Watch nothing except the lead racer.
Nothing else exists.
The gunman had stopped. He was turning back, standing less than thirty yards away. The gunman was leveling his gun at Stefanovitch—who was wildly caroming into better range.
Stefanovitch recognized his potential murderer. He knew the man… Chaos… madness filled his head.
John Stefanovitch swung up his revolver, losing control of the wheelchair as he did. The lesser of two evils, he thought in a flash. Maybe.
He fired before the other man. He didn’t see anything after that, because he was heading directly into the side door of a swerving yellow cab. The taxi was only inches from his face.
He caromed hard off the cab door, and was instantly hit by a speeding, low-slung red sports car.
Horns were screaming everywhere on Madison. A startled, angry swarm was all around him—brushing him, almost touching, desperately trying to not run him down.
The wheelchair had begun to fly. It was something he’d wanted to do for so long, one of his recurring fantasies. Just to fly away.
Only it was sheer terror to be flying, actually flying.
He knew he couldn’t possibly make the chair land on its wheels. The angle to the ground, to the blurry street pavement, was almost sideways. He was going to hit on the bad side, too, where he had already been shot.
There was nothing Stefanovitch could do to control his fate. All he could manage was to go along for the ride.
He struck the ground, and lost consciousness for an instant—not sure if he went out before or after he hit the street. He touched down partially with his left shoulder, partially with the side of his face; then the rest of his body followed. Wildly rolling over and over again. Over and over and over.
“It’s not St.-Germain!” was the next thing he heard. “It’s Burke. He’s dead, Stef. You got Burke.”
Stefanovitch nodded. The words vaguely registered somewhere in his mind.
He’d seen Jimmy Burke with one fast glimpse from the rampaging wheelchair. Burke from Long Beach, and now Sarah’s apartment. Of course, Alexandre St.-Germain hadn’t come himself. He had never given it a thought, had he?
Sarah was with him in the middle of Madison Avenue. So were an awful lot of policemen, and EMS ambulance people.
Some character in a white dress shirt and tuxedo trousers peered down at him through owl-rim glasses. A doctor? Stefanovitch hoped he was.
Sarah held his hand tightly in both of hers. The look on her face was so frightened that it scared him, too.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” he whispered behind a crooked smile. He was amazed at how weak he felt—helpless, yet strangely peaceful, sprawled there in the street.
His face felt out of kilter somehow. It matched his body, which was twisted and bent, lying like a broken doll in the bus lane of Madison Avenue.
Finally, he winked up at Sarah, and then both his eyes closed. His eyes felt so heavy. His head lolled gently to the right, settling on the thick white traffic line.
Fifteen yards farther down Madison Avenue, the sad wreck of Stefanovitch’s wheelchair lay flipped over on its side.
96
Sarah McGinniss; Milton, New York
IT WOULDN’T STOP…
The terror wouldn’t stop coming at her.
For days, Sarah wondered if she might be losing her mind. The relentless pressure of the past weeks had been overwhelming. Now it was even worse. At the same time, she felt that her wits were somehow sharpening again, as if a kind of clarity came with walking through fire.
Whenever she drifted off to sleep, she would bolt awake, terrified by the indescribable images in her head. Her brain would throb with a dull pain; her body was sore all over. She had lost more than ten pounds.
She looked gaunt and felt depressed. There were so many disturbing moments that she couldn’t erase from her mind; so many obsessive thoughts that wouldn’t stop flashing.
Sarah visited New York Hospital a dozen times. No one could, or would, tell her how Stefanovitch was really doing. There were vague, hopeful, and polite niceties—but no one told her the truth. No one would even tell her if he was going to live.
There was no news on Sam either. She wouldn’t allow herself to speculate on the reasons. She closed off certain regions of her mind, like rooms in an overly large house during the dead of winter.
Alexandre St.-Germain seemed to have disappeared from New York again; perhaps he’d fled the country. The police hadn’t been able to reach him for questioning.
The daily newspapers overflowed with stories about the terrible shooting at her apartment. She and Stefanovitch were emblazoned across all the front pages. The scenario had the staccato, slightly unreal feel of Hitchcock melodramas. Or was it more the feeling of an actual nightmare?
The phone call finally came early on Wednesday morning, three days after the vicious attack at her apartment. It was a brief call, not long enough for a police tracer of any kind.
Sarah picked up the phone downstairs, in the hallway off the living room. She heard a disturbing silence first; then an almost distinguished voice over the telephone.
“We want you to know that your little boy is fine…He’s safe as he can be. Not a hair on his head has been harmed,” she heard.
Then the telephone wire went dead.
Sarah leaned up against the wall. She couldn’t take any more of this. Her heart physically ached. She was suddenly trembling all over, her hands, her entire body.
Who had that been on the telephone? Why were they calling her now, then hanging up? What did it mean—your little boy is fine?
There was nothing else they could take from her. So why had they called to say that? Sam wasn’t fine at all. How could he be fine?
Who was the call from? St.-Germain? The Club? She didn’t understand the kidnapping, and now this call. But why should she suddenly understand the inner workings of the Club?
Sarah stayed within steps of her telephone for the remainder of the interminable day. During the early afternoon, she noticed her reflection in the mirror in the foyer. It startled her. She had never looked so drawn, so completely exhausted. Sagging black and purplish bags hung beneath both eyes. Her hair looked as if she’d used it to dust the apartment…. Where were they keeping Sam? What could they want from her now? What could they possibly want?
There was no follow-up phone call the next day. Twenty-four hours passed, with nothing but the torture of her inner thoughts to occupy her.
Keeping her mind in this nightmarish state was clearly part of the plan. Why, though? For what purpose?
She couldn’t go outside her apartment without meeting reporters camped like an aging neighborhood gang on Sixty-sixth Street. They wouldn’t leave her alone, and suddenly Sarah understood what it was like for victims besieged by newspeople after a tragedy.
She felt as if she had visible open wounds, and the newspapers and TV reporters were shamelessly picking at them. She had never been brutal at these kinds of news scenes herself, but she had certainly been a part of them. Only now did she understand what it felt like on the other side; to be besieged for news the public “deserved to know.”
One morning, when Sarah was short-tempered with the reporters, they sharply reminded her that she, of all people, ought to know better. She did know better, she told them. And so should they.
She visited New York Hospital again that same afternoon. Stefanovitch had just undergone a major operation.
The only blessing was that his doctor was excellent, a tireless healer named Michael Petito. Dr. Petito wasn’t one to dispense false hope or a misleading prognosis, however. He told Sarah that he didn’t know if Lieutenant Stefanovitch was going to come out of it.
Finally, someone had at least told her the truth.
97
“WE WANT YOU to do something for us, Sarah…If you do it, we’ll bring your little boy home to you.”
The second phone call came as suddenly and unexpected
ly as the first.
Both times, Sarah could picture the man who had taken Sam on Park Avenue. That moment was still so vivid in her memory.
“Yes… What do you want? Please,” she whispered hoarsely into the receiver. She knew she was hoping against hope: she was truly desperate now…
The telephone had woken Sarah from a rare sleep on Friday morning. She tried to concentrate on each word she heard. She needed to understand and remember every nuance.
The voice on the phone told her what to do next and what the consequences would be if she didn’t. It was all put very clearly.
At the end of the conversation, the caller even offered a measure of reassurance.
“There is no need for you to worry about your little boy. We want you to get your son back. It’s up to you. If you cooperate on this one thing, he’s as good as home….We don’t want any more attention drawn to us.”
It was all up to Sarah. The explanation had been that simple. She had her instructions to follow. Whether she trusted the caller or not, she had no choice but to go.
As she drove north toward the upstate New York village of Milton, Sarah finally began to understand. There had been a simple and very direct logic to it all, right from the beginning. She knew all the rules; she just had to follow them as directed.
We don’t want any more attention drawn to us.
Their rules.
Always.
Although a few people still seemed to reside there, the small village at the end of her journey was like an eastern version of a ghost town. Paint was peeling off most of the dilapidated houses. Foundations were collapsing. Front porches were caving in everywhere in Milton.
Nearly every backyard seemed to overflow with mechanical relics: rusting refrigerators, the shells of automobiles and pickup trucks, bent and twisted machine parts that couldn’t possibly have a function.
As she drove down closer to the Hudson River, the scenery changed for the better. There were larger houses, many of which appeared to be country estates. Birds sang in the trees, which were mostly maples and elms and graceful old evergreens.
Occasionally, the river peeked through drooping leaves, looking blindingly blue, oblivious to anything but its own monolithic beauty.
Following instructions, Sarah finally parked the Land Rover at an overgrown driveway bearing a wrought-iron signpost indicating that the house belonged to a certain J. Kamerer. She could see a large estate house from the road.
The house was off-white, graying in spots, with its paint peeling and chipped, but not beyond the ministrations of a handyman. An acre plot of lawn was overgrown, yet had obviously been shorn once or twice during the summer.
Why had she been asked to come to this place? Is Sam being kept here? she wondered. She climbed out of the Land Rover.
“Hello,” Sarah called. “Hello. Hello there?” she called again, her voice cutting sharply through the screen of summer’s insect buzz, the persistent bird chirping in the woods.
She had been calm on the drive upstate. Her state of distraction had served as a tranquilizer. Now she was aware of how vulnerable she was, standing here and looking around. Where are they holding Sam? her brain screamed.
“Hello?…Hello?…Is anyone there?” Sarah called out again. Still no answer came back.
She wondered if anyone was watching her. She had the disturbing intuition that someone probably was.
Intermittently, a solitary car or pickup truck drove by on the winding country road that had led her to the house. J. Kamerer? She didn’t know anyone by that name. Not that she could remember, anyway.
Finally, Sarah decided to do what she had been told. She slowly walked back to the Land Rover, to fetch her package. What they wanted from her. This was the hardest part yet, harder than she’d imagined when she received the instructions.
When she reached the vehicle, Sarah put her hands down into the front seat. She paused for a moment, trying to calm herself, trying to breathe.
Her writing and research for The Club were there, sitting on the car seat. All other copies had already been destroyed.
She gathered the bundle of papers up in her arms and began to carry it across the front lawn, almost like a small, injured animal.
Sarah understood that she was a loose end for them, no more than that. They didn’t want her book published. It would be embarrassing. That was what this was about. Saving the Midnight Club from discomfort and embarrassment. Preserving their respectability; their invisibility.
Their goddamn rules.
She was almost certain someone was watching. Where were they keeping Sam? Oh, Sam, where are you, baby?
Could he be right here, in this woodsy neighborhood, with all of its somber nooks and dark crannies? Could he be in that house?
Sarah realized she was feeling light-headed and feverish in the summer heat. Blue jays continued to sing from the trees. Crickets and other insects buzzed, almost like an electric current in the air.
Sarah listened for another kind of sound. A human sound? A small, innocent boy’s voice calling her name?
She shuffled unsteadily from the Land Rover, toward the oversized, ramshackle house. Tiny insects seemed to swarm around her. A woodpecker issued its tat-a-tat-tat from the trees. There were no human sounds.
Is this the end of it, then? she wondered, almost speaking out loud. Was this going to be the finish of everything?
Had they won every point, Alexandre St.-Germain and the Midnight Club? They had won, hadn’t they. They always seemed to win. Sarah wanted to scream.
She left two years’ worth of research and writing for them. She did as she had been instructed.
Their warning had been clear and coldly logical. If there were copies, if the notes were ever reconstructed in any way, she knew the consequences.
As she drove back to New York, she thought she had never felt so drained, so completely used up and unreal. Maybe it was going to stop now. Maybe it could just end.
98
Sarah McGinniss; East Sixty-sixth Street
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER the trip upstate, Sarah was walking in a slow, aimless, and drifting way. She shuffled west on Sixty-sixth Street, moving in the direction of Park Avenue.
After she’d left Milton that afternoon, she’d been filled with hope, even with a kind of strange joy. Since then, Sarah had become almost disconsolate. She’d done exactly as they had asked; she had played by their rules.
What more did they want from her? Where was Sam right now? Was he still alive?
There was something satisfying about not having anything to work on, at least. There was no book, no investigation. Walking around her neighborhood, Sarah had been noticing odd, unimportant things for the first time in months. Slants of sunlight bouncing off the hard city surfaces; colorful flowers growing up out of the sidewalk; a new northern Italian restaurant, a hopeful menu in the window.
The trouble was, there was no one to share it with anymore. She shook her head, to brush away the thought.
She saw the dark gray Mercedes moving along the street toward her, almost as if someone were searching in vain for a parking space.
She felt herself go cold, for maybe the hundredth time in the past few weeks.
Her eyes never left the slow-moving car. Two men were in the front seat. Hulking men in dark suits.
For an instant, Sarah thought about running up the stone stairs, hiding inside the brownstone she had just passed. Were they coming after her now?
The scene seemed to happen in slow motion.
Sarah had a horrible feeling about this car. She had no logical reason, just a gut reaction. They were after her. But why? She’d given them all her writing; the truth as she understood it; her research. It would take her more than a year just to reassemble The Club, and it would never be as strong a book.
The gray sedan stopped alongside Sarah, less than a foot away. She froze. The electric door locks sprung open. The rear door swung toward her.
A tall, gray-haired man
stepped out of the Mercedes. It was no one she knew. He stared directly at her, a slightly quizzical look about his eyes. Obviously, he didn’t care whether she could identify him. He operated with no fear. He knew he was in control.
He seemed so respectable. Just a man in a business suit.
“Mrs. McGinniss?” he asked, and she nodded without saying a word. She really couldn’t speak, didn’t want to speak. “None of this happened,” the man said. “Please understand that. We don’t want to read about any of this in any newspaper. We really wouldn’t appreciate that.”
Then Sarah’s mind seemed to disconnect from the rest of her body, from the entire scene on Sixty-sixth Street.
She saw Sam being helped out of the car, but she couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. It was like looking at a photograph that had come to life. She had never been so completely detached; not at any moment in her life.
“Mommy, Mommy,” Sam cried. She was suddenly afraid that they were going to let her see him, then take him away again, whisk him back inside the car.
Instead, they let Sam go, and he ran straight into her outstretched arms. The gray sedan continued up the narrow street canyons and finally disappeared, as if, indeed, none of this had happened.
But then why would she and Sam be crying in the middle of their street?
99
The Midnight Club; Beverly Hills, California
DISCREETLY HIDDEN AMONG the hills and canyons north of Sunset Boulevard, the suburb of Bel Air is almost exclusively residential, accessible for the most part through steel gates occasionally guarded by private police.
Nestled among the lush, low hills is the Hotel Bel Air: classic, palatial, secluded; unique for its understated and tasteful landscaping, its petal-strewn walkways, its swans.
Almost everything about the California hotel is beautiful, and best of all, respectable.
During the first week in November of that year—gloriously sunny days, consistently in the high seventies—there were no rooms or suites available to any of the business travelers, the movie studio executives, the movie stars, who frequent the Hotel Bel Air.