“Is that... Are you joking?”
“Uhm, well, no, sir,” said the man who, it was clear to Rhyme, probably never joked about computer matters.
“You have to have a faster computer there.”
“Doesn’t matter. Even with Fugaku, in Japan” — he said this almost reverently — “you might shave off a few hundred thousand years is all. But maybe we’ll be lucky and he used something short.”
Ah, the damn L-word again.
Rhyme added another unnecessary: “Let me know the minute you find something.”
“I’ll do that, sir. Oh, just one question?”
“Yes?”
“That Detective Sachs. Just checking. She is married, right?”
Was he really asking that?
“Uhm. Yes.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
They disconnected.
He ordered his phone, “Call Pulaski.”
A moment later: “Lincoln. How’s the case?”
“Taken some turns. It’s not real estate. The cranes’re a misdirection. He had us focus on the drones delivering the acid, when he was really using them to check his real target. Hale was hired to take out a U.S. senator. Edward Talese.”
“Why?”
“Not sure yet. And Gilligan’s computer’s a bust. The expert says it could take two hundred million years to crack it.”
“How many?”
“Two hundred million.”
“Phew. That’s a relief. I thought you said two hundred billion.”
“Looks like your sense of humor isn’t on paid leave. What’re you doing?”
A pause as dense as Emery’s. “I’m not prepared to answer that at this point in time.”
No idea what that sentence meant, nor was Rhyme inclined to find out.
“I have a question. What size shoe do you wear?”
“Is this like a dog whistle?”
“A what?”
“A question that’s really about something else.”
“When I ask a question, Pulaski, it’s about the question. What size?”
57
There she goes, another part of history.
He was eighty-eight years old, Simon Harrow was. His head bald, his spine curved. But on the whole, pain free — just those humid days of summer and spring... The remedy to the condition? Don’t leave the house on humid days of summer and spring.
Just sit on his balcony and gaze out over downtown Manhattan.
There she goes, being destroyed by the developers.
He was looking at a patchwork of construction near the Holland Tunnel, that artery that led from the city, under the broad and regal Hudson River into New Jersey’s industrial heart.
His own turf was for the time being safe from the wrecking ball. The ancient apartment in SoHo was rent-controlled, much to the dismay of the landlord, who sent the superintendent of the red-brick complex around occasionally to “see how he was doing,” meaning to find out if Harrow had conveniently died, allowing the man to elevate the rent to the stars.
Harrow, however, was determined to remain alive for his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, his parrot, Rimbaud... and the landlord himself.
Love was the motive for the first categories. Spite for the last one.
His coffee, cooling, the New York Times sitting folded upon his lap, he scanned the construction site. Demolition was done and a new series of buildings was beginning to emerge, though the job was on hold temporarily, thanks to some crazy man attacking jobsites.
His opinion about the end of yet another neighborhood in Manhattan — in this case the southwestern edge of SoHo — was by no means negative. Some had called New York City a living, breathing creature, but Harrow didn’t think of the place in such a limited way. He considered the five boroughs an evolutionary tree, many species appearing and adapting to the times, or, if not, vanishing.
Natural selection urban-style.
This was one neighborhood that had been transformed significantly. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, South of Houston had grown from sooty industrial to professional and chic and artsy.
Change...
One of the most significant had been what he was looking at now: the Holland Tunnel, which had required a massive redevelopment of the neighborhood to make way for the ventilation towers and approach routes.
His eyes rose to the entrance. His father had been a boy when the tunnel opened in the late 1920s, and Harrow Senior had grown fascinated with the project the way other boys then loved dirigibles and cowboys and the Dodgers. The man regaled his son with stories about the tunnel’s creation. Shields, like massive tin cans, dug through the earth beneath the river from both sides of the adjoining states. Those moving from New Jersey east were faster, as they had to push through ground that was mostly mud, the consistency of toothpaste. The sandhogs — tunnel workers — from the New York side had to contend with rock. Because of concerns about water and mud seeping into the tunnels during construction, the working areas were kept under high pressure and the sandhogs had to go through decompression after their shifts like scuba divers so they didn’t suffer from the bends.
While Harrow was not troubled about the concept of a city molting its old skin, he wasn’t pleased that one of the buildings going up nearby would cut off his view of the Palisades.
On the other hand, it might be residential, and the thought of what he might catch a glimpse of around a swimming pool made up for the altered vista of nature.
“Let’s hope for residential,” he said, sipping more cool coffee.
Rimbaud, sitting on a nearby perch, did not weigh in, occupied, as he was, with feather preening.
Harrow now frowned, noticing two bright flashes appear from the jobsite. Two loud bangs followed seconds later.
Something had happened at the base of the cranes.
Lord, this was one of the attacks!
The huge thing was starting to tilt.
He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses and replaced them.
The sound of a Klaxon began to fill the air.
It leaned farther and farther...
Then, like cutting a marionette’s strings, it collapsed fast. His apartment was about a half mile away and it took a second or two for the sound of the collision to reach him.
“Shit,” Harrow gasped, grabbing his phone and dialing 911, even though he was sure dozens if not hundreds of calls were already being made.
A voice nearby startled him. “Shit!”
He glanced up. Rimbaud was looking over the cloud of dust in the distance. He squawked once more. “Shit. Uh-huh. Shit.”
58
Jenny had made a joke when Martine was born.
“You ever notice the smell? It’s Eau d’Hospital.”
And Ron Pulaski had inhaled and said, “Yeah. They all smell alike. Don’t do a start-up that sells it. I’d think it’d be a limited market.”
Pulaski was aware of the same scent now as he walked, head down, along the corridor of the general administration wing.
He was in East Side General Hospital illegally. At least where he presently was, in the guts of the place. He could, of course, spend as much time in the visitor area as he wished. But strolling through the security door with the expired NYPD ID card and a silver badge that was a souvenir Brad had bought in the gift shop of one of the big movie studios after a tour? Nope. Not good. He wasn’t in uniform — that would be an offense too far, he judged — but was in a dark suit and white shirt. A tie that he wore maybe three times a year.
So, a silver-badge detective. Probably no one would know that was a contradiction.
He’d signed in, but the scrawl was illegible, as was the lettering in the Print Your Name block. He thought of Detective Ed Garner’s trick, getting him to draw a sloppy diagram of where the accident took place and of Burdick’s plan of using his past medical incident to sideline him.