TWENTY- SEVEN
I SAW THE WATCHER IMMEDIATELY. HE WAS LEANING ON A pillar in the centre of the Penn Station concourse, inert, with the kind of complete physical immobility that comes from being settled in for a long period of duty. He was stock-still, and the world was moving busily past him, like a river flows around a rock. He had a clamshell phone in his hand, open, held low down against his thigh. He was a tall guy, but reedy. Young, maybe thirty. At first sight, not impressive. He had pale skin with a shaved head and a dusting of ginger stubble. Not a great look. Scarier than an autograph hunter, maybe, but not by much. He was dressed in a shirt with a floral pattern and over it was a short tight leather jacket that was probably brown, but which looked lurid orange under the lights. He was staring at the oncoming crowd with eyes that had long ago grown tired, and then bored.
The concourse was full of people. I moved with the flow, slowly, hemmed in. I was carried along on the current. The watcher was about thirty feet away, ahead and on my left. His eyes were not moving. He was letting people walk through a fixed field of vision. I was about ten feet away from it. It was going to be like stepping through a metal detector hoop at the airport.
I slowed a little, and someone bumped into my back. I turned briefly, to check that they weren't tag-teaming me. They weren't. The person behind me was a woman with a stroller the size of an SUV, with two babies in it, maybe twins. There are a lot of twins in New York City. Plenty of older mothers, therefore plenty of laboratory fertilization. The twins in the stroller behind me were both crying, maybe because it was late and they were tired, or maybe they were just confused and bewildered by the forest of legs all around them. Their noise blended with the general hubbub. The concourse was tiled and full of echoes.
I drifted left, aiming to move six lateral feet in the next ten forward. I got near the edge of the stream and passed through the watcher's point of focus. His eyes were bright blue, but filmed with fatigue. He didn't react. Not at first. Then after a long second's delay his eyes opened wider and he raised his phone and flicked the lid to light the screen. He glanced at it. Glanced back at me. His mouth opened in surprise. By that point I was about four feet away from him.
Then he fainted. I lunged forward and caught him and lowered him gently to the ground. A Good Samaritan, helping out with a sudden medical emergency. That was what people saw, anyway. But only because people see what they want to see. If they had replayed the brief sequence in their heads and scrutinized it very carefully they might have noticed that I had lunged slightly before the guy had started to fall. They might have noticed that whereas my right hand was certainly moving to catch him by the collar, it was only moving a split second after my left hand had already stabbed him in the solar plexus, very hard, but close in to our bodies, hidden and surreptitious.
But people see what they want to see. They always have, and they always will. I crouched over the guy like the responsible member of the public I was pretending to be, and the woman with the stroller trundled on behind me. After that, a small crowd gathered, full of concern. New York's hostile reputation is undeserved. People are generally very helpful. A woman crouched down next to me. Other people stood close and looked down. I could see their legs and their shoes. The guy in the leather jacket was flat on the floor, twitching with chest spasms and gasping desperately for air. A hard blow to the solar plexus will do that to a person. But so will a heart attack and any number of other medical conditions.
The woman next to me asked, 'What happened?'
I said, 'I don't know. He just keeled over. His eyes rolled up.'
'We should call the ambulance.'
I said, 'I dropped my phone.'
The woman started to fumble in her purse. I said, 'Wait. He might have had an episode. We need to check if he's carrying a card.'
'An episode?'
'An attack. Like a seizure. Like epilepsy, or something.'
'What kind of a card?'
'People carry them. With instructions. We might have to stop him biting his tongue. And maybe he has medication with him. Check his pockets.'
The woman reached out and patted the guy's jacket pockets, on the outside. She had small hands, long fingers, lots of rings. The guy's outside pockets were empty. Nothing there. The woman folded the jacket back and checked inside. I watched, carefully. The shirt was unlike anything I had ever seen. Acrylic, floral, a riot of pastel colours. The jacket was cheap and stiff. Lined with nylon. There was an inside label, quite ornate, with Cyrillic writing on it.
The guy's inside pockets were empty, too.
'Try his pants,' I said. 'Quick.'
The woman said, 'I can't do that.'
So some take-charge executive dropped down next to us and stuck his fingers in the guy's front pants pockets. Nothing there. He used the pocket flaps to roll the guy first one way and then the other, to check the back pockets. Nothing there, either.
Nothing anywhere. No wallet, no ID, no nothing at all.
'OK, we better call the ambulance,' I said. 'Do you see my phone?'
The woman looked around and then burrowed under the guy's arm and came back with the clamshell cell. The lid got moved on the way and the screen lit up. My picture was right there on it, big and obvious. Better quality than I thought it would be. Better than the Radio Shack guy's attempt. The woman glanced at it. I knew people kept pictures on their phones. I've seen them. Their partners, their dogs, their cats, their kids. Like a home page, or wallpaper. Maybe the woman thought I was a big-time egotist who used a picture of himself. But she handed me the phone anyway. By that time the take-charge executive was already dialling the emergency call. So I backed away and said, 'I'll go find a cop.'
I forced my way into the tide of people again and let it carry me onward, out the door, to the sidewalk, into the dark, and away.
TWENTY-EIGHT
NOW I WASN'T THAT GUY ANY MORE. NO LONGER THE ONLY man in the world without a cell phone. I stopped in the hot darkness three blocks away on Seventh Avenue and looked over my prize. It was made by Motorola. Grey plastic, somehow treated and polished to make it look like metal. I fiddled my way through the menus and found no pictures other than my own. It had come out quite well. The cross street west of Eighth, the bright morning sun, me frozen in the act of turning around in response to my shouted name. There was plenty of detail, from head to toe. Clearly huge numbers of megapixels had been involved. I could make out my features fairly well. And I thought I looked pretty good, considering I had hardly slept. There were cars and a dozen bystanders nearby, to give a sense of scale, like the ruler painted on the wall behind a police mug shot. My posture looked exactly like what I see in the mirror. Very characteristic.
I had been nailed but good, photographically.
That was for damn sure.
I went back to the call register menu and checked for calls dialled. There were none recorded. I checked calls received, and found only three, all within the last three hours, all from the same number. I guessed the watcher was supposed to delete information on a regular basis, maybe even after every call, but had gotten lazy about three hours ago, which was certainly consistent with his demeanour and his reaction time. I guessed the number the calls had come in from represented some kind of an organizer or dispatcher. Maybe even the big boss himself. If it had been a cell phone number, it would have been no good to me. No good at all. Cell phones can be anywhere. That's the point of cell phones.
But it wasn't a cell phone number. It was a 212 number.
A Manhattan land line.
Which would have a fixed location. That's the nature of land lines.