“Sure,” he said, stepping to the right and holding the door as I passed him.
“Appreciate it,” I said, looking ahead over the box. A straight, plaster-walled corridor, empty. The only danger of interruption, someone coming down the elevator or in from the street. But at a little before noon, the middle of the workday, and with only thirty units in the building, the risk was small, and in any event unavoidable.
I set the box down next to the wall on my left with a grunt, leaving only a narrow space for Accinelli to get by me on the other side. I stood there as though catching my breath, ready for him to squeeze past.
Sudden, sickening doubt hammered me in the gut. A series of thoughts shot through my mind in preconscious shorthand, laser sharp and klaxon loud, the entire message delivered and received in a millisecond:
The whole thing’s a setup. There’s no mistress. Accinelli’s on the payroll. They staged it so you would follow him here, where he could take you out.
I spun counterclockwise to face him, my hands up, so sure I would be facing a gun or knife that as I came about and saw something in his fist, I didn’t stop, I just slapped it aside with my left hand. At the instant I made contact and the object broke loose to my left, I saw what it had been: his keys, and no more than that. Oh, shit.
The keys flew through the air. Accinelli’s head tracked them as they bounced off the corridor wall and hit the floor, his mouth wide open in surprise.
Oh, shit, I thought again. My paranoia had finally taken me over the edge. The setup had been so perfect-he’d been a half-second away from stepping past me, unconcernedly giving me his back. Now his expression was hardening, his arms coming up, his body blading to the left, the old soldier’s instincts kicking in, readying him to fight.
I wasn’t worried about whether I could handle him; I knew I could. But if I’d lost the element of surprise, if he fought me, there was no way it was going to look natural.
Decades of experience and underlying instinct took over. I stepped back and in a high voice said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry! I thought…I thought you had a knife. Oh, my God, another flashback, I can’t believe this. I was mugged once, and…I’m so sorry.”
He looked at me, confused and incredulous. No doubt part of his mind was still screaming that I was a threat, but if I were, why had I stepped back instead of pressing the attack? And my manner now was passive, even submissive in the abjectness of my tone and my apologies. Before he had a chance to put it all together, I said, “Here, let me just pick those up for you. I’m so sorry.”
“No!” he said, his hands still up, palms forward. “No, it’s fine. I’ll get them myself.” He turned and took a step toward where the keys had landed.
“No, really,” I said, moving with him, the words tumbling out in urgent cadences. “I feel so bad. I can’t believe this happened to me again. It’s so embarrassing. The hospital told me with the medications it wouldn’t, and it’s been three months since the last one so why would I expect a problem? But I guess I should have…”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said, now thoroughly convinced I was insane, and no doubt wanting more than ever just to be away from me.
I didn’t stop my agitated rant for a second. It’s difficult to talk and attack at the same time. The average person needs to get his mind right, focus, concentrate first, even if only for a moment. Accinelli would recognize this, on some level, and would therefore find my mad logorrhea comforting by comparison with what he’d feared a moment before.
He picked up his keys and shouldered past me. He kept his head turned toward me for an extra-long beat as he moved by, but I showed him my hands, palms forward, my arms held back, to demonstrate my harmlessness, and kept up my blathering.
Finally, his head turned. At the instant I was in his blind side, I shot in and looped my right arm around his neck, yanking him toward me, getting him back on his heels, off his base. The inside of my elbow centered on his windpipe, just hard enough for positioning, not hard enough to crush anything. I caught my left biceps in my right palm, brought my left hand around to the back of his head, and squeezed. I had learned the technique at the Kodokan as hadaka jime, naked choke, better known in the West as a sleeper hold.
Accinelli grunted and backed into me, trying to get his weight under him, to find his balance. His left hand scratched at my right forearm but found only the slippery neoprene gauntlet of the bicycle glove. He dropped his keys and reached back with his right, by instinct or long-ago training going for my eyes, but I buried my face in his shoulder and his scrabbling fingers were stymied by the bicycle helmet.
It was over in less than five seconds. Some people last a bit longer, some a bit shorter, but no one can go very long once the carotids have been closed off and oxygen is no longer reaching the brain. His groping hands abruptly fell away and he slumped in my arms. I leaned back against the wall, supporting some of his weight with my body, and held him there.
I was very conscious of how much pressure I was using. In the heat of the moment, it would be easy to apply too much, which at a minimum would cause bruises. The purpose of the choke was just to deny his brain oxygen. Anything more than that was unnecessary and would leave signs. I had a lot of experience with hadaka jime from my judo days, and always had a knack for it. I could feel just how firmly to squeeze.
I remained like that, controlling my breathing, counting off the seconds. Someone might have come down the elevator or in through the door, but the possibility didn’t trouble me. If it happened, I would just drop Accinelli, walk away, and deal with Hilger and everything else afterward. In any event, there was nothing I could do to influence, let alone control, the eventuality. I knew how I would react if it happened and that was enough.
I imagined what would come next: his mistress tries him on his cell phone, then checks downstairs when there’s no answer. Or some other resident finds him here. No sign of foul play-no gunshot, stab wounds, or blunt trauma-and therefore no justification to expend resources on an autopsy. There would be questions, of course, but he was a prominent man, and his family would be only too eager to close the matter quickly and obscure the details of where he died and what he might have been doing there. The cause would remain unknown, and would probably be treated as an embolism or some other such story that doctors proffer to families to help them find closure when death can’t otherwise be explained.
After four minutes, I knew he was past any attempt at resuscitation. I eased him down on the floor and looked outside. Two women in wool coats and fur earmuffs walked by, laughing about something, maybe on their way to an early lunch. I watched them pass. No one else was coming. Okay.
I picked up the box and stepped outside. I left the keys where they had fallen. Logical enough that Accinelli had been holding them when he was struck down by his mysterious embolic event, and that they would wind up on the floor beside him.
I headed down the stairs, glancing south on Mott as I moved. All clear. I glanced north. Then, only by virtue of years of experience, I turned my head away and continued down the stairs as though I had noticed nothing of any relevance.