“What’d you bring?”
“Really want to know?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets and cocked his head. “Sure.”
I made the sound of an adult exasperated by a child. “All right.” We had been walking the waterfront for a block now; there was nobody about. “Sit down.” So he straddled the beam along the siding, one foot dangling above the flashing black Hudson. I sat in front of him and ran my thumb around the edge of the briefcase.
Hawk hunched his shoulders and leaned. “Hey…” He flashed green questioning at me. “Can I touch?”
I shrugged. “Go ahead.”
He grubbed among them with fingers that were all knuckle and bitten nail. He picked two up, put them down, picked up three others. “Hey!” he whispered. “How much are all these worth?”
“About ten times more than I hope to get. I have to get rid of them fast.”
He glanced down at his hanging foot. “You could always throw them in the river.”
“Don’t be dense. I was looking for a guy who used to hang around that bar. He was pretty efficient.” And half the Hudson away a water-bound foil skimmed above the foam. On her deck were parked a dozen helicopters—being ferried up to the Patrol Field near Verrazano, no doubt. But for moments I looked back and forth between the boy and the transport, getting all paranoid about Maud. But the boat mmmmed into the darkness. “My man got a little cut up this evening.”
Hawk put the tips of his fingers in his pockets and shifted his position.
“Which leaves me up tight. I didn’t think he’d take them all but at least he could have turned me on to some other people who might.”
“I’m going to a party later on this evening”—he paused to gnaw on the wreck of his little fingernail—“where you might be able to sell them. Alexis Spinnel is having a party for Regina Abolafia at Tower Top.”
“Tower Top… ?” It had been a while since I palled around with Hawk. Hell’s Kitchen at ten; Tower Top at midnight—
“I’m just going because Edna Silem will be there.”
Edna Silem is New York’s eldest Singer.
Senator Abolafia’s name had ribboned above me in lights once that evening. And somewhere among the endless magazines I’d perused coming in from Mars I remember Alexis Spinnel’s name sharing a paragraph with an awful lot of money.
“I’d like to see Edna again,” I said offhandedly. “But she wouldn’t remember me.” Folk like Spinnel and his social ilk have a little game, I’d discovered during the first leg of my acquaintance with Hawk. He who can get the most Singers of the City under one roof wins. There are five Singers of New York (a tie for second place with Lux on Iapetus). Tokyo leads with seven. “It’s a two Singer party?”
“More likely four…if I go.”
The inaugural ball for the mayor gets four.
I raised the appropriate eyebrow.
“I have to pick up the Word from Edna. It changes tonight.”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t know what you have in mind but I’m game.” I closed the case.
We walked back towards Times Square. When we got to Eighth Avenue and the first of the plastiplex, Hawk stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. Then he buttoned his jacket up to his neck. “Okay.”
Strolling through the streets of New York with a Singer (two years back I’d spent much time wondering if that were wise for a man of my profession) is probably the best camouflage possible for a man of my profession. Think of the last time you glimpsed your favorite Tri-D star turning the corner of Fifty-seventh. Now be honest. Would you really recognize the little guy in the tweed jacket half a pace behind him?
Half the people we passed in Times Square recognized him. With his youth, funereal garb, black feet and ash pale hair, he was easily the most colorful of Singers. Smiles; narrowed eyes; very few actually pointed or stared.
“Just exactly who is going to be there who might be able to take this stuff off my hands?”
“Well, Alexis prides himself on being something of an adventurer. They might just take his fancy. And he can give you more than you can get peddling them in the street.”
“You’ll tell him they’re all hot?”
“It will probably make the idea that much more intriguing. He’s a creep.”
“You say so, friend.”
We went down into the sub-sub. The man at the change booth started to take Hawk’s coin, then looked up. He began three or four words that were unintelligible through his grin, then just gestured us through.
“Oh,” Hawk said, “thank you,” with ingenuous surprise, as though this were the first, delightful time such a thing had happened. (Two years ago he had told me sagely, “As soon as I start looking like I expect it, it’ll stop happening.” I was still impressed by the way he wore his notoriety. The time I’d met Edna Silem, and I’d mentioned this, she said with the same ingenuousness, “But that’s what we’re chosen for.”)
In the bright car we sat on the long seat; Hawk’s hands were beside him, one foot rested on the other. Down from us a gaggle of bright-bloused goo-chewers giggled and pointed and tried not to be noticed at it. Hawk didn’t look at all, and I tried not to be noticed looking.
Dark patterns rushed the window.
Things below the gray floor hummed.
Once a lurch.
Leaning once; we came out of the ground.
Outside, the city tried on its thousand sequins, then threw them away behind the trees of Ft. Tryon. Suddenly the windows across from us grew bright scales. Behind them the girders of a station reeled by. We got out on the platform under a light rain. The sign said TWELVE TOWERS STATION.
By the time we reached the street, however, the shower had stopped. Leaves above the wall shed water down the brick. “If I’d known I was bringing someone I’d have had Alex send a car for us. I told him it was fifty-fifty I’d come.”
“Are you sure it’s all right for me to tag along, then?”
“Didn’t you come up here with me once before?”
“I’ve even been up here once before that,” I said. “Do you still think it’s…”
He gave me a withering look. Well; Spinnel would be delighted to have Hawk even if he dragged along a whole gang of real nasty-grimies —Singers are famous for that sort of thing. With one more or less presentable thief, Spinnel was getting off light. Beside us rocks broke away into the city. Behind the gate to our left the gardens rolled up towards the first of the towers. The twelve immense, luxury apartment buildings menaced the lower clouds.
“Hawk the Singer,” Hawk said into the speaker at the side of the gate. Clang and tic-tic-tic and Clang. We walked up the path to the doors and doors of glass.
A cluster of men and women in evening dress were coming out. Three tiers of doors away they saw us. You could see them frowning at the guttersnipe who’d somehow gotten into the lobby (for a moment I thought one of them was Maud, because she wore a sheath of the fading fabric, but she turned; beneath her veil her face was dark as roasted coffee); one of the men recognized him, said something to the others. When they passed us they were smiling. Hawk paid about as much attention to them as he had to the girls on the subway. But when they’d passed, he said, “One of those guys was looking at you.”
“Yeah. I saw.”
“Do you know why?”
“He was trying to figure out whether we’d met before.”