The Shadow Man (11 page)

Andrews was nearing his hotel when without warning he was bumped to the side, off the walk and into the deeply recessed dark doorway of a travel agency that had closed for the evening. He barely avoided falling. The street was dim, with relatively few passersby. A mugging, Andrews thought immediately, clutching his upper arm and shoulder, where pain still throbbed. The man must have been wearing soft-soled shoes as he approached Andrews from behind and skillfully separated him from the rest of the pedestrians, from the rest of the human race. The sidewalk and street beyond the deep doorway might as well have been in another city.

The man advanced on Andrews from the shadows. Andrews sucked in his breath in a harsh, surprised gasp, phlegm rattling in the back of his throat. The bulky dark form moving toward him was familiar.

Martin Karpp!

The square shoulders were hunched slightly forward, and in his right hand was a pipe or a club of some sort, dangling loosely at his side. He made no sound as he drew nearer to Andrews, whose shoes seemed to be imbedded in hardened concrete. Andrews tried to speak Karpp’s name, heard himself croak a pitiable exclamation of dread. Of all things, this surely was happening to someone else.

As the ominous figure’s hand raised the weapon, the entranceway flared into white brightness near the sidewalk. Brakes squealed and voices argued loudly and with passion.

“Five eighty, I told you! This cab ain’t no escalator you can jump on for a free ride!”

“An’ I told you we was goin’ the long way. You think you’re gonna run up the fare on me? ...”

Less than a yard from Andrews, the man with the weapon stood motionless and poised. Time hung suspended with his upraised arm.

Andrews emerged from his debilitating fright with a burst of expanding terror, a strength and quickness he didn’t ordinarily possess. He sprang around his assailant, bouncing off the thick plate glass of the travel agency’s window as if it were unbreakable resilient plastic. Something that felt like a hornet sting shot through the right side of his neck. He was out onto the sidewalk, wheeling to run in the direction of the arguing voices.

The cab was parked half a block away, its headlights glaring blindingly at Andrews. He shouted and sprinted for it and the two men standing quarreling beside it.

He was on them in seconds, seeing surprised, frightened faces. The cabby was a lantern-jawed man with a flattened nose, his recalcitrant fare a lean, youthful Latin.

“What the fuck?” the cabby said, taking a full step backward away from the lunging Andrews. The younger man said nothing, dancing away in a graceful sideways leap. Andrews stopped himself by slapping his hands loudly and painfully against the parked cab’s front fender.

“Somebody tried to kill me!” he blurted out. “There in that doorway!”

Now that he had help, his fear had been transformed to rage; he wanted to retrace his steps with his newfound companions and crush the man who’d threatened him. His palms still tingled from their contact with the fender.

“We calla police!” the cabby said. “Hey! Where you goin’!”

The Latin youth was trotting down the sidewalk, looking back and grinning. He raised a middle finger in an obscene gesture, put on an impressive show of speed and disappeared around a corner.

The cabby took an impulsive step after him, then spat angrily into the street and turned back. “Five eighty he did me out of!” he said, almost in disbelief. Then he glowered at Andrews, as if Andrews had been in cahoots with the boy who had run rather than pay. His anger sought a new, more accessible direction. “So where’s this goddamn mugger?”

“That doorway,” Andrews told him.

Side by side, the two men advanced on the dark entrance. When they neared it, they swung wide so that they could look into it from the curb. All they saw was darkness. Andrews felt a cold jolt of fear. What if Karpp had a gun? Andrews and the furious cabby were easy targets.

Apparently that possibility never occurred to the cabdriver. He suddenly charged into the doorway and disappeared in the darkness. Swallowing a lump of fear as big as a tennis ball and just as fuzzy, Andrews hesitated, then took several uncoordinated steps into the nightmarish blackness after the cabby. Several onlookers had gathered now, so tentatively poised that they seemed on the verge of disappearing. But as Andrews moved off the sidewalk, he drew courage from their presence.

“Nobody,” pronounced a voice from the void. “If he was here, he’s gone now.”

The bulk of the cabby detached itself from black shadow. Andrews involuntarily took a step backward.

“We get a cop,” the cabby said, striding around Andrews and back toward his cab. “We report your muggin’ attempt and the little bastard that welshed on his fare.”

Andrews followed, holding his hand to the side of his neck to still the throbbing where he’d been struck. The wound had been numb until now. He knew the blow had nicked him on the meaty part of his neck; a few inches left or right and it would have been his skull or collarbone.

Even as the cabby began to chatter into his radio mike, a police car pulled to the curb behind the cab. Its cherry lights continued to revolve regularly, losing rhythm with the siren as it growled to silence. Red glare played over dark shadow, like paint of a different composition, never quite mixing. “Forget it,” Andrews heard the cabby say. The radio in the police cruiser blurted out something loud, metallic and unintelligible.

A tall, angular cop approached Andrews and the cabby, who’d gotten out of his cab and walked around to the sidewalk.

“What’s the story?” the cop asked.

“Fare skipped out on me,” the cabby told him, not giving Andrews a chance to speak. But when it turned out that the sum lost was only five dollars and eighty cents, the cop turned his attention to Andrews.

“What happened to your neck?” he asked.

“Somebody tried to mug him,” the cabby said. “Right there in that doorway.”

Andrews told his story while the cop listened attentively and even sympathetically. An attempted mugging. What else could it have been? Andrews didn’t argue.

“Description?” the cop asked.

“It was dark,” Andrews said. “A stocky man, square-shouldered, silent when he walked.”

The cop waited a few seconds, then looked up from the notes he was scribbling. “That’s it?”

“Sorry,” Andrews said. “It was dark,” he said again.

“Did he get anything?”

“No.”

“Ask for money?”

Andrews shook his head no.

“It’ll have to be plain assault then,” the cop said. “You see which direction he ran?”

“Down that way,” the cabby said, pointing.

“The mugger?”

“No!” the cabby spat. “The kid! Maybe he’s from the neighborhood!”

“Let me finish here and I’ll be with you,” the cop said calmly.

“I didn’t see him come out from the doorway,” Andrews said.

The cop looked around, raised his voice. “Did anybody see the suspect flee from that doorway?”

No one answered. Andrews wondered why cops always adopted the language of reports when speaking to the news media or public gatherings.

“Like always,” the cop said. He slapped his notebook shut and peered with narrow blue eyes at Andrews’ neck. “You want hospital treatment?”

“It’s not that bad,” Andrews said.

“Not much hope to catch the guy,” the cop said. “Happens like this too often. You from out of town?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“Just as bad there, I hear.”

“A different kind of stealing,” Andrews told him.

The cop grinned and nodded, a veteran of the lower, more visible echelons of corruption. “Call us at the Seventeenth if you think of anything else, Mr. Andrews. Anything comes up on our end, we’ll phone you at the Hayes if you’re still in town. You here on business?”

“Yes, for a few weeks.”

“Well, sorry this had to happen. But don’t hope too hard to hear from us.”

Andrews said that he wouldn’t and watched the cop stroll back toward the parked cruiser. The cabby hurried to catch up with him.

“This’ll be an hour’s wages outa my pocket while I go fill out a theft of services report!” Andrews heard the cabby say, beginning to raise his voice in indignation as he waved his arms. The cop was listening tolerantly, obviously eager to get back into the quiet of the police car.

Andrews brushed past the few onlookers still standing silently nearby. He walked on toward his hotel. He stayed as near as possible to the curb, well away from the blackness of recessed doorways and narrow alleys.

In his room, Andrews stood shirtless before the bathroom mirror and twisted his neck so he could see the area of scraped skin that was beginning to darken to a bruise. The neck was stiff now, as if he had exercised too strenuously an hour ago and the muscles were cramping. He ran some hot water on a washrag, folded it and walked to the bed as he held the warm compress to the wound.

Andrews lay wearily on the mattress and tried to sort out what had happened. Had it been merely a mugging attempt? He doubted it. And despite his limited vision in the dark doorway, the figure that had attacked him was built like, even seemed to move like, Martin Karpp. Andrews could hear Amos Franks asking him how many times he’d seen Karpp. “Once,” Andrews would have to answer. But Andrews knew better.

He thought back to the attack in the doorway and his escape. Everything had happened so swiftly, was so disjointed in memory. Had Karpp had time to run from the doorway without being seen? Andrews simply couldn’t recall. Time didn’t move in measured sequence during such a crisis.

And if Karpp hadn’t had time to escape from the doorway, where
had
he gone? Had he even been there? The steadily pulsing pain in Andrews’ neck and shoulder told him that someone had been there.

He sat up on the mattress, stacked the pillows behind his back and leaned against them, trying to hold his head and neck still. Switching hands on the folded, gradually cooling washrag, he pulled the phone from the bedside table and rested it in his lap. Then he dialed direct to CIA Headquarters in Langley, West Virginia, using a number he’d been supplied with several years ago, and identified himself.

After some expected delay, he was told where and when he could get in touch with Sam Underwood.

Judy Carnegie finished dressing and poured herself a cup of coffee from the electric pot on her kitchen counter. She kept the pot plugged into a timer, and each morning she awoke to the gentle gurgling and pungent aroma of perking coffee. Not only did that system save valuable time in the mornings, but it provided a daily incentive to rise. Unlike most energetic, ambitious people, Judy Carnegie could sleep away the day if nothing roused her.

But she had uncommon incentive to get out of bed early today. Work was stacked up at the office higher than it had ever been. It would have been so much easier all the way around if the senator had stayed in town for at least a week to help her. The only consolation was that Judy could work undisturbed in his absence. What she could accomplish by herself, she would get done without the usual interruptions.

She sat at the Formica table and sipped coffee while she idly scanned the Post. This was the daily initial ritual of her job. It was surprising how some seemingly innocuous bits of information, when juxtaposed with other data, could become suddenly meaningful.

But there really wasn’t much in the way of news this morning. Not like in the Watergate years. Judy wondered what it would have been like to work in Washington during that unsettled era. Sometimes she regretted having missed it. She had an appetite and a talent for picking her way through chaos. That was why she complemented her boss. Andrews, easy-going and personable as he seemed, despised chaos, had learned to tolerate it only while trying to set it straight.

It was odd that he hadn’t told her where he could be reached. That sort of thing usually wasn’t done; the unexpected cropped up at just such times. “New York,” was all he’d said. Judy was sure he wasn’t going anywhere with Pat Colombo. He’d always informed her of that when it happened, needed her at times to run interference. New York. Maybe he was there with his wife. It struck Judy as absurd that Andrews might inform her of trysts with his mistress, yet keep it a complete secret if he wanted privacy with his wife. She smiled around the rim of her cup as she finished her coffee.

Someone else knew that Andrews was in New York. A man had phoned the office the day after he left and asked where the senator could be reached. Not only did the fact that the man knew Andrews was in New York strike Judy as odd, but he seemed dissatisfied almost to the point of anger when she’d told him she couldn’t put him in touch with Andrews. And then he’d tactfully refused to identify himself.

But he had known Andrews’ general whereabouts. Judy was undeniably annoyed by the knowledge that Andrews would confide in someone else to the same extent he’d confided in her.

She rinsed out her coffee cup and set it upside down on the drainboard. She was hungry, but she’d decided to skip breakfast as part of her attempt to shed the few pounds she had lately gained from her long hours of sitting, doing Andrews’ research on the upcoming Senate confirmations. Avoiding even looking at the refrigerator, she left her apartment and took the elevator down to the basement garage where her two-year-old Mustang was parked.

A few minutes later, the immaculate yellow Mustang emerged from the shadows of the underground garage exit into bright, cold sunlight, made a sharp left turn and sprightly joined the swift morning traffic.

Judy Carnegie wasn’t the type to look back, either in life or in driving. It never occurred to her that she might be followed.

Andrews was dreaming. He knew that was so even as he dreamed. That was all he knew. He was alone somewhere he had never been, aware of high, formless clouds, a rushing sound, softness that gave like flesh beneath his feet. The beach! But what beach and when he didn’t know.

He rounded a corner of something looming and immeasurable and found himself facing the open sea. Several stars observed him like the eyes of night animals, their celestial arrangement unfamiliar in the black sky. And he was no longer alone.

Three figures were standing near the reaching surf, their arms at their sides. Andrews knew that they were waiting for him. The fleshiness began to move under his suddenly bare soles, carrying him toward the three figures faster than the length of his strides, yet with inexorable slowness.

When he was nearer, he saw by a grayish flickering light, much like the light cast by a film projector, the features of the three figures, and his heart spun crazily between poles of joy and fear. The smallest figure was Andrews as a youth of about twelve. The figure next to it was the same Andrews as a young man. The last figure was old, holding itself very, very erect, as if the weight of time might descend sparingly around it.

The three figures rolled eyes that were the same toward Andrews, said nothing, did nothing.

And passed to him an indecipherable certainty.

A dank and morbid dread enveloped Andrews, compressed heavily about him, suffocating him in chill and sickening apprehension. He looked to the sky, saw only blackness now and screamed noiselessly into it.

The muffled, ordinary sounds of the city told Andrews that he was awake.

Nightmare.

The dread remained with him. His heart was bucking against his ribs like a thing driven and unbalanced, and he was perspiring.

My God, he thought, wouldn’t Freud have had fun with that? Or Fellini? Or Dana Larsen?