The beam was wide enough, I told myself. Looked to be twelve inches across. I visualized a move that occurs about a third of the way through a tensho kata, where the fighter pivots around from front to back. I had done it hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I tried to feel it in my body, how it would take my feet, my legs, my core right around, and did it, breathing out, using the traditional hand movements to keep my balance.
"You learn that in ballet class?" Curry said.
If only he'd been close enough to hit.
I walked back along the beam, watching Curry more than Birk, but so far he was keeping the gun pointed down. I reached the end of the beam and stepped back onto the temporary flooring.
"Well done," Birk said. "You might be short on strategy, Geller, but you have nerve and everyone knows I like that in a man. And so I am going to surprise you, my Canadian friend, by keeping my word. You're free to go. The game is no longer afoot."
I kept watching Curry's gun hand.
"Go on," Birk said. "About your business. Chop-chop."
I started toward the elevator.
Birk said, "Francis."
Curry's gun came up.
"I said you could go," Birk said with a cold grin. "I didn't say you could take the elevator."
CHAPTER 40
"You were watching the workers here yesterday," Birk said. "You must have seen how it's done. Like a monkey shimmying down a palm tree."
I had watched a man climb down a girder wearing work gloves and boots. Wearing a harness that would stop his fall if he lost his grip.
I said, "If I don't?"
"Francis will shoot you. He won't need much provocation either. I don't think he likes you."
"Too many people know why I'm here. If I'm found with a bullet wound, they'll come after you."
"They who? The police? Chicago averages five hundred murders a year."
"So I've heard."
"Your body will be found in an area known for gang activity. They'll chalk it up to misadventure on your part. The naive Canadian who wandered into the baddest part of town and was shot for whatever was in his wallet."
"No one will buy that."
"People have been buying what I sell all my life. Francis will swear I never left my apartment. I'll swear he was with me all night. Tom Barnett will swear I'm Elvis Presley if I tell him to. Anyway, it's a moot point because I don't think you're going to stand there and meekly take a bullet. Be a sport, Geller. I'm giving you a chance to walk away."
"Some chance."
"Come on!" he cried. "Where's your sense of adventure? You're young. You're fit. You've shown us some moves. You certainly have a knack for survival. You climb down four floors, you'll be back on concrete and you can make it to a stairwell from there. It's not inconceivable you could make it."
Not inconceivable. Just the kind of odds you want.
"I'm giving you more of a chance than, say, Basil Rathbone would have given Errol Flynn. More than George Sanders would have given Tyrone Power. There are no sharks in these waters. Your hands are no longer tied."
"Can we move this along?" Curry said.
"Poor Francis," Birk said. "Francis doesn't care for classic movies the way I do."
"I liked Kiss of Death," he said.
He would, the hairless fucking waxwork.
"And if I fall?" I said. "How are you going to explain that?"
"Very easily. You've made your little obsession with me quite public. Your scene at the Department of Buildings. Harassing my site manager here. The scenario would be obvious, I think. Having been ejected earlier, you broke into the site, commandeered the elevator, came up here looking for some evidence to support your outlandish theories about me. And fell. Ouch. The end."
"They're not that outlandish," I said. "You did have them killed, didn't you?"
"On the off chance you make it down in one piece, I think I'll decline to comment."
"And the home invasion? You engineered it, didn't you?"
"Quit whistling out your ass," Curry said.
"On the advice of my director of security, I think I'll duck that one too. Now start climbing." His voice had lost the playful singsong tone he'd been using, sounding more like the balls-to-the-wall negotiator he was supposed to be.
I walked back out along the twenty-foot beam until I reached the beam to which it connected. I squatted down, gripped the sides of the girder and hugged it close to my body, thinking of the workman I'd watched through binoculars, gripping with his feet, shimmying down, as Birk had said, like a monkey down a tree. Except a monkey was made for climbing: exquisitely muscled with feet that gripped like hands and a prehensile tail. I started inching down, keeping my eyes fixed on the pale clock face of the Wrigley Building across the ribbon of river that ran in from the lake. It took several minutes to make it down to the next horizontal beam, where I thought I could rest. But as soon as my feet touched it, something slammed into my right shoulder. The shock of it made me lose my grip for a moment. I slid down hard, felt skin tearing off my palms as I gripped the girder trying to stop my fall. I thought I'd been shot. But then something clanged off a girder far below, and I knew that someone above me, Birk or Curry, had thrown something down. A long bolt.
"Just keeping you honest," Birk called.
I swung my body to the outside of the girder and started down the next length. My hands were cramping around the girder. My quads were stiffening. My collarbone where the bolt had hit felt like it was broken. The muscle that connected it to the scapula was going into spasm. I kept going. Six inches, a foot. Stopped to wrap my arms around the girder and flex my hands. But as soon as I did, more bolts rained down. One hit my right forearm. Another just missed my head. I gripped the girder and renewed my descent.
Thought, "This is what you get for trying." A former colleague, the late Francois Paradis, once told me, "No good deed goes unpunished." Is that how it really is? Is this how it ends? The fall itself would be over in seconds. I wouldn't feel a thing. I'd be dead a millisecond after I hit the ground, before the pain impulses could travel to my shattered brain.
I descended another few feet. My hands were being rubbed raw by rough steel. My right arm was on fire from my wrist up to the base of my neck. When I got to the next horizontal beam I stopped to rest again, hugging the girder tight to present the smallest possible target. It didn't help. Another bolt hit my right leg just above the knee. I howled in pain.
"Sorry about that," Birk yelled.
"You are not," I heard Curry say.
I wasn't going to make it. They would find me at the bottom. Ship what was left of me home. My mother would be devastated. Jenn would cry her heart out. Hollinger would probably regret the way things had gone. My brother-what would he feel? I had no idea, and somehow that made me feel sadder than anything else.
I felt tears in my eyes. From the wind, the pain, the rage throttling my heart.
I started down again. Two more floors, I told myself. A dozen more cramps. A hundred more breaths. Breathe into your hands, Geller. Into your quads, your knee, your shoulder, your arm. Fill your chest, your head with air. Sharp, cold nighttime Chicago air. Air off the lake. Air whistling through these towers around you. Breathe it. Climb down through it.
Two more bolts came down. Both missed, clanged off the girder. Maybe I was getting harder to see from up there.
I reached another horizontal beam, changed my position so all that was exposed was my hands and feet.
Another bolt hit my left hand. "Fuck!" I yelled. I felt blood spill through my straining fingers but didn't let go. Wasn't going to let go.
What if I just stay here? I thought. What if they find me in the morning, clinging to this post, stuck to it with dried blood, a twisted figurehead on the good ship Millennium Skyline?