At the best of times I don’t like subways. All those people, and many of them, I knew from thirteen years on the force, were armed. Buskers, pickpockets, madmen and women, and then all the potential victims, whom no police force on earth could protect.
My breathing in the crowded southbound car was erratic, and I could feel my heart beating. That cellar had been my grave for some hours, but it was just now that the terror was settling in.
Six times I decided to leave the country. Canada and then maybe Mongolia or Lithuania, Cuba or Chad. Jackie Robinson’s son made a new life for himself in Tanzania. Six times I steadied myself and thought of how I could dig my way out of a grave with no name on it.
The worst part of that leg of the journey was that I didn’t have a book on me. I needed to read something. It didn’t matter what.
A woman across the aisle got off at Thirty-Fourth Street leaving a throwaway newspaper on the seat next to her. I literally leapt out of my seat and grabbed the rag before anyone else could. Then I went to the chrome pole set between the center doors of the car and read all about Chinee Love, a black-skinned, yellow-haired New Age singer whose band played pots and pans behind her performance-art songs.
I climbed out of that hell at the West Fourth Street station and walked nine blocks to Name-it Storage facility. Their records knew me as Nigel Beard. I had a pretty big space on the thirteenth level.
It was a crowded room, twenty by twenty-five feet. There were boxes of books, papers, weapons, and other, more particular, tools of my trade.
But before I did anything else I sat down in the stuffed chair that I kept dead center of the secret workspace.
There was electricity, so I had light. There were a thousand books, so I didn’t have to read.
Over the next hour or so my breathing normalized and my heart gave up its drumroll. I was innocent of any crime. Those men had kidnapped me. I had every right to defend myself.
And then there were the simple pleasures of life: a comfortable chair and air to breathe, no chains or chimeric criminals who would kill you just for wanting to reveal the truth.
After calming down I used bottled water, bar soap, and a disposable razor to shave my head.
Against the south wall of the storage room stood a rosewood armoire that was eight feet high and six wide. From this I took a makeup case I bought while taking a class called Hollywood Makeup Techniques.
I studied that particular facet of cosmetics for one reason—to be able to don convincing fake facial hair when I needed anonymity. I realized over the years that a mustache made my face look different. Something about my nose, the distance between my eyes, and the shape of my skull.
After attaching the natural-hair lip wig and sideburns to hide my telltale scar, I waxed my bald pate and then studied myself in a hand mirror, as Lamont Charles had done.
I was pretty well satisfied with the results.
There was a dull ochre trench coat hanging from the closet pole of my wardrobe. It was stuffed with wadded material so that when I put it on I looked forty to fifty pounds heavier.
I then spent a good while looking at myself in the full-length mirror that lined the inner left-side door of the armoire. While checking out my disguise, I was considering a next move.
The disguise was solid. Scar, size, face, and hair all altered enough. On any other job I would have stopped there. But this was a situation where I couldn’t afford a mistake. My visage was still too cop-like.
So I reached into the armoire and took out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with clear, thick, nonprescription lenses. The transformation was now complete. Rather than a Cro-Magnon cop I was a Neanderthal nerd.
One thing I had learned in high school was that in sports you always had to move in a direction that your opponent did not expect. From Ping-Pong to prizefighting, the man with the unexpected moves was the player most likely to win.
Police work is a kind of intellectual sport, like Go or chess. And sometimes you have to make a move to fool yourself, a move that will keep you from putting yourself in the enemy’s line of fire.
That’s why I decided to pay a visit to Augustine Antrobus.
Antrobus Limited was listed on Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties. It was a tall and slender building plated with shiny brown stone with slit-like windows that made an odd pattern like a modern painting composed of matchsticks.
“May I help you?” a guard asked. He was standing behind a chest-high station made from see-through yellow plastic.
“Antrobus Limited.”
The security man looked ten years younger than he was, and appeared to be forty. His blue eyes took in my bulky coat, shiny pate, and geeky glasses. Though unrecognizable, I did look odd.
“Name?” he said after this brief moment of hesitation.
“Nigel Beard.” The ID in my wallet said the same.
There was a computer in front of the guard; I could see it through the yellow plastic.
“I don’t see a Beard here,” he said after a moment or two.
“Call them and see.”
Security didn’t like the command, but he picked up the phone and hit some numbers.
“I have a Beard down here says he wants to come up.” A few words passed, and he held the phone down and said, “The girls in his office don’t have any record of you either.”
“Tell them that it’s about William James Marmot. Something I think they’ll want to be apprised of.”
Again that natural hesitation and then a few more words through the wire.
He put the phone down and looked me in the glasses.
“Floor twenty-two.”
“Thank you kindly,” I said, experimenting with my new, disposable personality.
It wasn’t a crowded building. Only a young woman in a black skirt and white blouse and I waited for the elevator. The doors of car 8 opened, and I gestured for her to go first. She was multiracial, with a broad, friendly nose and brunette hair that strained toward red.
I hit the 22 button and she the number 2.
She must have noted me looking and said, “They lock the stairwells because they’re afraid of terrorists coming in through the exit doors. Otherwise I’d be walking.”
“When I was a kid,” I said, “I thought that if I worried about every way I could possibly die, then none of them would happen and I’d live forever.”
The doors opened, and she gave me a big gap-toothed grin, then walked out.
For the next twenty floors I turned my thoughts to Stuart Braun, A Free Man, and a fat man whom I almost decided to let die. There was a definite parallel between me in that Queens basement and the Staten Island Underground Railroad station where I passively participated in the torture of Simon Creighton. There was almost a karmic balance there.
The doors to the elevator slid away like the curtains to a very small stage, and I was on.
A short and slender man in a violet suit was there to meet me. The guard downstairs hadn’t said anything about a man working in the office, so I decided that this guy was security. Olive-skinned white, he had eyes that were a pale blue. His hair was brown at the root and blond thereafter. He was somewhere between the ages of thirty-six and sixteen and smelled of rose attar.
I wondered if the water fountains in that building were fed by an earlier, slightly flawed version of the Fountain of Youth.
“Mr. Beard?”
“Yes.” Even if he was a hired gun, I figured I still had the advantage; the wadding in my coat was laced with Kevlar.
“Follow me.”
He turned and gestured for me to go before him. I ran point down a useless hallway, finally coming to an opulent room that had three desks with a beautiful woman behind each one.
You can tell a lot about an employer by the makeup of her or his staff.
From the feminine bodyguard to the three office workers (all of whom were of a different race), I could tell that Antrobus was a sensualist.
There was a small oil painting of a bathing nude above the central desk, where a broad-faced and striking Asian woman sat. I would have given even odds that that canvas was an original Degas.
“Mr. Beard?” the woman said. Her name tag read HATIM.
“Yes.”
“What is your business, sir?”
“Private between me and him.”