I settled on 305.
There were a number of ways I could play this. I could knock on the door, and assuming someone answered, say, “So, listen, how are you, my name is Ray Kilbride, and my brother, Thomas, who’s a bit, well, you know, was surfing the Net and happened to notice someone being smothered in your window. Does that ring a bell? Because I don’t know about you, but that’s the sort of thing I’d remember.”
Perhaps there was a better approach.
I could take the printout from my jacket, show it to whoever came to the door, and just say, “We saw your place on Whirl360, and noticed this in your window, and if you don’t mind my asking, what the hell is it?”
Also, not so hot. But of the two, I preferred it.
Maybe there was some kind of cover story I could come up with. I’m an illustrator, I’d say. I had a Pearl Paint bag in my hand, after all. I could say I’d been commissioned to illustrate a Times article on lower Manhattan architecture, and was looking up your street online, came upon this image, and had to know, what is that, anyway?
Pathetic.
What I’d do was this. I’d knock on the door and show whoever answered the printout and just ask.
Maybe they’d tell me. If they had questions, I’d do my best to answer. I’d be honest. I’d tell them I had a brother who was obsessed with Whirl360, and every once in a while he saw something online he had to know more about.
God.
With the printout in my left hand, I knocked on the door with my right, still holding the Pearl Paint bag with it. The bag swung up against the door as I knocked.
When no one came after three seconds, I tried again.
And waited.
I debated whether to knock a third time. Maybe someone was sleeping. Did I really want to wake them up over this?
I was about to do it anyway when a door down the hall opened. 303, I thought it was. I turned and saw a heavyset woman, hair in curlers, looking at me through black, heavy-framed glasses. Half her body was in the hall, the other half still in her apartment, but her face leaned out so I could see all of it.
“No one lives there,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“No one lives there. The girls are gone.”
“Oh, okay, I didn’t know.”
“Been gone for months,” she said. “Landlord hasn’t rented it out.”
“Okay,” I said again, nodding. “Thanks.”
She stepped back into her apartment and closed the door.
So that was that.
I turned left as I walked out the front of the building, heading north up Orchard, thinking about what I would tell Thomas when I got home. Not much, really. I gave it a shot, but the place was empty.
What the hell else could I do?
I was sitting on the train, looking out at the passing Hudson, when, out of nowhere, something that had been troubling me for some time at an unconscious level came bubbling up to the surface: Why was the blade housing up, and the ignition in the OFF position, on Dad’s lawn tractor?
TWENTY-NINE
THOMAS knew he was going to have to make his own breakfast and lunch. Ray had told him it was going to be his responsibility. Ray had said if he was going to have to get up before the crack of dawn to grab a train into Manhattan to go on this cockamamie adventure (Thomas was pretty sure that was the word he’d used), then the least Thomas could do was feed himself.
“Okay,” Thomas said. “What do we have?”
“There’s bread and jam and peanut butter and tuna. Look around. Open the cupboards and help yourself.”
“If I make tuna, where’s the can opener?”
“Thomas, look at me.”
“Yes, Ray?”
“Use your head. If you can’t find something, look for it.”
“Okay.”
Ray didn’t seem very eager to check out that window on Orchard Street, but Thomas was pleased he’d agreed to it. He wasn’t sure he’d have sent another message to the CIA outlining his concerns about the face with the bag over it—he wanted to keep his relationship with the agency on a professional level. If the government got the idea he was going to involve them in every suspicious act he’d observed on Whirl360, they might be less inclined to use his services when The Big Thing happened, whatever The Big Thing turned out to be.
Regardless, Thomas was feeling more confident with each passing week that he was ready for it. At the end of every day, when he finally closed down Whirl360, erased his computer’s history, turned out the light, and lay his head on his pillow, he put himself to sleep by walking through a city he’d recently gotten to know. The night before, with his eyes closed, he had wandered San Francisco. He was going down Hyde, turning right onto the downhill corkscrew stretch of Lombard, the Coit Tower off in the distance. Or walking straight along Hyde, where it starts to slope down, off in the distance there, that has to be Alcatraz. Then crossing Chestnut, the buildings giving way to not much of anything on the left, something called the Russian Hill Open Space. And if he kept going this way on Hyde, pretty soon he’d be…