Imajica Read online

  The dead man’s letter was virtually incomprehensible, as Estabrook had warned, veering from pulpit rhetoric to opiate invention. The fact that Chant, knowing he was going to be murdered (that much was cogent), should have chosen to set these nonsenses down as vital information was proof of significant derangement. How much more deranged, then, a man like Estabrook, who did business with this crazy? And by the same token was Gentle not crazier still, employed by the lunatic’s employer?

  Amid all these fantasies and equivocations, however, there were two irreducible facts: death and Judith. The former had come to Chant in a derelict house in Clerkenwell; about that there was no ambiguity. The latter, innocent of her husband’s malice, was probably its next target. His task was simple: to come between the two.

  He checked into his hotel at 52nd and Madison a little after five in the afternoon, New York time. From his window on the fourteenth floor he had a view downtown, but the scene was far from welcoming. A gruel of rain, threatening to thicken into snow, had begun to fall as he journeyed in from Kennedy, and the weather reports promised cold and more cold. It suited him, however. The gray darkness, together with the horn and brake squeals rising from the intersection below, fitted his mood of dislocation. As with London, New York was a city in which he’d had friends once, but lost them. The only face he would seek out here was Judith’s.

  There was no purpose in delaying that search. He ordered coffee from Room Service, showered, drank, dressed in his thickest sweater, leather jacket, corduroys, and heavy boots, and headed out. Cabs were hard to come by, and after ten minutes of waiting in line beneath the hotel canopy, he decided to walk uptown a few blocks and catch a passing cab if he got lucky. If not, the cold would clear his head. By the time he’d reached 70th Street the sleet had become a drizzle, and there was a spring in his step. Ten blocks from here Judith was about some early evening occupation: bathing, perhaps, or dressing for an evening on the town. Ten blocks, at a minute a block. Ten minutes until he was standing outside the place where she was.

  II

  Marlin had been as solicitous as an erring husband since the attack, calling her from his office every hour or so, and several times suggesting that she might want to talk with an analyst, or at very least with one of his many friends who’d been assaulted or mugged on the streets of Manhattan. She declined the offer. Physically, she was quite well. Psychologically, too. Though she’d heard that victims of attack often suffered from delayed repercussions—depression and sleeplessness among them—neither had struck her yet. It was the mystery of what had happened that kept her awake at night. Who was he, this man who knew her name, who got up from a collision that should have killed him outright and still managed to outrun a healthy man? And why had she projected upon his face the likeness of John Zacharias? Twice she’d begun to tell Marlin about the meeting in and outside Bloomingdale’s; twice she’d rechanneled the conversation at the last moment, unable to face his benigncondescension. This enigma was hers to unravel, and sharing it too soon, perhaps at all, might make the solving impossible.

  In the meantime, Marlin’s apartment felt very secure. There were two doormen: Sergio by day and Freddy by night. Marlin had given them both a detailed description of the assailant, and instructions to let nobody up to the second floor without Ms. Odell’s permission, and even then they were to accompany visitors to the apartment door and escort them out if his guest chose not to see them. Nothing could harm her as long as she stayed behind closed doors. Tonight, with Marlin working until nine and a late dinner planned, she’d decided to spend the early evening assigning and wrapping the presents she’d accumulated on her various Fifth Avenue sorties, sweetening her labors with wine and music. Marlin’s record collection was chiefly seduction songs of his sixties adolescence, which suited her fine. She played smoochy soul and sipped well-chilled Sauvignon as she pottered, more than content with her own company. Once in a while she’d get up from the chaos of ribbons and tissue andgo to the window to watch the cold. The glass was misting. She didn’t clear it. Let the world lose focus. She had no taste for it tonight.

  There was a woman standing at one of the third-story windows when Gentle reached the intersection, just gazing out at the street. He watched her for several seconds before the casual motion of a hand raised to the back of her neck and run up through her long hair identified the silhouette as Judith. She made no backward glance to signify the presence of anyone else in the room. She simply sipped from her glass, and stroked her scalp, and watched the murky night. He had thought it would be easy to approach her, but now, watching her remotely like this, he knew otherwise.

  The first time he’d seen her—all those years ago—he’d felt something close to panic. His whole system had been stirred to nausea as he relinquished power to the sight of her. The seduction that had followed had been both an homage and a revenge: an attempt to control someone who exercised an authority over him that defied analysis. To this day he didn’t understand that authority. She was certainly a bewitching woman, but then he’d known others every bit as bewitching and not been panicked by them. What was it about Judith that threw him into such confusion now, as then? He watched her until she left the window; then he watched the window where she’d been; but he wearied of that, finally, and of the chill in his feet. He needed fortification: against the cold, against the woman. He left the corner and trekked a few blocks east until he found a bar, where he put two bourbons down his throat and wished to his core that alcohol had been his addiction instead of the oppositesex.

  At the sound of the stranger’s voice, Freddy, the night doorman, rose muttering from his seat in the nook beside the elevator. There was a shadowy figure visible through the ironwork filigree and bulletproof glass of the front door. He couldn’t quite make out the face, but he was certain he didn’t know the caller, which was unusual. He’d worked in the building for five years and knew the names of most of the occupants’ visitors. Grumbling, he crossed the mirrored lobby, sucking in his paunch as he caught sight of himself. Then, with chilled fingers, he unlocked the door. As he opened it he realized his mistake. Though a gust of icy wind made his eyes water, blurring the caller’s features, he knew them well enough. How could he not recognize his own brother? He’d been about to call him and find out what was going on in Brooklyn when he’d heard the voice and the rapping on the door.

  “What are you doing here, Fly?”

  Fly smiled his missing-toothed smile. “Thought I’d just drop in,” he said.

  “You got some problem?”

  “No, everything’s fine,” Fly said. Despite all the evidence of his senses, Freddy was uneasy. The shadow on the step, the wind in his eye, the very fact that Fly was here when he never came into the city on weekdays: it all added up to something he couldn’t quite catch hold of.

  “What you want?” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Here I am, anyway,” Fly said, stepping past Freddy into the foyer. “I thought you’d be pleased to see me.”

  Freddy let the door swing closed, still wrestling with his thoughts. But they went from him the way they did in dreams. He couldn’t string Fly’s presence and his doubts together long enough to know what one had to do with the other.

  “I think I’ll take a look around,” Fly was saying, heading towards the elevator.

  “Wait up! You can’t do that.”

  “What am I going to do? Set fire to the place?”

  “I said no!” Freddy replied and, blurred vision notwithstanding, went after Fly, overtaking him to stand between his brother and the elevator. His motion dashed the tears from his eyes, and as he came to a halt he saw the visitor plainly. “You’re not Fly!” he said.

  He backed away towards the nook beside the elevator, where he kept his gun, but the stranger was too quick. He reached for Freddy and, with what seemed no more than a flick of his wrist, pitched him across the foyer. Freddy let out a yell, but who was going to come and help? There was nobody to guard the guard. He w
as a dead man.

  Across the street, sheltering as best he could from the blasts of wind down Park Avenue, Gentle—who’d returned to his station barely a minute before—caught sight of the doorman scrabbling on the foyer floor. He crossed the street, dodging the traffic, reaching the door in time to see a second figure stepping into the elevator. He slammed his fist on the door, yelling to stir the doorman from his stupor.

  “Let me in! For God’s sake, let me in!”

  Two floors above, Jude heard what she took to be a domestic argument and, not wanting somebody else’s marital strife to sour her fine mood, was crossing to turn up the soul song on the turntable when somebody knocked on the door.

  “Who’s there?” she said.

  The summons came again, not accompanied by any reply. She turned the volume down instead of up and went to the door, which she’d dutifully bolted and chained. But the wine in her system made her incautious; she fumbled with the chain and was in the act of opening the door when doubt entered her head. Too late. The man on the other side took instant advantage. The door was slammed wide, and he came at her with the speed of the vehicle that should have killed him two nights before. There were only phantom traces of the lacerations that had made his face scarlet and no hint in his motion of any bodily harm. He had healed miraculously. Only the expression bore an echo of that night. It was as pained and as lost—even now, as he came to kill her—as it had been when they’d faced each other in the street. His hands reached for her, silencing her scream behind his palm.

  “Please,” he said.

  If he was asking her to die quietly, he was out of luck. She raised her glass to break it against his face but he intercepted her, snatching it from her hand.

  “Judith!” he said.

  She stopped struggling at the sound of her name, and his hand dropped from her face.

  “How the fuck do you know who I am?”

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. His voice was downy, his breath orange-scented. The perversest desire came into her head, and she cast it out instantly. This man had tried to kill her, and this talk now was just an attempt to quiet her till he tried again.

  “Get away from me.”

  “I have to tell you—”

  He didn’t step away, nor did he finish. She glimpsed a movement behind him, and he saw her look, turning his head in time to meet a blow. He stumbled but didn’t fall, turning his motion to an attack with balletic ease and coming back at the other man with tremendous force.

  It wasn’t Freddy, she saw. It was Gentle, of all people. The assassin’s blow threw him back against the wall, hitting it so hard he brought books tumbling from the shelves, but before the assassin’s fingers found his throat he delivered a punch to the man’s belly that must have touched some tender place, because the assault ceased, and the attacker let him go, his eyes fixing for the first time on Gentle’s face.

  The expression of pain in his face became something else entirely: in some part horror, in some part awe, but in the greatest part some sentiment for which she knew no word. Gasping for breath, Gentle registered little or none of this but pushed himself up from the wall to relaunch his attack. The assassin was quick, however. He was at the door and out through it before Gentle could lay hands on him. Gentle took a moment to ask if Judith was all right—which she was—then raced in pursuit.

  The snow had come again, its veil dropping between Gentle and Pie. The assassin was fast, despite the hurt done him, but Gentle was determined not to let the bastard slip. He chased Pie across Park Avenue and west on 80th, his heels sliding on the sleet-slickened ground. Twice his quarry threw him backward glances, and on the second occasion seemed to slow his pace, as if he might stop and attempt a truce, but then thought better of it and put on an extra turn of speed. It carried him over Madison towards Central Park. If he reached its sanctuary, Gentle knew, he’d be gone. Throwing every last ounce of energy into the pursuit, Gentle came within snatching distance. But even as he reached for the man he lost his footing. He fell headlong, his arms flailing, and struck the street hard enough to lose consciousness for a few seconds. When he opened his eyes, the taste of blood sharp in his mouth, he expected to see the assassin disappearing into the shadows of the park, but the bizarre Mr. Pie was standing atthe curb, looking back at him. He continued to watch as Gentle got up, his face betraying a mournful empathy with Gentle’s bruising. Before the chase could begin again he spoke, his voice as soft and melting as the sleet.

  “Don’t follow me,” he said.

  “You leave her . . . the fuck . . . alone,” Gentle gasped, knowing even as he spoke he had no way of enforcing this edict in his present state.

  But the man’s reply was affirmation. “I will,” he said. “But please, I beg you . . . forget you ever set eyes on me.”

  As he spoke he began to take a backward step, and for an instant Gentle’s dizzied brain almost thought it possible the man would retreat into nothingness: be proved spirit rather than substance.

  “Who are you?” he found himself asking.

  “Pie ‘oh’ pah,” the man returned, his voice perfectly matched to the soft expellations of those syllables.

  “But who?”

  “Nobody and nothing,” came the second reply, accompanied by a backward step.

  He took another and another, each pace putting further layers of sleet between them. Gentle began to follow, but the fall had left him aching in every joint, and he knew the chase was lost before he’d hobbled three yards. He pushed himself on, however, reaching one side of Fifth Avenue as Pie ‘oh’ pah made the other. The street between them was empty, but the assassin spoke across it as if across a raging river.

  “Go back,” he said. “Or if you come, be prepared. . . .”

  Absurd as it was, Gentle answered as if there were white waters between them. “Prepared for what?” he shouted.

  The man shook his head, and even across the street, with the sleet between them, Gentle could see how much despair and confusion there was on his face. He wasn’t certain why the expression made his stomach churn, but churn it did. He started to cross the street, plunging a foot into the imaginary flood. The expression on the assassin’s face changed: despair gave way to disbelief, and disbelief to a kind of terror, as though this fording was unthinkable, unbearable. With Gentle halfway across the street the man’s courage broke. The shaking of the head became a violent fit of denial, and he let out a strange sob, throwing back his head as he did so. Then he retreated, as he had before, stepping away from the object of his terror—Gentle—as though expecting to forfeit his visibility. If there was such magic in the world—and tonight Gentle could believe it—the assassin was not an adept. But his feet could do what magic could not. As Gentle reached the river’s other bankPie ‘oh’ pah turned and fled, throwing himself over the wall into the park without seeming to care what lay on the other side: anything to be out of Gentle’s sight.

  There was no purpose in following any further. The cold was already making Gentle’s bruised bones ache fiercely, and in such a condition the two blocks back to Jude’s apartment would be a long and painful trek. By the time he made it the sleet had soaked through every layer of his clothing. With his teeth chattering, his mouth bleeding, and his hair flattened to his skull he could not have looked less appealing as he presented himself at the front door. Jude was waiting in the lobby, with the shame-faced doorman. She came to Gentle’s aid as soon as he appeared, the exchange between them short and functional: Was he badly hurt? No. Did the man get away? Yes.

  “Come upstairs,” she said. “You need some medical attention.”

  III

  There had been too much drama in Jude and Gentle’s reunion already tonight for them to add more to it, so there was no gushing forth of sentiment on either side. Jude attended to Gentle with her usual pragmatism. He declined a shower but bathed his face and wounded extremities, delicately sluicing the grit from the palms of his hands. Then he changed into a selection of dry c
lothes she’d found in Marlin’s wardrobe, though Gentle was both taller and leaner than the absent lender. As he did so, Jude asked if he wanted to have a doctor examine him. He thanked her but said no, he’d be fine. And so he was, once dry and clean: aching, but fine.

  “Did you call the police?” he asked, as he stood at the kitchen door watching her brew Darjeeling.

  “It’s not worth it,” she said. “They already know about this guy from the last time. Maybe I’ll get Marlin to call them later.”

  “This is his second try?” She nodded. “Well, if it’s any comfort, I don’t think he’ll try again.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because he looked about ready to throw himself under a car.”

  “I don’t think that’d do him much harm,” she said, and went on to tell him about the incident in the Village, finishing up with the assassin’s miraculous recovery.

  “He should be dead,” she said. “His face was smashed up . . . it was a wonder he could even stand. Do you want sugar or milk?”

  “Maybe a dash of Scotch. Does Marlin drink?”

  “He’s not a connoisseur like you.”

  Gentle laughed. “Is that how you describe me? The alcoholic Gentle?”

  “No. To tell the truth, I don’t really describe you at all,” she said, slightly abashed. “I mean I’m sure I’ve mentioned you to Marlin in passing, but you’re . . . I don’t know . . . you’re a guilty secret.”

  This echo of Kite Hill brought his hirer to mind. “Have you spoken to Estabrook?” he said.