Reflected in the restaurant’s window was that car he’d been seeing throughout his travels. Nondescript sedan. Maybe a Civic. With the apparatus on the roof. He’d seen the car before. Many times. If he didn’t know better, he’d think it was following him. He put it out of his mind and looked through the glass, into the restaurant.
He wished it were possible for him to go inside and have a latte or a cappuccino. He could almost smell the coffee. But he had to keep going. So much of the world to see and so little time. Tomorrow he had plans to be in Montreal, and, depending how much ground he covered there, maybe Madrid the day after.
But he would remember this place. The sign in the window, the tables and chairs outside. The other businesses on Orchard. The narrow alleyways between the buildings. Plus everything that he had seen on Spring and Mulberry and Grand and Crosby and Prince and Elizabeth and Kenmare and Delancey.
He would remember it all.
He was about a third of the way down the block from the Broome cross street when he made that upward glance.
That was really where the element of chance entered into it. It wasn’t at all remarkable that he ended up on Orchard. It was the fact that he looked above the storefronts. He didn’t always do that. He scoped out the businesses and read the signs in their windows, studied the people in the coffee shops, made a mental note of the numbers above the doors, but he didn’t always cast his eyes above the first or second floors. Sometimes he forgot, and sometimes he was short of time. He might easily have gone down this street and never glanced upon that particular window of that particular tenement building.
Then again, he thought, chance might have had nothing to do with it. Maybe he was meant to see this window. Maybe, in some strange way, it was a test. To determine whether he was ready, even though he believed he was. But those who would make use of his talents—they might need some convincing before taking him on.
The window was on the third floor, above a place that sold cigarettes and newspapers—there was that car again, reflected in the window—and a second shop specializing in women’s scarves. It was divided into two panes. An air-conditioning unit stuck out from the sill, taking up half of the lower pane. Something white, above the air conditioner, had caught his eye.
At first, it looked like one of those white Styrofoam heads department stores and hair salons use to display wigs. He thought, Isn’t that funny, to put one of those in a window. A bald, featureless white head keeping watch over Orchard Street. He supposed that in New York you could find just about anything in someone’s window. If it had been his, he would have at least put a pair of sunglasses on it, to give the head some personality. A hint of whimsy. Although, he had to admit, people did not tend to think of him as whimsical.
But the more he looked at it, the less sure he was that it was a white foam head. The surface appeared more shimmery, slippery even. Perhaps plastic, like the bags the grocery stores used, or a dry cleaning bag, but not one of the clear ones.
He attempted to get a better look, zero in.
The thing was, this white, almost circular object in the window still had the shape of a head. The plastic material strained against a protuberance that could only be a nose. It hugged tight across what appeared to be a brow near the top, a chin at the bottom. There was even a trace of mouth, the lips open as though gasping for air.
Or screaming.
It was, he thought, as though a white stocking had been pulled down over someone’s head. But the material’s sheen still made him think it was plastic.
That wasn’t a very smart thing for someone to do. To put a plastic bag over their head. You could suffocate yourself doing something stupid like that.
A person would have to be pulling on the plastic bag, twisting it from behind, to make it conform so tightly to the contours of their face. But he didn’t see this person’s arms or hands doing anything like that.
Which made him wonder if someone else was doing it.
Oh. Oh, no.
Was that what he was witnessing? Someone putting a bag over another person’s head? Cutting off their air supply? Smothering them? Could this account for the mouth that seemed to be struggling for air?
Who was this happening to? A man? A woman? And who was doing it to them?
Suddenly he was thinking about the boy in the window. A different window. Many years ago.
But the person in this window, right now, didn’t look like a boy, or a girl. This was an adult.
An adult whose life was coming to an end.
That certainly was how it looked to him.
He felt his heart begin to beat more quickly. He’d seen things before on his travels. Things that weren’t right.
But they were minor compared to this. Never a murder.
That’s what he was sure this was.