Okay. I got out, locked the door, put the iPhone and keys in my pocket, and headed smoothly after him. I wasn’t angry now. It didn’t feel personal. It was just a job, like always. And I knew how to do it.
He was fifty yards up the street, moving quickly in the cold. He crossed to the other side of Christopher at Seventh Avenue, heading south. My gut told me he was going to the Sheridan Square subway station. Walking more quickly, I cut over onto Grove to intercept him.
He passed right in front of me when I was ten yards from West 4th Street. I fell in behind him, closing the distance. I logged my surroundings: moderate traffic on Seventh Avenue, none at all on West 4th. A handful of pedestrians going both ways on West 4th, talking, laughing, the usual New York polyglot. Storefronts, empty. Nothing out of place. It was near twilight now, and cold. People had their heads down, they were hurrying home to dinner, or even just to get inside. Nobody was going to notice, much less remember, one man in a watch cap and shades in the midst of the vast metropolis.
Sure enough, he took the stairs at the Sheridan Square subway entrance. I rotated my neck, cracking the joints, taking a last look behind me as I hit the stairs. All clear.
I followed him down, taking the ground noiselessly along the outer edges of my boot soles, my heart pounding now. Five steps behind. Four. Three.
He turned the corner. I glanced behind. Empty. I followed him around. Empty. I took a step closer. The range was perfect. Reach for his face with one hand, the other in his lower back. Pull him onto his heels, circle the neck, arch, crack, drop, done.
I was an eye blink away, a routine electrical command, a single fired synapse. In a thousand parallel universes, I did it and it was already done.
But here, in this life, I hesitated. In my eyes, I saw an empty subway station corridor and a perfect moment to act; in my mind, I saw Koichiro, laughing at whatever the man had said to him. My breath caught in my throat and my hands froze half outstretched in front of me. I stopped, my stomach clenching, my shoulders rolling forward as though at war with my rooted feet.
I watched him move down the corridor and turn another corner. Then he was gone.
I walked back to the car on unsteady legs. I got inside, slumped in the seat, put my face in my hands, and was suddenly convulsed in tears.
Maybe the man was like a father to Koichiro, or would be. Maybe he was as close to a father as my son would ever know. And I was about to take that away. Because I could? Because it would numb some hurt part of me?
I stayed there for a long time, feeling confused and helpless and miserable. Finally I got it under control. I fired up the car and drove away and I didn’t look back.
22
I FOUND A COUPLE Internet cafés and checked the bulletin boards. Nothing on either. Then, on foolish impulse, I Googled: “Jan Jannick bicycle Palo Alto.” The first hit was a front-page article in the Palo Alto Daily News. A bizarre accident, the article reported. Bicycle. Night. Rain. A tragedy. Jannick was survived by a wife and two small children, a boy and girl, all of whom were being cared for by relatives during this difficult time.
I purged the browser and rubbed my eyes. No choice, I reminded myself. It was Jannick or Dox. Jannick or Dox.
I stopped at a place called Katz’s Delicatessen at Houston and Ludlow. The food was good, but I ate with neither hunger nor relish, only to keep my body going. Finally, I drove out to Great Neck and checked in at the Andrew, where I took the hottest bath I could stand, trying to boil the tension out of myself.
I lay in bed afterward, exhausted but unable to sleep. A thousand fragmented images and voices pressed close inside my head, each a hungry demon, gnawing at my mind. Then, in the midst of that mental cacophony, I heard a single voice, Delilah’s, telling me about choice, how it was within me to make the right one, that it was my choices that would make me who and what I am. I seized on her voice, followed it, and it began to drown out the others.
And then, for the second time that evening, my eyes filled with tears, this time at the tenuous, terrifying hope that maybe Delilah had been right. That, improbably, even accidentally, I had proved her right. And that, if I could do it once, I could do it another time. And another after that.
You can, I told myself, again and again, my lips forming the words like a prayer, an incantation. You can. You can. And, breathing that silent mantra, clutching it as though it was my last and only hope, finally, fitfully, I slept.
23
I GOT UP AT five the next morning. The first thing I did was check the transmitter. Accinelli’s car hadn’t moved-it was still at his house in Sands Point. I showered, shaved, and got dressed, then went down to the restaurant for breakfast. I kept the iPhone open in front of me while I ate, in case Accinelli moved earlier than I thought likely.
At six o’clock, I started driving circuits on 25A and the Long Island Expressway between Mineola and Sands Point. At six-thirty, the transmitter started moving. I wasn’t surprised. Accinelli was a self-made man, with all the ambition self-made success implied. I hadn’t expected him to show up and punch a time clock at nine.
I watched on the iPhone as he came down Searingtown Road, then fell in behind him on the LIE. Traffic was already thick in the other direction, toward New York, and I supposed one of the benefits of living in Sands Point and working in Mineola was that doing so offered him a reverse commute.
As I followed him I hoped, but didn’t really expect, that he might pull over at a rest stop, or a favorite diner, or some other place where I might find an opportunistic few minutes alone with him. But he didn’t. From the LIE, he went south on the Northern State Parkway, then onto East Jericho. By the numbers, from home to the office. I went past as he waved to the guard in front of the parking lot, then watched him drive inside.
I picked up some sandwiches and fruit at a supermarket and went back to the hotel room. If Accinelli didn’t go anywhere until he was done at work, it was apt to be a long day of watching and waiting.
But at just before eleven o’clock, he moved. I went to the car, watching on the iPhone as he headed west on the LIE, toward New York. On the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I came close enough to spot his car, and stayed behind him across the Williamsburg Bridge. Downtown again. Interesting.
I followed him onto Delancey, keeping several cars between us. Where are you going? I wondered. Same place as yesterday?
I expected him to go right on Bowery and park at the lot I’d seen him use the day before. Instead, he continued onto Kenmare, then made a left on Mott, going the opposite direction from where I’d spotted him yesterday. Then right on Broome, right on Crosby, and into a parking lot between Spring and Prince. And all at once it came together for me. I knew why he was here.
I drove past the lot, made a right onto Houston, then another right onto Mott, the same block I’d seen him turn off yesterday. I paused at the corner of Mott and Prince, but didn’t see him coming. If I was wrong, I had already lost him, and wouldn’t be able to reacquire him until he was moving in the car again. But I knew I wasn’t wrong. The signs had all been there; I was just too distracted by thoughts of Midori and Koichiro to put them together.
Accinelli had a mistress.
Why had he still been in his golf clothes when I saw him yesterday? Why was he hurrying, first on foot, then on the highway? And he hadn’t been shopping here-he was carrying no packages.
I pictured it: he tells his wife he’ll be golfing at the club, and he will be, too, because it’s important that he’s seen there, that his buddies will unintentionally vouch for him, unwittingly provide an alibi. But he’s only staying for nine holes, not eighteen. The difference creates a two-hour window for him. He wants to make the most of it, so he doesn’t even change his clothes. In fact, he wants to stay in the clothes, wants to be wearing them when he gets home later. And then he stays too long, and hurries to return before his wife gets suspicious.