Gone Tomorrow

I took 58th Street, and walked to the hotel’s back entrance. It was just as splendid as the front entrance. There was brass and stone and there were flags flying and porters in uniform and doormen in top hats. There was a long line of limousines waiting at the kerb. Lincolns, Mercedes, Maybachs, Rolls-Royces. Well over a million dollars’ worth of automotive product, all crammed into about eighty feet. There was a loading dock, with a grey roll-up door, closed.

I stood next to a bell boy, with my back to the hotel door. Where would I go? Across the street was nothing but a solid line of high buildings. Mostly apartment houses, with the ground floors leased to prestige clients. Directly opposite was an art gallery. I squeezed between two chrome bumpers and crossed the street and glanced at some of the paintings in the window. Then I turned and looked back from the far sidewalk.

To the left of the hotel, on the side nearer Park Avenue, there was nothing very interesting.

Then I looked to the right, along the block as it approached Madison, and I got a new idea.

The hotel itself was recent construction on an insane budget. Neighbouring buildings were all quiet and prosperous and solid, some of them old, some of them new. But at the western end of the block there were three old piles in a row. Narrow, singlefront, five-storey brick, weathered, peeling, spalling, stained, somewhat decrepit. Dirty windows, sagging lintels, flat roofs, weeds along the cornices, old iron fire escapes zigzagging down the top four floors. The three buildings looked like three rotten teeth in a bright smile. One had an old out-of-business restaurant for a ground-floor tenant. One had a hardware store. The third had an enterprise abandoned so long ago I couldn’t tell what it had been. Each had a narrow door set unobtrusively alongside its commercial operation. Two of the doors had multiple bell pushes, signifying apartments. The door next to the old restaurant had a single bell push, signifying a sole occupier for the upper four floors.

Lila Hoth was not a Ukrainian billionaire from London. That had been a lie. So whoever she really was, she had a budget. A generous budget, certainly, to allow for suites in the Four Seasons as and when necessary. But presumably not an infinite budget. And town houses in Manhattan run to twenty or more million dollars to buy, minimum. And multiple tens of thousands of dollars a month to rent.

Privacy could be achieved much more cheaply in tumbledown mixed-use buildings like the three I was looking at. And maybe there would be other advantages, too. No doormen nearby, fewer prying eyes. Plus maybe a presumption that an operation like a restaurant or a hardware store would get deliveries at all hours of the night and day. Maybe all kinds of random comings and goings could happen without attracting much notice at all.

I moved down the street and stood on the kerb opposite the three old piles and stared up at them. People pushed past me in continuous stream on the sidewalk. I stepped into the gutter, to get out of the way. There were two cops on the far corner of Madison and 57th. Fifty yards away, on a diagonal. They were not looking my way. I looked back at the buildings and reviewed my assumptions in my head. The 6 train at 59th and Lexington was close by. The Four Seasons was close by. Third Avenue and 56th Street was not close by. That’s not close to me. Anonymity was guaranteed. Cost was limited. Five for five. Perfect. So I figured maybe I was looking for a place just like one of the three right in front of me, located somewhere within a fan-shaped five-minute radius east or west of the hotel’s back door. Not north, or Susan Mark would have parked in midtown and aimed to get out of the subway at 68th Street. Not south, because of 57th Street’s psychological barrier. Not somewhere else entirely, because they had used the Four Seasons as a front. Somewhere else entirely, they would have used a different hotel. New York City does not lack for impressive establishments.

Impeccable logic. Maybe too impeccable. Confining, certainly. Because if I stuck with the assumption that Susan Mark would have gotten out at 59th Street and aimed to approach from the north, and that 57th Street was a conceptual barrier to the south, then 58th Street was the whole ballgame, right there. And crosstown blocks in Manhattan take about five minutes to walk. Therefore a five-minute radius left or right out of the hotel’s back door would end on either the exact block I was currently loitering on, or the next one to the east, between Park and Lex. And tumbledown mixed-use properties are rare on blocks like those. Big money chased them away long ago. It was entirely possible I was looking at the only three left standing in the whole of the zip code.

Therefore it was entirely possible I was looking at Lila Hoth’s hideout.

Entirely possible, but most unlikely. I believe in luck as much as the next guy, but I’m not insane.