Two-twenty-two Park Avenue might have been one of the towers Eddie had seen from the bridge. It was all steel and glass, joined together at right angles, the top ten or twenty stories disappearing in the clouds. On the sidewalk below lay a man in a soggy blanket. He didn’t have a baby, just a sign: “Please help.” His eyes met Eddie’s. The look in them was as bad as anything Eddie had seen inside. That puzzled him. Out of Holesome Trail Mix, he reached into his pocket and found the $1.55 remaining from his gate money. The man made no move to take it. Eddie laid the money on the blanket, leaving himself with the two hundred-dollar bills, and followed a woman wearing a trench coat and sneakers through a revolving door into the lobby.
The lobby was probably the grandest room he’d ever been in. It had a fountain with water spouting from the mouth of a bearded sea god; a marble floor, marble walls, and a huge chandelier hanging from a ceiling several stories high; and at the far side, gleaming banks of brass elevators. Men and women dressed in suits and carrying briefcases got on and off in a hurry, funneling through a gap between two velvet ropes. Eddie was almost across the lobby when he noticed the two men in chocolate-colored uniforms standing at a desk in the gap between the ropes and realized it was a security check. He stopped dead.
Relax, he told himself. He had passed through thousands of security checks, what was one more? And this one: like a child’s notion of security, with the silly uniforms and velvet ropes. Besides, you’re a free citizen, not an inmate. So: move. But he didn’t want to go through that security check, had to force himself to take those last steps.
“Pass, sir?” said one of the security guards.
“What?”
The security guard’s eyes gave him a quick once-over. Eddie understood how he must have appeared in his soaked windbreaker, chinos, sneakers: much closer to the man in the blanket than to the ones with the suits and briefcases.
“You need a pass,” said the security guard, dropping the sir.
“Don’t have one.”
“Do you work here?”
“No.”
“What’s your business?”
Eddie almost replied, “I’m looking for work,” before he realized the guard wanted to know what business he had in the building.
“I’m here to see my brother,” Eddie said. “He’s got an office. Suite 2068.”
“One moment. Sir.” The guard opened a book. “What name would that be?”
“J. M. Nye,” said Eddie. “And Associates.”
The guard ran his finger down a page, eyes scanning back and forth. “Don’t see it,” he said.
“It might be 2086.”
“That’s not the problem.” The guard turned the page. “The problem is there’s no J. M. Nye, period. Ring a bell?” he asked the other guard.
“Nope.”
The first guard spoke into a portable phone, too quietly for Eddie to hear. He put down the phone, shook his head at Eddie. “Nope.”
“I know he was here at one time,” Eddie said. “Maybe he’s left his new address.”
“We don’t keep information like that,” the guard said, glancing over Eddie’s shoulder. “Everybody’s always moving. This is New York.”
People in suits were jamming up behind Eddie. The chocolate guards, without being aggressive about it, were blocking his way. He wasn’t going to get past this play-school security check.
Eddie went back through the grand lobby, through the revolving door, into the street. The man in the blanket noticed him, tried to make eye contact again. But this was New York, where everyone moved. Eddie would have to move too. He kept going.
Eddie had never been in a tower like 222 Park Avenue before, had seldom been in an office building of any kind, but he’d seen a lot of urban-drama type movies in prison, pseudo-experience he now relied on. He walked around the building until he found a parking garage, as he’d expected. He went down the ramp. A man in a glass booth watched him.
“Forgot my briefcase,” Eddie said without stopping, the way some actor, Lee Marvin maybe, might have done it.
The elevator door opened just as he got there. A good thing, in case the man in the booth was still watching. Eddie stepped in and pressed number twenty. The door slid closed; the elevator rose, but only to G, where it stopped. The door opened. Two women got on. Beyond them, Eddie could see the security check. One of the guards turned and looked his way. He blinked as the door closed.
The women were well dressed, well groomed, angry inside. Eddie was good at knowing things like that; he’d had to be. The door opened at twelve and the women got out.
“The residuals are a joke,” one said.
“No one’s laughing,” answered the other.
Eddie rode the rest of the way by himself, looking at his bald and damp reflection on polished brass.
Bing. Twenty. The door opened, not, as Eddie had expected, into a corridor, but directly into a reception area hung with paintings, full of flowers. Werner, Pratt, Olmsted, Larch and Groot, read a plaque on the wall, but Eddie had no idea what they did.
A man in a gray-flannel suit, yellow tie, and candy-striped shirt sat at the desk, tapping at a keyboard. “Sir?” he said.
“Is this twenty sixty-eight?” Eddie said.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Or maybe twenty eighty-six.”
“They don’t exist,” said the man. “This whole floor is Werner, Pratt. It’s simply two thousand.”
“My brother’s office was here. J. M. Nye. And Associates.”
The man looked blank. A phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” he said, picking it up. He was very polite. Eddie wanted to knock his computer off the desk, not hard, just a polite little toppling. Instead, he picked up a phone book lying on the desk, looked up J. M. Nye and J. M. Nye and Associates, found listings for neither. He closed the book. The man on the phone reached for it and tucked it in a drawer.
Eddie returned to the lobby, hopping over the velvet rope on his way out. The security guards didn’t notice. Anyone already inside was presumed to be safe. That was another thing that differentiated this security check from the ones Eddie knew.
He stood outside the revolving door, lost in thought. He wasn’t aware that he was standing over the man in the blanket until he felt a sharp kick against his ankle. He looked down.
“This is my spot,” said the man, not seeming to recognize Eddie at all. “Fuck off.”
Eddie didn’t like the implication, even though he’d already made the comparison himself, and he didn’t like being kicked. He recalled what he had done to the last man who’d kicked him. But Eddie did nothing this time. The man was protected by his blanket and his sign.
An hour and a half later, Eddie was in Brooklyn, standing outside 367 Parchman Avenue. It was a dirty brick building a few stories high, without a homeless man, revolving door, marble lobby, or security check. There was just an outer door and an inner door, with a row of buzzers in the square hall between them. Eddie checked the label on Prof’s mailing tube and pressed buzzer three. Nothing happened. He pressed it a few more times, then tried the inner door. It opened.
Number three was at one end of the basement corridor. The corridor was dark and full of smells-fried food, spilled beer, cigarette smoke. TV voices came through the door of number three. Eddie knocked.
“Who is it?” A woman’s voice, impatient.
“Ed Nye,” Eddie said, and started to add, “a friend of Prof’s.” The door opened before he could finish.
“I know who you are.” The woman was tall and lean. Eddie didn’t recognize her at first. She wore a red terrycloth robe, not the reindeer sweater she’d had on in Prof’s photograph. She’d also seemed rounder in the photograph, and darker of hair and complexion, at least the way he remembered it. But he wasn’t sure how well he remembered it, especially since there’d been a little mixing in his mind of her image and the image of the woman in the porn shot that had been taped beside it.
“Tiffany?” he said.
“That’s me.” She had dark eyes, intelligent, alert, even excited, he thought, although he didn’t know what there was to be excited about.
Eddie searched for some way to begin, found none, said, “Here,” and handed her the cardboard tube.
“What’s this?”
“From Prof. I said I’d mail it. But I was in New York anyway, so …” He took a step back, delaying his departure only to think of the phrase that would take him to good-bye.
Tiffany put a hand on his forearm, a long white hand, nails painted red. “You’re not running off, are you? You’ve come all this way. At least I can give you coffee.”
“No, thanks.”
She didn’t remove her hand. “Please. Prof would be really pissed if he found out I didn’t even give you coffee.”
“Okay,” Eddie said. She let go.
He followed her inside. She locked the door, slid two bolts into place. That gave Eddie a bad feeling. Cool it, he told himself.
But the apartment did nothing to take the prison feeling away. For one thing, it was small. No hall, just a kitchen he was already in and a bedroom off it. For another, it had no windows. Light came from a fluorescent strip over the stove and the TV glowing by the unmade bed. It could have been midnight. Those reindeer sweaters had led him to expect something better. He glanced around for some sign of the two kids and saw none.
Eddie sat at the kitchen table. Tiffany boiled water, spooned instant coffee into unmatched cups, poured. Through the bedroom doorway he heard the TV voices.
“Milk and sugar?” asked Tiffany.
“No, thanks.”
She came behind him, leaning over to put his cup on the table. He smelled her, felt her breast press lightly against the side of his head. “Back in a sec,” she said.
She went into the bedroom, closed the door. Eddie sipped the coffee. That first sip was good. On the second he realized it tasted like prison coffee, the same brand exactly. He drank it anyway, listening to the TV voices, fainter now. He thought he heard Tiffany’s voice too, maybe on the phone.
The door opened. Tiffany came out, her hair brushed, smelling of something floral.
“How’s the coffee?” she said, sitting down on the other side of the table. It was small, about the size of a cafe table for two.
“Good.”
She added three spoonsful of sugar to her own cup and stirred with her red-tipped finger. “This is great,” she said. “I’m glad you came. Really. Having you here is almost like, having him. Isn’t that weird?”
Eddie nodded.
“How is he?”
“Doing all right.”
“But what’s he doing, what’s he thinking, what’re his plans?”
“He wants to get into politics.”
Tiffany started laughing. Eddie laughed too. He stopped when he got the feeling that she had spent some time behind bars herself.
“He’s afraid, with you gone,” Tiffany said.
“Why?”
“You protected him.”
“I didn’t.”
“Just you being there protected him.”
Eddie was silent.
Tiffany twisted in her chair, reached across to the counter for a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” she said.
“No, thanks.”
“Fifteen years in the pen and you don’t smoke?”
“Trying to quit.”
She lit up, exhaled a blue cloud. The smell reached Eddie.
“Maybe I will after all,” he said.
She regarded him without surprise. “Help yourself.”
He lit up too. Big mistake: he knew that right away, but it went so well with the coffee.
“Habits are hard to break,” she said. “I sure as hell hope Prof can break some of his.”
“Like what?” Eddie didn’t want to seem nosy, but he was curious: he’d lived with Prof for a long time. He and Tiffany had Prof in common. He started to feel a little more comfortable in the dark and tiny apartment.
Tiffany took a deep drag, blew smoke through her nose this time. “Like doing stupid things,” she replied.
“You mean the documents and stuff?”
She squinted at him. “I mean getting caught. The documents and stuff are his job. How he supports us in the standard of living to which we’ve become accustomed.” She stabbed her cigarette, still mostly unsmoked, into her coffee, still mostly undrunk. It hissed. Eddie couldn’t imagine Tiffany in the reindeer sweater at all.
“He’s afraid without you,” she said, “but he was afraid of you, too.”
“Prof?”
“He thinks you’re crazy-reading books all the time and killing people.”
Eddie felt his face grow hot.
She gave him that narrow-eyed gaze again. “You don’t look crazy to me.”
Eddie recalled his image in the polished brass of the elevator and realized he probably did look a little crazy. “I’m coming out of it,” he said. “I’ve been in a crazy place for fifteen years.”
“That’s not the record,” she said.
Eddie laughed, tried a joke of his own. “What’s your personal best?”
Tiffany glared at him and didn’t reply. She picked up the cardboard tube, lying on the table. “Let’s see what this is.”
She picked the plastic cap off one end, slipped her fingers inside, and withdrew a sheet of scrolled paper, about two feet long. She unrolled it on the table. He felt her go still.
It was a charcoal drawing of a nude woman. She was gazing right into the eyes of the viewer and was unmistakably Tiffany. She was sitting in a kitchen chair, very like the one she sat in now, legs slightly spread and pinching one of her nipples between forefinger and thumb. The drawing seemed professional to Eddie, even artistic. Prof’s inscription wasn’t in the same class: “To Tiff, from her dirty old man.”
Eddie looked up from the drawing to find Tiffany watching him. Their eyes met. She licked her lips. “He’ll always be an idiot.”
“Is he an idiot?”
“Don’t you think so?” In the silence that followed, Eddie and Tiffany didn’t take their eyes off each other. “Don’t you think so?” she repeated, and opened her robe, just enough to expose one breast. She took the nipple between her red-pointed finger and thumb and pinched, harder than in the drawing, much harder. At the same time she stretched her bare foot underneath that little cafe table and ran it under Eddie’s khaki pants, up his leg.
“Come on, killer.”
Tiffany rose, took him by the hand, led him into the bedroom. Eddie hadn’t been with a woman in a long time, not since Mandy. The sex he had with her seemed so sweetly innocent now, compared to what was about to happen. It was going to happen. He couldn’t stop it. The sight of Tiffany’s breast, in life in color and on paper in black and white, the pinched erect nipple, the red fingernails, the knowledge that the cardboard tube he’d been carrying had had this power the whole time, like an amulet in a story or something: all that, combined with fifteen years of loneliness, the different kinds of loneliness, but especially the loneliness of a man for a woman, added up to much more than he could resist.
He went into the bedroom. She helped him strip off the clothes the state had given him. She looked him over.
“He’s right to be afraid of you,” she said. Even that couldn’t stop him.