While the old man searched the refrigerator, Thornton fixated on the black starburst on the ceiling, flipping through his mental Rolodex of triad sources until he inhaled a trace of lavender. He turned to find Catherine Peretti on the next stool.
“Just like old times,” she said, pushing a tendril of dark brown hair back from her face and grinning.
He felt admonishment, but it quickly yielded to wonder. She was as beautiful as ever, her gray eyes blazing with whimsy to match full lips curved at the ends like a bow, poised to break into a laugh at the slightest provocation. Her snug jeans said she still ran daily, and that it was worth it. How in the hell had he ever taken his eyes off her for wannabe mafiosos?
“So how was your decade?” he asked.
“Eventful. I got married and had two kids, for starters.”
Eight years ago, he’d read, with a sense of loss, the Times announcement of her wedding to a star at a white-hot hedge fund.
“Congrats,” he said with manufactured enthusiasm.
“Girls Emily and Sabrina, six and eight, husband Richard, forty.”
Peretti peeled off her suede jacket and knit cap, and Thornton processed the changes. There were shadows under her eyes, and she was no longer a blonde. Also, back in the day, if one of her hairs fell any way but ruler straight, you noticed, if only because she smoothed it at once.
“Outside of work,” she continued, “my decade has consisted of helping with homework, watching ballet, watching gymnastics, watching swimming, and listening to attempts at piano. On occasion, I’ve had time to floss. How about you?”
“I had a second date recently.”
“It’s comforting to know there are some constants in the world.”
He sat straighter and said, “One change worth noting is that now, given the choice, I would have taken you somewhere else for dinner.”
“Is the Goat Club yesterday’s news?”
“It was replaced by a dress shop, actually. Also the Kkangpae is the mob du jour. The reason I would have gone somewhere else is I know of about two hundred restaurants you might like.”
She smiled. “Actually, I’m not here for the food, not that I’d ever come here for the food—” She cut herself off as the big entry door swung inward. Taking in the new arrivals, a senior couple who looked to have come straight from a bingo game in Peoria, she was clearly relieved, but nothing close to calm.
He stilled her hand with his, but the wedding band was a red light. He quickly let go, saying, “Let me know if I’m imagining any of this: You called me on a disposable cell, you used an alias, you came in disguise, and now you’re worried you were tailed.”
She took a deep breath. “Last night, I was running around the park in Potomac when one of your standard preppy neighborhood dads in a Gore-Tex jogging suit pulled even with me and said, very cordially, that my family and I would have ‘major difficulties’ unless I forgot what I’d just learned at work. And I have every intention of forgetting it, but first I need you on the story.”
Thornton felt a familiar jolt. As well as anyone, journalists understand the fisherman’s maxim: The tug is the drug. In this instance, the buzz was doused by his awareness that it would be in both of their best interests for him to hand off the story to someone else.
“Between the mobs and law enforcement, there are probably as many microphones in this place as in Nashville,” he said. “We should go somewhere else after all.”
Exiting the restaurant, Thornton pulled out his phone’s battery so that his position couldn’t be determined from cell tower data. So many of his sources insisted on this, it was practically a habit.
“Where’s Jane Johnson’s phone?” he asked.
Peretti walked alongside him, head lowered as if against a storm, though the night remained temperate. “Last seen in the trash in the ladies’ room in the Bethesda Kmart.”
“And your regular phone?”
“On a train headed for Florida.”
“Lucky phone.” Thornton led the way up Mott, passing the first two available taxis — just in case — before flagging a third heading west on Prince.
He directed the driver to the Lower East Side via a succession of left turns.
“The chance of anyone who’s not a tail staying with us for three consecutive left turns is astronomical,” he told Peretti.
“You’ve picked up some spook, haven’t you?”
“What I’ve learned about tails can be summed up with T-E-D-D: Someone who’s seen repeatedly over time, in different environments, and over distance, or who displays poor demeanor. Surveillants are easier to spot than you might think.”
“How?”
“Sometimes they have no good reason for being where they are. Sometimes they even use hand signals to communicate with teammates. The hitch is the other times, when there’s only imperceptible surveillant behavior, the sort I would sense rather than see — if I had that ability. So in answer to your question, I’ve picked up enough spook to get me in trouble.”
“That’s comforting.” Peretti’s laughter was interrupted by a screech of tires. A Verizon service van was rounding the corner behind them. Too sharply.
Feigning interest in a billboard, Thornton tried but couldn’t see into the van through the brightly colored blur of lights reflected on its windows.
When the taxi took the next left, onto East Broadway, the van continued down the Bowery. Peretti regarded Thornton plaintively.
“It’s eight-fifteen,” he said. “It was probably just a Verizon service guy in a rush to get a customer who’d been told to be home between noon and eight.”
But he couldn’t discount the possibility that the Verizon guy was really someone other than a Verizon guy who had just handed the taxi off to a teammate in another vehicle. So he had the driver continue all the way down to Wall Street, which at eight-thirty was almost a ghost town by New York standards.
Thornton and Peretti got out at Water Street while the cab idled at a stoplight. He scanned the haze of exhaust for anyone else disembarking. There was no one. Or, rather, no one as far as he could tell.
He led her a block east to Pier 11, where the urban thrum dimmed. “Getting on a boat is another good way to tell if you’re being followed,” he said. “A tail probably couldn’t get people to the other side of the river before we got there, so he’d be forced to stay with us.” He indicated the esplanade, where a handful of late commuters were hurrying to one of the mammoth Staten Island ferries.
The sour smell of the East River was nearly overwhelming as he and Peretti ascended the gangway, which branched into three separate entrances. He directed her to the door on the left, then trailed her into the main cabin.
Just one passenger boarded after them, a thirtyish Hispanic man, ironically unique in that none of his plain features stood out — a Yankees jacket was his only distinguishing trait. If you passed him on the street ten minutes from now and he’d changed into a Mets jacket, Thornton thought, you probably wouldn’t recognize him.
The man opted for the door to the right, leading to the ship’s upper level, but when Thornton and Peretti took two of the five hundred molded plastic seats on the main level, there he was, directly across the deck, on a bench beneath one of the ubiquitous Lucite-encased posters advertising bedbug extermination services.
Leaning close to Thornton, Peretti said, “I’m not sure, but I think he was on the subway I took from Penn Station.”
Thornton felt a chill creep up the back of his neck. He snuck a look at the man’s reflection in a window. Nose buried in a tabloid. A foghorn announced the ferry’s departure, making it impossible for him to hear anything else, even if he had a directional mic concealed in the newspaper.