Chapter 18: move on (rated T for adult themes); forty-four; Inside

Lower Manhattan, January, 2015

It was hard walking on the snowy sidewalk, the two of them holding each other up as they weaved along. Root giggled like some kind of schoolgirl, her arm draped around the shoulders of her new friend – the one she'd just met at her favorite bar.

She'd gone there alone, late, and it was already crowded, and so loud, the music drowning any hope of conversation. Up at the bar, she'd just started to sip her drink when the first one came up alongside. Root felt someone lean in close, reaching out to signal the bartender for another, but pressing in on her as if losing her balance.

"Oh, sorry," she'd said, and leaned in a little harder, with her forearm on Root's shoulder to steady herself.

Then, " – think I've had one too many."

Root looked up from her own drink, and in the dim light, for a second, her heart jumped – in that flash, Sameen. Same body shape and height, but Root couldn't see her face.

Her breath caught, and she could feel herself reeling that Sameen was there. She'd come to her senses, come back to find her – tell her how sorry she was, how miserable she'd been after their fight – all of this in just that first flash of recognition.

She should have called. Let her know she was coming home. Damn. She could be so infuriating.

But then, when she'd leaned forward into the light for her drink, of course, she wasn't Sameen at all.

That hurt in Root's chest. And it even hurt in the place on her left cheek where the bruise was, from Sameen's strike that night in the shower. Root reached up with the back of her left hand to the spot on her cheek. And all the pain came pouring back in. That same pain, wave after wave of it, for days since Sameen had left for Italy. She couldn't get herself out of it. She was drowning in it.

Enough! She'd had enough – that's why she'd dressed up tonight, fixed her hair, come out to her favorite bar tonight. To forget.

This woman at her side, this stranger - not Sameen. But enough like her to make Root think of her – and she didn't want to have to think of her. Not tonight. Root reached over and pulled the woman's arm from her shoulder.

"I'm waiting for someone," Root said – straight into her face, a little too loud, but the music was so loud she couldn't help it. The stranger backed away, hollow eyes, mouthing something Root couldn't hear in the din. But at least she was gone; and Root could pull herself back together again. She took a long drink from her glass. Half-gone in one long pull. She could feel the warm feeling start to spread through her body from the drink. Ah, yes, more of that, please. She smiled inside herself.

She let her mind drift, sipping now, feeling the cold drink slide down inside, and turn to warmth – like her own internal glow. Just stay with that, she said to herself, stay with that and forget about the rest.

Days had gone by, days followed by long nights – and no word. Nothing from Sameen. She'd checked her phone for messages – fifty times a day. Empty silence. This wasn't right. This was Sameen being cruel – oblivious and cruel. Didn't she get this? Didn't she know how much this hurt?

Root lifted her glass and drank down the rest, raising her hand to the bartender for another. She was going to forget about Sameen tonight, stop consuming herself.

Whatever it took, it was time to move on.

Manhattan, January, 2015

The doorbell rang, startling him for a moment, and then he realized his food was finally there. He slid his slippers on, and hurried to the panel next to the apartment door. On the screen it showed the outside of the apartment building – a fuzzy image of the deliveryman, standing on the stoop with a white bag in his hand. Leon buzzed him into the lobby, saying he'd be right down.

He was careful not to say anything to the deliveryman, who spoke Mandarin, too. It was part of his strategy to avoid letting Greer and his people know that he spoke the language. That way he could listen in when Kara and the Zheng were making their plans. It never hurt to keep some assets a secret.

So, he smiled at the thin old man in the lobby. He handed him the correct change, plus a little something for his trouble, riding it over from the take-out two streets down, and in the snow. He could see the flakes melting on the man's clothes. Leon looked out the glass on the front door and could see the snow coming down, straight down from the sky, like it meant business. It was starting to stick on the grass and the pavement.

He'd been hard at work all day, and hadn't even heard the forecast. Snow. Always a problem in the City. Where do you put it all? And how do you get the streets cleaned? Where do all the cars go? He nodded to the old man, who turned and went back out into the snow, wiping his seat clean on the old bicycle with the basket on the front. He had another stop, another white bag in the basket.

Leon went back up to his apartment, and into his kitchen. The silver tin was still hot when he slid it out onto the counter. He pulled down a bowl and took out the carton of white rice from the bag. With chopsticks from the package, he scraped some of the sticky rice packed down inside the carton out into the bottom of the bowl. And then, he pried open the cover of the tin and lifted shrimp and veggies from the sauce onto the rice in the bowl. Then he lifted the tin, burning his fingertips, and poured some sauce over the top.

The tin hit the counter as it slipped from his fingers – too hot for him to stand it any longer, and hot sauce slopped out onto his shirt and pants. Expletives, in Mandarin, spewed out, while he backed away, and wiped himself down with a handful of napkins from the bag.

Lucky he hadn't done this in the middle of his work table, where all the maps were spread out. And his notes. All the notes he'd written to himself, from the research he'd done. Soaked in sauce, ink running. Ruined. It would have been a nightmare, to re-create everything he'd done. Thank God for small favors, he thought.

He sat down on the couch, in the living room, shoveling rice and hot food from the bowl into his mouth. This was his first real break all day. He was getting down to the last dozen or so locations. He'd started with nearly fifty, forty-four to be exact, and his heart had sunk when he first saw the list. But, little by little, he'd whittled them down to these last few.

Harold Finch's library office. He'd been inside it – just once – but the memory of it kept haunting him. There was something about the place, something that should make it easier to find. It was there inside his brain, but he couldn't get to it, couldn't remember what it was.

When the Man in the Suit had blindfolded him and brought him to Harold's office, there was something about it. Something he was desperate to recall. If he could just remember, he could cut through the rest of the list and find the one he was looking for – and the prize, the prize that Greer had promised for finding it, would be his.

He shoveled more food – hadn't realized he was so hungry, but this was his first meal of the day as he thought about it. He was consumed by it, this project. He thought about the trips to the public library, and the first meeting with one of the reference librarians. The man had been underwhelmed with the story Leon had concocted, about finding the right sites for shooting some movie scenes.

"Mayor's office," the librarian had said, trying to shoo him off like some low-life street-person in his midst. He could almost sense his bow-tied torso leaning away, as if Leon was going to infest him with something. So Leon had persisted. It gave him great pleasure to stand there, sidle in a bit closer, and watch the librarian pull back further, flaring his nostrils, reaching for pen and paper on a shelf behind him. He jotted, in perfect script, the name of another reference librarian he was certain could help. And then, he'd crossed his arms and pushed out his chest as if to say, "you're dismissed."

Leon took the paper, bowed graciously, and turned away, muttering expletives in Mandarin as he read the name written on the paper: Florence Eldridge. He thought perhaps that he needed a change in strategy. He went back home, and sat down at his computer. Very quickly, he found her on the library website. Miss Florence Eldridge. No smile. Grey hair. Skinny. With the collar of her dress buttoned all the way up to the top button. A perfect match for Bow-tie. Leon shuddered.

He looked through the list of Miss Eldridge's interests and one of them caught his eye: History and Memorabilia of the New York Public Library System.

Bingo. The old geezer had probably lived through most of it herself, personally. He leaned back in his chair and smiled to himself. Kill her with kindness. His new strategy. If he was going to find Harold Finch's office, he'd need to find someone who knew where the old abandoned sites could have been. Someone must know. There must be some record somewhere. He just needed a lead, a little guidance.

He was going to enjoy this. He went into his bathroom and showered. Then, he assembled some supplies from a shelf in his closet, things that had been useful for him in the past. He had some packs of makeup and a few wedge-shaped sponges to apply it. But for now, he just wanted to make a few easy changes to his appearance.

He picked up a bit of the makeup on a sponge and rubbed it lightly into his hair at the temples, and then a tiny bit of white make-up on another sponge, over the same spots. It turned his hair gray there, just a little, but the effect was already amazing. He barely recognized himself. And then, he added glasses, round metal-rimmed glasses, long out of style. A purple long-sleeved dress shirt with a collar, and an argyle sweater vest, over gray corduroy pants. He looked at himself in the mirror. Aged twenty years, maybe more. He was satisfied. But there was another way to find out if his disguise worked.

He showed up at the library, with sheafs of paper under his arm, jotting notes on a yellow sticker on top. He looked down at the librarian, the one with the bow-tie, and held his breath for a moment. The man glanced up at him and then leaned forward, toward him.

"May I help you?"

Manhattan, January, 2015

The subway from Queens was nearly empty at this time of day. The usuals were there in their usual seats, eyes closed, bodies swaying with the motion of the subway car rolling along underground. He watched the people, and when he was tired of them, he looked out into the darkened tunnel. Little to see, until the stations, when the brighter lights lit the scene and he could see the tiles on the walls, and numbers painted on the steel beams, identifying each station. If you could read them. Ping didn't read English. But he knew the stops along the way, and the one where he needed to stand up, to be ready for the next one, where the doors would open and a voice would announce something on the loudspeaker before the doors closed again. Usually, he was the only one leaving that car, and the platform was deserted. It was better this way. After the crowds had gone away and the daily commute was finished. Late in the evening was the best time to travel, to do what he had to do.

He would walk up the steps, the brass railing smooth under his hand, and down a hallway with low ceilings and garish lighting before he got to the stairs that lead up to the street level. Even at this hour, the streets were busy. There were always people out on the streets, walking, signaling for a car, on their way to some place. Sometimes, they'd wave or say something. He'd gotten used to it, seeing people all the time. It was not how it was back home. The little cluster of shacks nearby where he went for supplies. They watched him come and go, their eyes suspicious. He was a stranger. Not one of them. They never spoke unless spoken to. They disappeared from the streets when a stranger happened by.

This City engulfed you. You were a dot in the vastness of its space. And that was something Ping could understand. On his hill, outside his shack, the vastness of the Steppes spread in all directions, grasslands waving in the wind, to the horizon. And the sky was so black, the stars sparkled like crystals from the ground, so many it made his head spin to see them.

Here in the City, with all the light shining up, the sky was dimmer, shrouded by the millions of pinpoints of light. The stars in the sky were weaker, the sky grayer, washed out, not the intense blackness he was used to.

Ping was used to the City sky now, and the buildings that rose up from the concrete blocks to the clouds. And the heat and smell from the grates above the subway tracks, and the rumble of the cars rolling down the tracks below his feet, deep down in the tunnels.

This place never rested. It was alive, constantly moving, like a serpent. It would devour you if you let it.

He made his way through the streets, to his goal. A building with a wide brick face, and a stairway on the front, leading to a black door. As he approached, he looked for lights on inside. Nothing more than the few automatic lights that came on by themselves with the darkness. He walked by the stairway, and glanced up the stairs. They were empty. He walked down the street a little further, then stopped to look at a car on the street, as though it had caught his attention. He spent some time, admiring the lines, walking around it again and again, so anyone watching might have forgotten the direction he'd come from.

He doubled back to the apartment, and slowed in front of it, lifting his hands in front of his face, like he was trying to light a cigarette. He looked up the stairs again. Still empty. He made it look like he was having trouble lighting his cigarette, and walked into the shelter of the stairway. Leaves and some paper had blown up the steps in a swirl, and he was pleased. He climbed them to the top step, and leaned down, reaching with his fingers to the lower corner of the doorway. There, in the dark, he could feel, but not really see, a thin slender piece of bamboo reed he'd fastened to the door. Still there. No one had opened the door, disturbing the reed from its spot. The tall American had not come home yet, at least, not through this door.

He raised himself up, his leg complaining when he pushed off on the right side. He groaned softly to himself. The winter weather. It always made this old wound start hurting again. He flexed and straightened it a few times to see if it was going to pop, before he turned back down the stairs. It held. Sometimes, if he wasn't careful, or in the heat of battle, it would give out, just like when the injury had first happened. A kick to the inside of his knee that he hadn't blocked well. He felt the pop as the sinew on the outer part of the joint ruptured, and he went down to the ground. He would never forget how vulnerable he'd been in that moment. It could have been his last breath, right there.

Ping descended the rest of the steps, carefully, and then went out into the street, remembering to hold his hand to his face, as though smoking his cigarette. Down the street, to the alleyway, he ducked in and walked down the narrow lane to the back corner of the apartment building. He swung left, down further to another stairway. No one was around this back exit for the building. A single weak light lit the stairs, and he climbed them, flushing out a cat at the top, who was often there. His footsteps scared it away, and he moved closer to the door, feeling for a matching piece of reed hidden at the corner. It was there, undisturbed. This door hadn't been used either.

He nodded to himself. He was a patient man. The signs were all pointing to their next meeting. They would meet on his terms, on his turf. But if the Tall American came here, instead, a little surprise would be waiting. Inside.