His hotel was on East 34th, between Macy’s and the Empire State Building, as the man in the booth had informed him. He tried not to think about how much it was costing. It was only for one night after all, two at most, and he reckoned he deserved some comfort after what he’d been through. Christ alone knew what lay ahead. The bus dropped him off outside Penn Station, and he walked from there.
It was morning, though his body clock told him it was mid-afternoon. The receptionist said he shouldn’t really check in until noon, but saw how red his eyes were and checked her com- puter, then phoned maid service. It turned out she could give him a room after all, freshly cleaned-she’d just have to tweak a reservation. He thanked her and headed upstairs. He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The room spun around him in his darkness. It was like the bed was on a turntable set to 17 rpm. Jim’s first record player had been a Dansette with a setting for 17 rpm. They’d played Pinky & Perky records on it. The pigs had sounded like ordinary people. It was just a matter of slowing them down.
Reeve got up and ran a bath. The water pressure was low. He imagined a dozen maids all rinsing baths at the same time, preparing rooms for new guests, guests who came and went and left nothing behind.
He remembered a quote he’d read in one of his books: something about life being a river, the water never the same for any two people who walked through it. He’d remembered it, so it must have meant something to him at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure. He studied his face in the bathroom mirror. It was getting ugly, all tensed and scowling. It had looked that way in Special Forces: a face you prepared for when you met the enemy, a permanently pissed-off look. He’d lost it over time as he’d let his muscles relax, but he was getting it again now. He noticed that he was tensing his stomach muscles, too, as though readying to repel a punch in the guts. And his whole body tingled-not just from jet lag; senses were kicking in. You might call them a sixth sense, except that there was more than one of them. One told you if someone was watching you, one told you someone you couldn’t see was near. There was one that told you whether to run left or right to dodge gunfire.
Some of his colleagues in Special Forces hadn’t believed in the senses. They’d put it down to sheer luck if you beat the clock. For Reeve it was instinct, it was about picking open part of your brain normally kept locked. He thought maybe Nietzsche had meant something similar with his “Superman.” You had to unlock yourself, find the hidden potential. Above all, you had to live dangerously.
“How am I doing, old man?” Reeve said out loud, slipping into the bath.
In Queens, the fashion accessory of choice was the stare.
Reeve, though dressed in his needing-a-wash nontourist clothes, still got plenty of stares. His map of downtown Manhattan wouldn’t help him here. This was a place they told strangers to avoid. His cab driver had taken some persuading; the yellow cab had been idling outside the hotel, looking for a fare up to Central Park or over to JFK if he was on a roll, but when Reeve had asked for Queens, the man had turned to examine him like he’d just asked to be taken to Detroit.
“Queens?” the man had said. He looked Puerto Rican, a ribbon of black curly hair falling from his oily baseball cap. “Queens?”
“Queens.”
The driver had shaken his head slowly. “Can’t do it.”
“Sure you can, we just need to discuss the fare.”
So they’d discussed the fare.
Reeve had spent a lot of time with the Yellow Pages, and when he couldn’t find what he wanted in Manhattan, he’d switched to the outer limits: the Bronx and Queens. The third store he tried had sounded about right, so he’d asked for directions and written them down on a sheet of hotel notepaper.
So he sat with them in the back of the cab, listening to the wild, angry dialogue of the two-way radio. Whoever was manning the mike back at HQ was exploding. He was still exploding as the cab crossed the Queensboro Bridge.
The cab driver turned around again. “Last chance, man.” His accent, whatever it was, was so thick Reeve could hardly make out the words.
“No,” he said, “keep going.” He repeated the words in Spanish, which didn’t impress the driver. He was calling in, the mike close to his mouth.
The street they were looking for, the one Reeve directed the driver to, wasn’t too deep into Queens. They stuck close to the East River, as though the cabbie didn’t want to lose sight of the Manhattan skyline. When the cab stopped at lights, there were usually a few men hanging around, leaning down to peer into the back like they were at an aquarium. Or looking into a butcher’s cabinet, thought Reeve. He preferred the idea of the aquarium.
“This is the street,” Reeve said. The driver pulled over immediately. He wasn’t going to cruise looking for the shop, he just wanted to dump Reeve and get out of there.
“Will you wait?” Reeve asked.
“If I stop longer than a red light, the tires’ll be gone. Shit, I’ll be gone.”
Reeve looked around. The street was run-down, but it didn’t look particularly dangerous. It was no Murder Mile. “What about giving me your card,” he said, “so I can call for another cab?”
The man looked at him levelly. Reeve had already paid and tipped him. It was a decent tip. He sighed. “Look, I’ll drive around. No promises, but if you’re right here at this spot in twenty minutes, maybe I’ll be back here to pick you up. No promises, you hear? If I catch another fare, that’s it.”
“Deal,” Reeve said.
Twenty minutes might cover it.
He found the store on the other side of the street. Its window made it look like a junk shop-which in part it was-but it specialized in militaria and survivalist goodies. The hulk behind the padlocked counter didn’t look like he was going to be mugged. Brown muscled shoulders bulged from a tight black T-shirt with some Nazi-style emblems and writing on the front. There were tattoos on the man’s arms, variously colored. The thick veins ran through them like roads on a map. The man had a bulbous shaven head but a full black beard and mustache, plus a large looped earring in one ear. Reeve immediately pictured him as a pirate, cutlass between his teeth in some old black-and-white movie. He nodded a greeting and looked around the shop. What stock there was the mostly boxed, but the display cabinet behind which the owner-Reeve presumed he was the owner-sat was full of just what he’d come here for: knives.
“You the one that phoned?”
Reeve recognized the man’s voice and nodded. He walked towards the display case. The knives were highly polished combat weapons, some with extremely mean-looking serrated edges. There were machetes, too, and butterfly knives-even a foreshortened samurai sword. There were older knives among the flashing steel; war souvenirs, collectibles with dubious histories.
The man’s voice wasn’t as deep as his frame would suggest. “Thought you must be; we don’t get too many customers midweek. Lot of our stuff goes out mail order. You want I should put you on the computer?”
“What computer?”
“The mailing list.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You see anything you like?”
Reeve saw plenty. He’d considered buying a gun, but wouldn’t have known how to go about it. Besides, a knife was just about as good, so long as you got close. He was hoping to get very close…
“Nothing exactly like what I’m looking for.”
“Well, this is just a selection.” The man came from behind the counter. He was wearing gray sweatpants, baggy all the way down to his ankles, and open-toed sandals showing one toe missing. He went over to the door and locked it, turning the sign to CLOSED.
“Was it a bullet or shrapnel?” Reeve asked.