Deadly Beloved(89)

He pushed the man aside as gently as possible and walked into the building. Once he was off the street, it wasn’t so bad. The lobby was clean and surprisingly lobbylike. There were a couple of small sofas placed on either side of a low coffee table. It didn’t look as if they had ever been sat in, or as if the coffee table had ever held a cup of coffee. There was some generic modern art on the walls too.

“Is there a call-up board?” Gregor asked the man. “You know, someplace where I might be able to intercom up to Miss Verity?”

Blank. Blank, blank, blank. Gregor checked the piece of paper in his pocket with Liza Verity’s address on it. It indicated an apartment on the fourth floor.

“I’m going upstairs now,” Gregor told the blank man. “To see Miss Verity.”

Movement toward the elevators did what nothing else had been able to do. The blank man not only moved, he actually spoke.

“No, no,” he said. “No up.”

The accent was thick and difficult to understand. Fine, Gregor thought. He wasn’t dealing with a zombie here, only a man who spoke English badly and probably understood it worse.

“I have to see Miss Verity,” he said again. “In Apartment 4C. Can you call up to her?”

“No up,” the man said again, much more insistent this time.

Gregor was sorry he hadn’t called first. Maybe he should leave now and try calling from a pay phone down the street, to have Liza Verity meet him in the foyer. The problem was, he hadn’t seen a pay phone down the street. Like diners and laundries, pay phones were extinct in this neighborhood.

“I’m sure you must have a call board,” Gregor said, trying once again. “I’m here to see Miss Verity.”

The blank man was looking mulish. “You leave,” he said. “No up. I call police.”

Oh, fine, Gregor thought. That was all he needed. “I want to see Miss Verity,” he said again, feeling a little desperate this time. “I was invited.” What was he talking about?

“You leave,” the no-longer-blank man said again. By now he had begun to look menacing, hulking, and stupid. Gregor had never trusted stupid people. They got violent much too easily.

“You leave now,” the man insisted. “I throw you out. I call police. You leave now.”

Gregor didn’t know what he would have tried next if he had had to try something. He was just about to repeat himself yet again—as if that were going to do him any good—when the rumbling started.

Actually, the first thing Gregor heard wasn’t a rumbling. It was a ping, the sound of metal against metal, ball bearings falling to the surface of a stainless steel table. The next thing he heard was a mechanical punch, and then he had sense enough to be scared.

“Get down,” he said, grabbing the mulish man by the arm. “Get down now!”

The mulish man fought back, but he was in worse physical shape than Gregor was and it didn’t matter as much to him what happened next.

A second after the two of them hit the lobby’s carpet, the elevator doors exploded outward in an arc of cheap sheet metal and shards of glass.





PART THREE


First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes the Marriage Counselor and Six Sessions of Psychotherapy at Least





ONE


1.


NOBODY HAD ACTUALLY PUT a bomb in the elevator. It took a while to figure that out—and a lot of help from firemen and ambulance drivers and police officers—but where and why the bomb had been was the first thing anyone wanted to know, and it was what they worked hardest at besides rescue. The rescue was, in Gregor’s eyes, bizarre. There weren’t many people in the building at that time of day. It was the sort of place that would have been inhabited exclusively by artists and writers in New York City. The apartments were big and the space was appealingly “alternative.” In Philadelphia that just meant the place was not as expensive as it might have been, given the amount of care that had gone into outfitting the rooms and laying down the carpets. It was the middle of the day. Almost everybody was out at work. Wandering through the empty halls, watching out for the progress of the small fire that had started up on four, rescue workers went through one empty hall after the other. There was an old woman hiding in her closet in 3B, convinced that the street gangs of Philadelphia had armed themselves and started a war. There was a small child and her Peruvian nanny on six. The nanny thought they were in the middle of an earthquake and was trying to get away down the fire escape. There was Liza Verity.

“At least, we assume it was Liza Verity,” John Jackman said disgustedly after the crews had been at it for at least half an hour. He was standing next to Gregor in the lobby, looking through the door at the crowds gathered outside. Gregor would never have imagined that so many people would be able to collect in this one place, considering how few people there had been before anything happened. The people weren’t all derelicts and bag ladies either. There were two or three young men in suits, and several young women in the brightly colored clothes Gregor had come to think of as “secretary uniforms.” There were people from the press out there too. Gregor kept catching sight of camcorders and portable mikes. God only knew what they were saying out there to explain this thing to the people watching the news.