“We don’t have anything for you.”
This was the clincher. “Topping, Halliwell amp; Whiting.” The firm of lawyers in Chicago that had provided the original shell for the Grange Foundation.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s the name they gave me.”
“Who gave you?”
“Dispatch.” She let out a long-suffering sigh. “Look, I just go where they tell me to-there’s no pickup, it’s no skin off my whatever. I’ll see you.” She waggled the fingers of one hand up at the video camera. “Bye now.” She turned to leave, holding her breath as she turned. She had her foot down one step when the electronic voice came again.
“Wait.”
Bingo.
“I’ll have to check. Wait.”
“I’m not going to stand around out here.”
Another pause and finally a sharp click from behind the plate on the door.
“Come in.”
“Thanks a bunch.” Finn turned the knob and pushed in through the heavy door, trying to keep the bored, faintly annoyed look on her face.
Once inside she found herself in a plain, narrow foyer with a second door directly in front of her. As the first door clicked shut behind her there was a faint sound from the second door and it popped open slightly. A second closed-circuit camera looked down on her from the doorframe. The foyer was an airlock, trapping anyone they considered a risk.
Finn went through the second door and stepped into a large reception room furnished in Arts and Crafts-style with what appeared to be a genuine Stickley desk and office chair set, a pair of armchairs and a long wooden “settle” complete with leather-covered pillows. The floors were dark cherry. On the cream-colored wall behind the middle-aged male receptionist’s head there was a framed oil that looked a lot like one of Monet’s Garden at Giverny series. If it was genuine, it was probably worth in the neighborhood of twenty million dollars.
Nice neighborhood.
The receptionist had dark thinning hair, broad shoulders, a white shirt with a blue-on-blue silk tie and what appeared to be a Hugo Boss suit that didn’t quite disguise the heavy-looking bulge under his left shoulder or the broad, pale leather rig that held it in place. A gun. Which made sense if the Monet was real. Finn was in too deep to back out now: the bluff was on.
“Wait here,” said Hugo Boss with the obvious shoulder holster.
Finn did as she was told, slowly turning in a full circle, taking in the entire room. Beyond the expensive furniture and the Monet it could have been the office of any tasteful professional in Manhattan-lawyer, accountant, upscale consultant. There were two doors at the end of the room, one folding, a closet, the other leading deeper into the building. Somewhere behind it Finn could hear the flat thumping of a photocopier and the whirr-click-hum of an office-sized laser printer. She looked carefully. The phone on the receptionist’s desk had half a dozen lines, four of which were lit. Once again, nothing out of the ordinary.
Hugo Boss returned. “There’s nothing here for you. And we don’t use any courier company called On Time. When we use couriers we use Citywide.”
“That’s right,” said Finn, trying to go with it. “Only when Citywide is overbooked they give the slush to us.”
“Slush?”
“Overflow. And like I said, I just pick up and deliver. You say there’s nothing here, then there’s nothing here. No problem.” She pulled the Dodgers hat more firmly down on her head and turned to go. At the last second she paused and gave Hugo her brightest eager-beaver “I’m just a shy country girl in the big city” look. “Uh, can I ask you a favor?”
“What?”
“I’ve really got to pee.” Which was true enough; Hugo and the gun he was wearing were scaring the hell out of her.
“We don’t have a public toilet.”
“I’ll only be a second, promise. You can check out that pickup for me again.”
Hugo Boss paused and then frowned. Finn turned up the wattage on her pleading look, the same one she’d used in high school when she hadn’t done her homework.
“All right,” said Hugo. “Through there. First door on the right.” He pointed. Finn trotted down to the far end of the room, watching from the corner of her eye as Hugo picked up the phone on his desk. She went through the door and shut it behind her. She was in a short hall between the front and rear of the house. To the left was a copy room, the source of the photocopier noise. To her right was a plain door with a sign that said WASHROOM. Straight ahead was an archway leading into an inner office. Two women and a man were sitting at computer work stations in a brightly lit windowless room. A flight of narrow stairs led up to the second floor. Yet another door led even farther back into the building, probably into what had once been the kitchen. No one was paying attention, so Finn ignored the toilet for the moment and ducked into the copy room. There was a big floor-standing Canon digital copier, an office fax machine and an industrial-sized scanner as well as a shelf full of coffee-making equipment and a row of coat hooks. Someone had left a bunch of keys beside the photocopier and without thinking Finn scooped them up and slipped them into her shoulder bag. She left the room, slipped into the bathroom and sat down, breathing hard. She gave herself a few seconds to calm down, flushed the toilet, ran the water and then hurried out to the front office again.
“Anything?” she said to Hugo, knowing what the answer would be.
The receptionist was on the phone. He shook his head briefly.
“Thanks for the bathroom,” Finn whispered gratefully, giving the man a smile. She added a brief wave, then fled. A few minutes later she was on Hudson Street, looking for somewhere to get keys cut.
45
Michael Valentine moved through the stacks of Ex Libris, following his own arcane system of notation that was about as far from the Dewey Decimal System as you could get. He’d been working for most of the morning and part of the afternoon, consulting a dozen different encyclopedias of New York, old insurance plat books, ancient subway blueprints, the church records of half a dozen parishes and a complex sociological treatise on Greenwich Village from the 1930s that listed every single place of business and institution, street by street throughout the entire neighborhood. As Valentine made his way through the gloomy tiers of books and records he began to put together a picture of what the area around 421 Hudson Street had once been.
Originally of course it had been on the very edges of New York in the small rural village of Greenwich on the shores of the Hudson River. By the early 1800s the fields belonging to the Voorhis family had been sold to Trinity Church, who in turn leased the property to the St. Mary Magdalene Benevolent Society. By that time the two-block square of property bounded by Hudson Street, Clarkson, Morton and Varick was already being used as a burial ground for the Episcopal Church of St. Luke’s in the Field a little to the north. In the 1820s a Roman Catholic Church, Holy Redeemer, was built on the property and a stark, redbrick convent and home for “disadvantaged” girls built across Hudson Street. It was at this time that Edgar Allan Poe lived in the area, and his dour, stooped figure was regularly seen plodding through the tombstones of the burial ground. As time went on the burial ground property was subdivided and the first town houses on what was to become St. Luke’s Place were erected, the road being an extension of Le Roy Street to the west and running through to Varick. Holy Redeemer Church burned in 1865 and burials in the area were taken over by St. Paul’s to the south and St. Luke’s to the north. By the 1870s the first elevated trains were appearing, infringing on the property owned by the convent at 421. A fire in 1877 forced the closure of the building and the ruins were demolished in 1881 to make way for the eight-story warehouse building that presently occupied the site. By 1900 there was no trace of the convent, the church or the cemetery. The graveyard was a park, St. Luke’s Place was home to the Mayor of New York and streetcars and horse-drawn trolleys rumbled up and down Hudson Street.