45

MATHILDE LHEUREUX HAPPENED TO be nearest when the phone rang. “Babe,” she said, one hand over the mouthpiece, “for you—a Mr. Cardozo.”

Babe took the receiver and lifted the cord over the head of one of the seamstresses. “Vince? It doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s me. What are you doing?”

“Eighty-two things at once.”

Babe felt Mathilde Lheureux’s old humorous frowning gaze fix on her. Mathilde’s gray hair had turned totally white and she wore it pinned back from her forehead, but she still had the shrewd, naughty eyes of a playful monkey. Babe found something infinitely reassuring in that familiar smile and in that dear old face, only slightly aged from the face she remembered.

“Can you fit in an eighty-third?” Cardozo said.

Babe sighed. “Vince, it’s crazy here.”

Which was putting it mildly. She had been able to rent a little space for her own atelier in the penthouse of the Babethings building. Lawyers were working on the papers—for the moment she had a verbal agreement with Billi—and she and Mathilde had started on her summer and fall lines. Naturally, they hadn’t been able to put together their old group—but they’d found one of their old seamstresses, and one of the beaders, and two of the tailors.

“I guess I didn’t put that right,” Cardozo said. “I need your help. Can you meet me?”

Damn, Babe thought. “When?”

“Soon as possible.”

They crossed Gansevoort Street through the bright sunlight—Babe in her pale blue Chanel, and Cardozo with his .38 in the armpit of his seersucker jacket, holding a tape recorder.

The wind had swept away the fog, and the sky had the blinding colorless brightness of a scoured frying pan.

Babe’s eyes scanned the derelict buildings. A perplexed expression hovered on her face.

Cardozo pushed the button on the cassette player. Babe’s voice came sleepwalking out. “The building is on the corner. The cobbled street meets the asphalt.”

He took note of her reactions. Her hand tightening into a fist. Her mouth pulling shut. Her eyes narrowing, as though fending off images.

Next to the warehouse was a construction site: three stories of girders, and from the look of it many more to come. The steel was already rusted, as if it had been recycled from another structure.

One of the two signs was crudely painted on plywood:

DEMOLITION BY ZAMPIZI BROS.

347 FLOWER STREET, BROOKLYN N.Y.

The other was professionally lettered in flowing script:

THIS SITE WILL BE THE LOCATION OF

THE LUXOR

A THIRTY-TWO-STORY LUXURY CO-OP

BROUGHT TO YOU BY BALTHAZAR PROPERTIES

READY FOR SPRING OCCUPANCY

OFFERING BY PROSPECTUS ONLY

Workers moved slowly about on foot and machine. The zonked winos of the neighborhood had gathered on the opposite sidewalk, in front of the Espanita meat-packing plant, to watch and cheer.

The air smelled of rancid oil and decomposing animal parts with a faint understench of diluted sewage.

He paced himself to her, slow and easy.

In front of the warehouse, dappled in the sunlight, a pile of broken plaster waited in a dumpster. A man wearing a filthy I Love New York T-shirt and barber-pole-striped skivvies was picking bare-handed through the rubble.

Cardozo pushed the cassette button again.

“The sign is in English and Spanish. Body parts of cows.”

Babe stopped to stare at the sign.

“Familiar?”

She shook her head. She shuddered. “How can they eat eyes?”

“The doorway is on the left. That’s where I go in.”

Beside the shadowy doorway a trickle of water seeped from a split in the brick wall, zigzagging across the sidewalk.

The entrance area was dim and windowless, smelling of darkness and mildew. There was a bank of eight tarnished buzzers, four of them labeled. Cardozo copied down the names.

“Up the stairs in the dark. One flight.”

He led the way, climbing slowly up the peeling stairs. Babe guided herself up behind him, hand sliding lightly along the banister.

The stairway had cracked plaster walls, a ceiling fuzzy with spiderwebs. Heat beat stiflingly against the boarded windows. The narrow steps hadn’t been swept in years, but then the people likely to use a stairway in a building like this were apt to have other things on their minds than hygiene.

At the first landing Cardozo glanced down the crumbling hallway. Electric wires dangled from the ceiling. A junkie was sprawled in a doorway, snoring.

“Another flight.”

They went up a second flight of decaying stairs.

“I can hear voices.”

“Whose voices?”

“Mickey Mouse. Richard Nixon.”

Three steps led from the next landing to the corridor.

The hallway was two doors deep, with windows on one side. Hexagonal wire ribbing reinforced the panes.

“I open the door.”

“Which door, Babe?”

She stared at the first door. Her head came around. “That one.”

Cardozo crouched at the second door.

Babe hung back.

He inserted his MasterCard in the crack between the door and the jamb.

The door panels were the color of tapioca pudding that had been left out of the refrigerator for thirty years. Paint was peeling off the woodwork.

His hands moved carefully, silently, jiggling the latch open. The door swung smoothly inward.

She came down the corridor hesitantly.

She waited at the doorsill, staring. The room had been freshly painted a bright, flat white. It was stripped of all furnishing.

She went in first and he closed the door behind them. He slid the bolt.

She stood at the window and looked at the view across the low roofs of the surrounding warehouses to the higher roofs of Greenwich Village’s rowhouses. In the distance loomed the peaked high rises going up along the river and the glass towers of the financial district.

Cardozo began at the top. His eyes roamed the ceiling, noted it was freshly plastered, then slid over walls, freshly plastered and painted. The floor was oak boarding, polyurethaned to a mirror gloss. He noted long, parallel rows of new scratches, as though the wood had been freshly clawed by a dragon.

It was the sort of place that made nighttime sounds during the day: waterpipes talking to themselves, floorboards squeaking, things pinging in the walls.

His eye was troubled by dead spots on the floor where the light didn’t reflect. He crouched and made out a spattering of rust-colored deposits, barely visible.

“They don’t hear me. John Wayne is passing champagne. The man is naked.” “What man, Babe?” “The young man. I don’t know him. He has blond hair. He’s lying in the corner.”

“Which corner, Babe?”

Babe walked slowly into the other room. Also empty. Also white. There were two paper cups by the radiator, lying on their side.

Cardozo picked one up and saw the dry ring of coffee in the bottom. A bit further along a bottle top glinted. He stooped. Heineken beer.

“Winnie the Pooh and the Mad Hatter pick him up and tie him to the H.”

Now she snapped around and stared at the north wall. Something about it absorbed her. She was holding herself slightly forward of the perpendicular, trembling, on the brink of something.

His eye scanned, picking out details where there had only been featureless white. Ripples in the plaster. Lumps in the paint. A small elephant-shaped stain, a little below shoulder level, the color of rust. Next to it two holes, each a quarter inch in diameter. Someone had bored through the plaster into the wood beam beneath.

Below the two holes, at knee level, another pair of holes, identical to the first. Four feet to the right, two more pairs of holes, similarly spaced.

There was another rust-colored stain at ankle level, this one shaped like a tiny map of South America.