Chapter 2 #3
I crossed Rush mid-block, between two parked cars, with the absent walk of a woman who had decided she was on the wrong side.
I went into a small Italian place that did lunch, asked for the bathroom, was waved toward the back.
There was a service exit by the kitchen, propped open with a wedge of folded cardboard for ventilation. I went out it.
I came back onto an alley behind Rush.
I walked west.
At State Street I let myself glance at the window of a chain pharmacy. I did not turn my head. I used the corner of my eye.
Nothing.
I did not let myself believe it. I walked another block and I cut south on impulse and I did the corner-of-the-eye thing at the polished black side of a bus shelter, and at the back window of a parked SUV with tinted glass, and at the door of a Walgreens as I passed it.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I had now, by every rule I knew, performed three separate counter-surveillance routines, any one of which should have shaken a competent tail. Two cutouts through buildings with multiple exits. One doubling-back inside a block. A reset of direction. And he was not there.
The first thing I felt was not relief. The first thing I felt was a kind of slow careful disbelief, like a person who had been holding her breath underwater and was not yet sure her face had actually broken the surface. I took ten more blocks before I let myself acknowledge it.
He was gone.
I went into the Cultural Center because I did not know where else to go.
It was warm inside in the way public buildings in winter were warm—not comfortable, exactly, but a baseline kind of survival warmth, the warmth of a place that had decided a long time ago not to refuse anyone.
I climbed the marble stairs to the third floor.
I went into the room under the Tiffany dome and I picked a bench at the edge, the one against the far wall where the light from the dome did not quite reach, and I sat down.
I sat for a long time.
I watched the light move under the dome.
People came and went—tourists with their phones held up at the ceiling, the older couples who stood with their hands clasped behind their backs, a man in a parka who sat on the bench opposite mine for what must have been an hour and stared at nothing in particular and was clearly there for the same reason I was.
No one looked at me. No one looked at me for a long time, and the not-being-looked-at was so total and so unfamiliar that I began, against my will, to relax.
My calves hurt. My shoulder hurt where the bag strap had been.
I let my head rest against the wall behind me.
I let my hands sit open in my lap. The grey wool of my gloves had dried stiff and pilled at the cuffs, and I rubbed at the wool with the pad of my thumb and thought, with a brief absurd warmth, of Wendell, who had stood at a sink somewhere and run water through them for a woman he did not know.
I did not sleep. I did not let myself sleep. But I sat in the kind of stillness that was almost as good as sleep.
The hours moved over me the way the light did, slowly.
I went down to the second floor at some point and used a bathroom and washed my hands and looked at myself in a mirror.
I looked like a tired woman. I did not look like a hunted one.
The face I had been wearing all morning—the small flat alert face—had loosened around the mouth and the eyes.
There were shadows under my eyes but they were the shadows of any woman who had walked too far in the cold, and behind them my actual eyes were quiet again.
You are going to be okay, I thought.
I almost smiled at myself. Almost.
I went back upstairs. There was an exhibit in the room next to the dome, photographs of a neighborhood I had never been to, and I read the placard beside the first photograph three times because I could not concentrate.
Hours later, when I felt truly safe, I stood up. I went down the marble stairs and pushed through the heavy door onto the street.
The streetlights had not all come on yet but the early ones had, the ones on timers that ran a little fast, glowing weakly above sidewalks that still had the last grey of the day on them.
I walked east. Not toward anything in particular. Toward water, vaguely. Toward the thought of finding somewhere to eat something cheap and somewhere after that to be invisible for the night.
I had walked perhaps two blocks when I saw him.
He was across the street. He was inside the lit window of a coffee shop, standing at the counter as if he were a man waiting on a drink, looking at his phone.
He was not looking at me. He did not need to be looking at me.
He was positioned so that the door of the coffee shop opened onto the same cross street I was about to walk down.
The cold thing my stomach had done in the morning had been a small cold thing. What it did now was different. What it did now was the inside of a freezer.
I kept walking. I kept the pace. I did not turn my head. The analyst in the back of my head was waking up again, the cold competent voice, and the cold competent voice was very quiet, almost gentle, the way doctors were gentle when they were about to tell you something terrible.
He has been with you all day, she said. He let you sit in the cultural center. He waited.
I crossed the street at the next light without looking back. I walked half a block. I did the corner-of-the-eye thing at the window of a bank.
He was behind me again. Same coat. Same distance. Reading his phone.
My stomach did the cold thing again, but harder.
He is not bad at this, I thought.
He is, in fact, very not bad at this.
I kept walking. I made myself keep walking. The wind off the river was sharper here in the early dark, hard in my face. My calves were tight.
I cut west onto Hubbard.
Hubbard was a wrong choice and I knew it as soon as I made it.
Hubbard at this hour was the loading docks and the backs of restaurants and not much pedestrian cover, and beyond it was the river, and beyond the river was the city closing down into industrial blocks where a woman walking alone became conspicuous in the wrong way.
I had been improvising since I had seen him in the window of the coffee shop.
I had been improvising and I had been failing, and the analyst in the back of my head—the cold competent voice that had been the only useful thing about me for two years—was speaking up clearly now, with the calm precision of a woman delivering a diagnosis.
You are running out of city. You have been pulling tricks he has seen before. He is not following you. He is letting you tire yourself out so that you stop somewhere that suits him.
I was light-headed. The grey wool on my hands was wet at the cuffs from where I had brushed them against a wall in the alley. My bag had ridden up on my shoulder and was pressing into my collarbone in a way that, in any other moment, I would have stopped to fix.
I did not stop to fix it.
I came around a corner onto a block I did not know and I almost walked into the back of a man in a leather jacket who was the front end of a line.
A line.
A queue around the block.
I looked up.
Velvet ropes. Two ropes, the inside one for the line and the outside one to keep the line off the sidewalk, the kind of double-rope setup you got at places that wanted you to feel both managed and important.
A black awning over a black door with no sign on it that I could see, only a small subtle thing in the brick above that might have been a name but might have been anything.
The line was forty people deep. Women in coats over short dresses, men in good shoes, the small electric tension of people who were about to be allowed inside something.
A bouncer. Two bouncers. Bearded, wide, watchful. The kind of men who were paid attention as a profession.
Light spilled out from the doorway every time it opened. Warm light. Music—bass, layered, the felt thump that travelled through brick. Voices. Glasses. Crowd.
A crowd, I thought, with the part of my brain that was still functioning. A crowd was the one place a competent tail had to either come in after you, which made him visible, or stay outside, which gave you time.