Their headlights touched the bulky figure of their man. He was taking short, quick steps, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. He kept his face down.
“Where’s he going now?” Rogers said unnecessarily. He didn’t need Finchley to tell him.
“I don’t think he knows,” Finchley said.
In the darkness, the man was walking uptown on MacDougal Street. The lights of the coffee shops above Bleecker lay waiting for him. He saw them and turned abruptly toward an alley.
A girl had come down the steps of her house beside him, and he brushed by her. He stopped, suddenly, and turned. He raised his head, his mouth falling open. He was frozen in a pantomime of surprise. He said something. The car lights splashed against his face.
The girl screamed. Her throat opened and she clapped her hands to her eyes. The hideous sound she made was trapped in the narrow street.
The man began to run. He swerved into an alley, and even in the car, the sound of his feet was like someone pounding on a hollow box. The girl stood quiet now, bent forward, holding herself as though she were embarrassed.
“Get after him!” Rogers, in turn, was startled by the note his voice had struck. He dug his hands into the back of the front seat as the driver yanked the car into the alley.
The man was running well ahead of them. Their headlights shone on the back of his neck, and the glare of resected light winked in the rippling shadows thrown by the flapping skirt of his trailing coat. He was running clumsily, like an exhausted man, and yet he was moving at fantastic speed.
“My God!” Finchley said. “Look at him!”
“No human being can run like that,” Rogers said. “He doesn’t have to drive his lungs. He won’t feel oxygen starvation as much. He’ll push himself as fast as his heart can stand.”
“Or faster.”
The man threw himself against a wall, breaking his momentum. He thrust himself away, down a cross street, headed back downtown.
“Come on!” Rogers barked at the driver. “Goose this hack.”
They screamed around the corner. The man was still far ahead, running without looking back. The street was lined with loading platforms at the backs of warehouses. There were no house lights, and street lamps only at the corners. A row of traffic lights stretched down toward Canal Street, changing from green to red in a pre-set rhythm that rippled along the length of the street in waves. The man careered down among them like something flapping, driven by a giant wind.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” Finchley muttered urgently, “He’ll kill himself.”
The driver jammed speed into the car, flinging them over the truck-broken street. The man was already well past the next corner. Now he turned his head back for an instant and saw them. He threw himself forward even faster, came to a cross street, and flailed around the corner, running toward Sixth Avenue now.
“That’s a one-way street against us!” the driver yelled.
“Take it anyway, you idiot!” Finchley shouted back, and the car plunged west with the driver working frantically at the wheel. “Now, catch him!” Finchley raged. “We can’t let him run to death!”
The street was lined with cars parked at the crowded curbs. The clear space was just wide enough for a single car to squeeze through, and somewhere a few blocks ahead of them another set of headlights was coming toward them, growing closer.
The man was running desperately now. As the car began to catch him, Rogers could see his head turning from side to side, looking for some narrow alleyway between buildings, or some escape of any kind.
When they pulled even with him, Finchley cranked his window down. “Martino! Stop! It’s all right. Stop!”
The man turned his head, looked, and suddenly reversed his stride, squeezing between two parked cars with a rip of his coat and running across the street behind them.
The driver locked his brakes and threw the gear lever into reverse. The transmission broke up, but it held the driveshaft rigid. The car slid on motionless wheels, leaving a plume of smoke upon the street, the tires bursting into flame. Rogers’ face snapped forward into the seat back, and his teeth clicked together. Finchley tore his door open and jumped out.
“Martino!”
The man had reached the opposite sidewalk. Still running west, he did not stop or look behind. Finchley began to run along the street.
As Rogers cleared the doorway on his side, he saw the oncoming car just on the other side of the next street, no more than sixty feet away.
“Finch! Get off the street!”
Their man had reached the corner. Finchley was almost there, still in the street, not daring to waste time and fight his way between the bumper-to-bumper parked cars.
“Martino! Stop! You can’t keep it up — Martino-you’ll die!”
The oncoming car saw them and twisted frantically into the cross street. But another car came around the corner from MacDougal and caught Finchley with its pointed fender. It spun him violently away, his chest already crumpled, and threw him against the side of a parked car.
For one second, everything stopped. The car with the crushed fender stood rocking at the mouth of the street. Rogers kept one hand on the side of the FBI car, the stench of burnt rubber swirling around him.
Then Rogers heard the man, far down a street, still running, and wondered if the man had really understood anything he’d heard since the girl screamed at him.
“Call in,” he snapped to the FBI driver. “Tell your headquarters to get in touch with my people. Tell them which way he’s going, and to pick up the tail on him.” Then he ran across the street to Finchley, who was dead.
7
The hotel on Bleecker Street had a desk on the ground floor and narrow stairs going up to the rooms. The entrance was a narrow doorway between two stores. The clerk sat behind his desk, his chair tipped back against the stairs, and sleepily drooped his chin on his chest. He was an old, worn-out man with gray stubble on his face, and he was waiting for morning so he could go to bed.
The front door opened. The clerk did not look up. If somebody wanted a room, they’d come to him. When he heard the shuffling footsteps come to a stop in front of him, he opened his eyes.
The clerk was used to seeing cripples. The rooms upstairs were full of one kind or another. And the clerk was used to seeing new things all the time. When he was younger, he’d followed things in the paper. It had been no surprise to him when the Third Avenue El was torn down, or cars came out with four headlights. But now that he was older, things just drifted by him. So he never was surprised at anything he hadn’t seen before. If doctors were putting metal heads on people, it wasn’t much different from the aluminum artificial legs that often stumped up and down the stairs behind him.
The man in front of the desk was trying to talk to him. But for a long while, the only sound he made was a series of long, hollow, sucking sounds as air rushed into his mouth. He held onto the front edge of the desk for a moment. He touched the left side of his chest. Finally he said, laboring over the words, “How much for a room?”
“Five bucks,” the clerk said, reaching behind him for a key. “Cash in advance.”
The man fumbled with a wallet, took out a bill, and dropped it on the desk. He did not look directly at the clerk, and seemed to be trying to hide his face.
“Room number’s on the key,” the clerk said, putting the money in the slot of a steel box bolted through the floor.
The man nodded quickly. “All right.” He gestured self-consciously toward his face. “I had an accident,” he said. “An industrial accident. An explosion.”