He finds a coffee shop out on Sixth.
Convinced now that he is being followed, he can’t help feeling self-conscious, as though every move he makes, every gesture, is being watched and graded. A corollary of this, of course, is that his life might be in danger.
He stays in the coffee shop for an hour, until just after nine, sipping coffee and watching people as they come and go.
When he is out on the street again, he flags down a cab. He does this on impulse. He tells the driver East Fifty-eighth Street and they quickly join the flow of traffic heading uptown.
Jimmy half turns and looks through the rear window.
If he has a tail, could he lose it this easily?
Seems possible.
He turns around again, and looks ahead.
But it isn’t as if they’d have much trouble trying to work out where he’s going.
They.
Jimmy feels a surge of frustration here. Over three years ago six people died in a helicopter crash. They were murdered. He knows who was responsible, and why. He was told, and he believes it.
But that incident, and what led up to it, is locked away now, in a glass case, perceived by the public at large, and by the authorities, as a tragic accident.
So what does he think, he can come along and change that? He can smash the glass and replace what’s behind it?
With what?
The cab turns east at Fifty-seventh Street.
This event at the Blackwood Hotel is supposed to start at ten o’clock. He’ll arrive half an hour early and hang around. See what he can see. Without a press pass, he won’t get inside the door of the hotel, that’s for sure, won’t get near it, but he might catch a glimpse of Clark Rundle on his way in.
He gets the driver to pull over between Madison and Park. He pays and gets out. He’ll walk the rest of the way, one block north and two over.
From about half a block away he identifies the hotel, sees the marquee, and a small gathering of what look like photographers.
And security.
It’s a busy street, lots of midtown bustle, so no need to be overly self-conscious. He comes to One Beacon Court, and peers in at the glimmering, elliptical courtyard as he passes.
A few moments later, two or three buildings before the Blackwood, he stops and leans against some railings. He looks around, up the street, towards the hotel. There are more arrivals, technicians, a camera crew.
People standing around, random individuals like himself, free country.
He takes out his phone, but wishes he smoked, like his old man – standing there in the street, in a three-piece suit, busy with cigarettes and a lighter.
No questions asked.
Szymanski is tired. He feels like he was awake all night, but he must have slept periodically, five minutes here and there, enough to keep ticking over – micro doses, but never any of the deep stages, the REM, the restorative shit. That’s partly why he steered clear of the coke, which he’ll leave for housekeeping maybe. The weed he smoked some of, but most of it’s still in the bag.
He’ll leave that, too.
He checks out of the hotel at nine thirty.
He carries a canvas holdall with his stuff in it, but not a lot of time passes before he’s thinking about discarding it somewhere.
The day’s a little warm for the leather jacket he’s wearing, but the M9 fits perfectly in the lower inside pocket, so he needs it.
What has he got in the bag anyway? A couple of changes, toiletries, minor personal items. Nothing he couldn’t replace in a few minutes at a J. Crew and a Duane Reade. That was always the Gideon way, travel light, no excess baggage, leave it all behind you – including family, girlfriends, bosses, shitty jobs, whatever.
They didn’t have room, and weren’t interested.
Passing a construction site he tosses his bag into a dumpster.
There, gone, along with everything else.
But really this particular everything else – his everything else – he tossed a long time ago, when he signed up with Gideon in the first place.
Szymanski gets onto Fifth Avenue and starts walking north.
So that’s not what this is about, being unable, or unwilling, to go home to C-town – it’s about being unable to go back to work.
Unpaid leave.
Effective immediately.
That’s all he had left and now it’s been taken from him, and even if they’d acted differently, if they’d kept him on, it was all shot to shit anyway, as far as he was concerned, after what happened.
Ray Kroner.
Those people, the women and kids, the man at the wall.
What were their names? At least Ray had a name. And he got a body bag.
More than they got.
Szymanski turns right at Fifty-eighth Street. It’s a few blocks over.
He wonders about Ray’s family, out there in Phoenix, about what kind of an explanation they got, if any, and about the other families, the ones back in the DRC, in Buenke.
He knows they didn’t get any explanations.
They have to put up with Arnold Kimbela for Christ’s sake, day in, day out.
He slows down.
Man, some of the shit he saw over there, slave labour, systematic torture, systematic rape.
Explain that.
As he gets close to the hotel, Szymanski slows down even more, to a crawl. There’s security everywhere.
Naturally.
He’s assuming it’s all Gideon – their domestic division, the pussy squad, guys in suits, underarm holsters, earpieces. It’s unlikely that he’ll know any of them, or that they’ll know him. Unless Donald Ribcoff himself is around the place, which he probably will be. The CEO of Gideon is notoriously hands-on, especially when it comes to the high-profile jobs. He was in and out of Buenke all the time. But would he recognise Szymanski? Maybe, maybe not.
What does it fucking matter now, though, right?
Szymanski stands across the street from the hotel.
So this is it? He presses a hand against the gun in his jacket pocket. This is what it all comes down to in the end, the life of a spineless, deceitful bastard with a propensity to showboat on TV, who if he hadn’t been there that day, and hadn’t lied about it afterwards…
Szymanski finds the air around where he’s standing suddenly heavy with some local cooking smell. He realises his timing may not be the best, but he can imagine lying down now, there on the sidewalk, drifting off to sleep, falling into a pit of dreams.
He looks around.
People everywhere.
Just what exactly does he think he’s doing?
When Rundle arrives into J.J.’s Manhattan office on Third Avenue he’s surprised to see that Jimmy Vaughan is there, sitting on a couch in the corner shooting the breeze with some of the younger staff members. The idea was that Rundle and J.J. would head over to the Blackwood together, from here, wives in tow. Vaughan would show up whenever he chose – but over there, at the Blackwood.
Not here.
Rundle didn’t expect this.
‘Clark,’ J.J. calls from across the room. ‘Where’s Eve?’
Rundle walks towards him. ‘She’s down in the car, waiting.’ He looks at his watch, to reinforce the point. ‘Sally?’
‘She’s over there.’ He indicates another office behind him, door closed. ‘Some issue with her hair.’
A few feet away, in front of a desk, several of the senior staffers, Herb Felder included, appear to be tinkering – still tinkering – with J.J.’s speech.
‘We are all of us,’ one of them says, ‘we are each of us. Fuck. We are each of us. We are all of us.’
‘Try we are each of us,’ Herb Felder says.
‘OK, OK.’ Red pen on paper. ‘OK. Because we are each of us shareholders in this great democracy, we are each of us the bearers of a sacred trust -’