After thirty minutes the slower élite runners are finishing.
After an hour the first people in fancy dress start to come through. The park is full of families celebrating with their loved ones. A man walks past me with bloodstains running down from his nipples, his shirt attracting shocked glances from children and adults alike.
Close to the lake, near the Bethesda Fountain, I pick up a discarded foil space blanket and wrap it around myself. Nobody seems to notice. I sit down on a bench and pull my trousers up so they end above my knees. Do I look like a marathon runner? Not yet I don’t.
Close to the finishing line I find a discarded drawstring bag. It’s sponsored by the same banks and insurance companies who sponsor the space blanket and spectator stands. Inside I find a bottle of water, a protein shake, an oat and honey granola bar, a bottle of Gatorade, and a bag of pretzels encased in a packet modified to read You Did It.
I certainly did.
What I need now is a discarded baseball cap to hide my face. I see one but it’s in the secure area of the park, the area for registered runners only, people with wristbands, so I walk on. Eventually I spot a cap sponsored by the same bank that sponsors everything else. It’s been left up on a rock near the Plaza hotel. I walk over and pick it up and check it’s clean, and then I rinse it from the water bottle and pour the remaining water over my head as make-believe sweat. I put the cap on. You see me up on this rock and you see a triumphant runner, a sub-four-hours athlete, someone who trained for months and months and who finished her race.
I have almost finished my race.
The Ritz-Carlton is right in front of me, I can see my floor through the orange foliage of the trees. My window and my telescope. My belongings. My clothes. And my cash.
I look at my watch. I have several hours to stay lost and unidentified before my exit out of here. I’m tempted to board the Staten Island ferry and wait there until nightfall. Somewhere away from Manhattan, but still accessible. The subway is too dangerous; there are too many cameras. The main thoroughfares are littered with above-ground CCTV systems, and who knows how good the facial recognition technology is these days?
So, I stay in the park.
I’m looking south from my rock.
To my left is the Upper East Side, where DeLuca warned me, and further east is Brooklyn and my sister’s crematorium in Queens, and Violet’s home and JFK. South of me is the Bedfordshire Midtown Hostel and all the memories I have with my parents, those two tiny next-door rooms, the kindness the diner waitress gifted me the night I stayed there researching before the storm, conscious that my search history might get investigated, keen to have a head-start, eager to be the one who found James Kandee’s jet details to direct shade away from myself. Of course he had a cast-iron alibi. He gave speeches and hosted lunches that afternoon. He walked to the board meeting of a private equity fund based downtown with two of its founding partners, and he had a meeting at the UN regarding one of his charity projects. He wasn’t alone for a single minute, and he wasn’t anywhere near my sister’s apartment in Morningside Heights.
To my right is the YMCA, and further up is Columbia University: one of the finest colleges anywhere in the world.
A passer-by gives me a thumbs-up for finishing the race and I tip my cap to him.
I eat the pretzels. I need to keep my strength up and I need to stay away from shops and cafés until my eight o’clock pick-up.
I’m licking the salt from my lips when I spot them.
Four uniformed cops in the distance walking towards me, one of them pointing. Are they pointing at me?
They can’t be.
They are.
Chapter 47
I clamber down the rock and start walking towards Fifth Avenue. I don’t look back, but from the reactions of the people walking towards me I can tell the cops are running. So I run.
How did they find me? Undercover police? CCTV? I sprint and I feel my trouser legs fall down to my ankles and I sprint harder than I ever have before.
At the Plaza hotel intersection I run through traffic and clip the wing mirror of a yellow cab. Drivers honk their horns and one guy in a chromed delivery truck yells, ‘You crazy, lady?’ from his open window.
The cops get slowed down by the traffic. I head into the Plaza and straight through to the other side.
In the mirrors I see them in the distance: two cops. One fast, one slow.
As I burst out of the hotel doors and run down Fifth I see Martinez on the street talking into a radio. I cut into a store. Bergdorf Goodman.
The staff look aghast as I run through in my space blanket. I sprint through two departments, then slow and ditch the blanket. I crouch behind a rack of coats and remove my jacket and pull it inside out. It was red and now it’s grey. I ditch the bag of food and I ditch the cap, scraping my hair into a ponytail.