Time Out of Mind (16 page)
Authors: John R. Maxim
Tags: #Horror, #General, #Psychological, #Suspense, #Memory, #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Time Travel
In Barnes & Noble's, across Fifth Avenue and down a
block from Saks, Gwen found a pocket-sized book of Man
hattan neighborhood maps and a small spiral-bound note
book. In the latter she began jotting notes of Corbin's
random impressions while Corbin, having checked his
shopping bag but still holding the thin black umbrella, wan
dered ahead to a section marked History. He'd noticed
Gwen's switch to an umbrella more closely resembling a
walking stick and at once understood the workings of her
mind. He said nothing, only smiled and shook his head.
The historical section dealing with early New York contained a dozen or more books dealing with the nineteenth
century alone. Most were generously illustrated. A few con
sisted entirely of captioned photographs and engravings. Corbin reached for one of these. The earliest photographs, dating back to a decade or so before the Civil War, had a
particularly haunting quality. They were portraits of build
ings, mostly, or of wider cityscapes. Their subjects tended
to be immobile objects, because the plates that were used required time exposures of many seconds. The result was
eerie, because even though architectural details and adver
tising signs were in surprisingly sharp focus, all indications of human life were blurred and ghostly. Corbin caught his breath.
On a daguerreotype of a photographer's office
building, probably used as a sample of his wares, he noticed
a spectral horse and carriage waiting at the curb. It was
precisely like the many, the hundreds, he himself had seen,
except that his did not long remain blurred. His became
clear and solid and they moved and made sounds. Shod
hooves clacked lazily against cobblestones and iron-rimmed
wheels crunched along behind them. Drivers, all of whom
seemed’ slightly hunchbacked, made clicking sounds with
their mouths to urge their horses on in spite of a monotonous cadence that seldom varied. Sometimes the drivers would wave or tip their hats to familiar faces on the sidewalk. Corbin blinked rapidly and flipped a few decades
forward.
people. Great crowds of them in sharp focus. Details of
clothing, expressions on faces as men, women, and children
on city sidewalks were frozen at a precise moment of their
lives. The effect on Corbin was stunning. They were real.
A derbied group of idlers stared curiously at him. A child
being tugged along by a woman in a ribboned hat pointed
a finger at him. Corbin snapped the book shut before they
could begin moving.
“
Let's get that one,” he heard Gwen Leamas say behind
him. “Actually, we should buy all of these that are mostly
photographs.”
Old New York in Early Photographs
and another called
New York in the Nineteenth Century.
A third was the thick
Columbia
Historical Portrait of New York.
A fourth book, entitled
New York Then and Now
caught her eye. This last was a
collection of old New York street scenes with, on each
facing page, a more recent photograph taken from the same
vantage point.
Jonathan, look.” Gwen opened it to several pages that
depicted the avenue outside, Fifth Avenue, as it had been
a century before. “This really was quite a charming city once. A lot like Mayfair. Except in London we don't tear
down handsome old buildings every time a megalomaniac
developer feels the need to name a building alter himself.”
Corbin was paying less than full attention. Something,
not the book she held, was making him uncomfortable. He
glanced around the bookstore.
“
For example,” she went on, “we'd never have torn
down Claridges or the Savoy just to put up an unlovely
phallus like the Empire State Building.” She held up two facing pages for him to see, the one on the right being the
Empire State. “Imagine destroying this magnificent hotel
just to give suicides a longer drop.”
“
Let me see that.” Corbin stepped closer, his fingers involuntarily reaching to touch the print on the left-hand page. There, opposite a recent photograph of the tall Art Deco building, was an infinitely more elegant structure,
which once stood on that site. It could not have been more
than eighteen stories high, parts of it curiously shorter, but
it gave an impression of enormous mass. Its main entrance,
on the Thirty-fourth Street side, was marked by a row of
tall columns. Though he could not see past them in the
photograph, Corbin knew that they concealed a carriage drive that burrowed well into the building at street level.
He knew at once, without reading the caption, why the Waldorf-Astoria had seemed so strange to him two hours
earlier. This was the way it should have looked. This was
the real one. And he'd been there. He knew that if he
walked through the carriage drive toward the formal entrance, a clean-shaven doorman dressed in blue would ad
mit him to a colonnaded hall called Peacock Alley, and
farther along he would find a four-sided men's bar, which
as far as he knew was the only one like it in the world.
And in the dining room, with its carved pilasters and Italian
Renaissance exquisitry, there would be—Oscar. The same
Oscar who'd delayed in stopping the brawl in that other
hotel bar long enough to see the thin man beaten senseless.
Oscar. He'd be older now. He'd be
...
Corbin shuddered. An old anger flooded back, mixing
with his friend Oscar in his emotions. Anger and
something
else. A curious nervousness, a sense of danger that stopped
well short of being fear, was now nipping at the edges of
Corbin’s mind. He glanced around him once more. There
was no one in the sparse group of browsers who would
account for the feeling. Only one elderly man who had been staring in their direction before and now was doing it again,
or pretending not to.
Corbin touched Gwen's arm. “Do you know that man
over there?” He gestured with a flick of his eyes toward a
gaunt man of about seventy whose attention was fixed on
a display of paperback gothic romances. The man wore an
expensive-looking chesterfield and a black hat of a kind that was seldom seen north of Wall Street. His collar was turned
up against cheeks that had a shine to them, as if the skin
had been tightly stretched to cover his skull.
“
The man wearing the homburg?” Gwen shook her
head. “Why do you ask?”
“
He keeps looking over here.”
Elsewhere in the store, Raymond Lesko had settled near a
dump display of hurt books under a sign that read None
Over $2.99. He seldom looked at Jonathan Corbin. There
was no need. Lesko had already memorized the shelf location of the books Corbin and the woman were choosing
and would make a note of their titles as soon as the two of
them headed for the cashier's desk. The man in the black
hat was another matter. It took a conscious effort to pretend
he wasn't there and to avoid letting him know that he'd
been made. As a tail, Lesko had long decided, the old guy was pitiful. He wore clothing that was totally unsuited to
surveillance, to subways, and even to Saturday mornings.
Lesko had been studying him, a glance at a time, ever since the old man had followed them onto the Seventy-seventh
Street platform for what must have been the first subway
ride of his life.
Lesko remembered him staring in bafflement at the turn
stile and then at the change booth before he put the two of them together. And then on the train he couldn't bring him
self to sit on the soiled plastic seats, so he stood, being
jerked around like he was on roller skates until he finally
seized a door handle at the far end of the car. The first
thing that was clear, of course, was that this old man who
seemed so much out of his element did not work for Dancer. Dancer almost certainly worked for him. And whatever
was going on here was important enough to the guy pulling
the strings that he had to see it for himself. Which phone call
was he? Lesko wondered, recalling Dancer's two telephoned reports, which were clearly to two different levels of authority. Whichever, this one was unwilling or unable to wait for
Dancer to develop the roll of film Lesko had shot. He kept
straining for a clear look at Corbin's full face and yet he'd
duck behind a group of standing teenagers every time Corbin raised his head. Lesko, standing at the middle door where he
could watch both ends through their reflections in the glass,
thought he saw a certain wildness in the old man's eyes. It
was a look that went well beyond fright. Lesko remembered
a drug dealer named Hamsho who shot a cop during a raid
and went out a back window. Lesko was back there in the shadows. He could see on Hamsho's face that he thought he
had it made until he walked right into Lesko and saw his
teeth smiling over the sights of the magnum that blew off
first his balls and then his head. The old man had the same
kind of look. Like a guy who'd thought he had it made,
but now knew he was dead.
followed closely behind Corbin and Gwen Leamas on their walk across town toward Saks. Always too closely. Always
stopping to gaze ridiculously at the sky every time Corbin
paused. He was paying scant attention to Lesko now. Back
at Seventy-seventh Street, he'd seemed visibly irritated that Lesko was on the scene, which meant for sure that he was
Dancer's boss, because Dancer, now that Lesko thought of
it, had been under instructions to get him out of the way
by sending him on that stupid burglary errand to Connecticut. But the old man pressed on, secure in the assumption
that since Lesko could not know who he was, he was in
visible to Lesko.
Inside the department store, the old man, still too close, kept shifting his position, trying for the most unobstructed view of Corbin. Everything Corbin did, however artless, seemed designed to frustrate his efforts. Corbin was wearing that dumb tweed rain hat, which further concealed his
features from any direction but dead-on front. Lesko
watched as, again and again, the old man shook his bony fists in a sort of petulant frustration.
His face seemed vaguely familiar. Lesko couldn't place
it. A politician, maybe. Or a big-shot businessman. On the
other hand, maybe it's just that he was a type. He looked
like all those old men who sit in the backs of limousines
behind dark windows and live in big houses that have walls
around them. Insular. That was the word. The kind of guy
who carries the walls around with him. More than that, he had the look of a man who almost never did anything for
himself and whose actions were never questioned to his
face. Old money. Power. And probably a contempt for any
one who had less money and no power. It was a combi
nation, Lesko knew from experience, that often produced a
particularly stupid kind of arrogance. People like that, he
thought, can spend their whole adult lives without anyone but family having balls enough to tell them when they're
being a jerk.
turned with Gwen and was heading in the old man's direction on his way to the cashier. The old man quivered and
blinked. He looked, Lesko thought, like he'd just been
slapped. Corbin seemed to notice, too, but he kept on walk
ing. Past him. Corbin did not see the old man stagger forward, snatching at the book rack for support and knocking
several paperbacks to the floor. The man in the homburg
held on there, his breath coming in swallows and his eyes
staring wide, as if the image of Jonathan Corbin’ s face was
still fixed on them. He was still holding on as Corbin paid
for his purchases and, with a single backward glance,
stepped toward the Fifth Avenue exit.