A uniform cop walks in and I buy a beret at the counter for a hundred and forty dollars cash.
I walk out of a side door carrying the empty store paper bag and wearing the beret. I walk, slowly, with purpose, across the street. Six more blocks. I cut across to Lexington and walk a block and then cut back to Fifth and down 46th Street.
It feels like home.
Past the Sofitel and on towards the hostel.
I can’t see any cops there but I know there’s probably one in the room waiting for me to show up. I pass back to Fifth and circle through Bryant Park and up to the west end of 46th, away from the hostel, just to cover all the angles, before heading back there. Five minutes later a man in a long raincoat walks into the hostel. I see the bulge on his hip. He’s a detective.
I stay close to the hostel but I do not go inside.
My beret is tight on my head, almost covering my eyes.
‘Jimmy,’ I say, walking fast to his smoothie cart. ‘It’s me, Jimmy. The bag.’
He reaches under the counter and pulls out my go-bag. ‘You safe?’ he asks.
I nod and grab the bag and walk down to the Sofitel.
You can’t enter the lift in an establishment like the Sofitel and get access to the floors with rooms, you just can’t. But if you press down then you’ll go down. It’s because hotels need to sell gym memberships to non-guests in order to maximise their profits and please their shareholders. So I go down in my beret and I check myself into a spotlessly clean and air-conditioned restroom.
My chest’s pounding.
I unzip the go-bag.
I remove the beret and my jacket and fold them and place them on the toilet seat lid. I remove the high quality latex mask I bought in a costume store on my second full day here in New York, and I remove a cheap crumpled old man suit that I bought for cash in a thrift store in Gramercy. I stuff my clothes into the bag and then I listen to the room. There’s nobody out there washing their hands or fixing their make-up.
I step out and it feels terrifying to be in a public place wearing this thing. I look in the mirror and an old man with grey hair and grey stubble stares back. You cannot see that I’m not an old man.
I stuff my bag down into the waste paper basket and cover it with tissues.
As I turn to leave, a woman walks in and gasps. I mumble something apologetic in a deep voice and then I walk out towards the gents’ restroom. She watches me leave: a short man in his eighties wearing an old suit and new black sneakers.
Inside the gents’ there are two men washing their hands and neither one of them notices me.
I wash my own hands and walk out and take a tiny pebble from an ornamental plant. I place it in my right shoe and I call the lift and ride it up to the ground floor. A hotel employee opens the door for me and says, ‘Have a nice day, sir.’
I nod my thanks and limp out of the hotel on to 44th Street.
The third person I see outside is Detective Martinez.
He’s thirty yards ahead of me.
We’re walking towards each other.
He puts his hand inside his jacket.
Chapter 48
I keep on walking.
Martinez pulls out his phone.
I keep going. Hobbling. A retired CIA operative on YouTube explained this method of disguise as onion-like. You layer up and you layer down. I look like any other old man with this cutting-edge mask because my skin appears wrinkled. I have liver spots, thin grey hair, jowls. But I also have a wrinkly neck: the mask extends under my shirt line. You have to inhabit the role. Believe in it. No half-measures. Maybe I would get noticed without this limp. It’s hard to fake a limp – if you try you’ll look like you’re faking it. I’m not faking it, my limp is real and the pebble digging into my foot is causing me genuine pain.
Ten feet from me.
He walks closer.
I limp on.
As we pass I look straight into Martinez’s eyes. I can almost smell his cologne.
He stares straight past me.
I go on.
Fifth Avenue.
This is a significant operation. FBI, possibly. Could be they’re after James Kandee and I’m just a small part. A pawn.
Back up to Central Park. Slowly. The police wouldn’t expect anyone to return to the central location where they were first spotted and that’s exactly why I’m headed back there.
The post-race clean-up operation is in full swing. I have an hour to wait before my extraction.
The park’s getting dark in places but it’s still open. Doesn’t close until one a.m. I checked once why a place like Central Park isn’t well-lit and covered by cameras. The best answer I could find was that if they lit the place then it’d need policing. You light an area and you make it safe and then you need to police it to make sure it continues to stay safe. All 843 acres of it. With an already stretched police department. So they leave it wild. The only truly dark place in Manhattan outside of the waterways.