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 ice-sheathed 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.
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 thirty-third floor, the street was not entirely visible. He could barely make out the lines of the ambulance in the wash of 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 us—or at least you—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 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 see 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 minutes, 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.
38
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 pieces of toast, and a large quantity of Scotch. They approached the food as they had the woman: with intensity, with singlemindedness, with appetites that were not those of men but those of supermen.
At 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 had 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. ”
“I should call you 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 James 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 I deserved. 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 had a redneck name like Billy James Plover. ”
“You’re exaggerating. ” “How would you know? How in the hell would you know? You’ve always had a nice white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Northern name. Franklin Dwight Bollinger. 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 the South, against Southerners. They still are, except that 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 an Anglo-Saxon name like yours—or else one that was out-and-out Jewish. Frank Bollinger or Sol Cohen. You could
be accepted with either name. But not with Billy James 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. ”
“I 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 down 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.
39
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 reeled 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 foot-holds 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 five—since 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 and he would fall.