Shadow Dancers (37 page)

On the little entryway beneath the copper overhang, she paused to fish the keys out of her rope bag, still humming in tune with some lively air she heard through the earphones of her Walkman. Plucking the key out between two bony fingers, she squinted an eye, then stooped to find the keyhole. Going through her head just then was an enticing vision of the pot of coffee she intended to put up the moment she got in.

In her bag, along with the assorted siftings and debris of the night’s forage, were a couple of rolls and some crusts of bread she’d scavenged from Zaro’s inside the terminal. She knew a woman there, an old black lady, who always saved her some leftovers.

Just as the door squealed open on its hinges, a blast of wind at her back shoved her forward into the dark and a pair of hands closed round her throat. She felt herself being dragged headlong into the house, the tips of her shoes scuffing over the bare floors, the wires from her Walkman tangled around her neck and head. The wheels of the shopping cart squealed madly as it broke from her grip and caromed across the floor, banging into something just ahead and overturning its contents.

As she struggled for air, her arms flailed wildly against the black, heaving shape that dragged and kicked her and sprawled all over her as she tried to fight back. The darkness had gotten darker. Nearly strangled by the viselike grip round her throat, the inside of her head felt inflated, as though engorged with trapped blood and about to explode.

Just as she thought she would lose consciousness, a blow to the pit of her stomach emptied her lungs. A bolus of half-digested food shot into her mouth and geysered out between her lips, spreading over her chin and clothes as she crumpled into a heap on the floor.

A shaft of light suddenly flooded the room.

“Bitch!” Warren stood above her, straddling her, kicking her arms and legs. “Bitch, Bitch!”

She tried to protect her head from the hard tip of his boot. “Lay off! Lay off!” she screamed, flailing her arms feebly in the air before her.

He stooped down and wound the wire of the Walkman tight around her throat. “Bitch. I oughta squash you.”

“Lay off. I can’t breathe.”

“Where the hell is it? What the hell did you do with it?”

“With what?” A bubble of saliva swelled at her lip.

“Don’t give me that shit. You know what.” With one hand he lifted her head by the neck and kept banging it up and down on the floor. “Come on! Give! You’re lucky I don’t cut your fucking head off.”

She tried to answer but he’d put his foot down on her windpipe and in that fashion had pinned her squirming to the floor. “Where’s what?” she gasped.

“My stash. My fucking goods upstairs. You know what I mean.” He clenched his fist and thrust it in her face. “If you sold that stuff …”

By then her face had purpled and she was gagging.

When she could no longer talk, she gestured with her hands. The message got through and he lifted his boot, holding it an inch or so above her throat.

“Downstairs,” she gasped, wiping vomit from her lips with the back of her hand. “The tunnel.”

“Where in the tunnel?”

“The barrel. The barrel.”

“Which barrel, for Chrissake?”

“The small one.”

He gripped her by the throat again and shook her hard. “It better be there.” His eyes flashed at her, questions fluttering in and out of them. “What the hell you think you’re doing, taking my stuff? Goddamn you — don’t you ever …” The fist rose again, threatening to come down.

She rolled frantically away from him across the floor. He followed quickly, still kicking her as she went.

“Had to hide it.” Her eyes, watching his boot tips, rolled in her head. “Had to hide it. Police all over the place. Had to hide it. Hide your clothes.”

“Police were up there?” His fist went limp in the air. “In my room?”

“Searched the place,” Suki panted. She watched fear creep back into his eyes and seized the offensive. “Had to hide all your stuff. Lucky I was here. If they’d found it …”

She could see fright and suspicion in his eyes and it pleased her. She wiped her befouled chin with the back of her sleeve. “Crazy fool. You nearly killed me.”

For a moment he appeared contrite and she thought she had him back under her thumb. But in the next moment, he was swaggering again, brandishing the fist beneath her nose. “From now on, there’ll be some changes here.”

“Changes?”

“I’m in charge now. I run things in this house.”

“Sure.” Suki’s eyes narrowed. “Sure, sonny. Sure.”

“I don’t care about no fucking police. Don’t you ever touch my stuff again. I don’t even want you in that room again. You stay outta that room now. Hear? Stinking old bitch.”

He turned and slouched off toward the basement.

After he’d left, she lay there for a time on the floor, recovering her breath. Her mind was whirling. She could hear him moving through the cellar below her, kicking crates and boxes aside. The noise echoed hollowly in the space beneath the floor. Though she was not cold, she started to shake. Shortly, the shaking grew violent and uncontrollable until she was virtually convulsed with it. When at last she tried to rise from the floor, her legs buckled like wax beneath her.

It was several hours later on upper Fifth Avenue. In the cold winter light of dying afternoon, the sun still hung fiery in the west, while the pale white disc of the moon was already visible in the east. The frozen air had the quality of clarity so typical of winter light.

Across the way from 860 Fifth, Ferris Koops stood, hunched up in his trenchcoat and shivering, but scarcely aware that he was cold. The sunlight slanting sharply west had set the facade of the building ablaze with reflected light. The young man’s eyes were riveted to a line of windows on the fourteenth floor. He watched them, transfixed with an odd, rather vacant, smile. At that moment in the corner window of 860 he imagined he saw the face of a small boy peering out toward the park.

It brought him back nearly sixteen years and filled him with some vague, half-forgotten sorrow. He was there himself in the window now, gazing out at the encroaching twilight.

Ferris had not been to 860 for weeks. The need, the strong craving had not been upon him until sometime late that afternoon, when he felt suddenly impelled to go back there. This need came to him in the form of a terrible certainty that whatever he’d had there, whatever had been precious to him for so long, had all been suddenly withdrawn. The idea of such a loss filled him with panic.

When at last he reached there, late in the afternoon, running, half-stumbling most of the way, anticipating the worst, what a relief to find that everything was all still there, just as he’d left it weeks before. Nothing had changed — the building, its proud facade, the line of windows on the fourteenth floor, and especially the little corner window. It was all still there.

He felt better at once. He almost laughed aloud. He felt his old self again. But hadn’t things always been that way? Whenever he’d had this feeling before, this sensation of impending loss, estrangement, dissociation from himself, there would be the panic until he could struggle and battle his way back to himself. One moment he was Ferris, and the next he was not anyone. He was a void. He was air drifting on a current, whatever grip he’d had on reality grown even more tenuous.

Then, when he’d return there and stand outside, across the way from 860, it would all come back to him again with that reassuring rush of warmth. He’d gaze up at the corner window and see the face, his own haunted elfin face peering down at him, and everything would be all right.

And so it was that afternoon. Nothing had changed. Everything was still the same. Everything in its own cozy, familiar groove. Everything, that is, except one small detail. Ferris had noticed it at once. The old doorman (he didn’t know his name, but they’d always seemed to acknowledge each other’s presence) was gone. Ferris didn’t know the man but felt some strange, unaccountable affinity with him. There’d been something jolly about the corpulent figure brightly clad, swelling importantly in green and scarlet at the front doors. For Ferris, it brought back sad, sweet memories of Christmases past. He had no way of knowing that the old doorman had recently retired. Now with the fellow gone, Ferris experienced a keen sense of personal loss.

Ferris was upset. But long before he’d come there that day, he’d been upset. He’d read in the newspapers that the police had reason to believe that the man, the one they called the Shadow Dancer, was back again in New York.

Ferris had read about this early in the day, with a sinking sense of impending doom. Ever since this man had made his way to Ferris’s front door, Ferris had felt a deepening sense of communion with him. For each individual the Dancer had slain, Ferris felt guilt and shame, as if in some way he might have been able to prevent it. As vile and repugnant as the man and all of his activities were to Ferris, still he couldn’t deny the inescapable attraction this monster held for him.

In his mind, Ferris was convinced that he was the only person who knew the true identity of the Dancer. Certainly he’d been the only one canny enough to have tracked the fellow to his lair. Not only that, but hadn’t he stood guard over the place at the lower tip of Manhattan in an attempt to prevent further senseless slaying? And what was the reward for all of his good work? The police had picked him up and attempted to charge him as a suspect in these ghastly murders. He, Ferris, who would never knowingly hurt a fly. What a god-awful mess he’d made of things.

And now, the terrible irony of it was that he couldn’t even tell the police all that he knew about the man who lived in the funny old house on Bridge Street. For one thing, his lawyers forbade him to speak with the police under any circumstances. More damaging, he had no actual proof, other than his own deep convictions, that the man who lived on Bridge Street and the man they called the Dancer were one and the same. And of that, he could say nothing.

Silence then, at least for the time being. Silence, but not inaction. He had knowledge in his hands. Knowledge available to no one else. In that sense, he had power. Power and responsibility. If this man was truly back in New York, by merely keeping him under surveillance, without attracting attention to himself this time, Ferris might once again prevent further bloodshed.

Ferris’s heart beat faster. There was a kind of exhilaration, as if he’d been summoned to some exalted mission. As the shadows gathered about 860 Fifth and dusk descended, the lights from the building began to glow on the street. With a final nod to the small, haunted face in the fourteenth-story window, Ferris turned on his heel and, with a quick, urgent stride, started home.

FROM THE SEVENTIETH FLOOR OF THE NEW
United Mercantile Building, Manhattan looked serene in the cold December light. Half completed, it occupied the entire southeast corner of 61st and Madison.

At that elevation there was no sound of traffic, no suggestion of the teeming, turbulent waves of life below. If you looked down (that is, if it didn’t bother you), what you saw was a kind of grid over which innumberable tiny specks swarmed like some primitive, unicellular life in a miscroscopic field.

In the dazzling clarity of winter light the skies were a cloudless, nearly electric blue, the visibility perfect. Off to the west lay Passaic, and to the north the Yonkers skyline seemed but a stone’s throw away.

Down on the street the temperatures hovered just above the freezing mark. But high up on the beams and girders of the United Mercantile, the wind chill produced by gusts of up to twenty miles per hour buffeting through the skeletal substructure made it feel close to zero.

The men working up at that elevation — welders, masons, pipefitters, plasterers, electricians — were accustomed to those conditions. Wrapped in thermal underwear, innumerable sweaters, hooded parkas, and gloves, they moved about, ponderous in their wrappings, like some ancient druidic sect celebrating mysterious rites. Silent, they scarcely acknowledged each other. The howling wind made all but the most primitive communication virtually impossible.

It was one hour to quitting time. Aside from the punishing conditions up at that elevation, the men laboring on the site worked particularly hard and fast. At five o’clock there would be a topping-out party to celebrate their passing the three-quarter mark.

All that afternoon they’d watched deliveries of cases of scotch and imported beer, pots of steaming meatballs and sausages, and platters of cold cuts arriving by the truckload. Below, at that moment, on the sixtieth-floor level, they were setting it all out on trestle tables in an area protected by a large tarpaulin that wrapped around two sides of the building and hung down nearly ten stories.

Kneeling down, Michael Mancuso leaned out over a huge corner beam and sent a shower of sparks spraying skyward from his welding gun, neatly sealing the seam between two girders together. More than the topping-out party, he had an even more pressing reason to work fast. Janine had gone to the doctor that afternoon. Her period was nearly five weeks overdue. She’d been on the pill, of course, but that was not entirely foolproof. She’d gone to the doctor that day for a more final determination.

They were still not married. That was scheduled for the week of Christmas. But if, as they suspected, she was pregnant, they would want to move their date up. That was for Mickey’s parents and appearance’ sake. Janine had no parents to mollify.

Working mostly by himself (his partner had been out with the flu for the past week), he’d accomplished a great deal that day. Several rapid bursts from his gun sent a shower of sparks like a huge orange peony blooming gaily all about him. Detecting a seam between two girders he’d missed, he leaned out somewhat farther, splayed nearly flat on several planks that served as a platform between beams.

Working intently to close the seam, the upper half of his torso almost inverted from the edge of the platform, he scarcely noticed the heavy, clunky pair of workman s boots that had planted themselves firmly on the platform in the vicinity of his elbow. Imagining it to be someone attending to some other task nearby, he went on with his work. It had not occurred to him that the boots, which he saw from the curious perspective beneath his arms, never moved. They simply remained there with an odd stolidity, covered with plaster dust.