“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Good,” he said. “You having fun?”
“Mollie is. I hate skating. What time do you think you’ll be home? It’s Sunday, you know, I thought we could go to a movie. There’s a good one playing on Eighty-Sixth.”
“What time does it go on?”
“We’ve already missed the two o’clock.”
“When’s the next one?”
“Four fifteen.”
“And the one after that?”
“I didn’t even bother.”
“What’s it now?” Michael said.
“Three ten.”
“I’ll try to wrap up here in ten minutes,” he said, “be home no later than four.”
“That’s cutting it close.”
“Best I can do.”
“Chinese after the movie?”
“Yeah, good.”
“Shall I reserve?”
“Be a good idea. Honey, let me go. Sooner I can...”
“Goodbye already,” she said, and hung up.
She looked out over the rink to check on Mollie again, and then dialed “O” for operator, and then the area code and number Andrew had given her for his house on Long Island. When the operator came on, she did just what Andrew had instructed her to do.
“This is a collect call,” she said.
“Thank you for using New York Telephone,” the operator said.
Sarah waited.
The phone was ringing on the other end. Once, twice...
“Hello?”
His voice.
“I have a collect call for you sir.”
“Yes?”
“Miss, may I have your name, please?”
Miss, she thought.
“Sarah,” she said.
“I’ll accept,” Andrew said.
“Go ahead, please.”
“Hi,” she said.
“Where are you?” he said.
“The Wollman Rink.”
“Where’s that?”
“Central Park. Are you from Mars?”
“Yes,” he said. “I love you, do you know that?”
“Say it.”
“I love you.”
“Again.”
“I love you.”
“Say it in Martian.”
“Meet me at the apartment and I’ll fuck your brains out.”
“Is that Martian?”
“It’s plain English.”
“Basic English, I’d say.”
“Can you meet me?”
“Andrew; it’s Sunday!”’
“So what?”
“You know I can’t. You’re not serious. You won’t be going, there, will you?”
“Not unless you say you’ll meet me.”
“I can’t.”
“Are we set for Wednesday, then?”
“Yes.”
“No problems?”
“None. What are you doing?”
“Watching television.”
“Are you alone?”
“No, there are three Chinese girls with me.”
“I’ll break your head.”
“What are you wearing?”
“Oh, I’m very sexy freezing here in the cold.”
“What’ll you wear Wednesday?”
“My teacher clothes.”
“Do you plan to teach me something?”
“Maybe. I have to go. My daughter’s skating over.”
“Wednesday,” he said. “Billy will be waiting.”
“Outside the movie theater on Third and Fifty-Ninth,” she said. “Four o’clock.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Wednesday,” she said, and hung up before she had to say it.
Mollie executed a smart stop near the fence, sending up a spray of ice flakes.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Daddy,” Sarah said.
In the bedroom of the Great Neck house, Andrew put the receiver back on its cradle and turned to the bathroom door. Redheaded Oona Halligan was standing there wearing high-heeled pumps and one of his pajama tops unbuttoned low over her breasts.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“My mother,” he said, and opened his arms to her.
At eight o’clock that night, while Sarah and Michael and Mollie were coming out of a Chinese restaurant on Eightieth and Third, and while Andrew was really on the phone to his mother in Stonington, Connecticut, a uniformed police officer came up Broome Street, shaking doorknobs to make sure the shops lining the street were locked for the night. He tested doorknob after doorknob, rattling a knob, moving on, rattling yet another knob, until he came to the tailor shop on the corner of Broome and Mott, where he went through the same automatic routine before crossing the street. On the other side of the street, he went through the same ritual with the doors there, and then crossed over again and started back toward the tailor shop, checking both sides of the street as he approached the door. This time, there was a credit card in his left hand.
He took the doorknob in his right hand, made a swift pass at the doorjamb with the credit card, sliding it between jamb and spring bolt, and had the door open in exactly three seconds. In another two seconds, he was inside, the door locked again behind him. Two seconds after that, two men turned the corner from Mott Street and walked past the shop. By then, Freddie had brushed aside the hanging curtain and was in the back room. The two men took up a position in a dark doorway across the street. They were Freddie’s backups.
He snapped on his penlight only long enough to find an electrical outlet. He plugged a quarter-watt night-light into it and then waited while his eyes adjusted to the scant illumination. A moving flashlight would have been unmistakable from outside the shop. The beat officers had been alerted that he’d be in here, but he didn’t want one of the paisans passing by and noticing any flickering movement. From the outside, it would now appear as if someone had deliberately left a night-light burning, a not uncommon occurrence. He would work only by this light; he knew his tools well.
The back room was long and narrow.
You came through the curtains separating it from the front of the shop and immediately on the right, on one of the short walls was a pressing machine. On the long wall opposite the curtains was the table above which Coulter had plugged in his light. There was a huge pair of cutting shears on the table, several cardboard patterns, a bolt of blue cloth, a heavy pressing iron. A calendar hung on the wall behind the table, just above the outlet. Its illustration showed a peasant girl in a scoop-neck blouse, grinning and holding a basket overflowing with ripe yellow grapes. The days in January had been methodically X’d out to date; today was the thirty-first, the end of the month.
There was a door to the left of the table. Doorknob on it, a deadbolt lock above it. The door was painted white, like the rest of the room. A speaker with a push button on it was set into the jamb on the right. Coulter moved to the door, rapped gently on it with his knuckles, testing. It did not give back the sound of another room behind it; he guessed it opened on a stairwell. There were no wires running around the jamb; the speaker had been wired from the other side of the wall.
There were several chairs pulled up to the long table. Coulter surmised the table served several purposes. Shove the chairs back when you wanted to cut a garment, pull them up again when you wanted to talk or eat. On the short wall opposite the pressing machine and right-angled into the wall with the door and the cutting table, there was a pay telephone. Coulter was in business.
When the batteries in a battery-powered transmitter gave out, they had to be replaced, and this meant having to go in all over again, doubling or tripling or even quadrupling the risk depending on the length of the surveillance. You wired a person with a battery-powered transmitter, but when you were bugging a room, you looked for your AC power source. A telephone of any kind gave you exactly what you needed.