“I wouldn’t think of...”
“... advance, so I can send out for some Chinese food.”
She wondered if she should accept graciously, or back out while she still had the chance. Her heart was pounding. She hadn’t even suggested to Andrew that she might be able to get away for a few days, but now it seemed almost too easy, and Michael’s final if reluctant compliance made her feel manipulative and cheap. Tell him no, she thought. Tell him it was a stupid idea. Do it now, this minute. But the thought of driving up to New England someplace, finding a quiet little inn, spending two or three days there with Andrew...
“It’s just that I’ll miss you,” Michael said, and kissed her on the cheek and then reached up to turn out the light.
In the dark, her eyes wide open, Sarah wondered what she’d become. She did not fall asleep for a long, long time.
At nine o’clock on the balmy spring evening of May fourth, the telephone in the Welles apartment rang, and Michael picked up after the second ring.
“Hello?” he said.
There was a click on the line.
“Hello?” he said again.
Nothing.
He looked at the receiver, annoyed, and then hung up.
“Who is it, darling?” Sarah called.
“Nobody there,” Michael said.
She knew at once that the call was from Andrew. He was back.
She kept reading. The words made no sense to her. They swarmed over the page. She had to get out of here, had to get to a telephone. But not too soon after the call. Give it time, she thought, and read again the same paragraph for the third time. At twenty past nine, she said, “Do you feel like some frozen yogurt?”
“Not really,” Michael said.
“I think I’ll go down for some, would you mind?”
“I think there’s some in the freezer.”
“I want the soft kind,” she said, and got up and marked her place in the book, taking plenty of time, closing the book, setting it down on the coffee table, all of this feeling like slow motion to her, wanting to race out of the apartment, find the nearest phone booth, walking to the entry hall to the same slow-motion beat, “Can I bring one back for you?”
“No, thanks, hon.”
Hoping he wouldn’t suddenly change his mind and tell her he’d like to come along, picking up her bag from the hall table, opening it in slow motion, and then opening her purse to make sure she had quarters because otherwise she’d have to go to the laundry jar in the kitchen cabinet and steal some quarters, but there were three quarters in the purse, together with a handful of nickels and dimes, she was all right. She snapped the purse closed with a click that sounded like a cannon shot, and put it back in her bag, and slung the bag on her shoulder, and said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Maybe I...”
No, please, she thought, don’t!
“... will have one,” he said. “The no-fat Dutch chocolate, on a sugar cone. If they have it. Otherwise whatever they’ve got.”
“In no-fat, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. See you in a bit.”
Casually. No further talk. Just get out of here. Reaching for the doorknob. Opening the door. Stepping out into the hall. Pulling the door shut behind her. The click of the lock. Forcing herself to walk slowly, slowly, slowly down the hall to the elevator, and pressing the button for the elevator, and hearing it clattering up the shaft, the door sliding open, stepping into the car, pushing the black button with, the white L stamped onto it, the door sliding shut again, and the elevator starting its descent.
She did not feel safe until she reached the coffee shop on Seventy-Eighth and Lex.
“Hi,” she said, “it’s me.”
“Sarah! God, I missed you!”
“You’re back.”
“I’m back. You knew it was me calling...”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Downstairs. I made an excuse to get out.”
“Are we okay for tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Billy’ll be there. Same time.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Neither can I. I wish I were there with you right this minute.”
“So do I.”
“I love you, Andrew,”
“I love you, too, Sarah.”
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
There was a click on the line.
The pen register recorded the duration of the conversation as twenty-three seconds. Sitting the wire in the apartment on Grand Street, Detective/First Grade Jerry Mandel picked up the clipboard with the line sheets on it and recorded the caller’s name as Sarah.
At that very moment, a block away, Detective/First Grade Freddie Coulter, wearing Con Ed coveralls and a Con Ed hard hat, was unscrewing the plate from the street pole on the corner of Mott and Broome. He had installed a video camera with a pinhole lens in the hot dog cart that would be in place on the corner tomorrow. Now he needed his power source.
Power was always the main consideration. You either supplied your own power or you stole your power. In this instance, either a boat battery or a car battery inside the cart would have been sufficient, but sooner or later it would have needed replacement. He preferred stealing his power from Con Ed. He tapped into the pole now, fitted his cable with a male plug that would fit into the female outlet he’d already installed in the cart, and then screwed back onto the base a new panel notched to accommodate the cable running from inside the pole.
Hiding the cable with a tented wedge of wood painted in yellow and black stripes to look official, Coulter packed his tools and walked away from his handiwork, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow morning at ten, the hot dog cart would be here on the corner, ready to take pictures of anyone who went through that blue door across the street.
By four-thirty p.m. that Wednesday, the fifth day of May, Detective/Third Grade Gregory Annunziato of the District Attorney’s Office Squad was beginning to think the plant was a lousy idea. He’d sold a lot of hot dogs since ten this morning, true enough, but selling hot dogs wasn’t taking pictures of wiseguys.
Annunziato was wearing a plaid sports shirt and corduroy trousers and a white, mustard-smeared apron that effectively hid the .38 Detectives Special in a clamshell holster on his belt. He had curly black hair and dark brown eyes and a lot of his customers asked him if he was Italian. When he said he was — although he’d been born in Brooklyn — they invariably broke into Italian, which he spoke only sparingly, telling him how good his hot dogs and knishes were and expressing gratitude for the presence of the cart on this otherwise dismal corner. Annunziato kept his eye on the blue door across the street.
At four forty-three p.m., a black Lincoln Town Car pulled up on the same side of the street as the cart, some fifteen, twenty feet ahead of it, and a good-looking blond woman wearing a gray suit and carrying an attaché case and a gray leather shoulder bag got out of the car, leaned back in to say something to the driver, and then closed the door behind her. As she began walking diagonally across the street toward the blue door, Annunziato hit the remote button that started his video camera.
Her back to the camera, the woman went to the shadowed door and rang the bell.
She leaned in close to the speaker to say something.
Annunziato heard a buzzer sound across the street, unlatching the door.
As the woman went in and closed the door behind her, the tape digitally recorded the time and date as MAY 05–16:43:57.
She didn’t get to read him the poem she’d composed until that afternoon. She took it out of her handbag, and sitting naked in the center of the bed, feeling very much like a child reciting for an expectant parent, she began.