Jassim looked at his watch.
The time was twenty minutes past nine.
The intermission had ended five minutes ago.
But he still had ten minutes to get back to his seat, plant the bomb, and get out of the hall before it went off. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and ran across the street to the lobby entrance doors. The lobby was empty. The huge ornate brass clock over the center entrance doors read nine-twenty-one. There was violin music coming from within the hall. The second part of the concert had already begun. On all the television monitors circling the lobby, a miniature Svi Cohen was standing before the orchestra, violin under his chin, head bent as if in prayer, deeply engrossed in his playing. Jassim noticed that the Jew held the fiddle in his unclean hand. He was reaching for the brass handle on the door nearest him when a man wearing a gray uniform said, “I’m sorry, sir.”
Jassim turned to him, puzzled.
“I can’t let you in until the first movement is over.”
Jassim blinked.
“It started three minutes ago, sir. I’m sorry, those are my orders.”
The time was nine-twenty-two.
The Mendelssohn concerto had started at nine-nineteen, and the bomb was set to detonate at nine-thirty.
WILL WAS WONDERING how long he’d have to sit here. He was thinking that maybe him and Antonia could go for a bite to eat after this fiddle player did his thing, there seemed to be a nice Italian restaurant right across the avenue.
He was also wondering if anybody had ever tried to steal instruments from this place. Was there a room where they stored tubas and trombones and such? Or did all those musicians up there have their own instruments? He guessed maybe they did. Besides, he had to stop thinking like a thief. If Antonia went along with his scheme, he would never in his lifetime have to commit another burglary.
But, man, wasthis boring!
JASSIM LOOKED AT his watch again.
It was now nine-twenty-four.
The first movement of Mendelssohn’s accursed violin concerto was about twelve and a half minutes long. The Jew had started playing it at nineteen minutes past nine, which meant he would end the first movement at a bit past nine-thirty-one, perhaps later, nine-thirty-three, even nine-thirty-four, depending on how much artistic license he took with the piece. Jassim could not wait until any of those times because the bomb was set to go off at nine-thirty, which meant that unless he went into the hall, it would explode right here in the lobby in six minutes.
He took a deep breath.
“Hey!” the guard shouted, but he was too late.
Jassim had thrown open one of the doors and was already running down the aisle on the right hand side of the hall.
WILL TURNED TO look up the aisle when he heard somebody screaming. The person screaming was a short dark man carrying a handbag, holding it by the straps and beginning to twirl it over his head as he ran toward the stage, screaming. Will didn’t know what the man was screaming because it was in a foreign language, but whatever it was, there was enormous rage in the words. As the man rapidly approached the stage where the Israeli was playing, he almost looked like an undersized David twirling a slingshot to hurl a stone at a giant Goliath.
Will got to his feet the moment he realized this was close to what the little man intended.
“Hey! What the hell you doing?” he shouted, and threw himself at the man, intending to tackle him, but missing by a hair. He stumbled forward, off balance, as the man stopped some three feet from the stage and shouted something else in the same foreign language.
Will didn’t know quite why he hurled himself at the man again. Perhaps he was simply trying to impress Antonia, who sat in the seventh row, watching him with her mouth agape and her eyes wide. Perhaps he was remembering that the Khmer Rouge who’d tortured him had also spoken a language he couldn’t understand. Whatever the reason, he threw himself into the air again just as the man released his grip on the handbag’s straps. The Israeli tried to deflect the missile coming at him, raising the violin by its slender neck, simultaneously stepping aside to his right.
In that instant, Will landed on the man’s back.
In the next instant, the bag exploded.
13 .
NEW YEAR’S EVE dawned bright and clear and piercingly cold. Something had gone wrong with Hoch Memorial’s heating system during the night, and while technicians fiddled with thermostats and nozzles and valves, nurses ran around wearing sweaters or even coats over their starched white uniforms.
A multitude of people had drifted into Will’s room at all hours of the night, there to take his temperature or his blood pressure, to change the dressings on his face and his hands, to offer him medication and the sort of tender loving care a wounded individual deserved. When he heard voices outside the door to his room, he thought it might be more nurses coming in to change the sheets or the dressings or the bags hanging by the bed, but instead it was just someone asking a nurse if it was okay for him to go in and talk to the patient.
The man who entered his room looked a lot like Detective Stephen Louis Carella.
“Hey, hi,” Will said. “What’reyou doing here?”
Carella had just supervised the orderly discharge and transfer of one Anna DiPalumbo—which turned out to be the blond shooter’s true and honorable name—from Hoch Memorial to the hospital wing at the Women’s House of Detention downtown, but he didn’t offer this information to Will because discussing an informant with a person who was a known felon was simply stupid and might come back to haunt him later on. If Halloway’s threats were at all realistic, the arraignment later this morning might be sent south even without any further help, but it didn’t hurt to err on the side of caution, as the sage once remarked.
“I had some business here,” Carella said, which was true enough. “How are you doing?”
“Well, okay, I guess,” Will said. “A lot better than some of the others, that’s for sure.”
The newspapers this morning had reported that the Israeli violinist, Svi Cohen, had been killed in what was cautiously being called “a supposed terrorist bombing” at Clarendon Hall. Six musicians in the string section had also been killed. Plus eight concert-goers sitting in the first two rows. Plus the unidentified bomber himself. Carella didn’t think Halloway’s case would be helped by the fact that the person who’d tried to stop the bomber was a professional burglar and not one of W&D’s own elite band of brothers, as he’d called them, or sisters if you included Anna DiPalumbo, who was now on her way downtown in an ambulance, and whom Carella never cared to meet again on any snow-covered street anywhere in the world, thank you. But where were you when we needed you, Mr. Halloway? When push came to shove last night, where were all your knights in shining armor? The only hero last night had been little ole Wilbur Struthers here, sitting up in bed now and grinning like a kid on Christmas Day.
“Your picture’s on the front page of two newspapers, did you know that?” Carella said.
“Yeah, I saw them. I was on TV, too, early this morning. They came here to my hospital room, can you believe it? I guess it was because of the book deal.”