Mission (22 page)

‘Sure. Listen, everything's fine.' I pulled out my wallet. ‘Thanks for taking care of it. How much do I owe you?'

‘Nothing. Forget it.' She waved away my ten dollar bill. ‘He, er – already paid me.'

I had the feeling she was lying. ‘That still leaves the cab fare.'

She shook her head. ‘I walked.'

Now if you include the cross-town blocks, there's a total of fifteen
between the hotel and our office on 49th and Madison. So a two-way trip is quite a hike. And Linda, as I know from the petty cash slips, is not a girl who likes walking. Most of the time she totters around on four-inch heels.

I smelt trouble. ‘Linda – ?'

‘Is it okay if I sit down?' she said.

I motioned to her to pull up a seat and broke open a new pack of cigarettes.

‘I was followed,' she said.

I snapped my lighter shut and placed it carefully on my desk. ‘Tell me about it.'

Linda took a deep breath. ‘It was after I picked up the robe – ' I flagged her down. ‘Whose name did you put on the ticket?'

‘His.'

‘Okay. Sorry. Go on.'

‘Well, anyway – ' she continued. ‘This place I go to is run by a Cuban family. They're always bawling each other out in Spanish. So I go in and hand over the ticket to this young guy but when he checks the number, the robe is not hanging on the rack with the rest of the stuff that's ready for collection. Which is odd, because I'd brought it in the day before, and they clean things in a couple of hours – right?'

‘Right …' I said.

‘So he goes out back to check, and there's a lot of yakking going on, and this woman sticks her head round the door and takes a good look at me then finally, the old man who owns the place comes out with the robe folded in tissue paper, and puts it in a bag for me.'

I nodded. ‘Did he say anything?'

‘Yes,' said Linda. ‘He asked me if it was mine. So I said no, it belongs to a friend. So then he asked me if I knew where my friend had got it from. And I said I didn't know but that I thought it was probably from the Middle East because he'd just come back from there. It seemed like he was asking me a lot of questions but – well, I'm a pretty regular customer and he's always been a friendly guy. So I went along with it.'

I kept my voice casual. ‘The address on the ticket. Was it for the office or – ?'

‘The hotel,' she replied. ‘Anyway, finally, when I get outside, the woman from the cleaners is standing looking in the window of the next store. She was about fifty, grey hair, black headscarf and coat. You know the way they dress, and with a shopping bag. I was kind of
surprised to see her because I thought she was still working out back, then I thought “What the hell? It's probably her lunch hour too.” So I started back towards Madison Avenue.'

‘And she followed you,' I said.

Linda nodded. ‘Yes. I wasn't sure at first. I mean, when you walk along Madison at lunchtime, you can be in the same crowd of people for two or three blocks. So I kept going. I cut across the bottom of Central Park to the hotel, looked back when I reached the entrance – and there she was. About fifty yards behind me on the other side of the street.'

‘So what did you do?'

She shrugged. ‘I checked with the desk to see if he was in, rang his room, then went on up with the package. We talked for about ten or fifteen minutes. Mainly about the difference between New York, Los Angeles and the rest of America. He asked me a bit about my parents, and why we'd left Hungary. And that was it.'

‘What happened when you came out of the hotel?'

‘She was still standing in exactly the same place across the street. Holding her shopping bag. Like an old black crow.' She shuddered at the memory. ‘It was really creepy.'

‘I can imagine,' I said. I dragged deeply on my cigarette, sat back and tried to work it out. There was nothing special about the robe – at least, as far as I knew. It was like one of those wide-sleeved
djellabas
you see Arabs wearing in holiday brochures for places like Morocco and Tunisia. Only this one didn't have a hood. Nothing fancy. Just woven from rough, pale brown wool. ‘Did you walk back here?'

‘Part of the way,' she said. ‘I mean, you can't really tell if anyone's tailing you if you're in a cab.'

I nodded wisely. ‘Good thinking …'

‘Yes,' said Linda. ‘So I walked down to 57th and Broadway. I looked back a couple of times but she hadn't moved from the Park side of the street. Then I lost sight of her. I zig-zagged over to Ninth then got a cab back to the office. For all I know she may still be there.'

I picked up the phone and asked Nancy to get me Mr Sheppard in Room 315 of the Mayflower Hotel. Then I lit another cigarette and eyed Linda. I mulled over the idea of letting her in on our big secret and decided against it. She only had to blab it round the office and I'd be finished. Joe Gutzman's benevolence allowed me a certain amount of licence but if he discovered that my newest client was Jesus Christ, he'd tell the sign-writer to get busy with a bottle of paint remover.

‘Linda,' I said, eyeing her keenly. ‘Why do you think this woman followed you?'

‘I don't know,' she said, eyeing me back. ‘I was hoping you might tell me.'

Some chance.

The phone rang. It was Nancy. There was no answer from Room 315. The hotel switchboard had checked with the desk. Mr Sheppard had not left any messages.

‘Okay, thanks, Nancy. I'll try again later.' I rang off with a kind of blank feeling. Like when you're waiting for bad news. You know what I mean?

Linda stood up and put the chair back in place. I treated her to Resnick's winning smile. ‘If I solve the mystery, you'll be the first to know.'

She walked to the door. ‘We could always go round to the dry cleaning store and ask the lady what the problem is.'

‘We could,' I said. ‘But why make waves? You know how touchy these people are. There's no law against walking up Madison Avenue.'

‘I guess not.' She left looking distinctly disappointed.

I tried to settle down and catch up with the paperwork but the pressure wave generated by the implications of Linda's story made it difficult to concentrate. Yesterday the cops, today a Cuban drycleaning lady. But, despite what The Man had said, or rather what he had
not
said, were they real cops, or just a reasonable facsimile? In the case of Mrs el Cubano, the robe was obviously the catalyst, but was she a random element or another external agency that had been geared up by ‘Brax in a new effort to expose us? If so, the fact that she had stayed outside the hotel meant she had transferred her interest from Linda to the owner of the robe and that, in turn, meant that there was more to come. Terrific.

I taped some letters and rang the hotel a couple of times but there was no reply from his room. At six o'clock I left a message with the desk and put him out of my mind. So much so that, when I wrapped it up around a quarter of eight, I stepped into an empty elevator and rode it down to the lobby in solitary splendour without giving it a second thought. It was only when I got outside that I realised what I'd done. I went a little watery at the knees then shrugged it off. What was the point of worrying? Like I said before, I'm a New Yorker. And beyond that, what did I count for in the overall scheme of things? I was just a bio-degradable bag of bones housing an unquantifiable
chunk of one of the good guys. In the final analysis, when measured against the cosmic scale of the struggle in which The Man was involved, my life – or that of any individual – wasn't worth a dime.

Not that we, tied up in the day-to-day problems of living, saw it that way. To each of us, our own lives were our prime concern. To the young, the healthy, the thrusting individual, the most important thing was to go
on
living. It was the all-consuming passion. What the Eastern mystics labelled
samskara
– ‘the thirst for existence'. The desire to grab the goodies that the world had to offer.

I went into a bar I knew on 47th Street, ordered a bourbon on the rocks and sat at the end of the counter near the window where I could survey both the interior and the street outside. And I tried to convince myself that what the people around me were talking about was important. That the man in the blue suit halfway down the bar was right to be concerned about the standing of the Mets. And that the three girls in the window swapping office gossip about a colleague who had man-trouble were not just wearing out their tongues. That their concerns, however trivial, had some intrinsic value. That their lives and mine, in their limited earth-bound way still had some meaning. That our rules of behaviour were valid; our ambitions worthwhile.

I felt the need to make a conscious effort to maintain my grip on external reality; to combat the feeling of alienation that had been engendered by my contact with The Man and what he had told me. And which, if unchecked, threatened to destroy what I judged to be a promising career, a comfortable life and the pleasurable pursuits that were part of it.

It was with this firm resolution that I returned to my reflection upon the human condition. I had decided to ring the hotel at nine o'clock so I had a good forty-five minutes in which to pierce some of the secrets of the universe. I asked the bartender to refill my glass to help things along. My eye wandered to the copy of the
New York Times
that was wedged between a couple of bottles, and which he kept for customers. One of the headlines was about yet another killing. All over the world, the slaughter went on. And so did the agonising arguments about the retribution that our society should exact from the murderer. One of the cornerstones of our civilisation was the belief in the sanctity of human life yet, as we clawed our way to the top of our own particular heap, we had lost sight of the most
important, most fundamental belief of all; the sanctity of the human spirit.

Most of us – and that included me – paid lip-service to the idea of its presence within the human body but we regarded it as human, not divine. A facet of our individual personality which, in itself, was nothing more than the external expression of bio-chemical processes within the brain. A collage of genetic factors, and the complex interactions between inherited characteristics and environmental conditioning. But despite whatever we felt we might owe to our Ma and Pa, our grandparents, or to Uncle Walter, most of us still believed that the person we felt ourselves to be was an inseparable part of our bodies; and as unique as our fingerprints.

All well and good but, over the weekend, The Man had blown that comfortable idea apart; destroying many of the convenient excuses for our behaviour in the process.

His somewhat revolutionary thesis that we were no more than carrier vehicles for a unit of consciousness that, in itself, was only a mere fragment of a greater being had a certain coherence. Many theologians had advanced the idea that we were part of a divine collective. And it also found expression in the language we used to describe personal relationships and the sometimes surprising immediacy with which they could occur. The sudden empathy you could feel towards a total stranger; that we qualified with words like ‘kindred spirit' and ‘soul-mate'; and with phrases such as ‘on the same wavelength' and ‘putting out good vibes'. Was the instinctive kinship we felt simply the bonding of like with like? The sub-conscious recognition of another vestigial trace of our larger-than-life Celestial self? And was the desire for re-unification the driving force behind our emotional relationships?

It made sense but it was not an easy idea to live with. After all, most of us spend a good part of our lives trying to work out just who the hell we are and what we're doing here. Coming to terms with our God-given grab-bag of assets and liabilities. Resolving the crisis of identity, usually with the crushingly expensive help of our analysts. Some people never make it no matter how much they spend. I felt I had – and had even walked away with some loose change. Which was why I was not overly pleased to learn that the impressively cool Leo M. Resnick that I knew and loved was only one of many pairs of legs in the umpteenth section of a Celestial millipede that, in the reunion celebration following the Day of Judgement would samba
back through the Gates of Paradise to collect its back pay.

And yet. And yet…

What The Man's thesis didn't quite explain was the equally strong antipathy one could feel towards people. The way I'd been turned off by the sight of Greaseball Donati. But maybe that was caused by dissonant combinations of the twelve Ain-folk. Like when you make cocktails. The bottles all contain alcohol but they don't all blend agreeably together. And if you mix gin, vodka and brandy, it's a recipe for disaster.

On the other hand, it was possible that the trapped Ain-folk were not a close harmony Sunday School set whose idea of letting their hair down was to play frisbee with their haloes. Despite The Man's talk about a Golden Age, it may not have been all sweetness and light. Even though the Ain-folk were cosmic luminaries of a high order, it was quite possible that, out of the twelve, there had been at least one who got everybody's vote as being a celestial pain in the ass. And if there was a big chunk of him inside Donati, it could have explained my instant dislike of him.

It was a typical ‘Braxian thought, but one I enjoyed. The world mirrored the conflict and chaos he had sown throughout the Universe. Our combative nature drew its strength from our self-centredness. The ego that had been forged by ‘Brax in the fires of the world from our imprisioned souls.
This
was the meaning behind the allegorical language of the medieval alchemists. It was the ego that was the base metal which The Man, and the Initiates of the Mysteries in the Middle Ages, had sought to transmute into gold. The divine metal. The spirit; freed from its earthly impurities. Transcendent. Eternal.