Chapter Nineteen
It’s not until after his work shift ends—nearly midday on Friday—that Simon realizes Nomi is avoiding him.
After he and Cherie shared coffee and cigarettes in her cramped apartment, waiting out the police, he spent literally hours last night trying to find Nomi: walking home, knocking at her apartment, checking at Florent, returning to the Riverview to try again there .
. . He even walked up to Hector’s to see if she was at the counter. But she was nowhere. It was maddening.
Nomi had his file. The answers were right there, in her hands. Not to mention that he was worried about her: Cherie reassured him that Eureka/Enrique was not a wuss and would do a good job as substitute protection detail, but Simon still felt a responsibility.
By the time he finally made it back to his apartment, he’d run out of ideas for places to search and felt a dragging exhaustion.
It was after midnight; he had work in three hours.
Giving up didn’t feel like a choice. Simon smoked one last cigarette at the window, then undressed and went to bed, hoping Nomi wasn’t in serious trouble or—potentially worse—really pissed at him.
During his shift at Gennaro’s, he tried to sink into the orderly precision of the cutting, the cool, clean smell of the meat, the calming piped music; it worked for a while. He discovered there’d been no reports of strangers lurking and throwing his name around, so at least that was something.
But back home at midday, Sofia Rosa stands waiting for him outside her door on the ground floor.
“Simón?” She waves him over. “I have a message for you from No-mee. She visits me this morning.”
“Really?” He wipes his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “You saw her? Is she okay? I tried to—”
“No-mee says to tell you that she is all right.” Sofia Rosa wipes her hands and fishes a handful of peanuts out of the pocket of her apron. She begins cracking peanut shells. “She said she has errands to run and she will see you soon. She will visit with you soon.”
“She . . .” He’s at sea. “She has errands to run?”
“Sí, yes, this is what she tells me.” His landlady nibbles a few peanuts. “Do you want some peanuts? I have a pound of peanuts. Do you want coffee?”
“I don’t—” He stops himself. “Sofia Rosa, when did you see Nomi? When did she give you this message?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine o’clock?”
“This morning?”
“Sí, this morning.” Sofia Rosa finishes with the peanuts, puts the shells in her apron pocket and dusts off her palms. “She has come to me herself, and told me she—”
“You saw her in person? She looked all right?”
“Yes, of course,” his landlady confirms. “Of course she is all right. She is looking fine.”
“Okay,” he says, and that’s when he realizes.
Nomi has not been abducted by Claude Ameche.
Nomi is fine. She has his file. But she has not knocked on his door to talk with him about it.
She has not slipped him a note. She has not given him reassurance of any kind.
She has not tried to seek him out in any way.
In fact, all the evidence seems to point toward the idea that she is actively avoiding him.
None of these signs are good.
Simon goes to his apartment, showers, takes two Vicodin for a low-but-ramping headache, lies on his bed.
His file must be bad.
He tries to get his head around this. But then why did Nomi mouth “You’re fine!
” at him last night? None of this makes sense.
His file is bad. Like, how bad? How bad can a file for a good-with-knives, good-at-tailing-people, multiple-language-speaking, prone-to-violence person be? Okay, maybe it can be pretty bad.
What did I do? What did I do? He must have asked Flores that question a hundred times during his recovery, imagining the doctor thought his mind too fragile to handle the truth.
Every time, Flores would answer, “You’ve done nothing, my friend.
You’ve simply had an accident. You will get better soon, and all this confusion will fade. ”
Flores thought Simon was a medical trainee—but maybe he’s something less altruistic.
Maybe he’s a drug smuggler. Maybe he’s an assassin.
Honestly, with his skill set, “trained professional assassin” might be a best-case outcome, right?
So is Nomi avoiding him because she’s nervous about telling him what’s in the file, or nervous about being around him?
There are other lingering concerns. Nomi is walking around the district unescorted—although she’s not an idiot, she has a weapon, and she has, in any case, been doing this job for a long time before Simon’s faux-security arrival, a point she’s tried to make with him on a number of previous occasions.
There’s also been no further movement from Ameche.
Simon tries to factor that as a net good but can’t help thinking of it as an ominous quiet.
He wonders if he should be going out once more to knock at Nomi’s apartment door, search around for her again. Because that worked so well last night. Goddammit.
In the end, the Vicodin and his raw tiredness work on him, and he falls asleep. By the time he wakes, at two in the afternoon, the uncertainty is twisting him inside out.
He pulls on his boots and coat, tries Nomi at her apartment again—no dice.
Could she just be not answering for him?
That’s quite a concept. Then he thinks of a potential strategy when he sees the small blue card taped to her door.
He digs a pen from his coat pocket, writes Nomi’s phone number on the back of his hand, goes downstairs and out, and walks to the pay phone outside Perrotta’s deli grocery.
Simon tries calling the number. No answer. Gets his change back, tries once more.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
So she’s really not at home. Now what?
He walks back to Florent and gets a coffee, sits outside on the metal chairs to think. Could his file be in her apartment? He can almost visualize it: that brown document envelope she was holding last night, just lying there on the desk in her tiny office . . .
He taps his spoon on the side of his demitasse, angles his chair. Squints up, examining the side of their tenement. If he used the fire escape to break into Nomi’s apartment, would anyone see him from the street? Does he even care if he’s seen?
Simon finishes his coffee and his cigarette, walks back to the tenement and takes the stairs to the third floor, lets himself in.
There are three windows in his apartment; the one farthest left, near his bed, has the attached fire escape.
He hangs up his coat and goes to the bathroom for some more medication, then to the kitchen, where he finds the tools he thinks he’ll need and puts them in his back pocket.
Then he walks over, unlocks the window and opens it, climbs out.
He hasn’t been outside on the fire escape before.
The metal grille clangs under his boots, and the pavement seems a long way down.
Rusted paint is coagulated on the metal bolts.
The hardware securing the fire escape to the external wall of the tenement is loose, and the whole thing seems fairly flimsy.
But he’s committed now, and if he’s going to do this, he needs to just move fast and not think about it.
Is he going to do this? It’s a profound invasion of Nomi’s space and privacy.
And yet.
Simon squeezes around the fire escape rail and goes backward down the metal stairs.
Ducks under the brackets welded to the rampway he’s just descended.
Nobody seems to be watching him at ground level from the sidewalk; it’s almost like people in NYC try to ignore what’s going on with their neighbors. Incredible.
Now he’s facing the window that sees into Nomi’s office. And there it is, almost exactly like he imagined: The document envelope lies to one side of her desk, discarded. On the blotter, a gray cardboard wallet with a yellow sticky note on top. That’s got to be his file.
His file. His name, his past, his identity.
There’s rust on his hands; Simon wipes it on his jeans without thinking.
Looking at the window, it seems like the same double-hung arrangement as the windows in his own apartment.
He’d use the same technique to break into either of them: Rather than disable the latch, Simon uses the butter knife he took from his kitchen drawer and removes the beading around one of the small glass panels in the upper window.
With so much weather damage, the beading breaks away from the wooden casement quite easily.
Then he only has to pull out a few nails with his pliers and remove some old putty, and he’s got the bottom left panel loose.
Now he can just remove the glass, reach inside and undo the latch, push up the window, and step over the frame into her apartment. The whole exercise takes him about five minutes.
Nomi’s office is cramped and dark. Simon props the glass window panel on the floor against the wall, pulls down the blind, which makes the room darker still. He sets his housebreaking tools to one side.
There’s a reading lamp on the corner of the desk, and he switches it on. Wipes the sweat off his palms onto his shirt. Picks up the gray document wallet.
He starts reading the file standing up, but as soon as he sees the mug shots, he sits down.