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.”
“Buddy,” the clerk said, “I don’t give a damn. No drinking in your room and be out by eight o’clock, or it’s another five bucks.”
8
It was almost nine o’clock in the morning. Rogers sat in his cold, blank office, listening to the telephone ring. After a time, he picked it up.
“Rogers.”
“This is Avery, sir. The subject is still in the hotel on Bleecker. He came down a little before eight, paid another day’s rent, and went back to his room.”
“Thank you. Stay on it.”
He pushed the receiver back on the cradle and bent until his face was almost touching the desk. He clasped his hands behind his neck.
The interoffice buzzer made him straighten up again. He moved the switch over. “Yes?”
“We have Miss DiFillipo here, sir.”
“Would you send her in, please.”
He waited until the girl came in, and then let his hand fall away from the switch. “Come in, please. Here’s — here’s a chair for you.”
Angela DiFillipo was an attractive young brunette, a trifle on the thin side. Rogers judged her to be about eighteen. She came in confidently, and sat down without any trace of nervousness. Rogers imagined that in ordinary circumstances, she was a calm, self-assured type, largely lacking in the little guilts that made even the most harmless people turn a bit nervous in this building.
“I’m Shawn Rogers,” he said, putting on a smile and holding out his hand.
She shook it firmly, almost mannishly, and smiled back without giving him the feeling that she was trying to make an impression on him. “Hello.”
“I know you have to get to work, so I won’t keep you here long.” He turned the recorder on. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about last night.”
“I’ll be glad to help out.”
“Thank you. Now — your name is Angela DiFillipo, and you live at thirty-three MacDougal Street, here in New York, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Last night — that would be the twelfth — at about ten-thirty p.m., you were at the corner of MacDougal and an alley between Bleecker and Houston Streets. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me how you got there and what happened?”
“Well, I’d just left the house to go to the delicatessen for some milk. The alley’s right next to the door. I didn’t particularly notice anybody, but I did know somebody was coming up MacDougal, because I could hear his footsteps.”
“Coming toward Bleecker? On the west side of the street?”
“Yes.”
“Go on, Miss DiFillipo. I may interrupt you again, to clarify the record, but you’re doing fine.” And the record’s piling up, he thought. For all the good it does.
“Well, I knew somebody was coming, but I didn’t take any special notice of it, of course. I noticed he was walking fast. Then he changed direction, as if he was going to go into the alley. I looked at him then, because I wanted to get out of his way. There was a streetlight behind him, so all I could see was that it was a man — a big man-but I couldn’t see his face. From the way he was walking, I didn’t think he saw me at all. He was headed straight for me, though, and I guess I got a little tensed up.
“Anyhow, I took a short step back, and he just brushed my sleeve. That made him look up, and I saw there was something odd about his face.”
“How do you mean ‘odd,’ Miss DiFillipo?”
“Just odd. I didn’t see what it was, then. But I got the feeling it had something wrong with it. And I guess that made me a little bit more nervous.”
“I see.”
“Then I saw his face. He stopped, and he opened his mouth — well, his face was metal, like one of those robot things in the Sunday paper, and it was where a mouth would be — and he looked surprised. And he said, in a very peculiar voice, ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ ”
Rogers leaned forward in surprise. “Barbara — it’s I — the German? Are you sure of that?”
“Yes, sir. He sounded very surprised, and — ”
“What is it, Miss DiFillipo?”
“I just realized what made me scream — I mean, what really did it.”
“Yes?”
“He said it in Italian.” She looked at Rogers with astonishment. “I just realized that.”
Rogers frowned. “He said it in Italian. And what he said was ‘Barbara — it’s I — the German.’ That doesn’t make sense, does it? Does it mean anything to you?”
The girl shook her head.
“Well.” Rogers looked down at the desk, where his hands were tapping a pencil on the blotter. “How good is your Italian, Miss DiFillipo?”
“I speak it at home all the time.”
Rogers nodded. Then something else occurred to him. “Tell me — I understand there are a number of regional Italian dialects. Could you tell which one he was using?”