“Jesus God.”

“She’s being introduced to him right now.”

It was a short building, and the elevator was slow. Stone watched the floor numbers light up and tried to control his breathing. When they hit eleven, he pulled out his gun. As the elevator slowed to a stop on twelve, he heard something, and he knew what it was. The fire door on twelve had been yanked open so hard it had struck the wall. This noise was followed by the sound of somebody taking the steel steps of the fire stairs in a hurry. The elevator door started to open, and Stone helped it.

“Stay here, and don’t open the apartment door!” he said to the doorman.

The fire door was opposite the elevator; he yanked it open. From a floor below, the ring of shoe leather on steel drifted upward. Stone flung himself down the stairs.

The guy only had a floor’s start on him; Stone had a chance. He started taking the steps two at a time. “Stop! Police!” he shouted. That was procedure, and, if anybody was listening, he wanted it heard. He shouted it again.

As he descended, Stone got into a rhythm – bump de bump, bump de bump. He concentrated on keeping his footing. He left the eighth floor behind, then the sixth.

From the sound of it, he was gaining. Aiming carefully, he started taking the steps three at a time. Whoever was below him was hitting every one. Now Stone was barely a flight of stairs behind him. At the third-floor level he caught sight of a shadow. The ringing of the steel steps built to a crescendo, echoing off the cinder-block walls of the staircase, sounding much like a modern composition a girl had once dragged him to hear.

The knee was hurting badly now, and Stone tried to think ahead. If the man got out of the stairwell before he could be caught, then he’d have the advantage on level ground, because Stone wouldn’t be able to run him down before the knee went. Stone made a decision; he’d go for a flight at a time.

On the next landing, he took a deep breath and leaped. He landed right, pushed off the wall, and prepared to jump again. One more leap down the stairs, and he’d have his quarry in sight. This time, as he jumped, something went wrong. His toe caught the stamped tread of the steel step – not much, just enough to turn him in midair – and he knew he would land wrong. When he did, his weight was on the bad knee, and he screamed. Completely out of control now, he struck the wall hard, bounced, and fell backward down the next flight of stairs.

As he came to rest hard against the wall, he struggled to get a look down the stairs, but he heard the ground-floor door open, and, a moment later, he heard it slam. He hunched up in the fetal position, holding the knee with both hands, waiting for the pain to subside just enough to allow him to get to his feet. Half a minute passed before he could let go of the knee, grab the railing, and hoist himself up. He recovered his pistol, and, barely letting his left foot touch the floor, lurched into the lobby. The guy was gone, and there was no hope of catching him now. Swearing, he hammered the elevator button with his fist.

He pressed his cheek against the cool stainless steel of the elevator door, whimpering with pain and anger and sucking in deep breaths.

The bust of the century, and he had blown it.

There were only two apartments on the twelfth floor, and the doorman was standing obediently in front of 12-A. The door was open.

“I told you not to open it,” Stone said irritably.

“I didn’t,” the old man said indignantly. “It was wide open. I didn’t go in there, either.”

“Okay, okay. You go on back downstairs. There’ll be a lot of cops here in a few minutes; you tell them where I am.”

“Yessir,” the doorman said and headed for the elevator.

“Wait a minute,” Stone said, still catching his breath. “Did anybody come into the building the last half hour? Anybody at all?”

“Nope. I wake up when people come in. I always do,” the old man said defensively.

Sure. “What time did Miss Nijinsky come home tonight?”

“About nine o’clock. She asked for her mail, but there wasn’t any. It had already been forwarded to the new address.”

“She was moving?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What sort of mood was she in?” Stone asked.

“Tired, I’d say. Maybe depressed. She was usually pretty cheerful, had a few words to say to me, but not tonight. She just asked for her mail, and, when I told her there wasn’t any, she just sighed like this.” He sighed heavily. “And she went straight into the elevator.”

“Does she normally get many visitors in the building?”

“Hardly any. As a matter of fact, in the two years she’s been here, I don’t remember a single one, except deliverymen – you know, from the department stores and UPS and all.”

“Thanks,” Stone said. “You go on back to your post, and we’ll probably have more to ask you later.”

Stone stepped into the apartment. He reached high to avoid messing up any prints on the door and pushed it nearly shut. A single lamp on a mahogany drum table illuminated the living room. The place was not arranged for living. The cheap parquet floor was bare of carpets; there were no curtains or pictures; at least two dozen cardboard cartons were scattered or stacked around the room. A phone was on the table with the lamp. Stone picked it up with two fingers, dialed a number, waited for a beep, then, reading off the phone, punched in Nijinsky’s number and hung up. He picked his way among the boxes and entered the kitchen. More packed boxes. He found the small bedroom; the bed was still made.

Some penthouse. It was a mean, cramped, three-and-a-half-room apartment, and she was probably paying twenty-five hundred a month. These buildings had been thrown up in a hurry during the sixties, to beat a zoning restriction that would require builders to offset apartment houses, using less of the land. If they got the buildings up in time, they could build right to the sidewalk. There were dozens of them up and down the East Side.

The phone rang. He got it before it rang a second time.

“Yes?”

“This is Bacchetti.”

“Dino, it’s Stone. Where are you?”

“A joint called Columbus, on the West Side. What’s up?”

“Hot stuff.” Stone gave him the address. “Ditch the girl and get over here fast. Apartment 12 – A. I’ll wait five minutes before I call the precinct.”

“I’m already there.” Bacchetti hung up.

Stone hung up and looked around. The sliding doors to the terrace were open, and he could hear the whoop-whoop of an ambulance growing nearer. There was an armchair next to the table with the lamp and the phone, and next to it a packed carton with a dozen sealed envelopes on top. Stone picked up a printed card from a stack next to the envelopes.

Effective immediately,

Sasha Nijinsky is at

1011 Fifth Ave.

New York 10021.

Burn this.

The lady was moving up in the world. But, then, everybody knew that. Stone put the card in his pocket. The ambulance pulled to a halt downstairs, and, immediately, a siren could be heard. Not big enough for a fire truck, Stone thought, more like an old-fashioned police siren, the kind they used before the electronic noisemaker was invented.

He walked out onto the terrace, which was long but narrow, and looked over the chest-high wall. Sasha Nijinsky had not fallen – she had either jumped or been muscled over. Down below, two vehicles with flashing lights had pulled up to the scene – an ambulance and a van with SCOOP VIDEO painted on the top. As he watched, another vehicle pulled up, and a man in a white coat got out.

Stone went back into the apartment, found a switch, and flooded the room with overhead light. He looked at his watch. Two more minutes before this got official. Two objects were on the drum table besides the lamp and the phone. He unzipped her purse and emptied it onto the table. The usual female rubbish – makeup of all sorts, keys, a small address book, safety pins, pencils, credit cards held together with a rubber band, and a thick wad of money, held with a large gold paper clip. He counted it: twelve hundred and eleven dollars, including half a dozen hundreds. The lady didn’t travel light. He looked closely at the gold paper clip. Cartier.