Night Film(107)

The poor woman was sobbing and completely drenched, wearing only a thin pink housedress, clutching her arm in pain.

“What happened?” I asked a woman next to me.

“She just got mugged. The * even stole her cane.”

No sooner had she said the words, I was fighting my way through the crowd, racing as fast as I could back along the pathway.

The old man was already gone.

When I reached the empty bench, I could only stare down at it in anger.

There, abandoned, was the red umbrella, the backpack, the orthopedic cane and trench coat, the Subway sandwich wrappers. The cunning son of a bitch had probably taken them out of the trashcan so he’d appear to be enjoying a leisurely lunch.

Exactly where he’d been sitting was a small white scrap, facedown on the bench.

I picked it up. It was my business card.





75


I returned the belongings to the woman.

Every item was hers: the blue JanSport backpack, the red umbrella, the cane and coat. No money was missing. Her assailant had come from behind her, brutally wrenching her things away, shoving her down on the sidewalk.

“No way that was an old man!” Hopper shouted over the downpour as we jogged across Greenwich Street, heading back to Perry.

“I’m telling you. It was.”

“Then he’s been eating his friggin’ Wheaties, because he had the torque of a Suzuki. What’d he steal?”

“We’re about to find out.”

We picked up our pace. I could hardly calm myself to think, it had happened so quickly. Yet I had a feeling I shouldn’t have been so cavalier about leaving Nora alone. I hadn’t stopped to consider if the intruder had an accomplice.

We raced into my building. She wasn’t in the hallway.

“Nora!”

I shoved open the door, racing through the foyer. Nothing in the living room had been disturbed. I hurried down the hall to my office and stopped dead.

It looked like there’d been an earthquake. Papers and boxes, files, entire shelves had been ransacked and dumped on the floor. A window was open, rain pouring in. Nora was moving frantically around the wreckage.

“What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”

“He’s gone.”

“What?”

She was panicked. “Septimus. I can’t find him.”

I spotted the empty birdcage on the floor.

“Where the hell’s my laptop?” I shouted.

“Everything’s been stolen. Someone else was here. I heard him go out the window, but I didn’t see him.” She moved to the closet, the wooden door hanging off the runner.

I scaled through the mess to the window, angrily slamming it closed. My filing cabinets were pulled open, the papers looted. My old framed Time articles had been pulled off the wall. The Le Samoura? poster was hanging cockeyed, so Alain Delon—usually gazing out coolly in his fedora at something beyond the room—now contemplated the floor. Was that some type of cryptic message? A hint that I was shortsighted, wasn’t seeing straight?

I righted the frame, seized the leather cushions, and threw them to the couch. I grabbed one of the fallen shelves and heaved it upright, stepping on a picture frame lying facedown. I picked it up, seeing with a twinge of horror that it was my favorite shot of Sam, taken when she was hours old. The glass had been smashed. I shook out the shards, set it on my desk, then stepped over to the overturned box of Cordova research.

I almost laughed.

It was empty—except for the Meet Yumi escort flier that I’d pocketed back at 83 Henry. The half-naked girl stared mischievously at me, as if to whisper, Are you really that surprised?

I couldn’t fathom my stupidity. I’d known we were being followed, yet like some reckless fool, I’d taken no precautions, which now seemed especially idiotic, considering that the last time I’d gone after Cordova, my life had collapsed around me like a cheap vaudeville set. Now my notes were in the hands of the very subject of my investigation. Cordova would be reading my every note, every brainstormed thought and scrawl. He’d be perusing my head like a department store. My laptop had a password, but any decent hacker could override it. Now Cordova would know everything we knew about Ashley’s final days.

Whatever edge we might have had after breaking into Oubliette, the Waldorf, Briarwood, knowing that Ashley had been searching for this person called the Spider—it was gone.

I picked up my stereo, putting the receiver back on the shelf, and saw with disbelief Ashley’s CD was gone, too. This gave way to another alarming thought.

“Where’s Ashley’s police file?”

Nora was still digging through the closet.

“Ashley’s file that I got illegally from Sharon Falcone—you were reading it two days ago. Where is it?”

She turned, her face distraught.

“I don’t know.”

She began to cry, so I started trawling through the rubble myself. I couldn’t imagine the ripple effect of that file going public: Sharon losing her job; her career ending in disgrace due to my own folly; my name appearing in print yet again as something toxic. It made me so furious, it took me a moment to realize that Hopper was shouting for us.

We found him in the kitchen, standing by the open oven door.

The parakeet was inside, frantically fluttering around the fan.