Gone Tomorrow

the other way.
    Next stop, somewhere east of Fifth and south of 59th.

Chapter 59
    Madison Square Park nestles against the south end of Madison Avenue, right where it starts at 23rd Street. Madison Avenue runs straight for a hundred fifteen blocks, to the Madison Avenue Bridge, which leads to the Bronx. You can get to Yankee Stadium that way, although other routes are better. I planned on covering maybe a third of its length, to 59th Street, which was a little north and west of where Lila Hoth had said she wasn’t, on Third and 56th.
    It was as good a place to start as any.
    I took the bus, which was a slow, lumbering vehicle, which made it a counterintuitive choice for a wild-eyed fugitive, which made it perfect cover for me. Traffic was heavy and we passed plenty of cops, some on foot, some in cars. I looked out the window at them. None of them looked back in at me. A man on a bus is close to invisible.
    I stopped being invisible when I got out at 59th Street. Prime retail territory, therefore prime tourist territory, therefore reassuring pairs of policemen on every corner. I took a cross-street over to Fifth and found a line of vendors at the base of Central Park and bought a black T-shirt with New York City written on it, and a pair of counterfeit sunglasses, and a black baseball cap with a red apple on it. I changed shirts in a restroom in a hotel lobby and came back to Madison looking a little different. It was four hours since any on-duty cop had spoken to his watch commander. And people forget a lot in four hours. I figured that tall and khaki shirt would be all that anyone remembered. Nothing I could do about my height, but the new black upper body might let me slide by. Plus the writing on the shirt, and the shades, and the hat, all of which made me look like a regular out-of-town idiot.
    Which I was, basically. I had no real clue as to what I was doing. Finding any concealed hideout is difficult. Finding one in a densely-populated big city is close to impossible. I was just quartering random blocks, following a geographic hunch that could have been completely wrong to start with, trying to find reasons to narrow it further. The Four Seasons Hotel. Not adjacent, but comfortably proximate . Which meant what? A two-minute drive? A five-minute walk? In which direction? Not south, I thought. Not across 57th Street, which is a major cross-town thoroughfare. Two-way, six lanes. Always busy. In the micro-geography of Manhattan, 57th Street was like the Mississippi River. An obstacle. A boundary. Much more inviting to slip away to the north, to the quieter, darker blocks beyond.
    I watched the traffic and thought: not a two-minute drive. Driving implied a lack of control, a lack of flexibility, and delays, and one-way streets and avenues, and parking difficulties, and potentially memorable vehicles waiting in loading zones, and license plates that could be traced and checked.
    Walking was better than driving, in the city, whoever you were.
    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 curb. 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 gray 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. Neighboring 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, single-front, five-story brick, weathered, peeling, spalling, stained, somewhat decrepit. Dirty windows, sagging lintels, flat roofs, weeds along the cornice, old iron fire