Requiem for an Assassin

the change, and why only now? Could it be because he didn’t want to be seen by the same attendant every time he came here?
    I’d come across this kind of thing before. When a large part of your job involves following people surreptitiously, discovering patterns you can exploit, you see a lot of behavior that goes unnoticed by the outside world. Drugs. Prostitution. Gambling. Affairs. Closet homosexuality. Addictions and compulsions, cravings and lust. The real world, the id, the dark constants of our nature.
    Maybe it wasn’t a mistress. Maybe it was a gay lover, or a catamite, or some such thing. My gut told me a mistress, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I had a new focal point, one potentially more accessible than his home or his office.
    I crossed Prince and parked in front of a hydrant on the other side of Mott. I didn’t expect to be more than five minutes, and confirming my suspicions would be worth the small chance of a ticket, and the even smaller chance that the BMW’s presence here today would ever be discovered as meaningful.
    I got out, the hat and shades already on, and headed north on Mott, my breath fogging in the cold. Cars and trucks lurched along on Prince in front of me, gears grinding, the occasional horn honking. I heard children yelling and laughing somewhere, probably at a nearby school. A construction team was tearing up a sewer line, and for a moment the explosive pounding of a jackhammer drowned out everything else. I glanced left at the corner of Prince and bingo, there he was, wearing a navy suit, coming toward me. The light across Prince was red, and I was happy to be a good, law-abiding citizen and wait for it. It gave Accinelli time to make a left on Mott and get ahead of me.
    The light changed. I crossed Prince with a dozen other people and stayed on the west side of Mott, the opposite side from Accinelli, and therefore the more likely to escape his notice if he were to glance behind. To my left was a church, the grounds around it enclosed by an old brick wall. On the right side of the street, various awnings and signs for ground-level stores and cafés; above them, fashionable, red brick apartment buildings that had once been tenements and warehouses, dark fire escapes zigzagging down their façades. I counted four floors of living space on some of the buildings; others had five. My eyes tracked everywhere as I walked. Two men and a woman stood smoking and shivering in front of a place called Café Gitane, but they were too young, too hipster-looking, and I didn’t make them as a problem. An attractive brunette in a long leather coat was rolling up the metal gate in front of a store, opening for the day’s business. She displayed no awareness of anything around her and again I detected no problems. A bike messenger in dreadlocks and shades was taking a package from a woman in an apron in the doorway of a florist called Polux. Like everyone else I’d seen so far, they paid no attention to the street scene around them. They felt like civilians, and nothing more.
    As he walked, Accinelli reached into his pocket and took out a set of keys. Right, keys out now for faster entry, don’t want to linger on the street where you might be seen. About halfway down the street, he turned and went up a flight of four granite stairs to an apartment building entranceway. He unlocked the metal framed glass door and went in.
    I continued on Mott to Houston, then crossed the street and came back, checking hot spots. Everything still seemed fine. No good hides for a sniper, I was glad to see: this stretch of Mott offered no parking; the crosstown traffic on Houston and Prince rendered untenable a shot from a vehicle farther away; and with the church grounds across the street from the apartment, the only accessible windows and rooftops were directly overhead, too sharp an angle to be useful.
    I stopped in front of the building Accinelli had entered. It was sandwiched between two stores: a high-fashion men’s clothing consignment shop called INA Men, and a tiny place called A Détacher that looked equal parts fashion gallery and couture boutique. If I were Accinelli, paying my mistress’s rent, I would have selected a spot very much like this, with the church across the street, so no apartment windows from which someone might look down and see me, and the easy access to the Williamsburg Bridge and the LIE beyond it. Also, the nearby boutiques that would provide cover for