Cell: A Novel (7 page)

“Just take a gander out there,” he said, gesturing to Mr. Ricardi’s little window, which looked out on Essex Street. Essex was crowded with abandoned cars. There was also at least one body, that of a young woman in jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt. She lay facedown on the sidewalk, both arms outstretched, as if she had died trying to swim, varitek, her sweatshirt proclaimed. “Do you think you’re going to drive your car? If you do, you better think again.”

“He’s right,” Mr. Ricardi said. He was sitting behind his desk with his arms once more folded across his narrow chest, a study in gloom. “You’re in the Tamworth Street Parking Garage. I doubt if you’d even succeed in securing your keys.”

Clay, who had already given his car up as a lost cause, opened his mouth to say he wasn’t planning to drive (at least to start with), when another thump came from overhead, this one heavy enough to make the ceiling shiver. It was accompanied by the faint but distinctive shiver-jingle of breaking glass. Alice Maxwell, who was sitting in the chair across the desk from Mr. Ricardi, looked up nervously and then seemed to shrink further into herself.

“What’s up there?” Tom asked.

“It’s the Iroquois Room directly overhead,” Mr. Ricardi replied. “The largest of our three meeting rooms, and where we keep all of our supplies—chairs, tables, audiovisual equipment.” He paused. “And, although we have no restaurant, we arrange for buffets or cocktail parties, if clients request such service. That last thump…”

He didn’t finish. As far as Clay was concerned, he didn’t need to. That last thump had been a trolley stacked high with glassware being upended on the floor of the Iroquois Room, where numerous other trolleys and tables had already been tipped over by some madman who was rampaging back and forth up there. Buzzing around on the second floor like a bug trapped between the window and the screen, something without the wit to find a way out, something that could only run and break, run and break.

Alice spoke up for the first time in nearly half an hour, and without prompting for the first time since they’d met her. “You said something about someone named Doris.”

“Doris Gutierrez.” Mr. Ricardi was nodding. “The head housekeeper. Excellent employee. Probably my best. She was on three, the last time I heard from her.”

“Did she have—?” Alice wouldn’t say it. Instead she made a gesture that had become almost as familiar to Clay as the index finger across the lips indicating
Shh.
Alice put her right hand to the side of her face with the thumb close to her ear and the pinkie in front of her mouth.

“No,” Mr. Ricardi said, almost primly. “Employees have to leave them in their lockers while they’re on the job. One violation gets them a reprimand. Two and they can be fired. I tell them this when they’re taken on.” He lifted one thin shoulder in a half-shrug. “It’s management’s policy, not mine.”

“Would she have gone down to the second floor to investigate those sounds?” Alice asked.

“Possibly,” Mr. Ricardi said. “I have no way of knowing. I only know that I haven’t heard from her since she reported the wastebasket fire out, and she hasn’t answered her pages. I paged her twice.”

Clay didn’t want to say
You see, it isn’t safe here, either
right out loud, so he looked past Alice at Tom, trying to give him the basic idea with his eyes.

Tom said, “How many people would you say are still upstairs?”

“I have no way of knowing.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Not many. As far as the housekeeping staff goes, probably just Doris. The day crew leaves at three, and the night crew doesn’t come on until six.” Mr. Ricardi pressed his lips tightly together. “It’s an economy gesture. One cannot say
measure
because it doesn’t work. As for guests…”

He considered.

“Afternoon is a slack time for us, very slack. Last night’s guests have all checked out, of course—checkout time at the Atlantic Inn is noon—and tonight’s guests wouldn’t begin checking in until four o’clock or so, on an ordinary afternoon. Which this most definitely is not. Guests staying several days are usually here on business. As I assume
you
were, Mr. Riddle.”

Clay nodded without bothering to correct Ricardi on his name.

“At midafternoon, businesspeople are usually out doing whatever it was that brought them to Boston. So you see, we have the place almost to ourselves.”

As if to contradict this, there came another thump from above them, more shattering glass, and a faint feral growl. They all looked up.

“Clay, listen,” Tom said. “If the guy up there finds the stairs… I don’t know if these people are capable of thought, but—”

“Judging by what we saw on the street,” Clay said, “even calling them people might be wrong. I’ve got an idea that guy up there is more like a bug trapped between a window and a screen. A bug trapped like that might get out—if it found a hole—and the guy up there might find the stairs, but if he does, I think it’ll be by accident.”

“And when he gets down and finds the door to the lobby blocked, he’ll use the fire-door to the alley,” Mr. Ricardi said with what was, for him, eagerness. “We’ll hear the alarm—it’s rigged to ring when anyone pushes the bar—and we’ll know he’s gone. One less nut to worry about.”

Somewhere south of them something big blew up, and they all cringed. Clay supposed he now knew what living in Beirut during the 1980s had been like.

“I’m trying to make a point here,” he said patiently.

“I don’t think so,” Tom said. “You’re going anyway, because you’re worried about your wife and son. You’re trying to persuade us because you want company.”

Clay blew out a frustrated breath. “Sure I want company, but that’s not why I’m trying to talk you into coming. The smell of smoke’s stronger, but when’s the last time you heard a siren?”

None of them replied.

“Me either,” Clay said. “I don’t think things are going to get better in Boston, not for a while. They’re going to get worse. If it
was
the cell phones—”

“She tried to leave a message for Dad,” Alice said. She spoke rapidly, as if wanting to make sure she got all the words out before the memory flew away. “She just wanted to make sure he’d pick up the dry cleaning because she needed her yellow wool dress for her committee meeting and I needed my extra uni for the away game on Saturday. This was in the cab. And then we crashed!
She choked the man and she bit the man and his turban fell off and there was blood on the side of his face and we crashed!”

Alice looked around at their three staring faces, then put her own face in her hands and began to sob. Tom moved to comfort her, but Mr. Ricardi surprised Clay by coming around his desk and putting one pipestemmy arm around the girl before Tom could get to her. “There-there,” he said. “I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding, young lady.”

She looked up at him, her eyes wide and wild.
“Misunderstanding?”
She indicated the dried bib of blood on the front of her dress. “Does this look like a
misunderstanding?
I used the karate from the self-defense classes I took in junior high. I used karate on my own mother! I broke her nose, I think… I’m
sure
. . .” Alice shook her head rapidly, her hair flying. “And still, if I hadn’t been able to reach behind me and get the door open…”

“She would have killed you,” Clay said flatly.

“She would have killed me,” Alice agreed in a whisper. “She didn’t know who I was. My own mother.” She looked from Clay to Tom. “It was the cell phones,” she said in that same whisper. “It was the cell phones, all right.”

14

“So how many of the damn things are there in Boston?” Clay asked. “What’s the market penetration?”

“Given the large numbers of college students, I’d say it’s got to be huge,” Mr. Ricardi replied. He had resumed his seat behind his desk, and now he looked a little more animated. Comforting the girl might have done it, or perhaps it was being asked a business-oriented question. “Although it goes much further than affluent young people, of course. I read an article in
Inc.
only a month or two ago that claimed there’s now as many cell phones in mainland China as there are people in America. Can you imagine?”

Clay didn’t want to imagine.

“All right.” Tom was nodding reluctantly. “I see where you’re going with this. Someone—some terrorist outfit—rigs the cell phone signals somehow. If you make a call or take one, you get some kind of a… what?… some kind of a subliminal message, I guess… that makes you crazy. Sounds like science fiction, but I suppose fifteen or twenty years ago, cell phones as they now exist would have seemed like science fiction to most people.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s something like that,” Clay said. “You can get enough of it to screw you up righteously if you even
overhear
a call.” He was thinking of Pixie Dark. “But the insidious thing is that when people see things going wrong all around them—”

“Their first impulse is to reach for their cell phones and try to find out what’s causing it,” Tom said.

“Yeah,” Clay said. “I saw people doing it.”

Tom looked at him bleakly. “So did I.”

“What all this has to do with you leaving the safety of the hotel, especially with dark coming on, I don’t know,” Mr. Ricardi said.

As if in answer, there came another explosion. It was followed by half a dozen more, marching off to the southeast like the diminishing footsteps of a giant. From above them came another thud, and a faint cry of rage.

“I don’t think the crazy ones will have the brains to leave the city any more than that guy up there can find his way to the stairs,” Clay said.

For a moment he thought the look on Tom’s face was shock, and then he realized it was something else. Amazement, maybe. And dawning hope. “Oh, Christ,” he said, and actually slapped the side of his face with one hand.
“They
won’t leave. I never thought of that.”

“There might be something else,” Alice said. She was biting her lip and looking down at her hands, which were working together in a restless knot. She forced herself to look up at Clay. “It might actually be
safer
to go after dark.”

“Why’s that, Alice?”

“If they can’t see you—if you can get behind something, if you can hide—they forget about you almost right away.”

“What makes you think that, honey?” Tom asked.

“Because I hid from the man who was chasing me,” she said in a low voice. “The guy in the yellow shirt. This was just before I saw you. I hid in an alley. Behind one of those Dumpster thingies? I was scared, because I thought there might not be any way back out if he came in after me, but it was all I could think of to do. I saw him standing at the mouth of the alley, looking around,
walking
around and around—walking the worry-circle, my grampa would say—and at first I thought he was playing with me, you know? Because he
had
to’ve seen me go into the alley, I was only a few feet ahead of him… just a few feet… almost close enough to grab…” Alice began to tremble. “But once I was in there, it was like… I dunno…”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Tom said. “But if he was that close, why did you stop running?”

“Because I couldn’t anymore,” Alice said. “I just couldn’t. My legs were like rubber, and I felt like I was going to shake myself apart from the inside. But it turned out I didn’t have to run, anyway. He walked the worry-circle a few more times, muttering that crazy talk, and then just walked off. I could hardly believe it. I thought he had to be trying to fake me out… but at the same time I knew he was too crazy for anything like that.” She glanced briefly at Clay, then back down at her hands again. “My problem was running into him again. I should have stuck with you guys the first time. I can be pretty stupid sometimes.”

“You were sca—” Clay began, and then the biggest explosion yet came from somewhere east of them, a deafening
KER-WHAM!
that made them all duck and cover their ears. They heard the window in the lobby shatter.

“My…
God,
” Mr. Ricardi said. His wide eyes underneath that bald head made him look to Clay like Little Orphan Annie’s mentor, Daddy Warbucks. “That might have been the new Shell superstation they put in over on Kneeland. The one all the taxis and the Duck Boats use. It was the right direction.”

Clay had no idea if Ricardi was right, he couldn’t smell burning gasoline (at least not yet), but his visually trained mind’s eye could see a triangle of city concrete now burning like a propane torch in the latening day.

“Can a modern city burn?” he asked Tom. “One made mostly of concrete and metal and glass? Could it burn the way Chicago did after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern?”

“That lantern-kicking business was nothing but an urban legend,” Alice said. She was rubbing the back of her neck as if she were getting a bad headache. “Mrs. Myers said so, in American History.”

“Sure it could,” Tom said. “Look what happened to the World Trade Center, after those airplanes hit it.”

“Airplanes full of jet fuel,” Mr. Ricardi said pointedly.

As if the bald desk clerk had conjured it, the smell of burning gasoline began to come to them, wafting through the shattered lobby windows and sliding beneath the door to the inner office like bad mojo.

“I guess you were on the nose about that Shell station,” Tom remarked.

Mr. Ricardi went to the door between his office and the lobby. He unlocked it and opened it. What Clay could see of the lobby beyond already looked deserted and gloomy and somehow irrelevant. Mr. Ricardi sniffed audibly, then closed the door and locked it again. “Fainter already,” he said.

“Wishful thinking,” Clay said. “Either that or your nose is getting used to the aroma.”

“I think he might be right,” Tom said. “That’s a good west wind out there—by which I mean the air’s moving toward the ocean—and if what we just heard was that new station they put in on the corner of Kneeland and Washington, by the New England Medical Center—”

“That’s the one, all right,” Mr. Ricardi said. His face registered glum satisfaction. “Oh, the protests! The smart money fixed
that,
believe you m—”