The Vanished Man

as from the pain and the suffocation, Amelia Sachs felt herself start to black out.
    No! Don’t fall under their feet. Don’t fall!
    Please!
    She couldn’t breathe. Not a cubic inch of air entered her lungs. Then she saw a knee inches from her face. It slammed into her cheek and stayed rooted there. She could smell dirty jeans, saw a scuffed boot in front of her eyes, inches away.
    Please don’t let me fall!
    Then she realized that maybe she already had.

Chapter Thirty-one
    Wearing a bellhop’s uniform that closely matched those worn by the staff at the Lanham Arms Hotel, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Malerick walked along the fifteenth-floor hallway of the hotel. He carried a heavy room service tray on which was a domed plate cover and a vase containing a huge red tulip.
    Everything about him was in harmony with his surroundings so as not to arouse suspicion. Malerick himself was the model of a deferential, pleasant bellhop. The averted eyes, the half smile, the unobtrusive walk, the spotless tray.
    Only one thing set him apart from the other bellhops here at the Lanham: under the metal warming dome on the tray was not a plate of eggs Benedict or a club sandwich but a loaded Beretta automatic pistol, equipped with a sausage-thick sound suppressor, and a leather pouch of lockpicking and other tools.
    “Enjoying your stay?” he asked one couple.
    Yes, they were, and they wished him a good afternoon.
    He continued to nod and smile at the guests returning to their rooms after Sunday brunch or on their way to sightsee on this fine spring afternoon.
    He passed a window, in which he could see a bit of green—a portion of Central Park. He wondered what sort of excitement was unfolding there at the moment, inside the white tent of the Cirque Fantastique—the place to which he’d spent the past few days directing the police with the clues he’d left at the sites of the murders.
    Or mis directing them, he should say.
    Misdirection and ruse were the keys to successful illusion and there was no one better at it than Malerick, the man of a million faces, the man who materialized like a struck match, who disappeared like a snuffed flame.
    The man who vanished himself.
    The police would be frantic, of course, looking for the gasoline bomb, which they believed would go off at any moment. But there was no bomb, no risk at all to the two thousand people at the Cirque Fantastique (no risk other than the possibility that some of them would be trampled to death in their mindless panic).
    At the end of the hallway Malerick glanced behind him and observed that he was alone. Quickly he set the tray on the floor near a doorway and lifted the cover. He collected the black pistol and slipped it into a zippered pocket in his bellman’s uniform. He opened the leather tool pouch, extracted a screwdriver and pocketed the pouch too.
    Moving fast, he unscrewed the metal guard that allowed the window to open only a few inches (human beings do seem to take any opportunity to kill themselves, don’t they? he reflected) and raised the window all the way. He carefully replaced the screwdriver in itsspot in the leather pouch and zipped it away. His strong arms deftly boosted him onto the sill. He stepped carefully out on the ledge, 150 feet above the ground.
    The ledge was twenty inches wide—he’d measured the same ledge from the window of the room he’d taken here a few days ago—and though he’d only done limited acrobatics in his life, he had the superb balance of all great illusionists. He moved along the limestone rim now as comfortably as if it were a sidewalk. After a stroll of only fifteen feet he came to the corner of the hotel and stopped, looking at the building next door to the Lanham Arms.
    This, an apartment building on East Seventy-fifth Street, had no ledges but did have a fire escape, six feet away from where he now stood—overlooking an air shaft filled with the restless churning of air conditioners. Malerick took a brief running start and leaped over the bottomless gap, easily reaching the fire escape and vaulting over the railing.
    He climbed up two flights and paused at a window on the seventeenth floor. A glance inside. The hallway was empty. He placed the gun and the toolkit on the window ledge then stripped off the fake bellhop’s uniform in one fast peel, revealing beneath it a simple gray suit, white shirt and tie. The gun went into his belt and he used the tools again to open the window lock. He