New York - The Novel

restaurant where they served a very reasonable prix fixe menu with minimal choice, which changed every night. The Carnegie Hill area, lying as it did at the very top of the Upper East Side, contained a lot of young professionals who were glad of a chance to get an inexpensive meal in amusing surroundings, and the little restaurant’s half-dozen tables were seldom empty.
    She was going to meet her brother Martin. If he turned up.
    To be fair to Martin, he had been quite specific. The bookstore wherehe worked had an author reading that evening. If he was needed, he’d have to take a rain check. If not, he’d see her at the restaurant.
    Maggie had organized her time efficiently. She’d scheduled her doctor’s appointment, for a check-up, at five thirty. That was on Park in the Eighties. It gave her time to return home afterward, do the laundry she hadn’t been able to do the previous weekend, then go out to the restaurant. After she’d eaten, she’d take a taxi back to her Midtown office, and work until maybe midnight or one o’clock on a contract she was preparing. Maggie was a lawyer. She worked for Branch & Cabell. And like all the young associates at the big Manhattan law firms, she worked very hard. The lawyers at Branch & Cabell were almost immortals. They did not need to pause for rest or sleep. They worked in their wood-paneled skyscraper, advising the powerful, and sent out their mighty bills for the midnight hours.
    Maggie was happy with her life. She’d been born in the city, but when she was eight years old, her parents had moved out. Her father Patrick, whom she sometimes suspected was more interested in baseball than he was in being an insurance broker, always liked to say that after the Giants had departed the city for San Francisco, and the Dodgers for Los Angeles, he couldn’t think of a damn reason to stay there. But the truth was that her parents had been just one of hundreds of thousands of white, middle-class families who, in the fifties and sixties, had deserted the increasingly troubled streets of Manhattan for the peaceful suburbs.
    It had worried her parents that her brother had gone to live in the city back in 1969. When she had started working for Branch & Cabell they had been even more concerned. They’d insisted on seeing her apartment before she rented it, and when she told them that she intended to jog around the reservoir in Central Park, which was only minutes from her door, they had made her promise never to do so alone or after dark.
    “I’ll only jog when everyone else does,” she told them. And indeed, in the summer months when she went out at seven in the morning, there were dozens of people doing the same thing. “Jackie Onassis jogs round the reservoir, too,” she told her mother. Not that she’d ever seen Jackie Onassis, but she’d heard it was true, and she hoped it would help to reassure her.
    This summer, there was another threat to worry them.
    “I just wish the police would catch this terrible man,” her motherwould say, whenever she telephoned. Maggie couldn’t blame her. The Son of Sam, as he called himself, had scared a lot of people in recent months, shooting young women, and sending strange letters to the police and a journalist, stating that he would strike again. His attacks had been in Queens and the Bronx so far, but reminding her mother of this fact had done no good. “How do you know he won’t strike in Manhattan next?” she had said, and of course Maggie hadn’t got an answer.
    It had been stiflingly hot and close all day. It felt like the start of a serious heatwave. She had changed into a light cotton skirt and blouse, and she was looking forward to a long, cold drink.

    Juan Campos stood on the sidewalk and stared across the great divide. He too had noticed the hot and muggy weather, and right now, he sensed a heavy, electric feel in the air. He expected the rumble of thunder at any time.
    He looked toward Central Park. His girlfriend Janet lived on the West Side, on Eighty-sixth near Amsterdam. She was walking across the park to meet him.
    An ambulance, siren moaning and horn blaring, came round the corner from Third Avenue and raced along the north side of the street toward Madison. This was nothing out of the ordinary. There were always ambulances making a noise on East Ninety-sixth Street, because the hospital was so nearby.
    Juan was standing at the intersection of Ninety-sixth and Park. The apartment he’d recently moved into