Alan Glynn 5 страница

I was going to take a taxi from here and loop around for a bit, but I was too close to home, and too tired – and I honestly didn’t believe at this point that I had been followed – so I just gave in, dropped below Fourteenth Street and walked the remaining few blocks to my building.

BACK IN MY APARTMENT, I printed out the notes and rough draft of the introduction I’d written for the book. I sat down on the couch to read through them – to check again that I hadn’t been imagining it all – but I was so exhausted that I fell asleep almost at once.

I woke up a few hours later with a crick in my neck. It was dark outside. There were loose pages everywhere – in my lap, on the couch, spread out on the floor around my feet. I rubbed my eyes, gathered the pages up and started reading them. It only took a couple of minutes to see that I hadn’t been imagining anything. In fact, I was going to be sending this material to Mark Sutton at K & D the next morning, just to remind him that I was still doing the project.

And after that, after I’d read all of the notes, what then? I tried to keep busy by sorting through the papers on my desk, but I couldn’t settle down to it – and besides, I’d already done a perfectly good job of sorting through the papers on my desk the previous night. What I had to do – and clearly there was no point in pretending I could avoid it, or even put it off – was go back to Linden Tower and pick up the envelope. I was fairly apprehensive at the prospect, so I started thinking about some form of disguise – but what?

I went into the bathroom, took a shower and shaved. I found some gel and worked it into my hair for a while, flattening it and forcing it straight back. Then I searched through the closet in my bedroom for something unusual to wear. I had one suit, a plain grey affair, which I hadn’t worn in about two years. I also took out a light grey shirt, a black tie and black brogues. I laid them all on the bed. The only problem I could see with the suit was that the trousers mightn’t fit me any more – but I managed to squeeze into them, and then into the shirt. After I’d done up the tie and put on the shoes, I stood and inspected myself in front of the mirror. I looked ridiculous – like some overfed wiseguy who’s been too busy eating linguine and clipping people to update his wardrobe – but it was going to have to do. I didn’t look like me, and that was the general idea.

I found an old briefcase that I sometimes used for work and decided to take it with me, but passed on a pair of black leather gloves that I came across on a shelf in the closet. I checked myself one more time in the mirror by the door, and left.

Down on the street, there were no cabs in sight, so I walked over to First Avenue, praying that no one I knew would see me. I got a cab after a couple of minutes and started in on the journey uptown for the second time that day. But everything about it was different – it was dark now and the city was lit up, I was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase in my lap. It was the same route, the same trip, but it seemed to be taking place in an alternative universe, one where I felt unsure of who I was and what I was doing.

We arrived at Linden Tower.

Swinging my briefcase, I walked briskly into the lobby area, which was even busier than it had been earlier on. I skirted around two women carrying brown-paper grocery bags and went over to the elevators. I stood waiting among a group of about twelve or fifteen people, but I was too self-conscious to really look at any of them closely. If I was walking into anything here, a trap or an ambush, then that’s just what was going to happen – I would walk right into it.

On the way up in the elevator, I could feel the rate of my pulse increasing. I had pressed the button for the twenty-fifth floor, intending to take the stairs back down to the nineteenth. I was also hoping that after a certain point I might be left alone in the elevator car, but it wasn’t to happen. When we arrived at the twenty-fifth floor there were still six people left and I found myself getting out behind three of them. Two went to the left and the third one, a middle-aged guy in a suit, went to the right. I walked behind him for a few steps and willed him to go straight on, willed him not to turn the corner.

But he did turn the corner, so I stopped and put my briefcase down. I took out my wallet and made a show of going through it, as though I were looking for something. I waited a moment or two, then picked up my briefcase again. I walked on and turned the corner. The corridor was empty and I breathed a sigh of relief.

But almost immediately – behind me – I heard elevator doors opening again, and someone laughing. I walked faster, eventually breaking into a run, and just as I was going through the metal door that led to the emergency stairs, I looked back and caught a glimpse of two people appearing at the other end of the corridor.

Hoping I hadn’t been seen, I stood still for a few seconds and tried to catch my breath. When I felt sufficiently composed, I started walking down the cold, grey stairs, taking them two at a time. On the landing of the twenty-second floor I heard voices coming from a couple of flights below me – or thought I heard voices – so I slowed my pace a little. But when I heard nothing else, I picked up speed again.

At the nineteenth floor I stopped and put my briefcase down on the concrete. I stood looking at the stack of unmarked cardboard boxes in the alcove.

I didn’t have to do this. I could just walk out of the building right now and forget the whole thing – leave this little package for someone else to find. If I did go ahead with it, on the other hand, nothing in my life would ever be the same again. I knew that for sure.

I took a deep breath and reached in behind the cardboard boxes. I pulled out the plastic A & P shopping bag. I checked that the envelope was still inside it and that the stuff was still inside the envelope. I then put the plastic bag into the briefcase.

I turned around and started walking down the stairs.

When I got to the eleventh floor, I decided it was probably safe enough to go out and take an elevator the rest of the way down. Nothing happened in the lobby or out on the plaza. I walked over to Second Avenue and hailed a cab.

Twenty minutes later I was standing outside my building on Tenth Street.

Back upstairs, I immediately took the suit off and had a quick shower to wash the gel out of my hair. I changed into jeans and a T-shirt. Then I got a beer from the fridge, lit a cigarette and went into the living-room.

I sat at my desk and emptied the contents of the envelope on to it. I picked up the tiny black notebook first, deliberately ignoring the drugs and the thick wad of fifty-dollar bills. There were names and phone numbers in it. Some of the numbers had been crossed out – either completely or with new numbers written in directly above or below them. I flicked backwards and forwards through the pages for a few moments, but didn’t recognize any of the names. I must have seen Deke Tauber’s name, for instance, and a few others that should have been familiar, but at the time none of them registered with me.

I put the notebook back into the envelope, and then started counting the money.

Nine thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars.

I took six of the fifties and put them into my wallet.

After that, I cleared a space on the desk, pushing the keyboard of my computer to one side, and started counting the tablets. I put them into little piles of fifty, of which there were nine when I’d finished, with seventeen loose ones left over. Using a folded piece of copy paper, I shovelled the 467 tablets back into the plastic container. I sat staring into it for a while, undecided, and then counted out ten of them again. These I put into a small ceramic bowl on a wooden shelf above the computer. I replaced the rest of the cash and the container of tablets in the large brown envelope and took it with me into the bedroom. I put the envelope into an empty shoe-box in the bottom of the closet, and then covered the shoe-box with a blanket and a pile of old magazines.

After this, I toyed with the idea of taking one of the tablets and of getting down to some work straightaway. I decided against it, however. I was exhausted and needed to rest. But before I went to bed, I sat on the couch in the living-room and drank another beer, all the time looking up at the ceramic bowl on the shelf above the computer.

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