Not thirty-two. Was this the wrong building? The wrong address? She turned and studied the numbers above the five other golden doors. The same numerals: one to twenty-two. She dislodged her clothing, feeling unbearably hot in the crowded lobby, to examine her wristwatch. Now she was only six minutes early.
Holy cowabunga! Holy Howdy Doody! Now what was she going to do? Find someone who had to stand still in this mess, that's what, and answer a simple, heartfelt question: where's the thirty-second floor? What on God's green earth is wrong with people in Gotham City? Hasn't anyone ever noticed that half of this building is missing in action?
Temple turned against the crowd's lemming like rush to the elevators. No one even noticed her literal figurehead, the face of Midnight Louie eyeing each and every one of them. Struggling upstream, she craned her neck to see over the mob, a fruitless effort in the best of situations.
here must be a newsstand somewhere. A shoeshine stand. A fruit stand. A stolen goods stand. She'd even ask Frankenstein's grandmother if she were here selling something, like Tickle me, Igor dolls!
In despair, Temple noticed that she had steered back between the flanking elevator doors. This must indeed be a circle of Dante's Hell.
"Louie, we're going to be late for a very important date! What do we do?"
He knew what to do. He twisted, snapping at the drawstring that hemmed his head in. The effort, though futile, didn't do Temple's precarious balance any good.
She stared glumly at the heavenly Art Deco elevator doors and their frustrating lofty numbers. The only thing missing was the legend, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
She could almost see those fatal words etched in living flames above the floor pointer.
Which now read . . . twenty-three to forty-six.
She accelerated forward like a New Yorker-born and squeezed herself onto the next departing car. Louie's head protruded past the dark slit between elevator and shaft.
"Baby on board," Temple caroled loudly, backing shamelessly into whoever was behind her. In this mob, who could see what really was in her carrier? From behind, Louie looked like a black-haired baby, nice little Italian baby, maybe, future Al Pacino of cat-food commercials . . . who's to know?
She didn't notice a mass making-way, but as the doors slid shut, Louie's white whiskers bent at their pressure, then sprang to full width again after the doors had shut.
Oops, Temple thought. How to reach the distant control panel to punch in her floor? No way in this sardine factory. No way to lift an arm to check a watch either. Crammed jacket to jacket and boot heel to boot toe with a phalanx of native New Yorkers, Temple resigned herself to shooting past the thirty-second floor and catching it on the way down.
No way would she be on time for their appointment.
Her luck finally turned. Someone else wanted the same floor, for the doors cracked their gleaming twenty-four-carat smile and the mob shifted, and someone behind her elbowed his or her way out. Temple let the natural riptide action pull her and Louie out after the dear departing one. She could kiss him/her.
Actually . . . no, Temple reconsidered as the elevator doors shut behind her, stranding her in an almost empty hall. She would rather kiss a Tickle me, Igor doll.
The man was Nosferatu in a trench coat, cadaverously thin with blue veins mottling his temples and a Grim Reaper look on his face that did nothing to relieve the initial impression.
Temple let him go ahead, feeling she'd be trailing a hearse otherwise. More gilt numbers cast narrow shadows on the grass-cloth-covered hall walls. Probably the plaster was old and cracked, and grass cloth made an elegant camouflage.
She noted that the number she sought was well within the awesome range indicated to the left, 3262-3298. She would have to tread in the creepy gentleman's footsteps, after all.
"He'd probably be scared white if you crossed his path, Louie," she whispered to the patient cat. Carrying an animal up close and personal like this encouraged conversation, however one-sided. This was the way eccentrics were made, Temple thought, the pathetic folks who wander the streets discoursing with fire plugs and such. One day in New York City, and to this she was reduced!
Just outside the double frosted-glass doors labeled Colby, Janos and Renaldi, Temple battled her outerwear for a condemned woman's glimpse of the time.
One minute to 10 a.m. Well, she certainly wasn't embarrassingly early . . .
She walked in. A small foyer, crowded with the usual people, awaited her. Incurious eyes looked up from magazines like Advertising Age, then dropped to the slick pages again. She marched up to the receptionist's desk, where a chic young black woman in beautifully sculpted dreadlocks drummed her mandarin fingernails on the desktop while she cradled a phone receiver on her shoulder.
She looked up and actually noticed the cat. When she hung up, unsuccessful in reaching her party, Temple announced, "Temple Barr and Midnight Louie to see Kendall Renaldi."
Much to the astonishment of everyone in the room, with the possible exception of Midnight Louie, Esquire, they were shown right in.
Chapter 8
A Killer Xmas Present
By late afternoon, the gray collar of concrete surrounding the Circle Ritz pool like a homely pewter bezel hoarding an aquamarine had warmed in the December sunlight. At least the blue plastic exercise mats strewn over the surface didn't quite freeze -burn the soles of Matt's bare feet.
The fifties-vintage pool was more decorative than functional these days. Thirty feet the long way cramped exercise fanatics. Devout sun tanners still thrived in Las Vegas, gauging by the dusky leatherwork on many faces. They would disdain the old-fashioned tables and chairs, not one a lounge model.
Matt gazed at the deserted site, unable to concentrate today.
He jerked the tie of his roomy white cotton gj tighter, as if deceiving himself about finally getting down to a serious workout. He really should do this at Jack Ree's gym during what passed tor winter months in this climate. He had started with tai chi, which looked like shadowboxing to Westerners. And he had stopped when he realized whose shadow he was boxing.
The shadow wasn't very tall in person, but in absence it stretched into a long, thin tether of memory. Intended in flame, like a match.
Like red hair. Temple was out of town for the holidays, gone for Christmas, and that irritated him for some reason.
Come on! he coached himself, not sure if the voice he imitated was Jack Ree's or Kyle Menninger's back in Chicago. Or Frank Bucek's in seminary.
Matt hurled into a machine-gun burst of lunges and positions, punctuated by the ritual yells, his irritation striking its real target at last: himself. His sense of being stalled. Because Temple was gone, a niggling reason that shamed him. Because he couldn't find the always shadowy figure of his stepfather that he had pursued through Las Vegas like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. That was a more legitimate reason that didn't shame him as it ought to.
Moving through the martial-arts positions, he felt more like a hunting hound and less like a moping water spaniel. Sometimes his anger took him; he always performed better when it did. Yet anger was the least desirable quality in a martial-arts exercise. The art came in the control, in the seemingly artless control, of oneself, and thereby of others around oneself. That was the paradox so beloved of philosophers and religious leaders the world and ages over: to give up the self is to gain for oneself.
"Impressive force."
Was the voice a mere echo of a past master in his head?