“About this gentleman, the one they’re looking for,” Phillipa said. “Henry something.”
“You know how to find Henry Tyder?”
“No, of course I don’t,” Phillipa said. “If I’d known that, they’d have talked to me, wouldn’t they?”
“Who would have talked to you?”
“The police, of course. But no. It’s not him. It’s his sister. She gave me an interview.”
“Which sister?”
“Margaret Beaufort,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “You see, I went back down to that place where I’d been yesterday to talk to that man again, but the whole neighborhood was full of police. It was like martial law. And then—”
But Phillipa could see that Donna was no longer listening to her. She was on her feet and at the telephone.
3
Henry Tyder was good at disappearing into the street, but he was good enough to know that now was not the time to do it. As long as he had had something like time on his side, and the dark, there hadn’t been much danger. It hadn’t taken much to use the passkey to get into the back of that store on Eldridge Street, or to use it again to get into another one on South Drexel. The store on South Drexel had even been something of a find. Henry hadn’t thought anybody was stupid enough to leave cash in the register overnight anymore. Even so, cash wasn’t what he needed. Margaret could get him cash. What he needed was a place to be, out of the open.
He spent all night fussing about it, unable to make up his mind. He had two choices. One was an abandoned building, of which there were several hundred in the city, not a single one entirely unoccupied. And that was the trouble. An abandoned building with nobody at all in it, where no one ever went, where no one ever saw, would be the perfect place. It didn’t even matter that there would be no heat and no electricity. It was nearly spring. The days were semiwarm and the nights could be handled with adequate covering, and Margaret could get him that, too, if he wanted her to. The problem with abandoned buildings were the people in them, both the ones who were taking shelter and the ones who were not. The ones who were taking shelter came in two species: sleepers and rockets. The sleepers were no problem. The rockets were on so much crack cocaine that their paranoia meters were working overtime. They lashed out and they got crazy, and sometimes they killed somebody other than themselves. There was a reason why the winos didn’t go to abandoned buildings, and the rockets were it.
Henry wasn’t worried by the rockets. You could outrun them if you weren’t completely hammered, and Henry was not hammered at the moment, not even a little bit. He intended to get that way as soon as it was safe, but at the moment he could have outrun a cokehead without even breathing hard. What worried Henry were the guys who came into the abandoned buildings without intending to stay, the ones who prowled from building to building looking for . . . Henry didn’t really know what. He’d been an intelligent man, once, back in the days when he’d been in college. He’d still been an alcoholic, but his brain hadn’t been nearly as rattled as it was now. There was something about these guys that was diseased,spiritually diseased, that made old Dorian Grey look like an amateur. It made sense that some people stole from the rich when they were poor, or even when they were just not very well funded and a little resentful that other people were. You could look at the rich—at families like his own, Henry thought—and see that they had more than enough to get what they needed to get through life. They could feed and clothe themselves. They could educate their children. You took the money they would have spent on a second television or a few shares of a mutual fund.
The guys who came prowling through the abandoned buildings took money from men, and sometimes women, who had nothing. Their clothes were in rags. They had no place to sleep. Many of them almost never ate because what money they could find went to their addictions. Some of them were mentally ill, and some were mentally retarded. Many of them had no money on them at all. The guys beat them up if they couldn’t steal from them, or even if they could. They beat them bloody and left them, and then they went on to the next house to do it again. You had to wonder at the psychology of it. What was happening, exactly, when people went out and robbed and beat people poorer than they were?
Maybe it was Robin Hood, Henry thought, that got him into this muddle. Maybe there was no explanation for why these guys were what they were. Maybe they just were. Maybe everything every human being ever was was just something they just were. It didn’t matter. Henry hadn’t been under the delusion that he was living in a paradise of God’s making in the first place, so it couldn’t make any difference that what the world really was was a stage for sociopaths to work out their differences. He was a sociopath himself, although he preferred the term “psychopath.” “Sociopath” sounded like the kind of thing Eleanor Roosevelt would say: there are no bad boys. Of course there are bad boys, Henry thought. He was one of them.