicey to begin with, and it looked like Hoodlums Night at the club. “But if the Cavalry finds the car, they’ll know we’re here,” he said.
“They’ll find it, there’s no doubt about that. Our hope is that when they do, the car will be at the chop shop to which our accommodating car thief will have driven it. Most of those establishments are in New Jersey and Westchester. Make sure to leave the keys in the ignition.”
“Got you. Leave the motor running too?”
“Now you’re learning.”
Charlie clambered down the stairs into the Atlantic Avenue subway station. There was a chance, he thought, that the Baltimore Orioles fleece he had on-purchased at the minimart-could give him away. But at least it wasn’t the Yankees.
Drummond, who’d put on a new ski cap as well as a canvas barn jacket he’d found by the Wagoneer, descended at a more leisurely pace, fifteen or twenty steps behind Charlie. They didn’t appear to be together-or at least, that was the idea.
Charlie made it to the vending machine first, bought a Metro Card, pushed through the turnstile, and entered a tunnel that amplified the footfalls of the few other passengers and the sporadic shrieks of far-off trains. He emerged onto a drafty D train platform. The small crowd of prospective passengers had the hollow eyes and restlessness of having been waiting too long.
In a security mirror, Charlie saw Drummond scratch his left shoulder, the “all’s clear” signal. Charlie fell into step with him to the men’s room at the far end of the platform.
“What if it’s out of order?” Charlie asked. Out of Order signs dangled from subway restroom door handles as often as not.
“We have a backup,” Drummond said, pointing to the trash can beside the men’s room door. Stout metal legs raised its base an inch above the floor. “It’s easy to leave an envelope beneath it without attracting any notice, while tying a shoelace for instance. The problem is, contrary to popular belief, the platform is cleaned regularly.”
The men’s room was open, fortunately-unless the stench were taken into account; the ventilation grate looked to have been degrimed last in the ’70s. Assuming his appointed position at the sink, Charlie rinsed his hands and tried to breathe as seldom as possible. The spotty mirror gave him a view of an empty room in which the white tile walls and floors were grayed with filth and the ceiling tiles had greenish stalactites-of what, he didn’t want to guess.
Drummond entered, heading straight into the stall in order to place the vinyl pouch that had contained the Chevy Malibu owner’s manual and now held the crossword puzzle turned cipher.
“What if, for any of fifty reasons, this place gets shut down after we leave?” Charlie asked.
“The cutout either will have a key or some other idea,” Drummond said as he placed the pouch in a cavity behind a loose wall tile. “Speaking of things going wrong, you need to know that once the captain gets the note, he’ll have someone use the ten digits I added to the puzzle-the phone number of the Mykonos.”
“The diner on Bedford?”
“Right. If the trip’s a go, Stavros will flip a switch and light the neon waves of steam above the cup of coffee on the sign. We’ll be able to see it from Desherer’s. A help wanted flyer inside the door, on the other hand, means we need a new ride. But at the least, there will be handwritten instructions at the base of the flyer.”
That all this sounded reasonable to Charlie spoke to the way his thinking had adapted in a day. “So I guess we always had to get dinner at the Mykonos for work reasons?”
“No, we only went because Stavros was a friend of Tony’s. You didn’t like it?”
“Just not the food.”
“Sorry, I never thought about it one way or the other.”
“It’s not a big deal. It never killed me.”
“I probably wasn’t as attuned to that sort of thing as I might have been. That, at least, I can make up to you.”
“That’s okay-you don’t have to cook.” Charlie winced in recollection of the few times Drummond had tried.
“I know. I said ‘make up to you.’”
“What do you have in mind?”
Drummond exited the stall, thumbs-up-the drop was successfully loaded. “I was wondering if you would like a ski house in the Swiss Alps,” he said.
Charlie was delighted, probably as much as he ever had been. “Let’s find out.”
45
The chrome-banded facade of Desherer’s Sweet Shop was, in Charlie’s opinion, dazzling. Tonight was the first time he’d seen the rear of the building, which was essentially a pile of soot-blackened bricks. There were nicer tombs, he thought. Roomier ones too. Trailing Drummond into the alley required stooping and turning sideways to fit into a narrow, clammy passageway. Six steep steps, carpeted with moss and pungent with mildew, brought them down to a squat steel door. Drummond extended his fingers into one of the many dark crevices alongside it.
“I’m sort of surprised an actual spy’s safe house has a hide-a-key,” Charlie whispered. Neighbors slept above, street traffic was barely audible; the loudest sound was the clicking tread of a rat in a nearby alleyway.
“A retinal scanner, like the ones at the office, might have been a bit conspicuous here,” Drummond said.
Charlie joined in the search. When his fingers struck something slimy and jiggly, he yanked out his hand. An old rubber glove flopped out after it.
Drummond caught the glove. “Good work,” he said.
From the glove, he removed a key, then unlocked the door to the onetime storeroom, releasing a shaft of air redolent of fresh chocolate, bubble gum, and red licorice-a louvered wall was all that separated the back offices from the candy store. The aroma was enough to catapult anyone into the fondest childhood memories. As he followed Drummond in, Charlie’s memories were of standing outside Desherer’s big front window, drooling a puddle. Drummond meanwhile was across the street at the Mykonos Diner, collecting their take-out containers of dry meat loaf and boiled potatoes, or something even less exciting. Just making it inside Desherer’s now felt like a victory.
Hearing a car approach the front of the store, Drummond eased into a shadow and flattened against the side of a tall file cabinet. Charlie ducked beneath a window, his foot inadvertently sending a box of malted milk balls rattling across the floor.
The car drove up at a slow pace, on patrol, or on the prowl. High beams pierced the blinds that hung inside the store’s big front windows, making a display worthy of the Fourth of July out of the chrome counter and its myriad jars of colorful candies, and throwing huge shadows onto the walls and ceiling in the back storeroom.
“Them?” whispered Charlie, pressed against dusty floorboards.
“More likely just a routine police patrol.”
Whoever it was drove away. The store seemed blacker than before.
