The Blackbird

Four

Two hours late, Grofield’s plane ovaled between massed gray clouds and the grubby sprawl of New York City. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and through snow and haze Grofield could look down at the monotonous crisscross rows of lights or up at the dull gray-red reflection of those fights on the underpart of the cloud bank. Neither prospect pleased.

In fact, no prospect at all was pleasing. Grofield had been looking forward to this plane rot taking off at all, thereby maybe giving him some extra time to wiggle out of this mess, but the weather had unfortunately lifted, and so had the plane, and now here was New York. The Quebec plane would leave too, he was pessimistically sure of that, the Quebec plane would leave if it had to go north on the Thruway.

Who were his guards? The plane was half empty, but even so there were a good dozen men aboard who could conceivably be co-workers of Charlie and Ken. The damn thing was, intelligence agents were supposed to look like ordinary people, so the ones he’d picked out probably could all be eliminated. Once he’d decided an individual looked like a secret agent, by definition that person could not possibly be a secret agent. It was all very frustrating.

It was almost frustrating enough to make him give up and go along with their scenario. After all, even if he did elude them — in New York, say — they would surely not be the kind to forgive and forget. They would keep looking for him, and if they ever found him they would surely find some way to dump that armored car heist on him. So it would mean giving up his own name, it would mean joining Equity all over again with a new name — he’d have to grow a mustache, maybe, or change his hairstyle — it would mean giving up his small-time but satisfying acting career with the credits he’d amassed over the years and starting all over again, having to avoid as much as possible theaters and actors and directors who already knew him as Alan Grofield.

It would be a painful and frustrating and dangerous process, rebuilding a new life within the same very public career, but it would have one compelling advantage over playing Ken and Charlie’s game: he would be alive. Whereas if he went to Quebec and started pussyfooting amid a lot of incognito colonels and generals, playing at foreign intrigue, a game he knew not at all, it seemed to him there was only one finish he could reasonably anticipate. His own. Better discommoded than dead.

The problem was, how to make his escape. It was tough to run away from people if you didn’t know which people you were running away from. But he had to make the try.

In the meantime, the seat belt and smoking signs were lit, and the plane had finally quit ovaling and had started its long slanting approach, like coasting down an endless driveway. Outside the window, the dull red clouds were getting higher and higher, the grimy pinball machine below was getting closer and closer, then suddenly there were no lights at all down below, and then just a few stray lights, blue ones over there, one revolving yellow light, a few white dots in the snowy darkness, and all at once there was a feeling of how fast the plane was going. Then they hit, bumping hard, landing again, skid-swerving slightly, and Grofield put a hand to his seat belt, prepared to resist being killed by the airline too, but a second later he could feel the plane coming under control again, and he sat back in the seat and looked out at the distant small fights of Kennedy Airport. The plane braked, the engines roaring, and then became tame, and for the next ten minutes they trundled back and forth in the outfield, making lefts and rights seemingly at random, the lights of the low buildings never seeming to get any closer, and then for no reason at all they stopped. Grofield looked across the aisle and out the window on the other side, and there was the terminal building.

The aisle became crowded. Grofield carried his overcoat over his arm and inched off the plane with everybody else. No one seemed to pay him any particular attention.

Inside the terminal building, an endless, broad, cream-colored corridor led to a row of glass doors, beyond which Grofield found himself suddenly face to face with a short, beaming man wearing a black overcoat and a hat with a plastic raincover on it. The beaming man said, “Mr. Grofield! Have a pleasant flight?”

Grofield looked at him. “Do I know you?”

“I’m a friend of Ken’s,” the beaming man said. “Call me Murray.”

“Hello, Murray.”

“You sound depressed. Rough flight?”

“That must be it,” Grofield said.

“A hell of a day to fly. Well, let’s go get your luggage.”

They went and got the luggage, which Murray insisted on carrying. They then went and stood by the glass exit doors to wait for the terminal bus. “The last report I got,” Murray said, “is that your Quebec plane will take off, but it’ll be about an hour late.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Grofield said.

“I thought we’d have dinner in the International Arrivals Building,” Murray said. “Unless you already ate on the plane.”

“I didn’t eat much,” Grofield said. “Is the government buying?”

“The least we can do,” Murray said happily.

“You’re damn right,” Grofield said.

Murray said, “We’ll just check you in over at Northways, give them the suitcase, and then go over and eat.”

“Wonderful.”

That was what they did, traveling twice on the terminal bus, the second time getting off at the International Arrivals Building and taking the escalator to the second-floor restaurant the Brass Rail operates there under the name Golden Door. The restaurant was nearly empty, probably because of the snow. They were shown to a table, they ordered drinks, and Grofield said, “I’ll just go wash up.”

“Of course,” Murray said. “We have plenty of time.”

“Right,” Grofield said, and went off to the men’s room but not inside. Looking through banks of artificial foliage, he watched until he was sure Murray was looking the other way, and then unchecked his overcoat and hurried down the stairs.

There would be at least one other, he already knew that. But would they try to stop him, or merely follow him? If they tried to stop him, he would have to try and get away.

But no one came near him. He hurried out of the building, shrugging his overcoat on, and there were half a dozen cabs huddled in the snow against the curb there. He got into the lead cab and said, “Manhattan.”

“Certainly,” said the driver.

With the snow, it was impossible to tell if he was being followed, but he assumed he was. He sat back in the cab and tried to relax for a while.

There wasn’t very much traffic, but what there was moved very slowly. The snow was coming down in large, lazy, wet clumps, the street was gray slush streaked with black tire tracks. Grofield’s cab threaded the maze out of the airport and took the Van Wyck Expressway toward Manhattan. After they crossed the Belt Parkway the traffic was stop and go. They rode a good twenty minutes before Grofield leaned forward and pointed to an overpass just ahead of them, saying, “Is that Jamaica Avenue?”

“Right.”

Grofield handed over two dollars. “I’ll get out here,” he said.

The driver looked at him in astonishment. “In the middle of the highway?”

“Everything’s okay,” Grofield said. The line of traffic was stopped at that point, so he opened the left-hand door and stepped out into the snow. He shut the door again, saw the driver gaping through his side window at him like a goldfish in his bowl, and walked around the cab and between cars to the right side of the road. He didn’t have overshoes, and wet snow was already down inside his shoes, trickling inside his socks.

He went up the steep snowy slope, slipping and sliding, going to his knees a couple of times, getting his bare hands cold and wet in the snow, but when he got to the top and looked back there was no one coming up after him. He turned away and walked up to Jamaica Avenue and turned right to Queens Boulevard and the subway entrance. He had a ten-minute wait for a train, and couldn’t tell if anyone on the platform with him was paying him any particular attention. He rode the train fourteen stops to Eastern Parkway, got off, walked aimlessly around that sprawling station, could find no one following him, and took a Canarsie Line train on into Manhattan, changing at Union Square for the Lexington Avenue train uptown. Again, nobody seemed to be following him. He rode up to Grand Central, left the subway, went upstairs to the railroad terminal, and bought a ticket on a train to Albany, leaving in ten minutes. He bought a newspaper and sat in a corner of the terminal with the paper up in front of his face for seven minutes, until someone said, “Shall we go back, Mr. Grofield?”

He lowered the paper, and looked up at two hefty types in windbreakers and cloth caps. They didn’t look at all cheery or friendly, and he’d never seen either of them before in his life. He said, “I’m sorry, you must be mistaking me for someone else.”

“Murray doesn’t want to order before you get back,” one of them said. “So why don’t we start back now?”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grofield said.

The other one said, “Grofield, you aren’t going to get away from us. But if you want to play hide and seek a while, we’ll go along. You’ve got a little over two hours before plane time. We’ll give you thirty minutes’ head start if you want, and we’ll still pick you up in plenty of time to catch the plane. Now, do you want to run around in the snow for two hours, or do you want to go have dinner with Murray?”

Grofield stared at them. How could they do it? How could they find him so easily? How could they make a challenge like that? Was it a bluff? Somehow he doubted it.

So what now? Run? Fight? Grofield looked at them, at their faces and their hands and their shoulders, and he sighed and folded his paper and got to his feet. “Let’s not keep Murray waiting,” he said.