“What you want?” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Here I am, anyway,” Fly said, stepping past Freddy into the foyer. “I thought you’d be pleased to see me.”
Freddy let the door swing closed, still wrestling with his thoughts. But they went from him the way they did in dreams. He couldn’t string Fly’s presence and his doubts together long enough to know what one had to do with the other.
“I think I’ll take a look around,” Fly was saying, heading towards the elevator.
“Wait up! You can’t do that.”
“What am I going to do? Set fire to the place?”
“I said no!” Freddy replied and, blurred vision notwithstanding, went after Fly, overtaking him to stand between his brother and the elevator. His motion dashed the tears from his eyes, and as he came to a halt he saw the visitor plainly. “You’re not Fly!” he said.
He backed away towards the nook beside the elevator, where he kept his gun, but the stranger was too quick. He reached for Freddy and, with what seemed no more than a flick of his wrist, pitched him across the foyer. Freddy let out a yell, but who was going to come and help? There was nobody to guard the guard. He was a dead man.
Across the street, sheltering as best he could from the blasts of wind down Park Avenue, Gentle—who’d returned to his station barely a minute before—caught sight of the doorman scrabbling on the foyer floor. He crossed the street, dodging the traffic, reaching the door in time to see a second figure stepping into the elevator. He slammed his fist on the door, yelling to stir the doorman from his stupor.
“Let me in! For God’s sake, let me in!”
Two floors above, Jude heard what she took to be a domestic argument and, not wanting somebody else’s marital strife to sour her fine mood, was crossing to turn up the soul song on the turntable when somebody knocked on the door.
“Who’s there?” she said.
The summons came again, not accompanied .by any reply. She turned the volume down instead of up and went to the door, which she’d dutifully bolted and chained. But the wine in her system made her incautious; she fumbled with the chain and was in the act of opening the door when doubt entered her head. Too late. The man on the other side took instant advantage. The door was slammed wide, and he came at her with the speed of the vehicle that should have killed him two nights before. There were only phantom traces of the lacerations that had made his face scarlet and no hint in his motion of any bodily harm. He had healed miraculously. Only the expression bore an echo of that night. It was as pained and as lost—even now, as he came to kill her—as it had been when they’d faced each other in the street. His hands reached for her, silencing her scream behind his palm.
“Please,” he said.
If he was asking her to die quietly, he was out of luck.
She raised her glass to break it against his face but he intercepted her, snatching it from her hand. “Judith!” he said.
She stopped struggling at the sound of her name, and his hand dropped from her face.
“How the fuck do you know who I am?” “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. His voice was downy, his breath orange-scented. The perversest desire came into her head, and she cast it out instantly. This man had tried to kill her, and this talk now was just an attempt to quiet her till he tried again. “Get away from me.” “I have to tell you—”
He didn’t step away, nor did he finish. She glimpsed a movement behind him, and he saw her look, turning his head in time to meet a blow. He stumbled but didn’t fall, turning his motion to an attack with balletic ease and coming back at the other man with tremendous force.
It wasn’t Freddy, she saw. It was Gentle, of all people. The assassin’s blow threw him back against the wall, hitting it so hard he brought books tumbling from the shelves, but before the assassin’s fingers found his throat he delivered a punch to the man’s belly that must have touched some tender place, because the assault ceased, and the attacker let him go, his eyes fixing for the first time on Gentle’s face.