Cowboy Angels (11 page)

‘And then what?’

‘Then you can take me back to my hotel.’

‘I want to be there when he calls you,’ Linda said. ‘I
should
be there.’

‘He asked to talk to me, Linda. I’m sorry, but that’s the only way—’

A couple of blocks down the dark street, two white sedans veered around a corner in a squeal of tyres, straightened out, and sped toward the taxi.

‘Friends of yours?’ Stone said.

‘Locals,’ Linda said, squinting into the glare of two sets of headlights. ‘I should call Mr Welch.’

She seemed angry and determined, not at all scared. She was her father’s daughter, all right.

‘Let’s see what they want first,’ Stone said, watching men in suits spill from the sedans, drawing guns as they went left and right, up the steps into the brownstone or across the street to the park. Locals, putting on a show.

A tall man in a brown chalkstripe suit walked up to the taxi, knocked on the window by Stone’s head and spoke his name, stepping back when Stone swung the door wide and climbed out.

‘Ed Lar,’ the man said. ‘We haven’t met, but I bet David Welch mentioned my name. And I surely know who you are. Mind showing me what you found?’

‘Mind showing me some ID?’ Stone’s heart was beating quickly, but he felt calm and cool; he had been half-expecting this.

Lar flipped his badge case in front of Stone’s face. The FBI officer was in his early forties, hair of no particular colour slicked back from a lean face with sharp cheekbones and bright blue eyes. ‘I know you found something up on that roof that my men missed, Mr Stone. I’m impressed. Truly.’

‘How were you keeping watch?’

Lar jerked a thumb at the black sky. ‘Technology borrowed from you guys. A couple of stealthed drones equipped with cameras that can count every hair on your head, parabolic dishes that can hear your every breath.’

‘It would have been easier to bug the taxi.’

‘Not as much fun, though. You can hand over that thing you found directly, or we can waste time downtown. Your call.’

‘In the spirit of cooperation,’ Stone said, and lifted the matchbook cover from his breast pocket with two fingers and held it out. ‘Be careful - there could be fingerprints.’

Lar took the scrap of cardboard from him and held it up in the glare of the headlights of the sedans. ‘I guess we both know who left this little love note.’

‘You’ll notice it’s addressed to me.’

‘Yeah, and you found it so easily I can’t help wondering if you and Waverly have something going on.’

‘He wanted me to find it. That’s why he left it where he did. And I can’t help wondering, Mr Lar, why his daughter is involved in the search for him.’

Lar glanced at Linda Waverly, who was watching them through the taxi’s open door, and said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Was it David Welch’s idea to use her to try to flush out Tom Waverly, or did you two dream it up together?’

‘As far as I’m concerned, we don’t need either of you to find the son of a bitch,’ Lar said. He called over one of his officers, gave him the matchbook cover, and told him to find out who the phone number belonged to.

Stone said, ‘Tom Waverly wants to talk to me, Mr Lar, no one else. He wants me to be at that phone tomorrow, at nine-thirty. If I don’t answer, he’ll hang up. We’ll lose the chance to find out what he wants.’

Lar looked off at the park on the other side of the street. Flashlight beams danced in the darkness beneath the trees. ‘He wants to jerk our chains. To waste our time and resources by setting up a rendezvous he has no intention of keeping, because while we’re busy with his little diversion he’ll be attempting to slip past the security at Brookhaven.’

‘You could be right, but we can’t take the chance, can we?’ Stone said.

Lar pressed his eyes shut with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. After a few moments, he said, ‘I’ll talk to Welch, and then I’ll want to talk to you and Miss Waverly. I’ll get you a ride back to your hotel.’

‘Thanks for the offer, but I already have a ride.’

 

As they drove off, Stone asked Linda to call the local Company office and find the location of the phone whose number her father had written on the matchbook.

‘I thought you wanted to check it out in person?’

‘That was before Mr Lar muddied the water.’

Linda wedged her cell phone between her shoulder and ear as she drove, gave her name and the day code, then recited the telephone number. ‘I think you should pull up the phone company’s listings before you check the subscriber reverse directory.’

She listened for a few moments, then thanked the person at the other end of the line, switched off her phone, and told Stone, ‘It’s a pay phone, all right. One of six consecutive numbers in Duffy Square. Want to go check it out?’

‘Is Duffy Square north of Times Square here?’

Linda nodded. ‘Apart from the damage caused by the atomic bomb, everything’s more or less where it is in the Real. It’s good, isn’t it? That my father wants to talk, I mean.’

‘Of course it is.’ What else could he say? Besides, he wanted to believe it, too. He added, ‘I guess you’d better take me back to my hotel. I need to talk to Welch, get this thing with the locals straightened out.’

Linda said, ‘The bar where he got that matchbook—’

‘Your father is hardly likely to go back to it, Linda. Although I bet Mr Lar will put it under surveillance, just in case.’

‘It’s down in Alphabet City and features live music every night, the kind of old-time stuff my father likes. There are other places like it. I was thinking of checking them out.’

‘Are you asking my permission, or are you asking me to come along?’

‘You could help me canvass bar staff. Our friends in the white Dodge, by the way, they’re following us again. One lane over, three cars back.’

Stone thought for a moment. Now that the locals were all over him, it might not be a bad idea to have someone who could help him evade their attention. And while there was virtually no chance of picking up Tom’s trail, he would be able to see how Linda handled herself, and get an idea of how things worked in this sheaf . . .

He said, ‘If I go barhopping with you, I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time.’

‘So you’ll come along?’

‘Isn’t that what I said? But only if you can lose our friends.’

‘Let’s wait until we get to Atom City,’ Linda said. ‘They’ll have a hard time blending in there. Actually, so will you, in that suit and tie. The first thing we have to do is find you some appropriate clothes.’

 

When the atomic bomb had exploded over the Hudson, two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds and firestorms had levelled every building on the west side of Manhattan below Houston Street. East of Broadway, the upper storeys of surviving buildings were still printed with black scorch marks, and many were derelict, standing stark and windowless in wastelands of rubble. Linda Waverly told Stone that the social geography of Manhattan was reversed here: survivors with money and influence had moved as far as they could from Ground Zero, displacing the poor from Harlem and the Bronx, who had been resettled in high-rise blocks of social housing built on the ruins of Greenwich Village as part of the European-funded reconstruction plan. She pointed out a tall, slender tower outlined in red and green lights, about where the Pan-American Trade Center stood in the Real, and where reed beds grew along the shore at the edge of Susan’s farm.

‘The Atlantic Friendship Tower,’ she said. ‘It carries New York’s TV and radio traffic. Before we came through the mirror, it was popular with European tourists. They used to ride to the top to get a good view of Ground Zero.’

The Lower East Side, renamed Atom City, was mostly intact, although many buildings were propped up by massive wooden braces. Avenues A, B and C had been renamed Alpha, Beta and Cobalt 60. Cars and taxis crawled nose to tail along the potholed streets, reflections of neon signs sliding over their windshields, and pedestrians overflowed the crowded sidewalks. Most were under thirty, dressed in what looked like their grandparents’ clothes, men in hats and suits with wide lapels, women in A-line dresses or beaded sweaters and knee-length skirts. Young toughs in leather jackets or T-shirts and jeans lounged on stoops, sizing up the crowds with insolent eyes. Little knots of soldiers or sailors called to each other. Street vendors sold hot dogs and doughnuts, pretzels and Chinese noodles. A guy in a red jacket was beating the hell out of a stack of cardboard boxes and plastic crates with a pair of drumsticks.

After Linda found an empty spot and parked the taxi, the white Dodge nosed past. Two men in it, their gazes fixed straight ahead.

‘Take off your jacket,’ Linda told Stone. ‘We need to dress you down. It’ll help us lose those guys, and in the places where we need to go you could get in a lot of trouble if you’re wearing that suit.’

‘I was told the locals were friendly here.’

‘We have good relations with the government, but out on the street there are plenty of people who aren’t so happy with our presence. Street gangs, students, people who hang around student bars and pubs but aren’t actually students, if you know what I mean.’

They found a used-clothing store, a whitewashed basement crammed with racks of tuxedos and Hawaiian shirts, cotton dresses and sweaters and woollen overcoats. Linda helped Stone choose a red wool shirt with long, pointed lapels, and a loose-fitting navy-blue cord jacket that more or less hid his shoulder holster, then stepped back and studied him, her head tilted to one side. She was almost his height, dressed in a green needlecord shirt and knee-length khaki shorts. She’d caught up her mass of red curls under a shapeless old Homburg. Tom Waverly’s little girl, all grown up.

Stone said, feeling amused and slightly foolish in his disguise, ‘How do I look?’

‘Like an undercover cop who got out of bed in a hurry,’ Linda said. ‘But in a dim light and a crowded bar, you’ll just about pass for an ordinary human being.’

They hopped from bar to bar, buying drinks they didn’t touch, scoping out the customers, showing bartenders and waitresses a photograph of Tom Waverly that Linda had brought along, moving on. No one seemed to be following them. In a club that occupied a converted bus garage, where strings of coloured lights dangled from the steel trusses of the high roof and a three-piece band played a ragged blues, Linda persuaded one of the bartenders to let her and Stone leave through the fire door. They walked away quickly and circled around Tompkins Square and the tent city for the homeless that was laid out under the trees.

‘I think we lost our friends,’ Stone said.

‘You’re enjoying yourself.’

‘I guess it reminds me of the good old days.’

For a moment, the ghost of a young, exuberant, recklessly brave Tom Waverly touched both of them.

Linda said, ‘There’s one more place I’d like to check out.’

It was on the second floor of an old tenement building hidden behind a forest of wooden props. Stone followed Linda up a narrow flight of stairs into a space made out of three or four rooms knocked through, crowded with young people in old-fashioned clothes who were drinking beer and wine from paper cups and making a lot of noise under the pressed-tin ceiling. Most of them were smoking. In the big room at the end, on a small, low stage in front of windows shuttered with corrugated iron painted bright red, a man and a woman perched on bar stools with their acoustic guitars in their laps. Their audience sat on broken-down sofas and kitchen chairs, listening to the woman sing about how her morphine would be the death of her.

Stone stood with Linda at the back of the audience. The singer played rhythm guitar and wore a calf-length flowered dress and tooled leather cowboy boots, her pale face framed by auburn hair parted down the centre, her dark eyes grave and steady. Her partner, dressed in a grey suit, black hair tangled across his handsome Irish face, bent over his guitar, putting some Spanish into his phrasing. They played a song about John Henry. They played a pretty song about a brave little flower called the acony bell. They played a song about the coo-coo bird, that sings as it flies. Songs that put a shiver in Stone’s blood, reminding him of the Harvest Home dance at the Ellison place two weeks ago, of tunes played at christenings, barn-raisings, and Fourth of July picnics: the singer and her partner were like travellers from distant blue hills, come down into the city with the mythic cargo of a lost, half-forgotten America.

In a break in the set, while the two musicians retuned their guitars and chatted with friends in the audience, Linda told Stone that this bar was the centre of the revivalist scene.

‘When we first came through the mirror, all they had was European pop, European heavy metal, European dance hall. But after we made contact, there was a cultural flowering, a rediscovery of American roots. They have gospel, all kinds of blues, dozens, grunge . . .’

‘Grunge?’

‘It’s like heavy metal, but played real fast. There’s acid grunge, apocalypse grunge, garage grunge . . . all kinds. It’s what teenage white kids play in their bedrooms to annoy their parents, if they aren’t playing dozens.’

‘How about Bob Dylan? If we found him—’

‘We’d find my father.’ Linda smiled at Stone from under the brim of her Homburg. They were leaning close to make themselves heard over the noise of the crowd. He could feel the heat of her body. A faint scent of patchouli oil. She said, ‘I’ve looked hard, but I don’t think Dylan took up the guitar in this sheaf.’

‘Maybe he’s out there somewhere, walking the back roads. He just hasn’t made himself known yet. How about Elvis Presley?’

‘He’s strictly a movie actor here. He started out as a singer, but after the war he went into the movies. I saw him in one -
Judgement Day
. He played a corrupt Southern Senator.’

‘I’d say it puts this sheaf about thirty per cent on the Elvis scale.’