pencil flashlight, but even with that he needed more than a minute to
locate the keys.
As he got up, angry with himself, he wondered if Harris and the woman
were waiting here for him. He put away the flashlight and snatched the
pistol from his ocket. He stood quite still. He studied the darkp
ness. If they were hiding there, they would have been silhouetted by
the bright spot farther along at the alcove.
When he thought about it, he realized that they couldn't have known on
which floor he'd left the elevator.
Furthermore, they couldn't have gotten down here in time to surprise
him.
The thirty-first floor was a different story. They might have time to
set a trap for him up there. When the elevator doors slid open, they
might be waiting for him; he would be most vulnerable at that moment.
Then again, he was the one with the pistol. So what if they were
waiting with makeshift weapons? They didn't stand a chance of
overpowering him.
At the elevator he put the key in the control board and activated the
circuit.
He looked at his watch. 9:19.
If there were no more delays, he could kill Harris and still have twenty
minutes or half an hour with the woman.
Whistling again, he pushed one of the buttons: 31.
The lab technician disconnected the garbage disposal, wrapped it in a
heavy white plastic sheet, and carried it out of the apartment.
Preduski and Enderby were left alone in the kitchen.
in the foyer, a grandfather clock struck the quarter hour: two soft
chimes, running five minutes late. In accompaniment, the wind fluted
musically through the eaves just above the kitchen windows.
"If you find it hard to accept the idea of two psychopaths working so
smoothly together," Enderby said, "then consider the possibility that
they aren't psychopaths of any sort we've seen before."
"Now you sound like Graham Harris."
"I know."
"The Butcher is mentally ill, Harris says. But you wouldn't know it to
took at him Harris says. Either the symptoms of his mania don't show,
or he knows how to conceal them. He'd pass any psychiatric exam, Harris
says.
"I'm beginning to agree with him."
"Except you say there are two Butchers."
Enderby nodded.
Preduski sighed. He went to the nearest window and drew the outline of
a knife in the thin gray-white film of moisture that coated the glass.
"If you're right, I can't hold onto my theory. That he's just your
ordinary paranoid schizophrenic. Maybe a lone killer could be operating
in a psychotic fugue. But not two of them simultaneously.
"They're not suffering any psychotic fugue," Enderby agreed.
"Both of these men know precisely what they're doing. Neither of them
suffers from amnesia."
Turning from the window, from the drawing of the knife which had begun
to streak as droplets of water slid down the pane, Preduski said,
"Whether this is a new type of psychotic or not, the crime is familiar.
Sex murders are-"
"These aren't sex murders," Enderby said.
Preduski cocked his head. "Come again?"
"These aren't sex murders."
"They only kill women."
"Yes, but-"
"And they rape them first."
"Yes. It's murder with sex associated. But these aren't sex murders."
"I'm sorry. I'm lost. My fault. Not yours."
"Sex isn't the motivating force. Sex isn't the whole or even the
primary reason they have for attacking these women. The opportunity for
rape is there. bo they take it. Going to kill the women anyway. They
aren't adding to their legal risks by raping them first. Sex is
secondary. They aren't killing out of some psychosexual impulse."
Shaking his head, Preduski said, "I don't see how you can say that.
You've never met them. What evidence do you have that their motives
aren't basically sexual?"
"Circumstantial," Enderby said. "For instance, the way they mutilate
the corpses."
"What about it?"
"Have you studied the mutilations carefully?"
"I had no choice."
"All right. Found any sign of anal mutilation?"
"No."
"Mutilation of the genitalia?"
"No."
"Mutilation of the breasts?"
"In some cases he's cut open the abdomen and chest cavity.
utilation of the breasts alone?"
"When he opens the chest-"
"I mean has he ever cut off a woman's nipples, or perhaps her entire
breasts, as jack the Ripper did?"
A look of loathing came over his face. "No.
"Has he ever mutilated the mouth of a victim?"
"The mouth?"
"Has he ever cut off the lips?"
"No. Never."
"Has he ever cut out a tongue?"
T i "God, no! Andy, do we have to go on like this? It's morbid.
And I don't see where it's leading."
"If they were maniacal sex killers with a desire to cut their victims,"
Enderby said, "they'd have disfigured one of those areas."
"Anus, breasts, genitalia or mouth?"
"Unquestionably. At least one of them. Probably all of them.
But they didn't So the mutilation is an afterthought. Not a sexual
compulsion. Window dressing."
Preduski closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips to them, as if he were
trying to suppress unpleasant images. "Window dressing? I'm afraid I
don't understand."
"To impress us."
"The police?"
"Yes. And the newspapers."
Preduski went to the window where he had drawn the knife. He wiped away
the film of moisture and stared at the snow sheeting through the glow
around the street lamp. "Why would he want to impress us?"
"I don't know. Whatever the reason, whatever the need behind his desire
to impress-that is the true motivation.
"If we knew what it was, we might be able to see a pattern in the
killings. We might be able to anticipate him."
Suddenly excited, Enderby said, "Wait a minute. Another case.
Two killers. Working together. Chicago. Nineteen twenty-four. Two
young men were the murderers. Both sons of millionaires. In their late
teens."
"Leopold and Loeb."
"You know the case?"
"Slightly."
"They killed a boy, Bobby Franks. Fourteen years old. Son of anot er
rich man. They had nothing against him. None of the usual reasons.
No classic motive. Newspapers said it was for kicks. For thrills.
Very bloody murder. But they killed Franks for other reasons.
For more than kicks. For a philosophical ideal."
Turning away from the window, Preduski said, "I'm sorry. I must have
missed something. I'm not making sense of this. What philosophical
ideal?"
"They thought they were special. Supermen. The first of a new race.
Leopold idolized Nietzsche."
Frowning, Preduski said, "One of the quotes in there on the bedroom wall
is probably from Nietzsche's work, the other from Blake.
There was a quote from Nietzsche written in blood on Edna Mowry's wall
last night."
"Leopold and Loeb. Incredible pair. They thought that committing the
perfect crime was proof that they were supermen. Getting away with
murder. They thought that was proof of superior intelligence, superior
cunning."
"Weren't they homosexuals?"
"Yes. But that doesn't make Bobby Franks the victim of a sex killing.
They didn't molest him. Never had any intention of molesting him. They
weren't motivated by lust. Not at all. It was, as Loeb called it, 'an
intellectual exercise.
In spite of his excitement, Enderby noticed that his shirt cuffs were
not showing beyond the sleeves of his suit jacket. He pulled them out,
one at a time, until the proper half inch was revealed.
Although he had worked for some time in the blood-splashed bedroom and
then in the messy kitchen, he didn't have a stain on him.
His back to the window, leaning against the sill, conscious of his own
scuffed shoes and wrinkled trousers, Preduski said, "I'm having trouble
understanding. You'll have to be patient with me. You know how I am.
Dense sometimes. But if these two boys, Leopold and Loeb, thought that
murder was an intellectual exercise, then they were crazy.
Weren't they? Were they mad?"
"In a way. Mad with their own power. Both real and imagined power."
"Would they have appeared to be mad?"
"Not at all."
"How is that possible?"
"Remember, Leopold graduated from college when he was just seventeen. He
had an IQ of t*o hundred or nearly so. He was a genius.
So was Loeb. They were bright enough to keep their Nietzschean
fantasies to themselves, to hide their grandiose self-images."
"What if they'd taken psychiatric tests?"
"Psychiatric tests weren't very well developed in nineteen twenty-four."
"But if there had been tests back then as sophisticated as those we have
today, would Leopold and Loeb have passed them?"
"Probably with flying colors."
"Have there been others like Leopold and Loeb since nineteen
twenty-four?" Preduski asked.
"Not that I know of. Not in a pure sense, anyway.
The Manson family killed for murky political and religious reasons. They
thought Manson was Christ. Thought killing the rich would help the
downtrodden. Unmitigated crazies, in my book.
Think of some other killers, especially mass murderers. Charles
Starkweather. Richard Speck. Albert DeSaivo. All of them were
psychotic. All of them were driven by psychoses that had grown and
festered in them, that had slowly corrupted them since childhood. In
Leopold and Loeb, there were apparently no serious childhood traumas
that could have led to psychotic behavior. No black seed to bear fruit
later."
"So if the Butcher is two men," Preduski said forlornly, "we've got a
new Leopold and Loeb. Killing to prove their superiority."
Enderby began to pace. "Maybe. But then again, maybe it's more than
that. Something more complex than that."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. But I feel it's not exactly a Leopold and Loeb sort of
thing." He went to the table and stared at the remains of the meal that
had never been eaten. "Have you called Harris?"
Preduski said, "No."
"You should. He's been trying to get an image of the killer.
Hasn't had any luck. Maybe that's because he's focusing on a single
image, trying to envision just one face. Tell him there are two
killers. Maybe that'll breit open for him. Maybe he'll finally get a
handle on the case."
"We don't know there are two. That's just a theory. "Tell him anyway,"
Enderby said. "What harm can it do? "
"I should tell him tonight. I really should. But I just can't,"
Preduski said. "He's gotten behind in his work because of this case.
That's my fault. I'm always calling him, talking to him, pressuring him
about it. He's working late, trying to get caught up.
I don't want to disturb him." In the foyer by the front door, the
grandfather clock chimed the half hour, five minutes late again.
Preduski glanced at his wristwatch and said, "It'll soon be ten o'clock.
I've got to be going."
"Going? There's work to do here."
"I'm not on duty yet."
"Graveyard?"
"Yeah."
"I never knew you to hesitate about a bit of overtime."
"Well, I just got out of bed. I was cooking spaghetti when Headquarters
called me about this. Never got a chance to eat any of it. I'm
starving."
Enderby shook his head. "As long as I've known you, I don't believe
I've ever seen you eat a square meal. You're always grabbing sandwiches
so you don't have to stop working to eat. And at home you're cooking
spaghetti. You need a wife, Ira."
"A wife?"
"Other men have them."
"But me? Are you kidding?"
"Be good for you."
"Andy, look at me."
"I'm looking."
"Look closer."
"So?"
"You must be blind."
"What should I see?"
"What woman in her right mind would marry me?"
"Don't give me your usual crap, Ira," Enderby said with a smile.
"I know that under all of that selfdeprecating chatter, you've got a
healthy and proper respect for yourself."
"You're the psychiatrist."
"That's right. I'm not a suspect or a witness; you can't charm me with
that blather."
Preduski grinned.
"I'll bet there have been more than a few women who've fallen for that
calculated little-boy look of yours."
"A few," Preduski admitted uncomfortably. "But never the right woman."
"Who said anything about the right one? Most men are happy to settle
for half-right."
"Not me." Preduski looked at his watch again. "I really have to be
going. I'll come back around midnight. Martin probably won't even have
finished questioning the other tenants by then. It's a big building."
Dr. Enderby sighed as if the troubles of the world were on his
shoulders alone. "We'll be here too. Dusting the furniture for prints,
vacuuming the carpets for hairs and threads, finding nothing, but
working hard. The same old circus."
*Dim Graham's foot slipped off the rung.
Although he was still holding tightly with both hands, he panicked. He
struck out at the ladder with his feet, scrabbling wildly, as if the
ladder were alive, as if he had to kick it into submission before he
could regain his foothold on it.
"Graham, what's wrong?" Connie asked from her position on the ladder
above him. "Graham?"
Her voice sohered him. He stopped kicking. He hung by his hands until
he was breathing almost normally, until the vivid memories of Everest
had faded.
"Graham?"
With his feet he probed for a rung, found one after several seconds that
seemed like hours. "I'm all right. My foot slipped. I'm okay now."
"][)on't look down."
"I didn't. I won't."
He sought the next rung, stepped to it, continued the descent.
He felt feverish. The hair was damp at the back of his neck.
Perspiration beaded his forehead, jeweled his eyebrows, stung the
corners of his eyes, filmed his cheeks, brought a salty taste to his
lips. In spite of the perspiration, he was cold. He shivered as he
moved down the long ladder.
He was as much aware of the void at his back as he would have been of a
knife pressed between his shoulder blades.
On the thirty-first floor, Frank Bollinger entered the maintenance
supply room.
He saw the red door. Someone had put down the doorstop that was fixed
to it, so that it was open an inch or two. He knew immediately that
Harris and the woman had gone through there.
But why was the door ajar?
It was like a signpost. Beckoning him.
Alert for a trap, he advanced cautiously. He held the Walther PPK in
his right hand. He kept his left hand out in front of him, arm extended
all the way, to stop the door in case they tried to throw it open in his
face. He held his breath for those few steps, listening for the
slightest sound other than the soft squeak of his own shoes.
Nothing. Silence.
He used the toe of his shoe to push up the doorstop; then he pulled open
the door and walked onto the small platform. He had just enough time to
realize where he was, when the door closed behind him and all the lights
in the shaft went out.
At first he thought Harris had come into the maintenance room after him.
But when he tried the door, it was not locked. And when he opened it,
all the lights came on. The emergency lighting didn't burn twenty-four
hours a day; it came on only when one of the service entrances was open;
and that was why Harris had left the door ajar.
Bollinger was impressed by the system of lights and platforms and
ladders. Not every building erected in the 1920s would have been
designed with an eye toward emergencies. In fact, damned few
skyscrapers built since the war could boast any safety provisions.
These days, they expected you to wait in a stalled elevator until it was
repaired, no matter if that took ten hours or ten days; and if the lift
couldn't be repaired, you could risk a manually cranked descent, or you
could rot in it.
The more time he spent in the building, the deeper he penetrated it, the
more fascinating he found it to be. It was not on the scale of those
truly gargantuan stadiums and museums and highrises that Hitier had
designed for the "super race" just prior to and during the first days of
World War Two. But then Hitler's magnificent edifices had never been
realized in stone and mortar, whereas this place had risen.
He began to feel that the men who had designed and constructed it were
Olympians. He found his appreciation strange, for he knew that had he
been restricted to the halls and offices during the day, when the
building was full of people Dew R Kooniz and buzzing with commerce, he
would not have noticed the great size and high style of the structure.
One took for granted that which was commonplace; and to New Yorkers,
there was nothing unusual about a forty-two-story office building. Now,
however, abandoned for the night, the tower seemed incredibly huge and
complex; in solitude and silence one had time to contemplate it and see
how magnificent and extraordinary it was. He was like a microbe
wandering through the I'veins and bowels of a living creature, a
behemoth almost beyond measurement.
He felt in league with the minds that could conceive of a monument-like
this. He was one of them, a mover and shaker, a superior man. The
Olympian nture of 'i the building-and of the architects responsible for
itstruck a responsive chord in him, made him reverberate il 1 with the
knowledge of his own special godlike stature.
Brimming with a sense of glory, he was more deter- 4 mined than ever to
kill Harris and the woman. They were animals. Lice.
Parasites.
Because of Harris's freakish psychic gift, they posed a threat to
Bollinger. They were trying to deny him his rightful place in this new
and forceful current of history: the at first gradual but
ever-quickening rise of the new men.
He pushed the doorstop against the floor to keep the door open and the
lights burning. Then he went to the edge of the platform and peered
down the ladder.
They were three floors under him. The woman on top, nearest by a few
rungs. Harris below her, going first. Neither of them looked up.
Thiey certainly were aware of the momentary loss of light and understood
the significance of it. They were hurrying toward the next platform,
where they could get out of the shaft.
Bollinger knelt, tested the railing. It was strong. He leaned against
it, using it like a safety harness to keep him from tumbling to his
death.
He didn't want to kill them here. The place and method of murder were
extremely important tonight. Here, they would drop to the bottom of the
well, and that would ruin the scheme that he and Billy had come up with
this afternoon. He wasn't here just to kill them any way he could; he
had to dispose of them in a certain manner. If he brought it off just
right, the police would be confused, misled; and the people of New York
would begin to experience a spiraling reign of terror unlike anything in
their worst nightmares. He and Billy had worked out a damned clever
gambit, and he wouldn't abandon it so long as there was a chance of
bringing it off as planned.
it was a quarter of ten. In fifteen minutes Billy would be in the
alleyway outside, and he would wait on y until ten-thirty. Bollinger
saw that he probably wouldn't have time for the woman, but he was pretty
sure he'd be able to carry out the plan in forty-five minutes.
Besides, he didn't know what Harris looked like, and he felt there was
something cowardly about killing a man whose face he'd never seen.
It was akin to shooting someone in the back. That sort of killingven of
an animal, even of a louse like Harris-Aidn't fit Bollinger's image of a
superman. He liked to meet his prey head-on, to get close, so that
there was at least a hint of danger.
The trick was to force them out of the shaft without killing them; to
herd them to other ground where the plan could be carried out. He
pointed the pistol down, aimed wide of the woman's head and squeezed the
trigger.
The shot exploded; ear-splitting noise assaulted Connie from every side.
Over the diminishing echoes, she could hear the bullet ricocheting from
one wall to the other, farther down the shaft.
The situation was so unreal that she had to wonder if it was transpiring
in her mind. She supposed it was possible that she was in a hospital
and that all of this was the product of a fevered imagination, the
delusions of madness.
Descending the ladder, she repeatedly caught herself murmuring softly:
sometimes it was jumbled phrases that made little sense, sometimes
strings of utterly meaningless sounds. Her stomach rolled over like a
fish on a wet boat dock. Her bowels quivered. She felt as if a bullet
had already ripped into her, already had torn apart her vital organs.
Bollinger fired again.
The shot seemed less sharp than the one before it. Her ears were
desensitized, still ringing from the first explosion.
For a woman who had experienced little emotionaland no physical-terror
in her life, she was handling herself surprisingly well.
When she looked down, she saw Graham let go of, the ladder with one
hand. He grabbed the railing that ringed the platform. He took one
foot off the ladder; hesitated, leaning at a precarious angle; started
to bring his foot back; suddenly found the courage to put it on the edge
of the platform. For a moment, fighting his own terror, he stayed that
way, crucified between the two points of safety. She was about to call
to him, urge him on, when he finally freed himself of the ladder
altogether, wobbled on the brink of the platform as if he would fall,
then got his balance and climbed over the railing.
She descended the last dozen rungs much too fast and reached the
platform as Bollinger fired a third shot. She hurried through the red
door that Graham held open for her, into the maintenance supply room on
the twenty-seventh level.
The first thing she saw was the blood on his trousers. A bright spot of
it. As big as a silver dollar. Glistening on the gray fabric.
"What happened?"
"Had these in my pocket," he said, holding up the scissors. "A couple
of floors back, when I almost fell, the blades tore through the lining
and gouged my thigh.
"Is it bad?"
"No."
urt?
"Not much."
"Better get rid of them."
"Not just yet."
Bollinger watched until they left the shaft.
They had gotten out two platforms down. Because there was only a
service entrance at every second floor, that put them on the
twenty-seventh level.
He got up, hurried toward the elevator.
"Come on," Graham said. "Let's make a run for the stairs.
"No. We've got to go back up the shaft."
Incredulity showed on his face, anguish in hi s eyes. "That's crazy! "
"He won't be looking for us in the shaft. At least not for a couple of
minutes. We can go up two floors, then use the stairs when he comes
back to check the shaft."
She opened the red door through which they'd come only seconds ago.
"I don't know if I can do it again," he said.
"Of course you can."
"You said up the shaft?"
"That's right."
"We have to go down to escape."
She shook her head; her hair formed a brief dark halo. "You remember
what I said about the night guards?
'."They might be dead."
"If Bollinger killed them so he could have a free hand with us, wouldn't
he also have sealed off the building?
What if we get to the lobby, with Bollinger hot on our heels, and we
find the doors are locked? Before we could break the glass and get
out, he'd have killed us."
lee "But the guards might not be dead. He might have gotten past them
somehow."
"Can we take that chance?"
He frowned. "I guess not."
"I don't want to get to the lobby until we're certain of having a long
lead on Bollinger."
"So we go up. How's that better?"
"We can't play cat and mouse with him for twenty-seven floors. The next
time he catches us in the shaft or on the stairs, he won't make any
mistakes. But if he doesn't realize we're going up, we might be able to
alternate between the shaft and the stairs for thirteen floors, long
enough to get to your office."
"Why there?"
"Because he won't expect us to backtrack."
Graham's blue eyes were not as wide with fear as they had been; they had
narrowed with calculation. In spite of himself, the will to survive was
flowering in him; the first signs of the old Graham Harris were becoming
visible, pushing through his shell of fear.
He said, "Eventually, he'll realize what we've done. It'll buy us only
fifteen minutes or so."
"Time to think of another way out," she said. "Come on, Graham.
We're wasting too much time. He'll be on this floor any second now."
Less reluctantly than the first time, but still without enthusiasm, he
followed her into the elevator shaft.
On the platform he said, "You go first. I'll bring up the rear, so I
won't knock you off the ladder if I fall."
For the same reason, he had insisted on going first when they descended.
She put her arms around him, kissed him, then turned and started to
climb.
As soon as he got off the elevator on the twentyseventh floor, Bollinger
investigated the stairs at the north end of the building.
They were deserted ' He ran the length of the corridor and opened the
door to the south stairs. He stood on the landing for almost a minute,
listening intently for movement. He heard none.
In the corridor again, he searched for an unlocked office door until he
realized they might have gone back into the elevator shaft.
He located the maintenance supply room; the red door was ajar.
He approached it cautiously, as before. He was opening the door all the
way when the shaft beyond was filled with the sound of another door
closing on it.
On the platform, he bent over the railing. He stared down into the
vertiginous depths, wondering which one of the doors they had used.
How many floors had they gained on him?
Dammit!
Cursing aloud, overcoat flapping around his legs, Bollinger went back to
the south stairs to listen for them.
By the time they had climbed two flights on the north stairs, Graham was
wincing with each step. From sole to hip, pain coruscated through his
bad leg. In anticipation of each jolt, he tensed his stomach. Now his
entire abdomen ached. If he had continued to work out and climb after
his fall on Mount Everest, as the doctors had urged him to do, he would
have been in shape for this.
He had given his leg more punishment tonight than it ordinarily received
in a year. Now he was paying in pain for five years of inactivity.
"Don't slow down," Connie said. "Trying not to."
"Use the rail as much as you can. Pull yourself along.
"How r are we going?"
"One more floor."
"Eternity.
"After that we'll switch back to the elevator shaft."
He liked the ladder in the shaft better than he did the stairs.
On the ladder he could use his good leg and pull with both hands to keep
nearly all of his weight off the other leg. But on the stairs, if he
didn't use the lame leg at all, he would have to hop from one step to
the other; and that was too slow.
"One more flight," she said encouragingly.
Trying to surprise himself, trying to cover a lot of ground before the
pain transmitted itself from leg to brain, he put on a burst of speed,
staggered up ten steps as fast as he could. That transformed the pain
into agony. He had to slow down, but he kept moving.
Bollinger stood on the landing, listening for sound in the south
stairwell.
Nothing.
He looked over the railing. Squinting, he tried to see through the
layers of darkness that filled the spaces between the landing.
Nothing.
He went back into the hall and ran toward the north stairs.
Billy drove into the alley. His car made the first tracks in the new
snow.
A forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-deep service courtyard lay at the back of
the Bowerton Building. Four doors opened onto it. One of these was a
big green garage door, where delivery could be taken on office furniture
and other items too large to fit through the public entrance.
A sodium vapor lamp glowed above the green door, casting a harsh light
on the stone walls, on the rows of trash bins awaiting pickup in the
morning, and on the snow; the shadows were sharply drawn.
There was no sign of Bollinger.
Prepared to leave at the first indication of trouble, Billy backed the
car into the courtyard. H'e switched off the headlights but not the
engine. He rolled down his window, just an inch, to keep the glass from
steaming up.
iss When Bollinger didn't come out to meet him, Billy looked at his
watch. .
Clouds of dry snow swirled down the alley in front of him. In the
courtyard, out of the worst of the wind, the snow was relatively
undisturbed.
Most nights, squad cars conducted random patrols of poorly lighted back
streets like this one, always on the lookout for business-district
burglars with half-filled vans, muggers with half-robbed victims, and
rapists with half-subdued women. But not tonight. Not in this weather.
The city's uniformed patrolmen would be occupied elsewhere. The
majority of them would be busy cleaning up after the usual foul-weather
automobile accidents, but as much as a third of the evening shift would
be squirreled away in favorite hideouts, on a side street or in a park;
they would be drinking coffee-in a few cases, something stronger-and
talking about sports and women, ready to go to work only if the radio
dispatcher insisted upon it.
Billy looked at his watch again. 10:04.
He would wait exactly twenty-six minutes. Not one minute less, and
certainly not one more. That was what he had promised Dwight.
Once again, Bollinger reached the elevator shaft just as it was filled
with the sound of another door closing on it.
He bent over the railing, looked down. NOthing but other railings,
other platforms, other emergency light bulbs, and a lot of darkness.
Harris and the woman had gone.
I" He was tired of playing hide-and-seek with them, of dashing from
stairwell to stairwell to shaft. He was sweating profusely.
Under his overcoat, his shirt clung to him wetly. He left the platform,
went to the elevator, activated it with a key, pushed the button marked
"Lobby."
On the ground level, he took off his heavy overcoat and dropped it
beside the elevator doors. Sweat trickled down his neck, down the
center of his chest. He didn't remove his gloves. With the back of his
left hand and then with his shirt sleeve he wiped his dripping forehead.
Out of sight of anyone who might come to the street doors, he leaned
against the marble wall at the end of the offset that contained the four
banks of elevators. From that position, he could see two white doors
with black stenciled letters on them, one at the north end and one at
the south end of the lobby. These were the exits from the stairwells.
When Harris and the woman came through one of them, he would blow their
goddamned brains out. Oh, yes. With pleasure.
Hobbling along the fortieth-floor corridor toward the light that came
from the open reception-room door of the Harris Publications suite,
Harris saw the fire-alarm box. It was approximately nine inches on a
side, set flush with the wall. The metal rim was painted red, and the
face of it was glass.
He couldn't imagine why he hadn't thought of this before.
ILS7 Ahead of him, Connie realized that he had stopped.
"What's the matter?"
"Look here."
She came back.
"If we set it off," Graham said, "it'll bring the security guards up
from downstairs."
"If they aren't dead."
"Even if they are dead, it'll bring the fire department on the double.
Bollinger will have the crimps put to him.
"Maybe he won't run when he hears the bells. After all, we know his
name. He might hang on, kill us, sneak out past the firemen."
"He might," Graham agreed, unsettled by the thought of being stalked
through dark halls full of clanging, banging bells.
They stared through the glass at the steel alarm lever that glinted in
the red light.
He felt hope, like a muscle relaxant, relieve a fraction of the tension
in his shoulders, neck and face. For the first time all night, he began
to think they might escape.
Then he remembered the vision. The bullet. The blood. He was going to
be shot in the back.
She said, "The alarms will probably be so loud that we won't hear him if
he comes after us."
"But it works both ways," he said eagerly. "He won't be able to hear
us.
She pressed her fingertips to the cool plate of glass, hesitated, then
took her hand away. "Okay. But there's no little hammer to break the
glass." She held up the lag iL chain that was supposed to secure a
hammer to the side of the alarm. "What do we use instead?"
Smiling, he took the scissors from his pocket and held them up as if
they were a talisman.
"Applause, applause," she said, beginning to feel just enough hope to
allow herself a little joke.
"Thank you."
"Be careful," she said.
"Stand back."
She did.
Graham held the scissors by the closed blades. Using the heavy handles
as a hammer, he smashed the thin glass. A few pieces held stubbornly to
the frame. So as not to cut himself, he broke out the jagged splinters
before he put one hand into the shallow alarm box and jerked the steel
lever from green to red.
No noise.
No bells.
Silence.
Christ!
"Oh, no," she said.
Frantically, the flame of hope flickering in him, he pushed the lever
up, back to the green safety mark, then slammed it down again.
Still nothing.
Bollinger had been as thorough with the fire alarm as he had been with
the telephones.
The wipers swept back and forth, clearing the snow from the windshield.
The rhythmic thump-thumptbump was getting on his nerves.
Billy glanced over his shoulder, through the rear window, at the green
garage door, then at the other three doors.
The time was 10: 15.
Where in the hell was Dwight?
Graham and Connie went to the magazine's art department in search of a
knife and other sharp draftsmen's tools that would make better weapons
than the scissors. He found a pair of razor-edged scalpel-like
instruments in the center drawer of the art director's big metal desk.
When he looked up from the drawer, he saw that Connie was lost in
thought. She was standing just inside the door, staring at the floor in
front of a light blue photographic backdrop. Climbing equipment-coils
of rope, pitons, etriers, carabiners, klettershoes, nylon jackets lined
with down, and perhaps thirty other items-lay in a disordered heap
before the screen.
"See what I found?" he said. He held up the blades.
She wasn't interested. "What about this stuff?" she asked, pointing to
the climbing equipment.
Coming from behind the desk, he said, "This issue we're running a
buyer's guide. Each of those pieces wis photographed for the article.
Why'd you ask?" Then his face brightened. "Never mind. I see why."
He hunkered in front of the equipment, picked up an ice ax. "This makes
a better weapon than any draftsman's tool.
"Graham?"
He looked up.
Her expression was peculiar: a combination of puzzlement, fear and
amazement. Although she clearly had thought of something interesting
and important, her gray eyes gave no indication of what was going
through her mind. She said, "Let's not rush out to fight him. Can we
consider all of our options?"
"That's why we're here."
She stepped into the short, private hallway, cocked her head and
listened for Bollinger.
Graham stood up, prepared to use the ice ax.
When she was satisfied that there was nothing to listen for but more
silence, she came back into the room.
He lowered the ax. "I thought you heard something."
"Just being cautious." She glanced at the climbing equipment before she
sat down on the edge of the desk. "As I see it, there are five
different things we can do. Number one, we can make a stand, try to
fight Bollinger.
"With this," he said, hefting the ice ax.
"And with anything else we can find."
"We -can set a trap, surprise him."
"I see two problems with that approach."
"The gun."
"That's sure one."
"If we're clever enough, he won't have time to shoot.
"More important," she said, "neither of us is a killer.
"We could just knock him unconscious."
1 "If you hit him on the head with an ax like that, you're bound to
kill him."
"If it's kill or be killed, I suppose I could do it."
"Maybe. But if you hesitate at the last instant, we're dead." He didn't
resent the limits of her faith in him; he knew that he didn't deserve
her complete trust. "You said there were five things we could do."
"Number two, we can try to hide."
"Where?"
"I don't know. Maybe look for an office that someone forgot to lock, go
inside and lock it after us."
"No one forgot."
"Maybe we can continue to play cat and mouse with him."
"For how long?"
"Until a new shift of guards finds the dead ones."
"if he didn't kill the guards, then the new guards won't know what's
going on up here."
"That's right."
"Besides, I think maybe they work twelve-hour shifts, four days a week.
I know one of the night men. I've heard him curse the long shifts and
at the same time praise the eight hours of overtime he gets each week.
So if they come on duty at six, they won't be off until six in the
morning."
"Seven and a half hours."
"Too long to play cat and mouse in the elevator shaft and on the stairs.
Especially with this bum leg of mine.
"Number three," she said. "We could open one of your office windows and
shout for help."
"From the fortieth floor? Even in good weather, they probably couldn't
hear you on the sidewalk. With this wind, they wouldn't hear you even
two floors away."
"I know that. And on a night like this, there's not going to be anyone
out walking anyway."
"Then why'd you suggest it?"
"Number five is going to surprise you," she said. "When I get to it, I
want you to understand that I've thought of every other possible out."
"What's number five?"
"Number four first. We open the office window and throw furniture into
the street, try to catch the attention of anyone who's driving past on
Lexington."
"If anyone is driving in this weather."
"Someone will be. A taxi or two."
"But if we toss out a chair, we won't be able to calculate the effect of
the wind on it. We won't be able to gauge where it'll land.
What if it goes through the windshield of a car and kills someone?"
"I've thought of that."
"We can't do it."
"I know."
"What's number five?"
She slid off the desk and went to the pile of climbing equipment.
"We've got to get rigged out in this stuff."
"Rigged out?"
"Boots, jackets, gloves, ropes-the works."
He was perplexed. "Why?"
Her eyes were wide, like the eyes of a startled doe.
"For the climb down."
"Down what?"
"Down the outside of the building. All the way to the street.
part four FRIDAY 10:30 P.Mo SATURDAY 4:00 A.M.
Promptly at ten-thirty, Billy drove out of the service courtyard behind
the highrise.
The snowfall had grown heavier during the past half hour, and the wind
had become downright dangerous. Roiling in the headlight beams, the
sheets of powderdry flakes were almost as dense as a fog.
At the mouth of the alley, as he was pulling onto the side street, the
tires spun on the icy pavement. The car slewed toward the far curb.
He turned the wheel in the direction of the slide and managed to stop
just short of colliding with a panel truck parked at the curb.
He had been driving too fast, and he hadn't even been aware of it until
he'd almost crashed. That wasn't like him. He was a careful man.
He was never reckless. Never. He was angry with himself for losing
control.
He drove toward the avenue. The traffic light was with him, and the
nearest car was three or four blocks away, a lone pair of headlights
dimmed and diffused by the falling snow. He turned the corner onto
Lexington.
In three hundred feet, he came to the front of the Bowerton Building.
Ferns and flowers, molded in a twenty-foot-long rectangular bronze
plaque, crowned the stonework above the four revolving doors.
Part of, the enormous lobby was visible beyond the entrance, and it
appeared to be deserted. He drove near the curb, in the parking lane,
barely moving, studying the building and the sidewalks and the
calcimined street, looking for some sign of trouble and finding none.
Nevertheless, the plan had failed. Something had gone wrong in there.
Terribly, terribly wrong.
Will Bollinger talk if he's caught? Billy wondered uneasily.
Will he implicate me?
He would have to go to work without knowing how badly Dwight had failed,
without knowing whether or not Bollinger would be-had been?-apprehended
by the police. He was going to find it difficult to concentrate on his
job tonight; but if he was going to construct an alibi to counter a
possible confession from Dwight, it would help his case if he was calm
tonight, as much like himself as he could be, as thorough and diligent
as those who knew him expected him to be.
Franklin Dwight Bollinger was getting restless. He was bathed in a
thin, oily sweat. His fingers ached from the tight grip he had kept on
the Walther PPK. He'd been watching the stairwell exits for more than
twenty minutes, but there was no sign of Harris or the woman.
Billy was gone by now, the schedule destroyed. Bol linger hoped he
might salvage the plan. But at the same time he knew that wasn't
possible. The situation had degenerated to this: slaughter them and get
the hell out.
Where is Harris? he wondered. Has he sensed that I'm waiting here for
him? Has he used his carnival act, his goddamned clairvoyance to
anticipate me?
He decided to wait five minutes more. Then he would be forced to go
after them.
Staring out of the office window at an eerie panorama of gigantic,
snow-swept buildings and fuzzy lights, Graham said, "It's impossible."
Beside him, Connie put one hand on his arm. "Why is it impossible?"
"It just is."
"That's not good enough."
"I can't climb it."
"It's not a climb."
"What?"
"It's a descent."
"Doesn't matter."
"Can it be done?"
"Not by me."
"You climbed the ladder in the shaft."
"That's different."
"How?"
"Besides, you've never climbed."
"You can teach me."
"No."
"Sure you can."
"You can't learn on the sheer face of a forty-story building in the
middle of a blizzard."
"I'd have a damned good teacher," she said.
"Oh, yeah. One who hasn't climbed in five years."
"You still know how. You haven't forgotten."
"I'm out of shape."
"You're a strong man." -"You forget my leg."
She turned away from the window and went back to the door so that she
could listen for Bollinger while she talked. "Remember when Abercrombie
and Fitch had a man scale their building to advertise a new line of
climbing equipment?"
He didn't look away from the window. He was transfixed by the night.
"What about it?"
"At that time, you said what that man did wasn't really so difficult."
"Did I?"
"You said a building, with all its ledges and setbacks, is an easy climb
compared to almost any mountain."
He said nothing. He remembered telling her that, and he knew he had
been right. But when he'd said it he never thought he'd be called upon
to do it. Images of Mount Everest and of hospital rooms filled his
mind.
"This equipment you chose for the buyer's guide-"
"What about it?"
"It's the best, isn't it?"
"The best, or close to it."
"We'd be perfectly outfitted."
"if we try it, we'll die."
"We'll die if we stay here." "Maybe not."
"I think so. Absolutely."
"There has to be an alternative."
"I've outlined them already."
"Maybe we can hide from him."
"Where?"
"I don't know. But-"
"And we can't hide for seven hours."
"This is crazy, dammit!"
"Can you think of anything better?"
"Give me time."
"Bollinger will be here any minute."
"The wind speed must be forty miles an hour at street level. At least
when it's gusting. Fifty miles an hour up this high."
"Will it blow us off?"
"We'd have to fight it every inch."
"Won't we anchor the ropes?"
He turned away from the window. "Yes, but-"
"And won't we be wearing those?" She pointed to a pair of safety
harnesses that lay atop the pile of equipment.
"It'll be damned cold out there, Connie."
"We've got the down-lined jackets."
"But we don't have quilted, insulated pants. You're wearing ordinary
jeans. So am I. For all the good they'll do us, we might as well be
naked below the waist."
"I can stand the cold."
"Not for very long. Not cold as bitter as that."
"How long will it take us to get to the street?"
"I don't know."
"You must have some idea."
"An hour. Maybe two hours."
"That long?"
"You're a novice."
"Couldn't we rappel?"
"Rappel?" He was appalled.
"It looks so easy. Swinging out and back, dropping a few feet with
every swing, bouncing off the stone, dancing along the side of the
building .
"It looks easy, but it isn't."
"But it's fast."
"Jesus! You've never climbed before, and you want to rappel down."
"I've got guts."
"But no common sense."
"Okay," she said. "We don't rappel."
"We definitely don't rappel."
"We go. slow and easy."
"We don't go at all."
Ignoring him, she said, "I can take two hours of the cold. I know I
can. And if we keep moving, maybe it won't bother us so much."
"We'll freeze to death." He refused to be shaken from that opinion.
"Graham, we have a simple choice. Go or stay. If we make the climb,
maybe we'll fall or freeze to death. if we stay here, we'll sure as
hell be killed."
"I'm not convinced it is that simple."
"Yes, you are."
He closed his eyes. He was furious with himself, sick of his inability
to accept unpleasant realities, to risk pain, and to come face to face
with his own fear. The climb would be dangerous. Supremely dangerous.
It might even prove to be sheer folly; they could die in the first few
minutes of the descent. But she was correct when she said they had no
choice but to try it.
"Graham? We're wasting time."
"You know the real reason why the climb isn't possible."
"No," she said. "Tell me."
He felt color and warmth come into his face. "Connie, you aren't
leaving me with any dignity."
"I never took that from you. You've taken it from yourself." Her
lovely face was lined with sorrow. He could see that it hurt her to
have to speak to him so bluntly. She came across the room, put one hand
to his face. "You've surrendered your dignity and your selfrespect.
Piece by piece." Her voice was low, almost a whisper; it wavered.
"I'm afraid for you, afraid that if you don't stop throwing it away,
you'll have nothing left. Nothing."
"Connie . . ." He wanted to cry.
But he had no tears for Graham Harris. He knew precisely what he had
done to himself. He had no pity; he despised the man he'd become.
He felt that, deep inside, he had always been a coward, and that his
fall on Mount Everest had given him an excuse to retreat into fear.
Why else had he resisted going to a psychiatrist? Every one of his
doctors had suggested psychoanalysis. He suspected that he was
comfortable in his fear; and that possibility sickened him. "I'm afraid
of my own shadow.
I'd be no good to you out there.
Dem P- Koontr "You're not so frightened today as you were yesterday,"
she said tenderly. "Tonight, you've coped damned well.
What about ' the elevator shaft? This morning, the thought of going
down that ladder would have overwhelmed you."
He was trembling.
"This is your chance," she said. "You can overcome the fear. I know
you can."
He licked his lips nervously. He went to the pile of gear in front of
the photographic backdrop. "I wish I could be half as sure of me as you
are."
Following him, she said, "I understand what I'm asking of you. I know
it'll be the hardest thing you've ever done."
He remembered the fall vividly. He could close his eyes any time-even
in a crowded room-and experience it again: his foot slipping, pain in
the chest as the safety harness tightened around him, pain abruptly
relieved as the rope snapped, breath caught like an unchewed lump of
meat in his throat, then floating and floating and floating.
The fall was only three hundred feet, and it had ended in a thick
cushion of snow; it had seemed a mile.
She said, "If you stay here, you'll die; but it'll be an easier death.
The instant Bollinger sees you, he'll shoot to kill. He won't hesitate.
It'll be over within a second for you." She took hold of his hand. "But
it won't be like that for me."
He looked up from the equipment. Her gray eyes radiated a fear as
primal and paralyzing as his own.
"Bollinger will use me," she said.
He was unable to speak.
"He'll cut me," she said.
Unbidden, an image of Edna Mowry came to him. She had been holding her
own bloody navel in her hand.
"He'll disfigure me."
"Maybe-"
"He's the Butcher. Don't forget. Don't forget who he is.
What he is."
"God help me," he said.
"I don't want to die. But if I have to die, I don't want it to be like
that." She shuddered. "If we're not going to make the climb, if we're
just going to wait for him here, then I want you to kill me. Hit me
across the back of the head with something. Hit me very hard."
Amazed, he said, "What are you talking about?"
"Kill me before Bollinger can get to me. Graham, you owe me that much.
You've got to do it."
"I love you," he said weakly. "You're everything. There's nothing else
for me." She was somber, a mourner at her own execution.
"If you love me, then you understand why you've got to kill me."
"I couldn't do it."
"We don't have much time," she said. "Either we get ready for the climb
right nowr you kill me. Bollinger will be here any minute."
Glancing at the main entrance to see if anyone was trying to get in,
Bollinger crossed the marble floor and opened the white door. He stood
at the bottom of the north stairs and listened for footsteps. There were
none. No footsteps, no voices no noise at all. He peered up the
narrow, open core of the shaft, but he didn't see anyone moving
alongside the switchback railing.
He went to the south stairs. Those too were deserted.
He looked at his watch. 10:38.
Running some of Blake's verses through his mind to calm himself, he went
to the elevator. 31 Well-made boots are essential to a serious climber.
They should be five to seven inches high, crafted from the best grade of
leather, lined with leather, preferably hand-sewn, with foam-padded
tongues. Most important of all, the soles should be hard and stiff,
with tough lugs made of Vibram.
Graham was wearing just such a pair of boots. They were a perfect fit,
more like gloves than footwear. Although putting them on and lacing
them up brought him closer to the act that he regarded with terror, he
found the boots strangely comforting, reassuring. His familiarity with
them, with climbing gear in general, seemed like a touchstone against
which he could test for the old Graham Harris, test for a trace of the
courage he'd once shown.
Both pairs of boots in the pile of equipment were four sizes too large
for Connie. She couldn't wear either of them. If she stuffed paper
into the toes and along the " sides, she would feel as if she were
wearing blocks of concrete; and she would surely misstep at some crucial
point in the climb.
Fortunately, they found a pair of klettershoes that fitted well enough.
The klettershoe-an anglicization of Kletterschuh, German for "climbing
shoe"-was lighter, tighter, more flexible, and not so high as standard
climbing boots. The sole was of rubber, and the welt did not protrude,
making it possible for the wearer to gain toeholds on even the narrowest
ledges.
Although they would have to serve for want of something better, the
klettershoes weren't suited for the climb that lay ahead. Because they
were made of suede and were not waterproof, they should be used'only in
the fairest weather, never in a snowstorm.
To protect her feet from becoming wet and from the inevitable frostbite,
Connie wore both socks and plastic binding. The socks were thick, gray,
woolen; they came to mid-calf. The plastic was ordinarily used to seal
up the dry food that a climber carried in his rucksack.
Graham had wrapped her feet in two sheets of plastic, securing the
waterproof material at her ankles with rubber bands.
They were both wearing heavy, bright red nylon parkas with hoods that
tied under the chin. Between the outer nylon surface and the inner
nylon lining, his jacket was fitted with man-made insulation, sufficient
for autumn climbing but not for the cold that awaited them tonight. Her
parka was much better-although he hadn't explained that to her for fear
she would insist that he wear it-because it was insulated with one him
EL dred percent goose down. That made it the warmest garment, for its
size and weight, that she could have worn.
over the parka, each of them was wearing a Klettergiirtel, a climbing
harness, for protection in the event of a fall. This piece of equipment
was a great improvement over the waistband that climbers had once used,
for in a fall the band sometimes jerked so tight that it damaged the
heart and lungs. The simple leather harness distributed the pressure
over the entire body trunk, reducing the risk of a severe injury and
virtually guaranteeing the climber that he would not turn upside down.
Connie was impressed by the Klettergiirtel. As he strapped her into it,
she said, "It's perfect insurance, isn't it? Even if you fall, it
brings you up short."
Of course, if she didn't just slip or misplace her foot, if instead the
rope broke, and if she was on a single line, the harness would not stop
her fall. However, Connie didn't have to worry about that, for he was
taking extraordinary safety measures with her: she would be going down
on two independent lines. In addition to the main rope, he intended to
fix her to a second which he would belay all the way to the street.
He would not be so well looked after as she was. There was no one to
belay him. He would be descending last-on a single line.
He didn't explain that to her. When she got outside, the less she had
to worry about, the better her chances were of coming out of this alive.
Tension was good for a climber; but too much tension could cause him to
make mistakes.
Both harnesses had accessory loops at the waist. Graham was carrying
pitons, carabiners, expansion bolts, a hammer, and a compact
battery-powered drill the size of two packs of cigarettes. In her
harness loops, Connie had a variety of extra pitons and carabiners.
Besides the equipment hung on their harnesses, they were both burdened
with rope. Connie had hundredfoot lengths of it at each hip; it was
heavy, but so tightly coiled that it did not restrict her movements.
Graham had another hundred-foot coil at his right hip.
They were left with two shorter lengths: and these they would use for
the first leg of the descent.
Last of all, they put on their gloves.
At every floor, Bollinger got off the elevator. If the entire level was
occupied by one business firm, he tried the locked doors at opposite
ends of the alcove. If it was an "open" floor, he stepped out of the
alcove to make certain there was no one in the corridor.
At every fifth floor, he looked not only into the corridor but into the
stairs and the elevator shafts as well. On the first twenty floors,
four elevator shafts served the building; from the twentieth to the
thirty-fifth floors, two shafts; and from the thirty-fifth to the
fortysecond, only one shaft. In the first half of his vertical search,
he wasted far more time than he could afford, opening the emergency
doors to all of those shafts.
At ten-fifty he was on the fifteenth floor.
He had not found a sign of them. He was beginning to wonder if he was
conducting the search properly.
However, at the moment he was unable to see any other way to go about
it.
He went to the sixteenth floor.
Connie pulled on the heavy cord and drew back the office draperies.
Graham unlatched the center window. The two rectangular panes wouldn't
budge at first, then abruptly gave with a squeal, opened inward like
casement windows.
Wind exploded into the room. it had the voice of a living creature; its
screams were piercing, demonic. Snowflakes swirled around him, danced
across the top of the conference table and melted on its polished
surface, beaded like dew on the grass-green carpet.
Leaning over the sill, he looked down the side of the Bowerton Building.
The top five floors-and the four-story decorative pinnacle above
them-were set back two yards from the bottom thirty-seven levels.
just three floors below, there was a six-foot-wide ledge that ringed the
structure. The lower four-fifths of the building's face lay beyond the
ledge, out of his line of sight.
The snow was falling so thickly that he could barely see the street
lamps on the far side of Lexington Avenue. Under the lights, not even a
small patch of pavement was visible.
In the few seconds he needed to survey the situation, the wind battered
his head, chilled and numbed his exposed face.
"That's damned cold! " As he spoke, breath pluming out of him, he
turned from the window. "We're bound to suffer at least some
frostbite."
"We've got to go anyway," she said.
"I know. I'm not trying to back out."
"Should we wrap our faces?"
"With what?"
"Scarves-"
"The wind would cut through any material we've got handy, then paste it
to our faces so we'd have trouble breathing.
Unfortunately, the magazine didn't recommend any face masks in that
buyer's guide. Otherwise, we'd have exactly what we need."
"Then what can we do?"
He had a sudden thought and went to his desk. He stripped off his bulky
gloves. The center drawer contained evidence of the hypochondria that
had been an ever-growing component of his fear: Anacin, aspinn, half a
dozen cold remedies, tetracycline capsules, throat lozenges, a
thermometer in its case ... He picked up a small tube and showed it to
her.
"Chap Stick?" she asked.
"Come here."
She went to him. "That stuff's for chapped lips. If we're going to be
frostbitten, why worry about a little thing like chapped lips?"
He pulled the cap off the tube, twisted the base to bring up the waxy
stick, and coated her entire faceforehead, temples, cheeks, nose, lips
and chin. "With even a thin shield of this, the wind will need more
time to leech the warmth out of you. And it'll keep your skin supple.
Loss of heat is two-thirds of the danger. But loss of moisture along
with loss of heat is what causes severe frostbite. The moisture in
bitterly cold air doesn't get to your skin; in fact, subzero wind can
dry out your face almost as thoroughly as desert air."
"I was right," she said.
"Right about what?"
"There's some Nick Charles in you."
At eleven o'clock, Bollinger entered the elevator, swing Itched it on,
and pressed the button for the twentysecond floor.
The window frame was extremely sturdy, not coldpressed and not of
aluminurii as were most of the window frames in buildings erected during
the past thirty years. The grooved, steel center post was almost an
inch thick and appeared to be capable of supporting hundreds of pounds
without bending or breaking loose from the sash.
Harris hooked a carabiner to the post.
This piece of hardware was one of the most important that a climber
carried. Carabiners were made of steel or alloy and came in several
shape val D, offset D, and pear or keyhole-but the oval was used more
often than any of the others. It was approximately three and a half
inches by one and three-quarter inches, and it resembled nothing so much
as an oversized key ring or perhaps an elongated chain link. A spring-.
loaded gate opened on one side of the oval, making it possible for the
climber to connect the carabiner to the eye of a piton; he could also
slip a loop of rope onto the metal ring. A carabiner, which was
sometimes referred to as a "snap link," could be employed to join two
ropes at any point along them, which was essential when the ends of
those lines were secured above and below. A vital-but not the
only-function of the highly polished snap links was to prevent ropes
from chaffing each other, to guard against their fraying through on the
rough, unpolished eye of a piton or on the sharp edge of a rock;
carabiners saved lives.
At Graham's direction, Connie had stripped the manufacturer's plastic
bands from an eighty-foot coil of red and blue hawser-laid nylon rope.
"It doesn't look strong," she said.
"It's got a breaking strength of four thousand pounds."
"So thin."
"Seven-sixteenths of an inch."
"I guess you know what you're doing."
Smiling reassuringly, he said, "Relax."
He tied a knot in one end of the rope. That done, he grasped the double
loop that sprouted above the knot and slipped it through the gate of the
carabiner that was attached to the window post.
He was surprised at how quickly he was working, and by the ease with
which he had fashioned the complex knot. He seemed to be operating on
instinct more than on knowledge. in five years he had not forgotten
anything.
"This will be your safety line," he told her.
The carabiner was one of those that came with a metal sleeve that fitted
over the gate to guard against an accidental opening. He screwed the
sleeve in place.
He picked up the rope and pulled it through his hands, quickly measuring
eleven yards of itHe took a folding knife from a pocket of his parka and
cut the rope, dropped one piece to the floor. He tied the cut end of
the shorter section to her harness, so that she was attached to the
window post by a thirty-foot umbilical. He took one end of the other
piece of rope and tied it around her waist, usirig a bowline knot.
Patting the windowsill, he said, "Sit up here."
She sat facing him, her back to the wind and snow.
He pushed the thirty-foot rope out of the window; and the loop of slack,
from the post to Connie's harness, swung in the wind. He arranged the
forty-five-foot length on the office floor, carefully coiled it to be
certain that it would pay out without tangling, and finally tied the
free end around his waist.
He intended to perform a standing hip belay. On a mountain, it was
always possible that a belayer might be jerked from his standing
position if he was not anchored by another rope and a well-placed piton;
he could lose his balance and fall, along with the person whom he was
belaying. Therefore, a standing belay was considered less desirable
than one accomplished from a sitting position. However, because Connie
weighed sixty pounds less than he, and because the window was waist
high, he didn't think she would be able to drag him out of the room.
Standing with his legs spread to improve his balance, he picked up the
forty-five-foot line at a point midway between the neatly piled coil and
Connie. He had knotted the rope at his navel; now, he passed it behind
him and across the hips at the belt line. The rope that came from
Connie went around his left hip and then around his right; therefore,
his left hand was the guide hand, while the right was the braking hand.
From his anchor point six feet in front of her he said, "Ready?"
She bit her lip.
"The ledge is only thirty feet below."
"Not so far," she said weakly.
"You'll be there be ore you ow it."
She forced a smile.
She looked down at her harness and tugged on it, as if she thought it
might have come undone.
"Remember what to do?" he asked.
"Hold the line with both hands above my head.
Don't try to help. Look for the ledge, get my feet on it right away,
don't let myself be lowered past it."
"And when you get there?"
"First, I untie myself."
"But only from this line."
"Yes."
"Not from the other."
She nodded.
"Then, when you've untied yourself-l' "I jerk on this line twice."
"That's right. I'll put you down as gently as I can."
In spite of the stinging cold wind that whistled through the open window
on both sides of her, her face was pale. "I love you," she said.
"And I love you."
"You can do this."
"I hope so."
"I know His heart was pounding.
"I trust you," she said.
He realized that if he allowed her to die during the climb, he would
have no right or reason to save himself. Life without her would be an
unbearable passage through guilt and loneliness, a gray emptiness worse
than death. If she fell, he might as well pitch himself after her.
He was scared.
All he could do was repeat what he had already said, "I love you."
Taking a deep breath, leaning backward, she said, "Well ... woman
overboard!"
The corridor was dark and deserted.
Bollinger returned to the elevator and pressed the button for the
twenty-seventh floor.
The instant that Connie slipped backward off the windowsill, she sensed
the hundreds of feet of open space beneath her.
She didn't need to look down to be profoundly affected by that great,
dark gulf. She was even more terrified than she had expected to be.
The fear had a physical as well as a mental impact on her. Her throat
constricted; she found it hard to breathe. Her chest felt tight, and
her pulse rate soared. Suddenly acidic, her stomach contracted
sickeningly.
She resisted the urge to clutch the windowsill before it was out of her
grasp. Instead, she reached overhead and gripped the rope with both
hands.
The wind rocked her from side to side. It pinched her face and stung
the thin rim of ungreased skin around her eyes.
In order to see at all, she was forced to squint, to peer out through
the narrowest of lash-shielded slits. Otherwise, the wind would have
blinded her with her own tears.
Unfortunately, the pile of climbing equipment in the art director's
office had not contained snow goggles.
She glanced down at the ledge toward which she was slowly moving.
It was six feet wide, but to her it looked like a tightrope.
His feet slipped on the carpet.
He dug in his heels.
judging by the amount of rope still coiled beside him, she was not even
halfway to the ledge. Yet he felt as if he had lowered her at least a
hundred feet.
Initially, the strain on Graham's arms and shoulders had been tolerable.
But as he payed out the line, he became increasingly aware of the toll
taken by five years of inactivity. With each foot of rope, new aches
sprang up like sparks in his muscles, spread toward each other, fanned
into crackling fires.
Nevertheless, the pain was the least of his worries. More important, he
was facing away from the office doors. And he could not forget the
vision: a bullet in the back, blood, and then darkness.
Where was Bollinger?
The farther Connie descended, the less slack there was in the line that
connected her to the window Post. She hoped that Graham had estimated
its length correctly. if not, she might be in serious trouble. A
toolong safety line posed no threat; but if it was too short, she would
be hung up a foot or two from the ledge. She would have to climb back
to the window so that Graham could rectify the situationr she would have
to give up the safety line altogether, proceed to the setback on just
the belayer's rope.
Anxiously, she watched the safety line as it gradually grew taut.
overhead, the main rope was twisting and untwisting with lateral
tension. As the thousands of nylon strands repeatedly tightened,
relaxed, tightened, she found herself turning slowly in a semicircle
from left to right and back again. This movement was in addition to the
pendulumlike swing caused by the wind; and of course it made her
increasingly ill.
She wondered if the rope would break. Surely, all of that twisting and
untwisting began where the rope dropped away from the window. Was the
thin line even now fraying at its contact point with the sill?
Graham had said there would be some dangerous friction at the sill. But
he had assured her that she would be on the ledge before the nylon
fibers had even been slightly bruised. Nylon was tough material.
Strong. Reliable. It would not wear through from a few minutes-or even
a quarter-hour-of heavy friction.
Still, she wondered.
At eight minutes after eleven, Frank Bollinger started to search the
thirtieth floor.
He was beginning to feel that he was trapped in a surreal landscape of
doors; hundreds upon hundreds of doors. All night long he had been
opening them, anticipating sudden violence, overflowing with that
tension that made him feel alive. But all of the doors opened on the
same thing: darkness, emptiness, silence. Each door promised to deliver
what he had been hunting for, but not one of them kept the promise.
It seemed to him that the wilderness of doors was a condition not merely
of this one night but of his entire life. Doors. Doors that opened on
darkness. On emptiness. On blind passages and dead ends of every sort.
Each day of his life, he had expected to find a door that, when flung
wide, would present him with all that he deserved. Yet that golden door
eluded him. He had not been treated fairly. After all, he was one of
the new men, superior to everyone he saw around him. Yet what had he
become in thirty-seven years? Anything? Not a president.
Not even a senator. Not famous. Not rich. He was nothing but a lousy
vice detective, a cop whose working life was spent in the grimy
subculture of whores, pimps, gamblers, addicts and petty racketeers.
That was why Harris (and tens of millions like him) had to die.
They were subhumans, vastly inferior to the new breed of men. Yet for
every new man, there were a million old ones. Because there was
strength in numbers, these pitiful creatures-risking thermonuclear
destruction to satisfy their greed and their fondness for childish
posturing-held on to the world's power, money and resources. Only
through the greatest slaughter in history, only in the midst of
Armageddon, could the new men seize what was rightfully theirs.
The thirtieth level was deserted, as were the stairs and the elevator
shafts.
He went up one floor.
Connie's feet touched the ledge. Thanks to the scouring wind, the stone
was pretty much free of snow; therefore, there had been no chance for
the snow to be pressed into ice. She wasn't in any danger of sliding
off her perch.
She put her back to the face of the building, staying as far from the
brink as she could.
Surprisingly, with stone under her feet, she was more impressed by the
gulf in front of her than when she was dangling in empty space.
Swinging at the end of the rope, she had not been able to see the void
in the proper perspective. Now, with the benefit of secure footing, she
found the thirty-eight-story drop doubly terrifying; it seemed a
bottomless pit.
She untied the knot at her harness, freed herself of the main line. She
jerked on the rope twice, hard. Immediately Graham reeled it up.
in a minute he would be on his way to her. Would he panic when he got
out here?
I trust him, she told herself. I really do. I have to.
Nonetheless, she was afraid he would get only part of the way out of the
window before he turned and fled, leaving her stranded.
Graham took off his gloves, leaned out of the window, and felt the stone
below the sash. It was planed granite a rock meant to withstand the
ages. However, before the icy wind could numb his fingertips, he
discovered a tiny horizontal fissure that suited his purpose.
Keeping one hand on the crack in order not to lose it, he took the
hammer and a piton from the tool straps at his waist. Balanced on the
sill, leaning out as far as he dared, he put the sharp tip of the steel
peg into the crack and pounded it home.
The light he had to work by was barely adequate. It came from the
aircraft warning lights that ringed the decorative pinnacle of the
building just thirty feet, above him; it alternated between red and
white.
From his upside-down position, the work went more; slowly than he would
have liked. When he finished at'i last, he looked over his shoulder to
see if Bollinger was behind him. He was still alone.
The piton felt as if it were well placed.
He got a good grip on it, tried to wiggle it. It was firm.
He snapped a carabiner through the eye of the piton.
He snapped another carabiner to the center post of the window, above the
one that secured Connie's safety line.
Next, he pulled the knots out of the belaying rope. He took it from
around his waist and dropped it on the floor by the window.
He closed one of the tall, rectangular panes as best he could; the
carabiners fixed to the center post would not permit it to close all the
way. He would attempt to shut the other half of the window from the
outside.
He hurried to the draw cords and pulled the green velvet drapes into
place.
Eventually, Bollinger would come back to this office and would realize
that they had gone out of the window. But Graham wanted to conceal the
evidence of their escape as long as possible.
Stepping behind the drapes, he sidled along to the window. Wind roared
through the open pane and billowed the velvet around him.
He picked up an eleven-yard line that he had cut from another
hundred-foot coil. He tied it to his harness and to the free carabiner
on the window post. There was no one here to belay him as he had done
Ct)nnie, but he had worked out a way to avoid a singleline descent; he
would have a safety tether exactly like Connie's.
He quickly tied a figure-eight knot in one end of the forty-five-foot
line. Leaning out of the window once more, he hooked the double loops
of rope through the carabiner that was linked to the piton. Then he
screwed the sleeve over the gate, locking the snap link. He tossed the
rope into the night and watched to be sure that it hung straight and
unobstructed from the piton. This would be his rappelling line.
He was not adhering strictly to orthodox mountain climbing procedure.
But then this "mountain" certainly was not orthodox either.
The situation called for flexibility, for a few original methods.
After he had put on his gloves again, he took hold of the thirty-foot
safety line. He wrapped it once around his right wrist and then seized
it tightly with the same hand. Approximately four feet of rope lay
between his hand and the anchor point on the window post. In the first
few seconds after he went through the window, he would be hanging by,
his right arm, four feet under the sill.
He got on his knees on the window ledge, facing the lining of the office
drapes. Slowly, cautiously, reluctantly, he went out of the room
backward, feet first.
just before he overbalanced and slid all the way out, he closed the open
half of the window as far as the carabiners would allow. Then he
dropped four feet.
Memories of Mount Everest burst upon him, clam-A ored for his attention.
He shoved them down, desperately forced them deep into his mind.
He tasted vomit at the back of his mouth. But he swallowed hard,
swallowed repeatedly until his throat was clear. He willed himself not
to be sick, and it worked. At least for the moment.
OL With his left hand he plucked the rappelling line from the face of
the building. Holding that loosely, he reached above his head and
grabbed the safety rope that he already had in his right hand.
Both hands on the shorter line, he raised his knees in a fetal position
and planted his boots against the granite. Pulling hand over hand on
the safety tether, he took three small steps up the sheer wall until he
was balanced against the building at a forty-five-degree angle. The
toes of his boots were jammed into a narrow mortar seam with all the
force he could apply.
Satisfied with his precarious position, he let go of the safety tether
with his left hand.
Although he remained securely anchored, the very act of letting go of
anything at that height made the vomit rise in his throat once more.
He gagged, held it down, quickly recovered.
He was balanced on four points: his right hand on the shorter rope, now
only two feet from the window post; his left hand on the line with which
he would rappel down; his right foot; his left foot. He clung like a
fly to the side of the highrise.
Keeping his eyes on the piton that thrust up between his spread feet, he
jerked on the rappelling line several times. Hard. The piton didn't
move. He shifted his weight to the longer line but kept his right-hand
grip on the safety tether. Even with a hundred and fifty pounds of
downward drag, the piton did not shift in the crack.
Convinced that the peg was well placed, he released the safety tether.
Now he was balanced on three points: left hand on the long line, both
feet on the wall, still at a forty-five.
degree angle to the building.
Although he would not be touching it again before he reached the ledge,
the safety rope would nevertheless bring him up short of death if the
longer line broke while he was rappelling down to Connie.
He told himself to remember that. Remember and stave off panic.
Panic was the real enemy. It could kill him faster than Bollinger
could. The tether was there. Linking his harness to the window post.
He must remember ...
With his free hand, he groped under his thigh, felt behind himself for
the long rope that he already held in his other hand. After a maddening
few seconds, he found it. Now, the line on which he would rappel came
from the piton to his left hand in front of him, passed between his legs
at crotch level to his right hand behind him. With that hand he brought
the rope forward, over his right hip, across his chest, over his head,
and finally over his left shoulder. It hung down his back, passed
through his right hand, and ran on into empty space.
He was perfectly positioned.
The left hand was his guiding hand.
The right hand was his braking hand.
He was ready to rappel.
For the first time since he had come through the window, he took a good
look around him. Dark monoliths, gigantic skyscrapers rose eerily out
of the winter storm. Hundreds of thousands of points of light, made
hazy and even more distant by the falling snow, marked the night on
every side of him. Manhattan to his left.
Manhattan to his right. Manhattan behind him. Most important-Manhattan
below him. Six hundred feet of empty night waiting to swallow him.
Strangely, for an instant he felt as if this were a miniature replica of
the city, a tiny reproduction that was forever frozen in plastic; he
felt as if he were also tiny, as if he were suspended in a paperweight,
one of those clear hemispheres that filled with artificial snow when it
was shaken. As unexpectedly as it came, the illusion passed; the city
became huge again; the concrete canyon below appeared to be bottomless;
however, while all else returned to normal, he remained tiny,
insignificant.
When he first came out of the window, he had focused his attention on
pitons, ropes and technical maneuvers. Thus occupied, he had been able
to ignore his surroundings, to blunt his awareness of them.
That was no longer possible. Suddenly, he was too aware of the city and
of how far it was to the street.
Inevitable, such awareness brought unwanted memories: his foot slipping,
harness jerking tight, rope snapping, floating, floating, floating,
floating, striking, darkness, splinters of pain in his legs, darkness
again, a hot iron in his guts, pain breaking like glass in his back,
blood, darkness, hospital rooms....
Although the bitterly cold wind pummeled his face, sweat popped out on
his brow and along his temples.
He was trembling.
He knew he couldn't make the climb.
Floating, floating ...
He couldn't move at all.
Not an inch.
In the elevator, Bollinger hesitated. He was about to press the button
for the twenty-third floor, when he realized that, after he lost track
of them, Harris and the woman apparently had not continued down toward
the lobby. They had vanished on the twenty-seventh level. He had
searched that floor and all those below it; and he was as certain as he
could be, short of shooting open every locked door, that they were not
in the lower three-fourths of the building. They'd gone up.
Back to Harris's office? As soon as that occurred to him, he knew it
was true, and he knew why they had done it. They'd gone up because that
was the last thing he would expect them to do. If they had continued
down the stairs or elevator shaft, he would have nailed them in minutes.
Sure as hell. But, in going up, they had confused him and gained time.
Forty-five minutes of time, he thought angrily. That bastard has made a
fool out of me. Forty-five minutes. But not one goddamned minute more.
He pushed the button for the fortieth floor.
Six hundred feet.
Twice as far as he had fallen on Everest.
And this time there would be no miracle to save him, no deep snowdrift
to cushion the impact. He would be a bloody mess when the police found
him. Broken. Ruined. Lifeless.
Although he could see nothing of it, he stared in tently at the street.
The darkness and snow obscured the pavement.
Yet he could not look away. He was mesmerized not by what he saw, but
by what he didn't need to see, transfixed by what he knew lay below the
night and below the shifting white curtains of the storm.
He closed his eyes. Thought about courage. Thought about how far he
had come. Toes pressed into the shallow mortar-filled groove between
two blocks of granite. Left hand in front. Right hand behind.
Ready, get set ... but he couldn't go.
When he opened his eyes, he saw Connie on the ledge.
She motioned for him to hurry.
If he didn't move, she would die. He would fail her utterly. She
didn't deserve that after the eighteen months she'd given him, eighteen
months of tender care and saint-like understanding. She hadn't once
criticized him for whining, for his paranoia or his self-pity or his
selfishness. She had put herself in emotional jeopardy that was no less
terrifying than the physical risk demanded of him. He knew that mental
anguish was every bit as painful as a broken leg. In return for those
eighteen months, he had to make this climb for her. He owed her that
much; hell, he owed her everything.
The perspiration had dissolved some of the coating of Chap Stick on his
forehead and cheeks. As the wind dried the sweat, it chilled his face.
He realized again how little time they could spend out here before the
winter night sapped their strength.
He looked up at the piton that anchored him.
Connie will die if you don't do this.
He was squeezing the line too tightly with his left hand, which ought to
be used only to guide him. He should hold the line loosely, using his
right hand to pass rope and to brake.
Connie will die....
He relaxed his left-hand grip.
He told himself not to look down. Took a deep breath. Let it out.
Started to count to ten. Told himself he was stalling. Pushed off the
wall.
Don't panic!
As he swung backward into the night, he slid down the rope. When he
glided back to the wall, both feet in front of him and firmly planted
against the granite, pain zigzagged through his game leg. He winced,
but he knew he could bear it. When he looked down, he saw that he had
descended no more than two feet: but the fact that he had gotten
anywhere at all made the pain seem unimportant.
He had intended to thrust away from the stone with all his strength and
to cover two yards on each long arc. But he could not do it. Not yet.
He was too scared to rappel as enthusiastically as he had done in the
past; furthermore, a more vigorous descent would make the pain in his
leg unbearable.
instead, he pushed from the wall again, swung backward, dropped two feet
along the line, swooped back to the wall. And again: just a foot or
eighteen inches this time. Little mincing steps. A cautious dance of
fear along the face of the building.
Out, down, in; out, down, in; out, down, in ...
The terror had not evaporated. It was in him yet, bubbling, thick as
stew. A cancer that had fed upon him and grown for years was not likely
to vanish through natural remission in a few minutes. However, he was
no longer overwhelmed by fear, incapacitated by it. He could see ahead
to a day when he might be cured of it; and that was a fine vision.
When he finally dared to look down, he saw that he was so near the ledge
that he no longer needed to rappel. He let go of the rope and dropped
the last few feet.
Connie pressed close to him. She had to shout to be heard above the
wind. "You did it!"
" I did it!"
"You've beaten it."
"so far."
"Maybe this is far enough."
"What?"
She pointed to the window beside them. "What if we break in here?"
"Why should we?"
"It's somebody's office. We could hide in it."
"What about Bollinger?"
She raised her voice a notch to compensate for a new gust of wind.
"Sooner or later, he'll go to your office."
"So?"
"He'll see the window. Carabiners and ropes."
"I know."
"He'll think we went all the way to the street."
"Maybe he will. I doubt it. "Even if he doesn't think that, he won't
know where we stopped. He can't blast open every door in the building,
looking for us."
The wind whooshed between them, rebounded from the building, rocked them
as if they were toy figures.
it wailed: a banshee.
Snowflakes sliced into Graham's eyes. They were so fine and cold that
they affected him almost as grains of salt would have done. He squeezed
his eyes shut, trying to force out the sudden pain. He had some
success; but the pain was replaced by a copious flow of tears that
temporarily blinded him.
They pressed their foreheads together, trying to get closer so they
wouldn't have to yell at each other.
"We can hide until people come to work," she said.
"Tomorrow's Saturday."
"Some people will work. The custodial crews, at least.
"The city will be paralyzed by morning," he said.
"This is a blizzard! No one will go to work."
"Then we hide until Monday."
"What about water? Food?"
"A big office will have water coolers. Coffee and sodavending machines.
Maybe even a candy and cracker vendor."
"Until Monday?"
"if we have to."
"That's a long time."
She jerked one hand to the void at her left side. "And that's a long
climb!"
"Agreed."
"Come on," she said impatiently. "Let's smash in the window."
Bollinger stepped over the fallen liquor cabinet and looked around
Harris's office.
Nothing out of the ordinary. No sjgn of the prey.
Where in the name of God were they?
He was turning to leave when the green velvet drapes billowed out from
the wall.
He brought up the Walther PPK, almost opened fire.
Before he could squeeze off the first shot, the drapes fell back against
the wall. Nobody could be hiding behind them; there wasn't enough room
for that.
He went to one end of the drapes and found the draw cords. The green
velvet folded back on itself with a soft hiss.
As soon as the middle window was revealed, he saw that something was
wrong with it. He went to it and opened the tall, rectangular panes.
The wind rushed in at him, fluttered his unbuttoned collar, mussed his
hair, moaned to him. Hard-driven flakes of snow peppered his face.
e saw t e carabiners on the center post, and the ropes leading from
them.
He leaned out of the window, looked down the side of the building.
"I'll be damned!" he said.
Graham was trying to unhook the hammer from the accessory strap on his
safety harness, but he was hampered by his heavy gloves. Without the
gloves, it would have been an easy chore, but he didn't want to take
them off out here for fear they would slip away from him and disappear
over the edge. If something went wrong and they were forced to continue
the climb, he would need gloves desperately.
Above him, the wind made a strange sound. Whump! A loud, blunt noise.
Like a muffled crack of thunder.
He finally got the hammer off the strap.
Whump!
Connie grabbed his arm. "Bollinger!"
At first he didn't know what she meant. He looked up only because she
did.
Thirty feet above them, Bollinger was leaning out of the window.
To Connie, Graham said, "Stand against the wall!"
She didn't move. She seemed stunned. This was the first time ' she had
ever looked frightened.
"Don't make a target of yourself!" he shouted.
She pressed her back to the building.
'Untie yourself from the safety line," he said.
overhead, a tongue of flame licked out of the pistol's muzzle: whump!
Graham swung the hammer, struck the window.
Glass exploded inward.
Frantically, unable to forget the vision of himself being shot in the
back, he smashed the stubborn, jagged shards that clung to the frame.
Whump!
The sharp sound of a ricochet made Graham jump.
The bullet skipped off the stone inches from his face.
He was sweating again.
Bollinger shouted something.
The wind tore his words apart, transformed them into meaningless sounds.
Graham didn't look up. He kept working at the spiked edges of the
window.
Whump!
"Go." he shouted as he shattered the last dangerous piece of glass.
Connie scrambled over the windowsill, disappeared into the dark office.
He slipped the safety line knot at his harness.
Whump!
The shot was so close that he cried out involuntarily. The slug plucked
at the sleeve of his parka. He was unbalanced by the surprise, and for
an instant he thought he would fall off the ledge.
Whump!
Whump!
He plunged forward, through the broken window, expecting to be stopped
at the last second by a bullet in the spine.
In the unlighted office on the thirty-eighth floor, the glass crunched
under their feet.
Connie said, "How could he miss us?"
As he patted the sweat from his face with the palm of his glove, Graham
said, "Wind's near gale force. Could have deflected the bullets
slightly."
"In just thirty feet?"
"Maybe. Besides, he was firing from a bad angle. Leaning out the
window, shooting down and in. Light was bad. Wind was in his face.
He'd have been damned lucky if he'd hit us."
"We can't stay here as we planned," she said. "Of course not. He knows
which floor we're on. He's probably running for the elevator right
now."
"We go back out?"
"I sure don't want to.
"He'll keep popping up along the way, trying to shoot us off the side of
the building."
"Do we have a choice?"
"None," she said. "Ready to climb?"
"As I'll ever be."
"You've done well."
"I'm not all the way down yet."
"You'll make it."
"Are you the clairvoyant now?"
"You'll make it. Because you aren't afraid anymore."
"Who? Me?"
"You."
"I'm scared to death."
"Not like you once were. Not that bad. Anyway, there's good reason to
be afraid right now. It's a healthy fear you've got this time."
"Oh, yeah. I'm brimming with healthy fear."
"I was right."
"About what?"
"You're the man I've always wanted."
"Then you haven't wanted much."
In spite of what he said, she detected pleasure in his voice. He didn't
sound as if he were seriously denigrating himself; at worst, he was
poking fun at the sort of inferiority complex he'd displayed before
tonight. Already, he had regained some of his self-respect.
He pulled open the second half of the window and said, "You wait here.
I'll set another piton, tie up a new line." He took off his gloves.
"Hold these for me."
"Your hands will freeze."
"Not in just a minute or two. I can work faster with bare hands.
Cautiously he put his head out of the window, looked up.
"Is he still there?" she asked.
"No."
He crawled onto the six-foot-wide ledge, stretched out on his stomach.
His feet were toward her, his head and shoulders over the brink.
She took a few steps away from the window. Stood very still.
Listened for Bollinger.
In the Harris Publications suite, Bollinger paused to reload the Walther
PPK before going to the elevator.
Graham hammered the piton into the tight horizontal mortar line between
two granite blocks. He tested it, found it to be secure, and snapped a
carabiner to it.
Sitting up, he took the hundred-foot length of rope from his right hip
and quickly arranged it in a coil that would unravel without a hitch.
The wind had sufficient force to disturb the coil; he would have to
watch it all the while he was belaying Connie. If it got fouled on
itself, they would both be in trouble. He tied a knot in one end of the
line, a knot with two small loops rising above it.
Lying down again, he reached over the brink and hooked the loops of rope
through the carabiner. He shut the gate on the snap link and screwed
the sleeve in place.
He sat up, his back to the wind. He felt as if strong hands were trying
to shove him off the ledge.
Already, his fingers were numb with cold.
The two safety lines they had used during their descent from the
fortieth floor were dangling beside him. He took hold of one.
overhead, the line had been fixed to the carabiner in such a fashion
that it could be tugged loose and retrieved from below. As long as
there was heavy tension on the line, the knot remained tight and safe;
in fact, the more tension there was-and the greater the climber's
weight, the greater the tension-the firmer the knot.
However, when the climber left the rope, releasing the tension, and when
the rope was tugged in the proper manner, the knot would slip open. He
jerked on the line, then again, and a third time. Finally it freed
itself from the snap link and tumbled down into his lap.
He took a folding knife from a pocket of his parka, opened it. He cut
two five-foot pieces from the elevenyard safety line, then put the knife
away.
He stood up, tottering slightly as pain shimmered through his bad leg.
One of the five-foot lines was for him. He tied an end of it to his
harness. He tied the other end to a carabiner and snapped the carabiner
to the window post.
Leaning in the window, he said, "Connie?,"," She stepped out of the
shadows, into the wan fan of light. "I was listening."
"Hear.anything?"
"Not yet."
"Come out here."
He wished Billy could be here for the kill. He felt that Billy was half
of him, fifty percent of his flesh and and mind.
Without Billy, he wasn't fully alive at moments like this. Without
Billy, he could experience only a part of the thrill, half of the
excitement.
On his way to the elevator, Bollinger thought about Billy, mostly about
the first few nights they had known each other.
They had met on a Friday and spent nine hours in a private all-night
club on Forty-fourth Street. They had left well after dawn, and they
were amazed at how the time had flown. The bar was a favorite hangout
for .city detectives and was always busy; however, it seemed to
Bollinger that he and Billy had been the only people in the place, all
alone in their corner booth.
From the start they weren't awkward with each other. He felt as if they
were twin brothers, as if they shared that mythical oneness of twins in
addition to years of daily contact. They talked rapidly, eagerly. No
chitchat or gossip. Conversation. Honest-to-God conversation. It was
an exchange of ideas and sentiments that Bollinger had never enjoyed
with anyone else. Nothing was taboo. Politics.
Religion. Poetry. Sex. Selfappraisal. They found a phenomenal number
of things about which they held the same unorthodox opinions.
After nine hours, they knew each other better than either of them had
ever known another human being.
The following night they met at the bar, talked, drank, picked up a
good-looking whore and took her to Billy's apartment. The three of them
had gone to bed together, but not in a bisexual sense. in fact, it
would be more accurate to say that the two of them had gone to bed with
her, for although they performed, some times separately and sometimes
simultaneously, a wide variety of sex acts with and upon her, Billy did
not touch Bollinger, nor did Bollinger touch Billy.
That night, 'sex was more dynamic, exhilarating, frenzied, manic, and
ultimately more exhausting than Bollinger had ever imagined it could be.
Billy certainly didn't look like a stud. Far from it. But he was
precisely that, insatiable. He delighted in withholding his orgasm for
hours, for he knew that the longer he denied himself, the more
shattering the climax when it finally came. A sensualist, he preferred
to refuse immediate satisfaction in favor of a far greater series of
sensations later on. Bollinger realized from the moment he climbed into
the bed that he was being tested. Rated. Billy was watching. He found
it difficult to match the pace set by the older man, but he did. Even
the girl complained of being worn out, used up.
He vividly recalled the position in which he'd been when he'd climaxed,
because afterward he suspected that Billy had maneuvered him into it.
The girl was on hands and knees in the center of the bed.
Billy knelt in front of her. Bollinger knelt behind, stroking her
dog-fashion. He faced Billy across her back; later, he knew that Billy
had wanted to finish while confronting him.
He watched himself moving in and out of the girl, then looked up and saw
Billy staring at him. Staring intently. Eyes wide, electric.
Eyes that weren't entirely sane. Although he was frightened by it, he
returned the stare-and was plunged into an hallucinogenic experience.
He imagined he was rising out of his body, felt as if he were floating
toward Billy. And as he floated, he shrank until he was so small he
could tumble into those eyes. Knowing that it was an illusion in no way
detracted from the impact of it; he could have sworn that he actually
was sinking into Billy's eyes, sinking down,down....
His climax was considerably more than a biological function; it joined
him to the whore on a physical level, but it also tied him to Billy on a
much higher plane. He spurted deep into her vagina, and precisely at
that moment Billy spilled seed into her mouth. In the throes of an
intense orgasm, Bollinger had the odd notion that he and Billy had grown
incredibly inside of the girl, had swelled and lengthened until they
were touching at the center of her. Then he went one step further, lost
all awareness of the woman; so far as he was concerned, he and Billy
were the only people in the room. In his mind he saw them standing with
the tips of their organs pressed together, ejaculating into each other's
penis. The image was powerful but strangely asexual. There was
certainly nothing homosexual about it.
Absolutely nothing. He wasn't queer. He had no doubt about that.
None at all. The imaginary act that preoccupied him was similar to the
ritual by which members of certain American Indian tribes had once
become blood brothers. The Indians cut their hands and pressed the cuts
together; because they believed that the blood flowed from the body of
one into that of the other, they felt that they would be part of each
other forever. Bollinger's bizarre vision was like the Indians'
bloodbrother ceremony. It was an oath, a most sacred bond.
And he knew that a metamorphosis had taken place; henceforth, they were
not two men but one.
Now, feeling incomplete without Billy beside him, he reached the
elevator cab and switched it on.
Connie clamhered through the window, onto the thirty-eighth-floor
setback.
Graham quickly tied the free end of the hundred foot main line to her
harness.
I "Ready?" she asked.
"Not quite."
His hands were getting numb. His fingertips stung, and his knuckles
ached as if they were arthritic.
He tied carabiners to both ends of one of the five-foot pieces of rope
he had cut. He snapped both carabiners to a metal ring on her harness.
The rope between them looped all the way to her knees.
He clipped the hammer to the accessory strap on the waist belt of her
harness.
"What's all this for?" she asked.
"The next setback is five stories down. Looks about half as wide as
this one. I'll lower you the same way I got you here. I'll be anchored
to the window post."
He tugged on his own five-foot tether. "But we don't have time to rig a
seventy-five-foot safety line for you. You'll have to go on just a
single rope."
She chewed her lower lip, nodded.
"As soon as you reach that ledge," Graham said, "look for a narrow,
horizontal masonry seam between blocks of granite. The narrower the
better. But don't waste too much time comparing cracks. Use the hammer
to pound in a piton."
"This short rope you just hooked onto me: is that to be my safety line
when I get down there?"
"Yes. Unclip one end of it from your harness and snap the carabiner to
the piton. Make sure the sleeve is screwed over the gate."
"Sleeve?"
He showed her what he meant. "As soon as you've got the sleeve in
place, untie yourself from the main line so that I can reel it up and
use it."
She gave him his gloves.
He put them on. "One more thing. I'll be letting the rope out much
faster than I did the first time. Don't panic. just hold on, relax,
and keep your eyes open for the ledge coming up under you."
"All right."
"Any questions?"
"No."
She sat on the edge of the setback, dangled her legs over the gulf.
He picked up the rope, flexed his cold hands several times to be certain
he had a firm grip. A meager trace of warmth had begun to seep into his
fingers. He spread his feet, took a deep breath, and said, "Go!"
She slid off the ledge, into empty space.
Pain pulsated through his arms and shoulders as her full weight suddenly
dragged on him. Gritting his teeth, he payed out the rope as fast as he
dared.
in the thirty-eighth-floor corridor, Frank Bollinger had some difficulty
deciding which business lay directly under Harris's office. Finally, he
settled on two possibilities: Boswell Patent Brokerage and Dentonwick
Mail Order Sales.
Both doors were locked.
He pumped three bullets into the lock on the Dentonwick office.
Pushed open the door. Fired twice into the darkness. Leaped inside,
crouched, fumbled for the wall switch, turned on the overhead lights.
The first of the three rooms was deserted. He proceeded cautiously to
search the. other two.
The tension went out of the line.
Connie had reached the ledge five stories below.
Nevertheless, he kept his hands on the rope and was prepared to belay
her again if she slipped and fell before she had anchored her safety
tether.
He heard two muffled shots.
The fact that he could hear them at all above the bowling wind meant
that they were frighteningly close.
But what was Bollinger shooting at?
The office behind Graham remained dark; but suddenly, lights came on
beyond the windows of the office next door.
Bollinger was too damned close.
Is this where it happens? he wondered. is this where I get the bullet
in the back?
Sooner than he had expected, the signal came on the line: two sharp
tugs.
He reeled in the rope, wondering if he had as much as a minute left
before Bollinger found the correct office the broken window-and him.
li he was going to reach that ledge five stories below before Bollinger
had a chance to kill him, he would have to rappel much faster than he
had done the first time.
Once more, the rope passed over regularly spaced windows. He would have
to be careful not to put his feet through one of them.
Because he'd have to take big steps rather than little ones, and because
he'd have to descend farther on each arc and take less time to calculate
his movements, avoiding the glass would be far more difficult than it
had been from the fortieth to the thirty-eighth floor.
His prospects rekindled his terror. Perhaps it was fortunate that he
needed to hurry. If he'd had time to delay, the fear might have grown
strong enough to immobilize him again.
Harris and the woman were not in the offices of Dentonwick Mail Order
Sales.
Bollinger returned to the corridor. He fired two shots into the door of
the Boswell Patent Brokerage suite.
Boswell Patent Brokerage Gccupied three small rooms, all of them
shabbily furnished-and all of them deserted.
At the broken window, Bollinger leaned out, looked both ways along the
snow-swept six-foot-wide setback. They weren't there either.
Reluctantly, he brushed the shards of glass out of his way and crawled
through the window.
The storm wind raced over him, pummeled him, stood his hair on end,
dashed snowflakes in his face and shoved them down his shirt, under his
collar, where they melted on his back. Shivering, he regretted having
taken off his overcoat.
Wishing he had handholds of some sort, he stretched out on his belly.
The stone was so cold that he felt as if he had lain down bare-chested
on a block of ice.
He peered over the edge. Graham Harris was only ten feet below,
swinging away from the building on a thin rope, slipping down the line
as he followed his arc, swinging back to the building: rappelling.
He reached down, gripped the piton. It was so cold that his fingers
almost froze to it. He tried to twist it loose but discovered it was
well planted.
Even in the pale, almost nonexistent light, he could see that there was
a gate in the snap link that was fixed to the piton. He fingered it,
tried to open it, but couldn't figure out how it worked.
Although he was right on top of Harris, Bollinger knew he could not get
off an accurate shot. The cold and the wind had brought tears to his
eyes, blurring his vision. The light was poor. And the man was moving
too fast to make a good target.
Instead, he put down the Walther PPK, rolled onto his side, and quickly
extracted a knife from his trousers pocket. He flicked it open.
It was the same razor-sharp knife with which he had murdered so many
women. And now, if he could cut the rappelling line before Harris got
down to the ledge, he would have claimed his first male victim with it.
Reaching to the piton, he began to saw through the loop of the knot that
was suspended from the jiggling carabiner.
The wind struck the side of the building, rose along the stone, buffeted
his face.
He was breathing through his mouth. The air was so cold that it made
his throat ache.
Completely unaware of Bollinger, Harris pushed away from the building
once more. Swung out, swung back, descended six or eight feet in the
process. Pushed out again.
The carabiner was moving on the piton, making it difficult for Bollinger
to keep the blade at precisely the same cutting point on the rope.
Harris was rappelling fast, rapidly approaching the ledge where Connie
waited for him. In a few seconds he would be safely off the rope.
Finally, after Harris had taken several more steps along the face of the
highrise, Bollinger's knife severed the nylon rope; and the line snapped
free of the carabiner.
As Graham swooped toward the building, his feet in front of him,
intending to take brief possession of a narrow window ledge, he felt the
rope go slack.
He knew what had happened.
His thoughts accelerated. Long before the rope had fallen around his
shoulders, before his forward momentum was depleted, even as his feet
touched the stone, he had considered his situation and decided on a
course of action.
The ledge was two inches deep. Just the tips of his boots fit on it. It
wasn't large enough to support him.
Taking advantage of his momentum, he flung himself toward the window and
pushed in that direction with his toes-up and in, with all of his
strength-the instant he made contact with the window ledge. His
shoulder hit one of the tall panes. Glass shattered.
He had hoped to thrust an arm through the glass, then throw it around
the center post. If he could do that, he might hold on long enough to
open the window and drag himself inside.
However, even as the glass broke, he lost his toehold on the icy
two-inch-wide sill. His boots skidded backward, sank through empty air.
He slid down the stonework. He pawed desperately at the window as he
went.
His knees struck the sill. The granite tore his trousers, gouging his
skin. His knees slipped off the impossibly shallow indention just as
his feet had done.
He grabbed the sill with both hands as gravity drew him over it.
He held on as best he could. By his fingers. Dangling over the street.
Kicking at the wall with his feet. Trying to find a toehold where there
was none. Gasping.
The setback where Connie waited was only fifteen feet from the sill to
which he clung, just seven or eight feet from the bottoms of his boots.
Eight feet. It looked like a mile to him.
As he contemplated the long fall to Lexington Avenue, he hoped to God
that his vision of a bullet in the back had been correct.
His gloves were too thick to serve him well in a precarious position
like this. He lost his grip on the icesheathed stone.
He dropped onto the yard-wide setback. Landed on his feet. Cried out
in pain. Tottered backward.
Connie shouted.
With one foot he stepped into space. Felt death pulling at him.
Screamed. Windmilled his arms.
Connie was tethered to the wall and willing to test the piton that she
had hammered between the granite blocks. She jumped at Graham, clutched
the front of his parka, jerked at him, tried to stagger to safety with
him.
For what must have been only a second or two but seemed like an hour,
they swayed on the brink.
The wind shoved them toward the street.
But at last she proved sufficiently strong to arrest his backward fall.
He brought his foot in from the gulf. They stabilized on the last few
inches of stone. Then he threw his arms around her, and they moved back
to the face of the building, to safety, away from the concrete canyon.
ML 37 "He may have cut the rope," Connie said, "but he isn't up there
now."
"He's coming for us."
"Then he'll cut the rope again."
"I guess he will. So we'll just have to be too damned fast for him."
Graham stretched out on the yard-wide ledge, parallel to the side of the
building.
His bad leg was filled with a steady, almost crippling pain from ankle
to hip. Considering all the rappelling he would have to do to reach the
street, he was certain the leg would give out at some crucial point in
the climb, probably just when his life most depended on surefootedness.
He took a piton from one of the accessory straps at his waist. He held
out one hand to Connie. "Hammer."
She gave it to him.
He twisted around a bit, lay at an angle to the building/ his head and
one arm over the edge of the setback.
Far below, an ambulance moved cautiously on Lexington Avenue, its lights
flashing. Even from the thirtythird floor, the street was not entirely
visible. He could barely make out the lines of the ambulance in the
wash f its own emergency beacons. It drew even with the Bowerton
Building, then drove on into the snowy night.
He found a mortar seam even without removing his bulky gloves, and he
started to pound in a piton.
Suddenly, to one side, two floors below, movement caught his eye.
A window opened inward. One of two tall panes. No one appeared at it.
However, he sensed the man in the darkness of the office beyond.
A chill passed along his spine; it had nothing to do with the cold or
the wind.
Pretending that he had seen nothing, he finished hammering the piton in
place. Then he slid away from the edge, stood up. "We can't go down
here," he told Connie.
She looked puzzled. "Why not?"
"Bollinger is below us."
"What?"
"At a window. Waiting to shoot u as we go past him."
Her gray eyes were wide. "But why didn't he come here to get us?"
"Maybe he thought we'd already started down. Or maybe he thought we'd
run out of his reach along this r at least you setback the moment he
came into an office on this floor.
"What now?"
"I'm thinking."
"I'm scared."
"Don't be."
"Can't help it."
Her eyebrows were crusted with snow, as was the: fringe of fur lining
that escaped her hood. He held her, The wind moaned incessantly.
He said, "This is a corner building."
"Does that matter?"
"It faces on another street besides Lexington."
"So?"
"So we follow the setback," he said excitedly. "Turn the corner on the
setback."
"And climb down the other face, the one that overlooks the side street?"
"You've got it. That's no harder to climb than this wall.
"And Bollinger can only ee Lexington Avenue from his window," she said.
"That's right."
"Brilliant."
"Let's do it."
"Sooner or later he'll figure out what we've done."
"Later."
"It had better be."
"Sure. He'll wait right where he is for a few minutest expecting to
pick us off. Then he'll waste time checking this entire floor."
"And the stairwells."
,And the elevator shafts. We might get most of the way down before he
finds us."
,Okay," she said. She unhooked her safety tether from the window post.
At the open window on the thirty-first floor, Frank Bollinger waited.
Apparently they were preparing the rope which they would hook to the
piton that Harris had, just pounded into place.
He looked forward to shooting the woman as she came past him on the
line. The image excited him. He would enjoy blowing her away into the
night.
When that happened, Harris would be stunned, emotionally destroyed,
unable to think fast, unable to protect himself. Then Bollinger could
go after him at will. If he could kill Harris where he chose, kill him
cleanly, he could salvage the plan that he and Billy had devised this
afternoon.
As he waited for his prey, he thought again of that second night of his
relationship with Billy....
After the whore left Billy's apartment, they ate dinner in the kitchen.
Between them they consumed two salads, four steaks, four rashers of
bacon, six eggs, eight -ces of toast, and a large quantity of Scotch.
They ap ached the food as they had the woman: with inten _ty, with
singling mindedness, with appetites that were those of men but those of
supermen. -t midnight, over brandy, Bollinger had talked about the years
when he had lived with his grandmother.
Even now he could remember any part of that conversation he wished. He
was blessed with virtually total -,."recall, a talent honed by years of
memorizing complex poetry.
,So she called you Dwight. I like that name.
"Why are you talking that way?"
"The Southern accent? I was born in the South. I bad an accent until
I was twenty. I made a concerted effort to lose it. Took voice
lessons. But I can recall it when I want. Sometimes the drawl amuses
me."
"Why did you take voice lessons in the first place?
The accent is nice."
"Nobody up North takes you seriously when you've got a heavy drawl. They
think you're a redneck. Say, what if I call you Dwight?"
"If you want."
"I'm closer to you than anyone's been since your grandmother. Isn't
that true?"
"Yeah."
"Ishouldcallyou Dwight. In fact, I'm closer to you than your
grandmother was.
"I guess so."
"And you know me better than anyone else does.
"Do I? I suppose I do."
"Then we need special names for each other.
"So call me Dwight. I like it.
"And you call me-Billy- "Billy?"
"Billy lames Plover.
"Where'd you get that?"
I was born with it.
"You changed your name?"
"just like I did the accent.
"When?"
"A long time ago.
"Why?"
"I went to college up North. Didn't do as well as I should have done.
Didn't get the grades and Finally dropped out. But by then I knew why I
didn't make it. In those days, Ivy League professors didn't give you a
chance if you spoke with a drawl and hag a redneck name like Billy lames
Plover.
"You're exaggerating.
How would you know? How in the hell would you know? You've always
had a nice white All Protestant Northern name. Franklin D; boulinger.
What would you know about it?"
"I guess you're right."
"At that time, all the Ivy League intellectuals were involved in a
conspiracy of sorts against Southerners. They still are, except the
conspiracy isn't so broad or so vicious as it once was Back then, the
only way you could succeed in a Northern university or community was to
have ai Saxon name like yours-or else one that was out and out Jewish.
Frank Bollinger or Sol Cohen.
THE F OF FEM 'be accepted with either name. But not with Billy Lames
Plover.
,So you stopped being Billy.
"As soon as I could.
"And did your luck improve?"
,The same day I changed my name.
"But you want me to call you Billy.
"It wasn't the name that was wrong. It was the people who reacted
negatively to the name.
"Billy "Shouldn't we have special names for each other?"
"Doesn't matter. if you want.
"Aren't we special ourselves, Frank?"
,i think so."
"Aren't we different from other people?"
"Quite different.
"So we shouldn't use between us the names they call us by.
"If you say so.
"We're supermen, Frank.
"What?"
"Not like Clark Kent.
"We sure don't have X-ray vision."
"Supermen as Nietzsche meant.
"
"Nietzsche?"
"You aren't familiar with his work?"
"Not particularly."
"I'll lend you a book by him.
"Okay- "
"In fact, since Nietzsche should be read over and Over again, I'll give
you a book by him.
"Thank you ... Billy.
"You're welcome, Dwight.
At the half-open window, Bollinger glanced at his watch. The time was
12:30.
Neither Harris nor the woman had started dow from the thirty-third-floor
setback.
He couldn't wait any longer. He had squandered too much time already.
He would have to go looking for them. Connie hammered a piton into a
horizontal mortar seam. She hooked the safety tether to the piton with
a carabiner, then untied herself from the main line.
The moment it was free, Graham Feeled up the rope.
Climbing this face of the building was proving easier than scaling the
front on Lexington Avenue. Not that there was a greater number of
setbacks, ledges or footholds here than there; the distribution of those
was the same. However, the wind was much less fierce on the side street
than it had been on Lexington. Here, the snowflakes that struck her
face felt like snowflakes and not like tiny bullets. The cold air
hugged her legs, but it did not press through her jeans; it didn't pinch
her thighs and stab painfully into her calves as it had done earlier.
She had descended ten floors-and Graham fivesince they had seen
Bollinger waiting for them at the window. Graham had lowered her to the
yard-wide twenty-eighth-floor setback and had rappelled down after her.
Below that point there was only one other setback, this one at the sixth
floor, three hundred and thirty feet down. At the twenty-third level,
there was an eighteen-inch-wide decorative ledge-quintessential art
deco; the stone was carved into a band of connected, abstract bunches of
grapes-and they made that their next goal. Graham belayed her, and she
found that the carved ledge was large and strong enough to support her.
In less than a minute, powered by his new-found confidence, he would be
beside her.
She had no idea what they would do after that. The sixth-floor setback
was still a long way off; figuring five yards to a floor, that haven lay
two hundred and fifty-five feet below. Their ropes were only one
hundred feet long. Between this ledge of stone grapes and the sixth
story, there was nothing but a sheer wall and impossibly narrow window
ledges.
Graham had assured her that they were not at a dead end.
Nevertheless, she was worried.
Overhead, he began to rappel through the falling snow. She was
fascinated by the sight. He seemed to be creating the line as he went,
weaving it out of his own substance; he resembled a spider that was
swinging gracefully, smoothly on its own silk from one point to another
on a web that it was constructing.
In seconds he was standing beside her.
She gave him the hammer.
He placed two pitons in the wall between the windows, in different
horizontal mortar seams.
He was breathing hard; mist plumed from his open mouth.
"You all right?" she asked.
"So far."
Without benefit of a safety line, he sidled along the ledge, away from
her, his back to the street, his hands pressed against the stone.
On this side of the building, the gentler wind had formed miniature
drifts on the ledges and on the windowsills. He was putting his feet
down in two or three inches of snow and, here and there, on patches of
brittle ice.
Connie wanted to ask him where he was going, what he was doing; but she
was afraid that if she talked she would distract him an he would fall.
Past the window, he stopped and pounded in another piton, then hung the
hammer on the accessory strap at his waist.
He returned, inch by inch, to where he had placed the first two pegs. He
snapped his safety harness to one of those pitons.
"What was all that for?" she asked.
"We're going to rappel down a few floors," he said. "Both of'us.
At the same time. On two separate ropes."
Swallowing hard, she said, "Not me."
"Yes, you."
Her heart was thumping so furiously that she thought it might burst. "I
can't do it."
"You can. You will."
She shook her head: no.
"You won't rappel the way I've done."
"That's for damned sure."
"I've been doing a body rappel. You'll go down in a seat rappel. It's
safer and easier."
Although none of her doubts had been allayed, Connie said, "What's the
difference between a body rappel and a seat rappel?"
"I'll show you in a minute."
"Take your time."
He grabbed the hundred-foot line on which he had descended from the
twenty-eighth-floor setback. He tugged on it three times, jerked it to
the right. Five stories above them, the knot came loose; the rope
snaked down.
He caught the line, piled it beside him.
He examined the end of it to see if it was worn, and was satisfied that
it wasn't. He tied a knot in it, looped the rope through the gate of
the carabiner. He snapped the carabiner to the free piton that was one
mortar seam above the peg that anchored his safety tether.
"We can't rappel all the way to the street," Connie said.
"Sure we can."
"The ropes aren't long enough."
"You'll rappel just five floors at a time. Brace yourself on a window
ledge. Then let go of the rappelling line with your right hand-"
"Brace myself on a two-inch sill?"
"It can be done. Don't forget, you'll still be holding onto the line
with your left hand."
"Meanwhile, what will my right hand be doing?"
"Smashing in both panes of the window."
"And then?"
THEFmm oFFEm "First, attach your safety tether to the window.
Second, snap another carabiner to the center post. As soon as that's
done, you take your weight off the main line and then-"
"Tug on it," Connie said, "pull apart the overhead knot like you did
just a minute ago."
"I'll show you how."
"I catch the line as it falls?"
"Yes."
"And tie it to the carabiner that I've linked to the window post."
"That's right."
Her legs were cold. She stamped her feet on the ledge. "I guess then I
unhook my safety line and rappel down five more floors."
"And brace yourself in another window and repeat the entire routine.
We'll go all the way to the streetbut only five stories at a time."
"You make it sound simple."
"You'll manage better than you think. I'll show you how to use a seat
rappel."
"There's another problem."
"What?"
"I don't know how to tie one of those knots that can be jerked loose
from below."
"It isn't difficult. I'll show you."
He untied the main fine from the carabiner in front of him.
She leaned close to him and bent over the rope that he held in both
hands. The world-famous glow of Manhattan's millions of bright lights
was screened by the storm. Below, the rimed pavement of the street
reflected the light from the many street lamps; but that illumination
scarcely affected the purple shadows twenty-three floors above.
Nevertheless, if she squinted, she could see what Graham was doing.
In a few minutes, she learned how to attach the rope to the anchor point
so that it could be retrieved. She tied it several times to make sure
she would not forget how it was done.
Next, Graham looped a sling around her hips and through her crotch. He
joined the three end-points of the rope with yet another carabiner.
"Now, about this rappelling," she said as she gripped the main line. She
manufactured a smile that he probably did not see, and she tried not to
sound terrified.
Taking another snap link from the accessory strap at his waist, Graham
said, "First, I've got to link the main line to the sling. Then I'll
show you how you should stand to begin the rappel. I'll explain-" He
was interrupted by the muffled report of a gun: whump!
Connie looked up.
Bollinger wasn't above them.
She wondered if she actually had heard a gun or whether the noise might
have been produced by the wind.
Then she heard it again: whump! There was no doubt. A shot. Two
shots. Very close. Inside the building. Somewhere on the twenty-third
floor.
Frank Bollinger pushed open the broken door, went into the office,
switched on the lights. He stepped around the receptionist's desk,
around a typewriter stand and a Xerox copier. He hurried toward the
windows that overlooked the side street.
When the lights came on behind the windows on both sides of them, Graham
unhooked his safety tether from the piton and told Connie to unhook her
own five-foot line.
There was a noise at the window on their right as Bollinger pushed up
the rusty latch.
"Follow me," Graham said.
He was perspiring again. His face was slick with sweat. Under the
hood, his moist scalp itched.
He turned away from Connie, from the window that Bollinger was about to
open, turned to his left, toward Lexington Avenue. Without benefit of a
safety line, he walked the narrow edge i Instead of sidling along it. He
kept his right hand on the granite for what little sense of security it
gave him. He had to place each foot directly in front of the other, as
if he were on a tightrope, for the ledge was not wide enough to allow
him to walk naturally.
He was fifty feet from the Lexington Avenue face of the highrise.
When he and Connie turned the corner on the ledge, they would be out of
the line of fire.
Of course, Bollinger would find an office with windows that had a view
of Lexington. At most they would gain only a minute or two. But right
now, an extra minute of life was worth any effort.
IL He wanted to look back to see if Connie was having any difficulty,
but he didn't dare. He had to keep his eyes on the ledge ahead of him
and carefully judge the placement of each boot.
Before he had gone more than ten feet, he heard Bollinger shouting.
He hunched his shoulders, remembering the psychic vision, anticipating
the bullet.
With a shock he realized that Connie was shielding him. He should have
sent her ahead, should have placed himself between her and the pistol.
If 'she stopped a bullet that was meant for him, he didn't want to live.
However, it was much too late for him to relinquish the lead.
If they stopped they would make even better targets than they already
were.
A shot cracked in the darkness.
Then another.
He began to walk faster than was prudent, aware that a misstep would
plummet him to the street. His feet slipped on the snow-sheathed stone.
The corner was thirty feet away.
Twenty-five....
Bollinger fired again.
Twenty feet....
He felt the fourth shot before he heard it. The bullet ripped open the
left sleeve of his parka, seared through the upper part of his arm.
The impact of the slug made him stumble a bit. He lumbered forward a
few quick, unplanned steps. The street appeared to spin wildly below
him. With his right hand he pawed helplessly at the side of the
building. He put one foot down on the edge of the stone, his heel in
empty air. He heard himself shouting but hardly knew what he was
saying. His boots gripped in the drifted snow, but they skidded on a
patch of ice. When he regained his balance within half a dozen steps,
he was amazed that he hadn't fallen.
At first there was no pain in his arm. He was numb from the shoulder
down. It was as if his arm had been blown off. For an instant he
wondered if he had been mortally wounded; but he realized that a direct
hit would have had more force, would have knocked him off his feet and
pitched him off the ledge. In a minute or two the wound would begin to
hurt like hell, but it wouldn't kill him.
Fifteen feet....
He was dizzy.
His legs felt weak.
Probably shock, he thought.
Ten feet....
Another shot. Not so loud as the ones that had come before it.
Not as frighteningly close. Fifteen yards away.
At the corner, as he started to inth around onto the Lexington Avenue
face of the highrise where a violent wind wrenched at him, he was able
to glance back the way he had come. Behind him, the ledge was empty.
Connie was gone.
4 Connie was four or five yards below the thirty-thirdfloor ledge of
stone grapes, swinging slightly, suspended over the street.
She couldn't bear to look down.
Arms extended above her, she held the nylon rope with both hands.
She had considerable difficulty maintaining her grip. Strain had numbed
her fingers, and she could no longer be certain that she was clutching
the line tightly enough to save herself. A moment ago, relaxing her
hands without realizing what she was doing, she had slipped down the
rope as if it were well greased, covering two yards in a split second
before she was able to halt herself.
She had tried to find toeholds. There were none.
She fixed her gaze on the ledge overhead. She expected to see
Bollinger.
Minutes ago, when he opened the window on her right and leaned out with
the pistol in one hand, she had known at once that he was too close to
miss her.
She couldn't follow Graham toward the Lexington Avenue corner.
If she tried that, she would be shot in the back. Instead, she gripped
the main line and tried to anticipate the shot. If she had even the
slimmest chance of escaping-and she was not convinced that she had-then
she would have to act only a fraction of a second before the explosion
came. If she didn't move until or after he fired, she might be dead,
and she would certainly be too late to fool him. Fortunately, her
timing was perfect; she jumped backward into the void just as he fired,
so he must have thought he hit her.
She prayed he would think she was dead. If he had any doubt, he would
crawl part of the way through the window, lean over the ledge, see
her-and cut the rope.
Although her own plight was serious enough to require all of her
attention, she was worried about Graham. She knew that he hadn't been
shot off the ledge, for she would have seen him as he fell past her.
He was still up there, but he might be badly wounded.
Whether or not he was hurt, her life depended on his coming back to look
for her.
She was not a climber. She didn't know how to rappel. She didn't know
how to secure her position on the rope. She didn't know how to do
anything but hang there; and she wouldn't be able to do even that much
longer.
She didn't want to die, refused to die. Even if Graham had been killed
already, she didn't want to follow him into death. She loved him more
than she had ever loved anyone else. At times she became frustrated
because she could not find the words to express the breadth and depth of
her feeling for him. The' language of love was inadequate. She ached
for him. But she cherished life as well. Getting up in the morning and
making French toast for breakfast.
Working in the antique shop. Reading a good book. Going out to an
exciting movie. So many small delights. Perhaps it was true that the
little joys of daily life were insignificant when compared to the
intense pleasures of love, but if she was to be denied the ultimate, she
would settle willingly for second best. She knew that her attitude in
no way cheapened her love for Graham or made suspect the bonds between
them. Her love of life was what had drawn him to her and made her so
right for him. To Connie, there was but one obscenity, and that was the
grave.
Fifteen feet above, someone moved in the light that radiated through the
open window.
Bollinger?
Oh, Jesus, no!
But before she could give in to despair, Graham's face came out of the
shadows. He saw her and was stunned.
. I Obviously, he had expected her to be twenty-three stories below, a
crumpled corpse on the snow-covered pavement.
"Help me," she said.
Grinning, he began to reel her up.
In the twenty-third-floor corridor, Frank Bollinger stopped to reload
his pistol. He was nearly out of ammunition.
,So you read Nietzsche last night. What did you think?"
"I agree with him.
,About what?"
"Everything."
"Supermen?"
"Especially that.
"Why especially?"
,He has to be right. Mankind as we know it has to be an intermediate
stage in evolution. Otherwise, everything is so pointless.
"
"Aren't we the kind of men he was talking about?"
"It sure as hell seems to me that we are. But one thing bothers me.
I've always thought of myself as a liberal. In politics.
"SO?"
"How do I reconcile liberal, left-of-center politics with a belief in a
superior race?"
"No problem, Dwight. Pure, hard-core liberals believe in a superior
race. They think they're it. They believe they're more intelligent
than the general run Of mankind, better suited than the little people
are to manage the little people's lives. They think they have the one
true vision, the ability to solve all the moral dilemmas of the century.
They prefer big government because that is the first step to
totalitarianism, toward unquestioned rule by the elite. And of course
they see themselves as the elite. Reconcile Nietzsche with liberal
politics? That's no more difficult than reconciling it with extreme
right-wing philosophy." Bollinger stopped in front of the door to Opway
Electronics, because that office had windows that overlooked Lexington
Avenue. He fired the Walther PPK twice; the lock disintegrated under
the bullets' impact.
Suggesting ways that she could help herself, favoring his injured left
arm, Graham pulled Connie onto the ledge.
Weeping, he hugged her with both arms, squeezed her so tightly that he
would have cut off her breath if they hadn't been wearing the insulated
parkas. They swayed on the narrow ledge; and for the moment they were
unaware of the long drop beside them, temporarily unimpressed by the
danger. He didn't want to let go of her, not ever. He felt as if he
had taken a drug, an upper, something to boost his spirits.
Considering their circumstances, his mood was unrealistic.
Although they were a long way, both in time and in distance, from
safety, he was elated; she was alive.
"Where's Bollinger?" she asked.
Behind Graham, the office was full of light, the window opened.
But there was no sign of the killer.
"He probably went to look for me on the Lexington side," Graham said.
"Then he does think I'm dead."
"He must. I thought you were."
"What's happened to your arm?"
"He shot me."
"Oh, no! "
"It hurts. And it feels stiff, but that's all."
"There's a lot of blood."
"Not much. The bullet probably cauterized the wound; that's how shallow
it is." He held out his left hand, opened and closed it to show her
that he wasn't seriously affected. "I can climb."
,You shouldn't."
"I'll be fine. Besides, I don't have a choice."
"We could go inside, use the stairs again."
"As soon as Bollinger checks the Lexington side and doesn't find me,
he'll come back. If I'm not here, he'll look on the stairs. He'd nail
us if we tried to go that way.
"Now what?"
"Same as before. We'll walk this ledge to the corner. By the time we
get to Lexington, he'll have looked over that face of the building and
be gone. Then we'll rappel.
"With your arm like this?"
"With my arm like this."
"The vision you had about being shot in the back-"
"What about it?"
She touched his left arm. "Was this it?"
"No.
Bollinger turned away from the window that opened onto Lexington Avenue.
He hurried out of the Opway Electronics suite and down the hall toward
the office from which he had shot at Harris a few minutes ago.
"Chaos, Dwight.
"Chaos-I"
"There are too damned many of- these subhumans lor the supermen to take
control of things in ordinary times. Only in the midst of Armageddon
will men like us ascend "You mean ... after a nuclear war?"
"That's one way it could happen. Only men like us wouldbave the courage
and imagination to lead civilization out of the ruins. But wouldn't it
be ridiculous to wait until they've destroyed everything we should
inherit?"
"Ridiculous.
"So it's occurred to me that we could generate the chaos we need, bring
about Armageddon in a less destructive form.
"How?"
"Well... does the name Albert DeSalvo mean anything to you?"
"No.
"He was the Boston Strangler.
"Oh, yeah. He murdered a lot of women.
"We should study DeSalvo's case. He wasn't one of us, of course.
He was an inlezior and a psychotic to boot. But I taink we should use
him as a model. Singlehandedly, he created so much fear that he almost
threw the city of Boston into a state of panic. Fear would be our basic
tool. Fear can be stoked into panic. A handful of panic-stricken
people can transmit their hysteria to the entire population of a city or
country.
"
"But DeSalvo didn't come close to creating the kind of fear the degree
of-chaos that would lead to the collapse of society.
"Because that wasn't his goal.
Even if it had been-"
"Dwight, suppose an Albert DeSalvo ...
better yet, suppose a Jack the Ripper were loose in Manhattan. Suppose
he murdered not just ten women, not twenty, but a hundred two hundred.
In a particularly brutile fashion. With clear evidence of aberrant sex
in every case. So there was no doubt that they all died by the same
hand And what if he did all of this in a few months?" ,There would be
fear. But-"
"it would be the biggest news story in the city, in the state, and
probably in the country. Then suppose that after we murdered the first
hundred women, we -began to spend half of our time killing men. Each
time, we'd cut off the man's sex organ and leave behind a message
attributing the murder to a fictitious militant feminist group.
"What?"
"We'd make the public think the men were being murdered in retaliation
for the murders of the hundred women."
"Except women don't typically commit crimes like that."
"Doesn't matter. We're not trying to create a typica] situation."
"I'm not sure I understand what sort of situation we are trying to
create."
"Don't you see! There are damned ugly tensions between men and women
in this country.
Hideous tensions- Year by year, as the women's liberation movement has
grown, those tensions have become almost unbearable, because they're
repressed, hidden. We'll make them boil to the surface.
"It's not bad. You're exaggerating. "I'm not. Believe me. I know. And
don't you see what else? There are hundreds of potential psychotic
killers out there. All they need is to be given some direction, a
little push. They'll hear about and read about the killings so much
that they'll get ideas of their own. Once we've cut up a hundred women
and twenty or so men, pretending to be psychotic ourselves, we'll have a
dozen imitators doing our work for us.
"Maybe.
"Definitely. All mass murderers have had their imitators. But none of
them has ever committed crimes grand enough to inspire legions of
mimics, We will And then when we've turned out a squad of sex killers,
we'll shift the direction of our own activities.
"Shift to what?"
"We'llmurder whitepeopleatrandom anduseafictitious black revolutionary
group to claim credit. After a dozen killings of that sort-"
"We could knock off some blacks and leave everyone under the impression
they were killed in retaliation."
"You've got it. Fan the flames.
"I'm beginning to see your point. In a city this size, there are
countless factions. Blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, Orientdls, men,
women, liberals, conservatives, radicals and reactionaries, Catholics
and Jews, rich and poor, young and old... We could try to turn each
against its opposite and all of them against one another Once factional
violence begins, whether it's religious or political or economic, it
usually escalates endlessly.
"Exactly. If we planned carefu]1y enough, we could do it. In six
months, you'd have at least two thousand dead. Maybe live times that
number.
"And you'd have martial law That would put an end to it before there was
chaos on the scale you've talked about.
,We might have martial law. But we'd still have chaos. In Northern
Ireland they've had soldiers on street corners for Tears, but the
killing goes on. Oh, there'd be chaos, Dwight. And it would spread to
other cities as-"
"No. I can't swallow that.
'All over the countzy, people would be reading and beadng about New
York. They'd-"
"It wouldn't spread that easily, Billy.
"All sight. All light. But there would be chaos here, it least.
The voters would be ready to elect a toughtalking mayor with new ideas.
"Certly."
"We could elect one of us, one of the new race. The mayoralty of New
York is a good political base for a -imart man who wants the
presidency."
"The voters might elect a political strongman.
But not evezy political strongman is going to be one of our people."
"If we planned the chaos, we could also plan to run one of our men in
the wake of it. He would know what was coming; he'd have an inside
track.
"One of our men? Hell, we don't know any but you and me.
"I'd make an excellent mayor.
"You?"
"I have a good base or campaign.
f a "Christ, come to think of it, you do.
"I could win.
"You'd,have a fair chance, anyway "It would be a step up the ladder of
power for our kind, our race."
"lesus, the killing we'd have to do!"
"Haven't you ever killed?"
"A Pi . mp. Two drug pushers who pulledguns on me. A whore that
nobody knows about.
"Did killing disturb you?"
"No. They were scum."
"We'd be killing scum. Our inferiors.
Animals.
"Could we get away with it?"
"We both know cops. What would cops look for? .Known mental patients.
Known criminals. Known radicals. People with some sort of motive. We
have a motive, but they'd never figure it in a million years."
"If we worked out every detail, planned carefully hell, we might do it."
"Do you know what Leopold wrote to Loeb before they murdered Bobby
Franks? 'The superman is not liable for anything he may do, except for
the one crime that it is possible for him to commit-to make a mistake.
we did something like this-" ,You're committed to it?"
"Aren't you, Dwight?"
,We'd start with women?"
"Yes."
"Kill them.
"Yes.
"Billy ... ?"
"Yes?"
"Rape them first?"
"Oh, yes- " ,it could even be filn.
Bollinger leaned out of the window, looked both ways along the ledge.
Harris was not on the face of the building that overlooked the side
street.
Although the pitons were wedged in the stone beside the window, as they
had been when he'd fired at Harris, the rope that had been attached to
one of them was gone.
Bollinger crawled onto the windowsill, leaned out much too far, peered
over the ledge. The woman's body should have been on the street below.
But there was no corpse. Nothing but the smooth sheen of fresh snow.
Dammit, she hadn't fallen! He hadn't shot the bitch after all!
Why wouldn't these people die?
Furious, he stumbled back into the room, out of the wind-whipped'snow.
He left the office and followed the corridor to the nearest stairwell.
Connie wished that she could rappel with her eyes closed. Balanced on
the side of the highrise, twenty-three stories above Lexington Avenue,
without a safety tether, she was unnerved by the scene.
Right hand behind.
Left hand in front.
Right hand to brake.
Left hand to guide.
Feet spread and planted firmly on the wall.
Repeating to herself all that Graham had taught her, she pushed away
from the building. And gasped. She felt as if she had taken a suicidal
leap.
As she swung out, she realized that she was clenching the rope too
tightly with her left hand. Left to guide. Right to brake. She
relaxed her grip on the rope in front of her and slid down a few feet
before braking.
She approached the building improperly. Her legs were not straight out
in front of her, and they weren't rigid enough. They buckled. She
twisted to the right, out of control, and struck the granite with her
shoulder. The impact was not great enough to break a bone, but it was
much too hard.
It dazed her, but she didn't let go of the rope. Got her feet against
the stone once more. Got into position. Shook her head to clear it.
Glanced to her left. Saw Graham three yards away on that side. Nodded
so he would know that she was all r. Then pushed outward. Pushed hard.
Slid down. Swung back. She didn't make any mistakes this time.
THEFAmoFFEm Grinning, Graham watched as Connie took a few more steps
down the stone. Her endurance and determination delighted him.
There really was some Nora Charles in her. And a hell of a lot of Nick
too.
When he saw that she had pretty much gotten the knack of rappelling-her
style was crude but adequate-he kicked away from the wall. He descended
farther than she did on each arc and reached the eighteenth floor ahead
of her.
He braced himself on the almost nonexistent window ledge. He smashed in
the two tall panes of glass and fixed a snap link to the metal center
post. When he had attached his safety tether to that carabiner, he
released the main line, pulled it free of the overhead anchor. He
caught the rope, tied it to the carabiner in front of him, and took up a
rappelling position.
Beside him, nine feet away, Connie was also ready to rappel.
He flung himself into space.
He was amazed not only at how well he remembered the skills and
techniques of a climber, but at how quickly the worst of his fear had
vanished. He was still afraid, but not unnaturally so. Necessity and
Connie's love had produced a miracle that no psychiatrist could have
matched.
He was beginning to think they might escape. His left arm ached where
the bullet had grazed it, and the fingers of that hand were stiff. The
pain in his bad leg had subsided to a continuous dull throb that made
him grit his teeth occasionally but which didn't interfere too much with
his rappelling.
in a couple of steps he reached the seventeenth floor.
in two more jumps he came to rest against the sixteenth-story window
ledge-where Frank Bollinger had decided to set up an ambush.
The window was closed. However, the drapes had been drawn back.
One desk lamp glowed dimly in the office.
Bollinger was on the other side of the glass, a huge silhouette.
He was just lifting the latch.
No! Graham thought.
In the same instant that his boots touched the window ledge, he kicked
away from it.
Bollinger saw him and pulled off a shot without bothering to open the
rectangular panes. Glass sliced into the night.
Although Bollinger reacted fast, Graham was already out of his line of
fire. He swung-back to the wall seven or eight feet below Bollinger,
rappelled again, stopped at the fifteenth-story window.
He looked up and saw flame flicker briefly from the muzzle of the pistol
as Bollinger shot at Connie.
The gunfire threw her off her pace. She hit the wall with her shoulder
again. Frantic, she got her feet under her and rappelled.
Bollinger fired again.
Bollinger knew that he hadn't scored a hit on either of them.
He left the office, ran to the elevator. He switched on the control
panel and pushed the button for the tenth floor.
As the lift descended, he thought about the plan that he and Billy had
formulated yesterday.
" Yo u'll kill Harris firs t. Do what you wan t with th e woman, but be
sure to cut her up."
"I always cut them up. That was my idea in the first place."
"You should kill Harris where it'll cause the least mess, where you can
clean up after.
"Clen up? "
"When you're done with the woman, you'll go back to Harris, wipe up
every speck of blood around him, and wrap his body in a plastic tarp. So
don't kill him on a carpet where he'll leave stains. Take him into a
room with a tile floor.
Maybe a bathroom.
"Wrap him in a tarp?"
"I'll be waiting behind the Bowerton Building at ten o'clock.
You'll bring the body to me. We'll put it the car. Later, we can take
it out of the city, bury it upstate someplace.
"Bury it? Why?"
"We're going to try to make the police think that Harris has killed his
own fiancee, that he's tho Butcher. I'll disguise my voice and call
Homicide. I',U claim to be Harris, and I'll tell them I'm the Butcher.
"To mislead them?"
"You've.got it.
,"sooner or later they'll smell a trick.
"Yes, they will. Eventually. But for a few weeksg maybe even for a few
months, they'll be after Harzis There wouldn't be any chance whatsoever
that they follow a good lead, one that might bring them to us."
"A classic red herring.
"ecisely."
"It'll give us time.
"Yes."
"To do everything we want.
"Nearly everything." The plan was ruined.
The clairvoyant was too damned hard to kill.
the lift slid apart.
Bollinger tripped coming out of the elevator. The pistol flew out of his
hand, clattered against the wall.
He got to his knees and wiped the sweat out of his eyes.
He said, "Billy?"
But he was alone.
Coughing, sniffling, he crawled to the pistol, clutched it in his right
hand and stood up.
He went into the dark hall, to the door of an office that would have a
view of Lexington.
Because he was worried about running out of ammunition, he used only one
shot on the door. He aimed carefully. The boom! echoed and reechoed
in the corridor. The lock was damaged, but it wouldn't release
altogether. The door rattled in its frame. Rather than use another
bullet, he put his shoulder to the panel, vressed until it gave inward.
By the time he reached the Lexington Avenue windows, Harris and the
woman had passed him. They were two floors below.
He returned to the elevator. He was going to have to go outside and
confront them when they reached the street. He pushed the button for
the ground floor.
Braced against the eighth-floor windows, they agreed to cover the final
hundred and twenty feet in two equal rappels, using the fourth-floor
window posts as their last anchor points.
At the fourth level, Graham smashed in both rectangular panes. He
snapped a carabiner to the post, hooked, his safety tether to the
carabiner, and jerked involuntarily as a bullet slapped the stone a foot
to the right of his head.
He knew at once what had happened. He t-slightly and looked down.
Bollinger, in shirt sleeves and looking harried, stood on the
snow-shrouded sidewalk, sixty feet below.
Motioning to Connie, Graham shouted, "Go in! Get inside! Through the
window!"
Bollinger fired again.
A burst ollight, pain, blood.- a bullet in the back....
Is this where it happens? he wondered.
Desperately, Graham used his gloved fist to punch out the shards of
glass that remained in the window frame. He grabbed the center post and
was about to drag himself inside when the street behind him was suddenly
filled with a curious rumbling.
A big yellow road grader turned the corner into Lexington Avenue.
Its large black tires churned through he slush and spewed out an icy
liquid behind. The t plow on the front of the machine was six feet high
and ten feet across. Emergency beacons flashed on the roof of the
operator's cab. Two headlights the size of dinner lates popped up like
the eyes of a frog, glared through p the failing snow.
It was the only vehicle in sight on the storm-clogged street.
Graham glanced at Connie. She seemed to be having trouble disentangling
herself from the lines and getting through the window.
He turned away from her, waved urgently at the driver of the grader.
The man could barely be seen behind the dirty windshield. "Help!
Graham shouted. He didn't think the man could hear him over the roar of
the engine. Nevertheless, he kept shouting. "Help! Up here!
Help us!"
Connie began to shout too.
Surprised, Bollinger did exactly what he should not have done. He
whirled and shot at the grader.
The driver braked, almost came to a full stop.
"Help!" Graham shouted.
Bollinger fired at the machine again. The slug ricocheted off the steel
that framed the windshield of the cab.
The driver shifted gears and gunned the engine.
Bollinger ran.
Lifted by hydraulic arms, the plow rose a foot off the pavement.
It cleared the curb as the machine lumbered onto the sidewalk.
Pursued by the grader, Bollinger ran thirty or forty feet along the walk
before he sprinted into the street. Kicking up small clouds of snow
with each step, he crossed the avenue, with the plow close behind him.
Connie was rapt.
Bollinger let the grader close the distance between them. When only two
yards separated him from the shining steel blade, he dashed to one side,
out of its way. He ran past the machine, came back toward the Bowerton
Building.
The grader didn't turn as easily as a sports car. By the time the
driver had brought it around and was headed back, Bollinger was standing
under Graham again.
Graham saw him raise the gun. It glinted in the light from the street
lamp.
At ground level where the wind was a bit less fierce, the shot was very
loud. The bullet cracked into the granite by Graham's right foot.
The grader bore down on Bollinger, horn blaring.
He put his back to the building and faced the mechanical behemoth.
Sensing what the madman would do, Graham fumbled with the compact,
battery-powered rock drill that was clipped to his waist belt. He got
it free of the strap.
The grader was fifteen to twenty feet from Bollinger, 2 who aimed the
pistol at the windshield of the operator's cab.
From his perch on the fourth floor, Graham threw the rock drill.
It arched through sixty feet of falling snow and hit Bollinger-not a
solid blow on the head, as Graham had hoped, but on the hip. It glanced
off him with little force.
Nevertheless, the drill startled Bollinger. He jumped, put a foot on
ice, pitched forward, stumbled off the curb, skidded with peculiar grace
in the snow, and sprawled facedown in the gutter.
The driver of the grader had expected his quarry to run away; instead,
Bollinger fell toward the machine, into it. The operator braked, but he
could not bring the rader to a full stop within only eight feet.
The huge steel plow was raised twelve inches off the street; but that
was not quite high enough to pass safely over Bollinger. The bottom of
the blade caught him at the buttocks and gouged through his flesh,
rammed his head, crushed his skull, jammed his body against the raised
curb.
Blood sprayed across the snow in the circle of light beneath the nearest
street lamp.
2!PS 43 MacDonald, Ott, the security guards and the building engineer
had been tucked into heavy plastic body bags supplied by the city
morgue. The bags were lined up on the marble floor.
Near the shu"ered newsstand at the front of the lobby, half a dozen
folding chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle. Graham and Connie
sat there with Ira Preduski and three other policemen.
Preduski was in his usual condition: slightly bedraggled. His brown
suit hung on him only marginally better than a sheet would have done.
Because he had been walking in the snow, his trouser cuffs were damp.
His shoes and socks were wet. He wasn't wearing galoshes or boots; he
owned a pair of the former and two pairs of the latter, but he never
remembered to put them on in bad weather.
"Now, I don't mean to mother you," Preduski said to Graham. "I know
I've asked before. And you've told me. But . I worry unnecessarily
about a lot of things. That's another fault of mine.
But what about your arm? Where you were shot. Is it all right?"
Graham lightly patted the bandage under his shirt. A paramedic 'm just
fine."
"What about your leg?"
Graham grimaced. "I'm no more crippled now than I was before all this
happened."
Turning to Connie, Preduski said, "What about you?
The doc with the ambulance says you've got some bad bruises."
"Just bruises," she said almost airily. She was holding Graham's hand.
"Nothing worse."
"Well, you've both had a terrible night. just awful. And it's my
fault. I should have caught Bollinger weeks ago. If I'd had half a
brain, I'd have wrapped up this case long before you two got involved."
He looked at his watch. "Almost three in the morning." He stood up,
tried unsuccessfully to straighten the rumpled collar of his overcoat.
"We've kept you here much too long. Much too long. But I'm going to
have to ask you to hang around fifteen or twenty minutes more to answer
any questions that the other detectives or forensics men might have. Is
that too much to ask? Would you mind? I know it's a terrible,
terrible imposition. I apologize."
"It's all right," Graham said wearily.
Preduski spoke to another plain-clothes detective sit ting with the
group. "Jerry, will you be sure they aren't kept more than fifteen or
twenty minutes?"
"Whatever you say, Ira." Jerry was a tall, chunky man in his late
thirties. He had a mole on his chin.
"Make sure they're given a ride home in a squad car."
Jerry nodded.
"And keep the reporters away from them."
"Okay, Ira. But it won't be easy."
To Graham and Connie, Preduski said, "When YOU get home, unplug your
telephones first thing. You'll have to deal with the press tomorrow.
But that's soon enough. They'll be pestering you for weeks.
One. more cross to bear. I'm sorry. I really am. But maybe we can
keep them away from you tonight, give you a few hours of peace before
the storm."
"Thank you," Connie said.
"Now, I've got to be going. Work to do. Things that ought to have been
done long ago. I'm always behind in my work. Always. I'm not cut out
for this job. That's the truth."
He shook hands with Graham and performed an awkward half bow in Connie's
direction.
As he walked across the lobby, his wet shoes squashed and squeaked.
Outside, he dodged some reporters and refused to answer the questions of
others.
His unmarked car was at the end of a double line of police sedans,
black-and-whites, ambulances and press vans. He got behind the wheel,
buckled his safety belt, started the engine.
His partner, Detective Daniel Mulligan, would be busy inside for a
couple of hours yet. He wouldn't miss the car.
Humming a tune of his own creation, Preduski drove onto Lexington, which
had recently been plowed. There were chains on his tires; they crunched
in the snow and sang on the few bare patches of pavement. He turned the
corner, went to Fifth Avenue, and headed downtown.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he parked on a tree-lined street in
Greenwich Village.
He left the car. He walked a third of a block, keeping to the shadows
beyond the pools of light around the street lamps. With a quick
backward glance to be sure he wasn't observed, he stepped into a narrow
passageway between two elegant townhouses.
The roofless walkway ended in a blank wall, but there were high gates on
both sides. He stopped in front of the gate on his left.
Snowflakes eddied gently in the still night air. The wind did not reach
down here, but its fierce voice called from the rooftops above.
He took a pair of lock picks from his pocket. He had found them a long
time ago in the apartment of a burglar who had committed suicide.
Over the years there had been rare but important occasions on which the
picks had come in handy. He used one of them to tease up the pins in
the cheap gate lock, used the other pick to hold the pins in place once
they'd been teased. In two minutes he was inside.
A small courtyard lay behind Graham Harris's house. A patch of grass.
Two trees. A brick patio. Of course, the two flower beds were barren
during the winter; however, the presence of a wrought-iron table and
four wrought-iron chairs made it seem that people had been playing cards
in the sun just that afternoon.
He crossed the courtyard and climbed three steps to the rear entrance.
The storm door was not locked.
As delicately, swiftly and silently as he could manage, he picked the
lock on the wooden door.
He was dismayed by the ease with which he had gained entry.
Wouldn't people ever learn to buy good locks?
Harris's kitchen was warm and dark. It smelled of spice cake, and of
bananas that had been put out to ripen and were now overripe.
He closed the door soundlessly.
For a few minutes he stood perfectly still, listening to the house and
waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Finally, when he could
identify every object in the kitchen, he went to the table, lifted a
chair away from it, put the chair down again without making even the
faintest noise.
He sat down and took his revolver from the shoulder holster under his
left arm. He held the gun in his lap.
The squad car waited at the curb until Graham opened the front door of
the house. Then it drove away, leaving tracks in the five-inch snowfall
that, in Greenwich Village, had not yet been pushed onto the sidewalks.
He switched on the foyer light. As Connie closed the door, he went into
the unlighted living room and located the nearest table lamp.
He turned it on-and froze, unable to find the strength or the will to
remove his fingers from the switch.
A man sat in one of the easy chairs. He had a gun.
Connie put one hand on Graham's arm. To the man in the chair, she said,
"What are you doing here?"
Anthony Prine, the host of Manhattan at Midnight, stood up. He waved
the gun at them. "I've been waiting for you."
"Why are you talking like that?" Connie asked.
"The Southern accent? I was born with it. Got rid Of it years ago.
But I can recall it when I want. It was losing the accent that got me
interested in mimicry. I started in show business as a comic who did
imitations of famous people. Now I imitate Billy lames Plover, the man
I used to be."
"How did you get in here?" Graham demanded.
"I went around the side of the house and broke a window.
"Get out. I want you out of here."
"You killed Dwight," Prine said. "I drove by the Bowerton Building
after the show. I saw all the cops. I know what you did."
He was very pale. His face was lined with strain.
"Killed who?" Graham asked.
"Dwight. Franklin Dwight Bollinger."
Perplexed, Graham said, "He was trying to kill us."
"He was one of the best people. One of the very best there ever was. I
did a program about vice cops, and he was one of the guests.
Within minutes we knew we were two of a kind."
"He was the Butcher, the one who-" Prine was extremely agitated.
His hands were shaking. His left cheek was distorted by a nervous tic.
He interrupted Connie and said, "Dwight was half the Butcher.
"Half the Butcher?" Connie said.
Graham lowered his hand from the switch and gripped the pillar of the
brass table lamp.
'llwastheotherhalf,"Prinesaid."Wewereidentical personalities, Dwight and
l." He took one step toward them. Then another. "More than that. We
were incom 3W plete without each other. We were halves of the same
organism." He pointed the pistol at Graham's head.
"Get out of here!" Graham shouted. "Run, Connie!" And as he spoke he
threw the lamp at Prine.
The lamp knocked Prine back into the easy chair.
Graham turned to the foyer.
Connie was opening the front door.
As he followed her, Prine shot him in the back.
A terrible blow on the right shoulder blade, a burst of light, blood
spattering the carpet all around him ...
He fell and rolled onto his side in time to see Ira Preduski come out of
the hallway that led to the kitchen.
He floated on a raft of pain in a sea that grew darker by the second.
What was happening?
The detective shouted at Prine and then shot him in self-defense.
Once. In the chest.
The talk-show host collapsed against a magazine rack.
Pain. Just the first twitches of pain.
Graham closed his eyes. Wondered if that was the wrong thing to do. If
you go to sleep, you'll die. Or was that only with a head injury? He
opened his eyes to be on the safe side.
Connie was wiping the sweat from his face.
Kneeling beside him, Preduski said, "I called an ambulance." Some time
must have passed. He seemed to fade out in the middle of one
conversation and in on the middle of the next.
He closed his eyes.
Opened them.
AL "Medical examiner's theory," Preduski said.
"Sounded crazy at first. But the more I thought about it .
I'm thirsty," Graham said. He was hoarse. "Thirsty? I'll bet you
are," Preduski said.
'Get me . drink."
"That might be the wrong thing to do for you," Con the said.
"We'll wait for the ambulance." epil c The room spun. He smiled.
He rode the room as if it were a carousel.
,l shouldn't have come here alone," Preduski said miserably. "But you
see why I thought I had to? Bol MMDAY linger was a cop. The other
half of the Butcher might be a coP too. Who could I trustz Really.
Who Craham licked his lips and said, "P rine. Dead?
afraid not," Preduski said.
The?
"What about you?"
'Dead?"
,you'll live."
sure?
"Bullet wasn't near the spine. Didn't puncture any vital organs, I'll
bet."
"Sure?
"I'rll sure," Connie said.
Graham closed his eyes.
Ira Preduski stood with his back to the hospital window. The late
afternoon sun framed him in soft gold light. "Prine says they wanted to
start racial wars, religious wars, economic wars . . ."
Graham was lying on his side in the bed, propped up with pillows.
He spoke somewhat slowly because of the pain killers he had been given.
"So they could gain power in the aftermath."
"That's what he says."
From her chair at Graham's bedside, Connie said, "But that's crazy. In
fact, didn't Charles Manson's bunch of psychos kill all those people for
the same reason?"
"I mentioned Manson to Prine," Preduski said. "But he tells me Manson
was a two-bit con man, a cheap sleazy hood."
"While Prine is a superman.
Preduski shook his head sadly. "Poor Nietzsche. He was one of the most
brilliant philosophers who ever lived-and also the most misunderstood."
He bent over and sniffed at an arrangement of flowers that stood on the
table by the window. When he looked up again, he said, "Excuse me for
asking. It's none of my business. I know that. But I'm a curious man.
One of my faults.
But-when's the wedding?"
"Wedding?" Connie said.
"Don't kid me. You two are getting married."
Confused, Graham said, "How could you know that?
We just talked about it this morning. just the two of us.
"I'm a detective," Preduski said. "I've picked up clues."
"For instance?" Connie said.
"For instance, the way the two of you are looking at each other this
afternoon."
Delighted at being able to share the news, Graham said, "We'll be
married a few weeks after I'm released from the hospital, as soon as I
have my strength back."
"Which he'll need," Connie said, smiling wickedly.
Preduski walked around the bed, looked at the bandages on Graham's left
arm and on the upper right quarter of his back. "Every time I think of
all that happened Friday night and Saturday morning, I wonder how you
two came out of it alive."
"It wasn't much," Connie said.
"Not much?" Preduski said.
"No. Really. It wasn't so much, what we did, was it, Nick?"
Graham smiled and felt very good indeed. No, it wasn't much, Nora."