Stone 588 (52 page)

A poke from Audrey.

Calling his attention to two men moving up the far side aisle on the right. They stood out from the tourists, were both taller, hefty, looked menacing in their proper dark suits. One had a plain brown paper bag in hand. A gun in it?

Audrey crossed her legs so her right ankle was resting on her left knee. That put her pistol within an instant of her lingers. Springer's right hand went reflexively in under the left side of his jacket. They watched the two men come up the side aisle, peripherally saw them stop at a spot about twenty-five feet away beyond a section of pews that were mostly unoccupied. The men didn't appear to be taking special notice of Springer and Audrey, as, of course, they wouldn't. In fact they seemed rather detached from their surroundings, oblivious to the milling tourists. Next, Springer and Audrey expected, the two men would cross over to the near aisle and sit in the pew just behind them and be within point-blank range of the back of their heads.

However, the two men turned away and gave their attention to the tiered rack of votive candles positioned in front of one of the small railed-olf chapels along that side of the cathedral. There was the sound of metal scraping marble floor as they moved the pedestaled rack a couple of feet away from the railing. The glass candleholders rattled in place. One of the men knelt and, with such a big bunch of keys it was like a nosegay, reached in under and unlocked the metal offering box that was a permanent part of the rack. He pulled out the drawer of the offering box. It was so crammed that bills and coins dropped to the floor, causing him, annoyed, to express the need for larger drawers that would require fewer collections. The other man held the mouth of the bag open so the contents of the drawer could be dumped into it. The stray money was retrieved. The drawer was noisily replaced, locked, and tried, and the tiered rack shifted back into position. The two men, church custodians, continued on up the aisle to the votive candle rack of the next side chapel.

The false alarm was such a letdown for Springer and Audrey that it was therapeutic, slackened their tension a bit. Springer fixed his eyes almost straight ahead on the baldachin that served the high altar. Gleaming, golden bronze, intricately detailed with figures, floral finials and tracery, the archlike baldachin created the impression that the altar was standing on the doorstep of some surely holy realm. Springer noticed that on the topmost point of the baldachin, about five stories up, was the figure of an angel. He didn't know that it was the Archangel Michael but he saw that the figure had a sword and it occurred to him how that supported Audrey's theory. If an angel couldn't go anywhere without a sword, who should?

While Springer's eyes remained on the baldachin, his mind resumed with Libby. It seemed to him that her initial vitriol was something she just had to get out of her system. Because since then she'd been consistently congenial toward him. More than that. She'd gone out of her way to be generous, well-intentioned. Only the day before yesterday she'd phoned and inquired about Jake, said she'd taken the initiative of contacting the Head of Medicine at Johns Hopkins for his recommendation of an oncologist to care for Jake, whoever in the world was most advanced and knowledgeable in the area of osteogenic sarcoma. She'd been referred to a doctor in Edinburgh, had spoken with him, explained the circumstances, and persuaded him to make Jake his priority case. One of her personal jets would fly Jake over. Everything would be arranged. Please, allow her to help, she'd said. And now, two days later, she'd sent her private armed guard out to kill him?

A Libby man.

Springer saw him come in by way of 50th Street. No doubt about him. He was the one who had spotted Springer in Saks. He had gray hair with some blond left in it, but dark eyebrows. His saunter conveyed that he was disregarding where he was. At the center aisle he turned his back to the high altar and searched the pews with his eyes, took his time, systematically scanned the pews on the right and the left.

Springer and Audrey were to the left of him only about fifty feet away. They felt obvious, were tempted to duck down out of sight, but any quick move would draw attention.

'Pray," Springer whispered to Audrey.

Slowly they knelt on the red plastic-covered knee rest, placed their hands on the back of the pew in front of them, hunched forward, and lowered their foreheads to their hands. Over their knuckles they could still see the Libby man. He stood there for a while longer, concentrating his survey on the pews to his right. Then, apparently satisfied, dropping his shoulders a bit as he gave up, he turned and walked out the 51st Street doors.

Springer and Audrey continued to pray.

"Did he see us?" Audrey asked.

"I don't think so," Springer replied.

When, after five minutes, the Libby man didn't reappear. Springer and Audrey sat up. They were quite confident that they'd given their pursuers the slip. They agreed that for margin they should stay in St. Patrick's at least another half hour. Audrey began massaging the back of Springer's neck, a conclusive gesture. While her fingers kneaded caringly, Springer's thoughts returned to the perplexity of Libby.

Okay, he reasoned, say there was some one-sided misunderstanding serious enough for Libby to want him done in, just say there was, then what about Audrey? These men were out to also do away with Audrey, and Libby wouldn't want that, probably not under any circumstances, no matter how obsessively envious she might be of Audrey's many fewer years or jealous of what Audrey and he had together. Nothing short of insanity would call for such drastic action. No, it just didn't wash.

He felt like taking his head off and giving it a few hard loosening shakes. The answer, anyway the clue, to this Libby thing had to be stuck in there somewhere. Did it perhaps have to do with the Russian diamond deal? He went back over the times he'd been with Libby, what had been said. Words of hers ran across the front of his mind. Several fragments went zipping by at the speed of thought but insisted on coming back for replay:

I have enough people here . . . quite capable people and very loyal.

That had been Libby's reply when they were down in her vault at the Greenwich house putting the Russian diamonds away and he'd inquired about her security. He remembered wondering at the time how she could be so certain the staff of men that protected her was so capable . . . and loyal . . . and she had told him:

Wintersgill finds my people for me . . . recruits and screens them intensively.

Wintersgill. The getter, the front, the green floodgate.

Wintersgill. The bloodlined lacky with marriage ambitions.

If Wintersgill found these men weren't they his? Didn't they owe their selves to him? If he screened them wouldn't he make sure they knew from whom their bonuses were coming? Hell, yes. Groat and Fane and all the others were, when push came to kill, Wintersgill's own task force. Then, of course, it followed that Wintersgill, not Libby, had sicced these men on them. A purge. More than likely, not they but Libby was the main mark, and wherever she was at that moment, she too was in mortal danger.

Perhaps she was already dead.

That shivering thought brought Springer to remind himself all this was mere surmise. His scenario. It stacked up a lot more neatly than anything else, though.

He put it to Audrey, what did she think?

"Wintersgill." She nodded.

"But why? What would he have to gain?"

She looked up at stained glass windows of the north transept, as though the answer was up there among the colors and the tracery. "Maybe," she said, "gain isn't his motive. Maybe it's a matter of what he has to lose."

"We've got to get to Libby."

Springer looked off to his right and left and then turned and looked behind.

There they were.

Ten pews back.

Two Wintersgill men. The gray-haired blond and another. Their eyes held on Springer's. They were smirking malignantly. Evidently they'd been sitting there for some time, enjoying their edge. The gray-haired blond must have spotted them and not let on, gone around, and come in through the front entrance.

What to do now?

They sure as hell couldn't be outsat.

Mass ended. The hundreds attending got up from the pews and were filing out. Springer and Audrey saw it as a chance. They joined those leaving by way of the center aisle, got as close in among them as possible, using them as a shield. The two Wintersgill men waited for Springer and Audrey to pass before joining the flow. Springer and Audrey would go out to Fifth Avenue, would, as soon as they were a foot out of the cathedral, make a dash down the steps to the sidewalk, the curb. Luck and timing would be with them. An available taxi would be coming along, would be right there and they'd jump in and be swiftly carried away to safety.

Now they'd reached the end of the aisle. The crowd diverged in the main vestibule. The main way out was closed, as it usually was on weekdays. There was the choice of going out by way of the north or south vestibules. Springer and Audrey chose the south, hurried through the doorway to it and were about to step outside when they saw Groat. Unmissable in his double-breasted brown twill livery, shiny beaked cap, leather leggings. Groat and another with him, at the comer of the exterior landing, were waiting for them, watching for them. Saw them.

Impasse.

Wintersgill men ahead and coming on behind.

Springer noticed a door just inside the vestibule, an ordinary single door. No telling what it might lead to. He tried it. It came open. He and Audrey darted in and quickly closed the door after them. They, along with an old tin dustpan and a wornout broom, were at the bottom of a steep spiral stairway, so narrow they would have to go up single file. Clear glass lightbulbs of twenty-five watts at most were suspended from outdated fabric-covered wires.

A bannister that followed the curve of the white plaster walls offered its assistance.

Because of the sharp continuous turn of the steps, they had to be taken one at a time. Audrey went up ahead of Springer. Her feet were almost level with his eyes and he saw the repetitious blur of her heels as she scurried up and around, up and around. It was dizzying. Desperation made it seem all the more so.

When they'd climbed three complete spirals, they heard what surely had to be the Wintersgill men on the stairs below: the heavy, pursuing steps of perhaps as many as three. Springer and Audrey could only be mentally spuned on, for their feet were already going as fast as possible. At the completion of the fifth spiral they had climbed one hundred fifty-three steps, about the equivalent of ten stories. At that point the stairway ended at a landing. There was a closed door on the right, a solid wood door with a hundred-year-old brass knob that had never been polished.

No time to catch a badly needed deep breath.

Springer turned the knob, pulled. The door seemed to be locked, but he noticed there was only the knob, no keyhole. He pulled harder. The door, swollen in its jamb from humidity, gave slightly. He attacked the door with a sudden yank. It complained stridently and came open a foot. Just enough to squeeze through, Audrey first. While Springer pulled the door closed from inside, Audrey reached down and got her pistol. Springer saw it in her hand and took his out too.

They quickly assessed the space they had entered. It was indeed a space more than an area. The inside of the inside, an attic of sorts situated between the cathedral's vaulted ceiling and its roof. It was long, about a hundred and fifty feet, but only about ten feet wide. Overhead, cutting down on the space, was the diagonal underside of the roof, its beams burned brown with age. There was no floor. Instead, a catwalk made up of unnailed wood planks ran the entire length. The only light came from weak bulbs suspended every twenty-five feet or so.

Springer and Audrey rushed unsurely along the catwalk. The uneven planks rumbled beneath them; their swiftness aroused dust. As they were avoiding the hang of the first lightbulb they heard the door being tried, then the rasp of it being jerked open, followed, almost at once, by three consecutive spatting sounds, the distinctive sounds of shots from a pistol being compressed by a silencer.

Springer anticipated the jolt, the pain, the bum, whatever would be felt from a bullet in the back. Then, as though acting on their own, his legs stopped, refused to run, his feet pivoted.

The Wintersgill man seemed small, vague, too far away.

Springer fired three times.

One bullet missed. Another passed through the fabric of the man's jacket and shirt and the skin and subcutaneous flesh that covered the sixth rib where it curved around his side. It grazed the bone of the rib and went on through. Springer's third bullet struck approximately four inches to the left of the second. At a velocity of one thousand one hundred feet per second, the hollow-nosed slug entered the man between his sixth and seventh ribs, spread to nearly twice its diameter when it met the resistance of the cartilage that connected the two ribs, and tore through the walls of the left ventricular chamber of his heart. It veered as tissue slowed it, so that it partially penetrated and lodged in one of the transverse processes of the man's spine.

He was the gray-haired blond Wintersgill man. The impact of the bullet caused his arms to spring out from his body. He lashed fearfully, surprised, as though he'd stepped on a snake. Driven back, his heaviness slammed against the door, forcing it farther open. He slid down, a dead heap.

Audrey had taken aim but had not had time to get off a shot.

She and Springer continued quickly along the catwalk and found that it went at a ninety-degree angle off to the right. Forty feet along they came to the dead end of it. They went back to the place where it angled and took up position there, where they could see down the long nanow attic space to the door that evidently was the only way in or out, keep a watch for their other pursuers.

It was a relief for them to kneel, to take air in deeply. Springer was stunned by what he'd done. Killed someone. His hand and the pistol in its grasp seemed fused, would forever be. The pistol was extremely heavy, requiring tremendous effort to keep it from weighing him over, lopsiding him. The endogenous old dragon in him had been let out of its lair, had finally flicked its ferocious tongue. He had killed someone, in a church of all places.