Recoil (32 page)

The older girl was Sandra—fourteen, a bit on the plump side, ample of bosom: athletic and attractive but she would be matronly in ten years' time. She had a round face, almost cherubic, surrounded by a frizzy explosion of dark hair. Her sister Nora, twelve years old, was slender, pubescent, tall for her age. She wore her dark hair long and straight and it framed a piquant triangular face with extraordinarily large eyes.

There were always two men in the Mercedes that delivered and collected them.

The driver was a chauffeur who went by the name of Lloyd Belmont.

The bodyguard was Gregory Cestone, a large hard man whose face reminded Mathieson of a lunar landscape. It was a disquietingly immobile face that had been badly burned.

Belmont and Cestone in the Mercedes were due to appear in forty-five minutes. Roger shot his cuff over his watch. “Reckon I'll go over to Madison and use the little boy's room while there's time. You want to go first?”

“No, I'm all right. Pick up a pack of Life Savers or something, will you? I feel peckish.”

Roger walked away in the rain and disappeared around the corner.

It was stuffy in the car and Mathieson rolled the window down. A fine spray of rain drifted against his face. It came across the park off the Hudson estuary and carried the tang of sea salt.

If
we cart only bring this off
. He had set Monday as the target date because if Gregory Cestone didn't lead them to a connection by Friday evening it would still leave them the weekend to find another source. Right now Vasquez and Homer would be shadowing Cestone; they would drop the baton here at half past three; Mathieson and Roger would pick it up.

But the Mercedes was early.

In the side mirror he saw it come into the street from Madison. It drew up slightly behind him, stopping in front of the school; its horn tooted three times. In the intersection Mathieson saw Vasquez's brown Cadillac slide slowly by—it couldn't turn into the street because it would have had to squeeze past the double-parked Mercedes and that would have given Cestone and Belmont a close look at Vasquez.

Mathieson reached out as if to adjust the side mirror. It was the signal to Vasquez that he was picking up the relay. There was nothing else he could do. From that distance Vasquez would have no way of seeing there weren't two men in the Plymouth but it couldn't be helped.

He saw no sign of Roger on the sidewalk.

The two girls came down the steps. Cestone held the rear door open for them. Sandra carried an umbrella; she folded it as they got into the car. Cestone got back into the car and Belmont moved the Mercedes away.

It came past at a crawl and when it was dead abreast Cestone abruptly looked point-blank into Mathieson's face.

Mathieson felt the stab of panic. He bluffed: looked at his watch, looked in the rearview mirror, made a face as if awaiting a date who hadn't shown up on time. He was sure it wasn't convincing.

The Mercedes rolled on. Inside it Cestone twisted his face close to the rain-mottled window, staring back at Mathieson.

It dwindled toward the far corner. Mathieson turned the key and started the engine. He began to back up. Then he saw Roger running forward along the curb. Roger dived into the car grinning.

Up ahead the Mercedes was at the end of the block waiting for the signal to change.

Mathieson could no longer see Cestone's rigid face. Was he looking back past the girls through the rear window? The rain made it impossible to tell. Had he seen Roger get into the car or had he turned to face front by then?

“Maybe we blew it,” Mathieson said.

“Hell, old horse, take the chance. Reckon we got nothing to lose.”

When the signal changed the Mercedes made the left into Fifth Avenue and Mathieson let it go out of sight before he pulled away from the hydrant; the tires squealed and he turned left through the light just as it changed.

At the far end of the block the staggered signal went green and the cars began to surge away but he was only half a block behind the Mercedes.

“This could backfire.”

Roger said, “Supposin' we just see what happens.”

“If there's any talking I'll do it. You hide behind your beard and keep your mouth shut.”

“Yes sir, General sir.”

“Don't make a joke out of it, Roger.”

“Just hankering for a gun in my pocket about now.”

“Just as well you haven't got one—you won't be tempted to wave it around.” There was no point carrying guns around New York; if you were caught with one in your pocket it could cost you ten years.

The cars knotted up, crowding past the snag of buses in front of the Metropolitan Museum; afterward it was an easy run in light traffic down into the lower Sixties and Mathieson let the Mercedes stretch its lead to three blocks. A bus arrogantly shouldered in front of him; for a moment he lost sight of the quarry. He crowded a small car aside and went out past the bus in time to see the Mercedes swing east on Fifty-sixth.

“Taking the girls home early? Why?”

He squirted between taxis and looked for openings but the light went red at Fifty-seventh and he had to wait it out.

“Goddamn it.” Homer wouldn't have got caught that way.

But he kept going when the traffic began to move; he pried through the pedestrians at the turn and had a glimpse of the Mercedes two blocks away, snarled in crosstown traffic, its right-hand light flashing for a turn into Park Avenue.

“Sure enough,” Roger said, “taking them home.”

By the time Mathieson inched through the intersection the Mercedes had pulled up, the doorman had it open and Cestone was out on the curb. A group of adolescent girls converged on the canopied doorway and Cestone produced a small gift-wrapped box from his pocket and handed it to Nora Pastor: The girl beamed up at Cestone and went running inside with her sister and the five or six friends. Mathieson thought back, printed the dossier on the screen of his mind:
Nora Pastor, b. 23 Oct. 1963, NYC (Women's Hosp), dtr. Frank & Carola Pastor
.

It was her birthday—that explained it.

The traffic carried them abreast the Mercedes. In the rain they couldn't see much; Cestone was getting back into the car. The flow pushed Mathieson on by.

Behind them the Mercedes pulled out into the avenue. “What now?” If he pulled over immediately and let it go by they'd certainly notice.

Obligingly the Mercedes went over to the far lane and its signal-flasher started up a block and a half short of the next available left turn at Fifty-second; Mathieson had time to get there first and swing into the pass between the islands. The light was with them and they got across into the side street while the Mercedes was still bottled in Park Avenue.

He went down half the length of the block and pulled up ahead of a heavy double-parked truck; he backed up until he was nearly against its front bumper. Then he waited, half hidden there. He switched off the wipers.

The Mercedes was the first car through and it went by at a good clip. Roger said, “Go.” Four cars followed it and Mathieson pulled out behind them. The Mercedes left him behind at the Lexington Avenue light but he made it up at Third. He kept the four cars between them. One of them turned south at Second Avenue; the others trailed the Mercedes east as far as First Avenue where everything turned left. Within a few blocks of here they had waylaid George Ramiro a few nights ago. Now he followed the Mercedes uptown and it coasted unhurriedly with the traffic and he had no difficulty keeping his position half concealed in the stop-and-go East Side tangle.

Roger said, “Take it easy now. Don't spook 'em.”

At Ninety-sixth Street it went out into the FDR Drive and they trailed it north in a coagulation of traffic toward the Triboro Bridge. Roger said, “Maybe you ought to tell me one more time where this is supposed to get us.”

“If we get the stuff from Cestone's connection then Pastor will know it's the real thing—not a bluff.”

“You can buy the real thing on any street corner around here. I hear tell it comes in brand-name packages these days.”

The Mercedes led them across the Triboro and down the Grand Central Parkway. Heading for what? An airport?

But it went right past La Guardia and left the parkway at Northern Boulevard. He had a harder time keeping up now because he didn't know this section. Fortunately the Mercedes was in no hurry.

Roger said mildly, “Those two boys ain't hardly wet behind the ears no more, old horse.”

“I know.” He took Roger's meaning: By now Belmont and Cestone probably knew they were being followed.

“Wild-goose chase maybe,” Roger said; “They could be just funnin' with us.”

“They'll want to find out who we are and what we're up to. Otherwise they'd have ditched us before this.”

“Meanin'?”

“Meaning they won't just stop and blaze away at us. They'll want to ask questions.”

“Figure we got answers that'll satisfy them?”

“Well I hope so, Roger, because if we don't we could be in a little trouble.”

“That's real comforting.”

The quarry led them into a dreary endless commerce of used-car lots and franchise service shops, fast-food diners and cut-rate haberdasheries. Bayside, Queens.

A left turn at—what? He searched for the street sign: They'd need to know their way back.

Bell Boulevard. The sign was half hidden. He followed along, two blocks behind the squat gray limousine. They were twenty miles from midtown Manhattan; the area looked like the broken-down hub of an upstate industrial town. A corner of his mind was bemused by the realization that this was still New York City—a part that didn't exist outside the minds of the people who inhabited it.

It was nearly four o'clock. The rain was intractable. The wipers batted noisily, keeping tempo to the chug of his pulse.

Roger said, “If push comes to shove, you distract 'em and I'll rush 'em.”

“Other way around, Roger. It's my party.”

Fat women browsed under the awnings of open-front vegetable shops, waving flies off the fruit, squeezing things experimentally.

“You hear me?”

“All right, old horse, I hear you.”

Just ahead of them a bright yellow car pulled out of a parking space. He almost collided with it. His tires skidded on the oil-wet paving. The car, something from a drag strip, made an ear-shattering roar and slithered wildly away, spewing a wake that sheeted across Mathieson's windshield and blinded him. Roger grunted: “Weasel.”

When the wipers cleared it away he had a glimpse of the Mercedes turning right.

The yellow racer veered away, leaving a scalloped set of tracks in the wet. Mathieson slowed when he approached the intersection where the Mercedes had turned. A warehouse on the near corner; an abandoned five-and-ten on the other, its windows exed with the white paint of condemnation. He made the turn.

Right ahead of him the street bent out of sight around a forty-five-degree turn.

He accelerated a little. This might be what they had been waiting for.

There was no curb: The street skirted close by a heavy brick corner of the looming warehouse. He had to twist the wheel hard through the abruptly narrowing gap.

The paving was chuckholed and muddy. In front of him the street petered out: a morass and a cul-de-sac against a high mesh fence. Rain coursed down past the fence—he had a vague gray-green impression of earth falling away: an old embankment, a railroad cut or canal or highway.

There was no sign of the Mercedes.

Roger had time to say, “Hoo boy. They've done this before, old horse—they had this set up.”

Because there must have been a
Dead End
sign at the corner back there and they must have had it removed.

Behind him in the mirror as he stopped the car he saw the gray bulk of the Mercedes ooze out of an opening in the brick wall and position itself crosswise in the neck of the alley. Like a stopper, bottling them in.

“Boxed like sheep,” Roger said contemptuously. “Shee-yit.”

Cestone and Belmont came walking forward in the rain.

He looked at Roger. Roger lifted his eyebrows. “Might as well, old horse.”

They got out of the car to meet it.

2

Bleakly he watched the gun in Belmont's hand. Cestone looked them up and down, nothing in his face moving except his eyes. Cestone had his hatless head lowered against the rain and his hands in his coat pockets.

The two men stopped three paces away. Roger edged away from Mathieson. He saw Belmont's lip twitch—in amusement? Belmont kept wiping water off his forehead with his free hand.

Cestone never touched his face. Possibly the nerves were gone.

“What you people want with us?” Cestone's voice was petulant and high-pitched. Behind him the Mercedes blocked the entire width of the only exit. Its wipers flapped steadily.

“I want to talk to you,” Mathieson said.

“Me? I don't know you, man. Who are you? What you want then?” Cestone's speech had curious rhythms: It was almost Jamaican.

“A little business.”

“You had to shadow us all afternoon? Why don't you just come to me and say, Gregory, I want to talk a little business? Why don't you just do that?”

“I'm doing it now,” Mathieson pointed out.

“What kind of business, man?”

“We want to make a connection.”

Cestone uttered a sound that might have been a laugh. It chilled Mathieson because the face displayed nothing at all.

“What kind of stupid cops are you?”

“No cops.” Mathieson held both hands out from his sides, palms out. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Roger take his hands out of his pockets, empty.

“No cops. Look, we figured we'd follow you to your man and make our own connection with him afterward. That's all. We're from out of town, see? Your name's the only name we know.”