There were ray guns to the left of me. Robots to the right. Somewhere, an alien on a television screen was growling. I headed straight on. There, up ahead, was an entire city in miniature: a little skyline of multicolored snap-together blocks. Skyscrapers, brownstones, stadiums, the works. All of it in stunning combinations of yellow, blue, red, and white.
As I headed into the midst of it, a youth who seemed to be made of flesh and blood stepped forward and called to the shoppers around him. He was a tall, strapping fellow with lots of yellow hair. His voice was sharp and loud.
“Hi, everyone, I’m the Lego man, and this is Lego Land, come on in, you know you can, and try your hand in Lego Land …”
And so on. He kept up the patter. He was pointing at a round table. Children and adults were sitting there, making their own creations out of the little blocks.
“Try your hand, it’s Lego Land, come and see the Lego man!”
I hustled past him. Finally I saw what I wanted. It was right there ahead of me. There was the entrance to another hallway like the one I’d come down. Just beyond that entrance was another escalator. It had to lead down to the rear entrance. I was practically running for it.
I was at the edge of the hallway when the punk came out of it.
He’d gone around the other side, cut me off. He’d come tearing down the hall. I guess he’d slipped on the slick floor. He slammed right into me.
I let out a cry of fright as we collided. I thought maybe he had a knife. One of those curved jobs, like his buddy had used on Colt. Maybe he’d already slipped it into me and I hadn’t felt it yet.
I reacted without thinking. I grabbed hold of him, caught him by the front of his coat. I hurled him to one side.
“Wo-o-oh!” he commented.
He skated across the floor, backpedaling on his heels. The edge of the little round table caught him right behind the knees. He went down on top of it. The crash sent a spray of yellow, red, white, and blue into the air.
The table turned over. The punk went with it, thudding onto a bed of scattered plastic.
“Gentlemen!” cried the strapping blond. “Gentlemen, stop it! This is Lego Land!”
I didn’t wait to argue. I pivoted and headed for the escalator.
“Wells!”
The scream stopped me. It was high-pitched, broken. I turned. The punk had clambered to his knees. He pointed at me.
“Stay out of it, Wells!” he screamed. “Stay out of it or you’re a dead man! He’ll kill you, I swear, you saw him and he’ll kill you, and we don’t want anyone else to die, but you saw him and he’ll kill you if you don’t stay out of it I swear …” He was babbling. He was terrified.
For a moment I stood confused. I ran my hand up through my hair. My hand came out covered with sweat. I considered staying, grabbing him, making him talk. I glanced at my watch. It was quarter to ten.
Just then the toy soldier came running around the far corner. He tore past the trains, holding his busby on his head.
“What’s happening here?” he shouted.
“Trouble in Lego Land!” cried his blond colleague.
The toy soldier spotted me. He pointed as he ran. “That’s the guy who made fun of my uniform!”
“Oh my God, somebody get him!” shouted the Lego man.
“Wells!” the punk screamed hoarsely. “Wells, I’m warning you!”
That did it. It was unanimous. I bolted for the escalator. It was thick with shoppers. I shoved past them. Women cried out. Men cursed. Packages tumbled down. I hopped over the scattered boxes as I hit the ground floor.
There, at last, was the rear exit. Right next to an enormous Mickey Mouse marionette. I pushed out into the darkness of Madison. Gratefully I sucked in the winter air. It went down about halfway, then hit a wall of used nicotine. I started coughing.
Through tear-filled eyes I spotted a cab pulled to the curb. A man was getting out. A woman waited to get in. I hobbled to the cab’s door, slipped behind the emerging man. I collapsed onto the backseat, gasping for breath.
“Hey!” shouted the woman.
“Drive,” I said.
The hack headed uptown.
I looked over my shoulder as we pulled away from the curb. The woman stood there shaking her fist at me, but no one had followed me out of the toy store. I leaned back against the seat, wheezing quietly. Now I could go meet Paul without the pleasure of the punk’s company.
Unless, of course, it had been Paul who’d sent him after me.
Had it been Paul?
I thought about it as the cab went along. I thought about it and I coughed. I coughed hard. I bucked against the seat as I coughed. Remnants of cigarettes I’d smoked in 1967 came up into my throat. I spit them out into a Kleenex. I coughed some more.
“You okay, buddy?” the driver asked me.
“Yeah,” I gasped. “Take me to the natural history museum, will you? I’m gonna donate my lungs.”
He laughed. We headed up toward Seventy-ninth Street. I watched the lights of Madison roll by. I coughed.
I coughed and I thought. I thought about Paul. According to Holloway, Colt had enlisted Paul’s aid in getting Eleanora out of Sentu when the rebels took over. But Eleanora hadn’t made it. Colt had thought she was dead. Until that night in the Press Club, he’d obviously thought Paul was dead as well. “You owe me an accounting,” Colt had said. An accounting of what? Of what had happened to Eleanora? Of the fate of the woman he loved? Maybe Paul had had Colt killed to keep from answering his questions. Maybe he’d called me out tonight to have me killed as well.
But then why have me followed? He knew where I’d be. Why warn me off? I wondered who these two guys were, the assassin and the punk in Toyland. I wondered and I coughed. After a while, I just coughed.
By now the taxi was pushing across Central Park to the West Side. I looked out over the transverse wall. A gibbous moon had risen over the white wedge of the Citicorp Building to the east. Its light fell on rolling hills and curving pathways still covered with a thin patina of snow. The naked branches of the December trees stood out starkly.
We came through a tunnel, around a curve. The traffic light at the edge of the park came into view. It was red.
“I’ll get out here,” I said.
The cab pulled over at the corner of Central Park West. I tossed some money at the driver, stepped outside.
I stood across from the northern edge of the museum. I was about a block from the front door. It was about two minutes to ten. Cars and cabs raced up and down the avenue, but the sidewalk by the park was empty. The gray octagonal stones that paved it shone dimly under the streetlamps. The branches of the overarching trees swayed above. Benches sitting empty against the park wall seemed to shift and shudder in the moving shadows. Coughing lightly, I stuck a cigarette in my mouth. My heels sounded hollow on the stones as I walked beneath the streetlamp, from pool of light to darkness to pool of light.
I moved along the sidewalk until I was directly opposite the museum entrance. I stood still there. A wind blew down from Harlem, and I hunched my shoulders at it. I cupped my hands around a match, held it to the cigarette.
Across the street, a sweep of white steps led up to the museum. Stone walls curled gracefully in toward the massive pillars flanking the doors. Atop the steps, before the doors, was a massive bronze of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback. He peered grandly over my head and into the blackness of the park behind me.
The blue Chevy pulled up to the curb suddenly. It was a big old hunkering jalop. Its spark plugs fired the way a bad chorus line kicks. I could hear the whine of its fan belt. I could smell its thick exhaust.
The Chevy’s door swung open. The toplight did not go on. All I could see of the driver was his shape behind the wheel.
“Get in,” he said.
I stepped forward, crouched over, slid into the car.
I shut the door as the Chevy pulled away. I turned to the man beside me. When we passed under a light, I caught a glimpse of his cra
ggy cheeks, his scarred mouth. It was the man who had tangled with Colt in the Press Club.
The Chevy went north slowly. Lester Paul spoke in his deep, slightly foreign voice.
“You have come alone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone tried to follow me, but I think I ditched him.”
He turned to me quickly when I spoke. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
He was silent. Then he said heavily: “We had better not be disturbed.”
We went uptown a few blocks. At the corner of another entrance into the park, we stopped at a red light. Now I could make out the thick black hair that crowned Paul’s head. I could see the brooding expression in his sunken eyes. His eyes glittered. They were black. They looked dead, like marbles.
I saw them shift up to the rearview mirror. Paul tensed beside me.
I glanced back and saw a cop car. It had stopped at the red light a block back.
Our light turned green. Paul swung the wheel over. The Chevy turned the corner, into the park. He moved away from CPW slowly. He did not relax until he saw the police cruiser pass by the park entrance without turning.
There wasn’t much traffic on the park drive. Cabs mostly. They shot by us at high speeds. Paul kept the Chevy in the right lane and moved slowly. He said nothing as he drove.
All at once, Paul reached for the dash, hit a button. The headlights died. There were no other cars around us. He pulled the Chevy sharply into the left lane. There was a little walkway there. It climbed out of sight up a steep hill. Paul yanked the wheel over. I bounced in my seat as the car bumped over a curb. Paul drove up the footpath, over the hill, out of sight of the road below. He killed the rattling engine. Quiet settled in around us. We could hear the whisper of the cars passing on the drive below.
I smoked my cigarette. Paul sat, still silent, surveying the scene through the windshield. Beyond his profile, I saw a long flat playing field. It was white with snow and moonlight. It was bordered by a black stand of trees. When I glanced out my window, I saw the high walls of an outdoor theater blotting out the sky. There were golden statues before it: an old man, his beard blown by the wind, shielding a young girl with his cape. A man and woman embracing.
When I faced Paul, he was looking past me.
“Shakespeare,” he said. “The Tempest. ‘What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?’”
I shrugged. “I don’t come to the park too often.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do.”
“Look,” I said, “I’d love to discuss the classics with you, but first I’d like to know who cut Tim Colt’s heart out.”
Paul had a dull, flat laugh. It was hardly a laugh at all. “A Sentuan murder-man, I imagine.”
“Right. Great. What’s that?”
“It’s a cult,” said Paul. “It used to have quite a following in Sentu. It was already dying out when I was there. Not something the ordinary Westerner would even hear of. I’m sure the new government has quashed it by now.”
I took a pull of my cigarette. I stared out at the darkened field. I shuddered as if someone had walked over my grave.
“They were something like the thugs of India,” Paul said. “Religious highwaymen, more or less. Trained from earliest youth to commit murder and robbery in the name of the gods. By cutting into the hearts of their victims, they somehow connected with the source of life.”
“I’ll say.”
“The little ceremonial knife you described so accurately in your story on Colt’s death,” said Paul. “That was their weapon of choice.”
There was silence a moment.
“Sentu,” I said then.
“Yes,” Paul answered in the same tone. “Sentu.”
I glared at him. His sunken eyes were circles of darkness. The eyes of a skull.
“Did you kill him?” I said.
He laughed his mirthless laugh again. “Is that what you think?”
“It’s what the cops think.”
“Yes, I know. One of them was so kind as to visit me at my hotel and tell me I was wanted for questioning in the case. But, of course, I knew that already from reading your newspaper.”
“So you shot him,” I said.
He hesitated. “Yes, I shot him.”
“How’d you beat the raid?”
“While he called for help, I disguised myself as one of my many indigent neighbors. Before the other officers arrived outside, I climbed out the window and onto the nearest ledge. I made so bold as to go through that window into the next apartment. For the price of ten dollars, the current occupant allowed me to share his quarters. When the police arrived to arrest Lester Paul, they evacuated me with the others to keep us from harm.”
Paul’s voice took on a slight undertone of pride as he recounted how he’d done it. I played to that, to keep him talking.
“That was pretty clever,” I said.
“Not really. Your police are not exact—”
The words stopped as if cut off with a blade.
“What …?”
He hissed at me. “Shut up.” His body had gone taut, his head was cocked in an attitude of listening. “Below us. A car has stopped on the drive.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “I didn’t—”
“Shut up.”
I turned to him. “Listen—” I shut up. He had a gun.
Its barrel was long and black. The bore peered at me lifelessly, like his eyes.
“You betrayed me,” he said.
I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was going to kill me.
“Listen, Paul,” I said. “I tried to drop them. It’s those guys with the funny knives. I didn’t—”
“Get out of the car.”
He raised the gun. The bore was level with my eyes. I tried not to look at it. The sight made my guts roil.
“Get out now,” he said.
“Hell, no. I want you to have to clean the blood off your upholstery.”
He shoved the gun barrel up under my right nostril. “It’s an old car, Wells,” he said.
“There is that.”
I opened the door. I figured I had half a chance in the open. I could dodge, I could duck, I could run. Probably not, but it was something.
I moved fast. I curled myself up and went out the door in a ball. I hit the snowy grass at the edge of the path. The jolt knocked the air out of me. The snow crunched under me as I kept rolling. I waited for the gunshot, for the bullet that would burn through me. It seemed the seconds did not pass as I rolled.
I jumped to my feet. Lester Paul was leaning forward through the open door as if to get a better bead on me.
But he didn’t fire. Instead he grabbed hold of the door. He pulled it shut with a bang.
The Chevy’s engine roared. The headlights sprang on, blinding me. Tires screeching, the car jumped backward. It tore down the path to the drive.
I ran after it to the top of the hill. I looked down in time to see the big car bounding over the curb. The rubber squealed again as the Chevy spun around, righted itself, pointed downtown. With one great, throaty explosion, the car threw itself forward along the drive. It shot out of my sight like a cannonball.
I stood staring at the place where the car had been. There was a streetlamp there, at the corner of the footpath and the road. The lamp let down a circle of dim yellow.
The man who killed Timothy Colt stepped into that circle, pointed a pistol at me, and pulled the trigger.
He was a good man with a dagger, but he was not as expert with a gun. If he’d gone for my body, he’d have taken me down. There’d have been plenty of time to kill me. He tried for my head. A tougher shot. I felt the breath of the bullet in my ear as it went by.
He fired again, but by then I was running. I faked to the left, broke to the right. I heard the crack of the pistol but felt no pain. I ducked deep into the shadow of the Shakespearean theater.
I pressed against the wall, panting. A fresh bout of coughing worked
in my throat. I gulped it back. I stared at the crest of the footpath.
The assassin came jogging over it. He wore black as he had the last time I saw him. A black jump-jacket this time, black jeans. His face still bore the scars I’d given him. In the moonlight, I saw his nose was bandaged. One of his cheeks was scarred.
The sight of him nearly stripped me of hope. I remembered our fight in the hotel. I was a reporter. He was an assassin. If we tangled again, I didn’t think I’d survive.
He stood on the path. He scanned the ball field for me, the barrel of his gun following his gaze.
I crouched down quickly. I grabbed a fistful of snow. It was melting, icy. It stung my hands with cold. I packed it into a ball.
The assassin was turning slowly toward the theater. He stood now in profile to me, staring down the path.
I gave the snowball an overhand toss. The assassin turned to face me. I watched the little gray missile fly over his head into the moonlit night. The ice in it glittered.
The assassin started. He’d spotted the statues. At the same moment, the snowball hit the edge of the field behind him.
He whirled and fired. The gun cracked once in the quiet park. The barrel spat flame.
I took off, stretching my legs over the snow.
There was a path around the theater’s curving wall. I took it, putting the building between us, blocking his shot. I stood still for a second. I tried to quiet my panting. I listened.
He was coming. Slowly. Warily.
I ran.
I stayed on the clear path so the field’s brittle snow would not betray me. He was young and in good shape. I had no chance of outstripping him without the element of surprise.
I was around the theater now. I was sprinting by the edge of a small lake. The white light of the moon rippled on its surface. Some kind of castle peered down on it from above. My arms windmilled the air as I ran beside the water. My lungs heaved. My breath came in little cries.
Just ahead of me, the path curved away from the lake. It went up a small hill and disappeared behind some shrubbery. I did not look back. I poured it on. My head hung loose on my neck with exhaustion. I watched my feet flap against the pavement. I didn’t have the energy to keep it quiet now.