At twenty-four minutes past noon, standing at a first-floor rear window of the post office, I stood looking across the street to the north at the little wintertime park and the people moving along its crisscrossing paths, and the strangeness of what I was doing took hold of me. Staring out that soot-dirtied window, I was remembering the note I'd seen in Kate's apartment, the paper yellowing at the edges, its once-black ink rusted with time. And the meeting in this park, arranged by that note, became an ancient event, decades old and long since forgotten. Could it really be about to happen? I wasn't able to believe that it would. People, strangers, continued to walk out of and into the park and along the walks all around it. Just ahead and across the street to my right, Park Row, stood the five-story New York Times Building I'd seen the night Kate and I walked to the El station, and again it was strange knowing it still stood in twentieth-century Manhattan. Now in daylight, I read the long narrow signs, suspended just below windowsill level, of other lower-floor tenants of the building: FOREST, STREAM, ROD GUN ... LEGGO BROS.... The Times Building shared a common wall with another five-story stone building right behind it almost directly across the street to my right. It was nondescript, with tall narrow windows, its front—like the Times Building beside it and like most other such buildings in this area—hung with narrow gilt-on-black or black-on-white signs suspended just below the windows of the tenants. Then my eyes dropped to the street-level entrance, and Jake Pickering was standing in it. I was inside the post office, across the street from the south end of City Hall Park. The doorway in which Jake Pickering stood was recessed, several yards back from the street and up two or three steps from street level; it was almost directly to my right so that I could see him, but from the park ahead I knew he couldn't be seen. And he took care not to be seen, standing on the steps close beside the stone wall of the recessed doorway. He was searching the park across the street from him and ahead. Then, satisfied, he stepped quickly out, moved across the walk, and dodging through the traffic, he crossed Park Row and walked swiftly into the park, and directly to the center, where most of the walks converged. There he stood, hat on the back of his head, outer coat unbuttoned, hands jammed into his pants pockets, his jaws clenched on a cigar, angling it upward, and he waited.
Five minutes passed. I could see Pickering's breath; it was cold out there, and he felt it and began strolling slowly back and forth, a dozen yards each way from the center of the park. But he didn't button his coat or take his hands from his pockets or his cigar from his mouth. From time to time he puffed the cigar, its blue smoke mingling with the white vapor of his breath, and I realized that he was posing, offering a picture of a man at ease. And succeeding: His posture and slow walk, everything about him, said that he was relaxed and content, that he didn't even notice the cold. Five minutes more passed; the City Hall clock across the park said twelve thirty-five. And when I looked down from the clock the second man was well inside the park walking swiftly toward its center from the west. And I knew that the fleck of blue in his gloved hand (the event was no longer ancient; a chill moved along my spine at knowing that here I stood watching it begin) was the envelope I'd seen Pickering mail, held in the other man's hand now as a symbol of recognition. Pickering had seen him and was walking toward him; my breath was clouding the dirty pane, I was leaning so close, and I stepped back a grudging inch or so. Now Pickering was smiling, and the two men stopped, facing each other. As the second man tucked the blue envelope into an inner coat pocket, Pickering removed the cigar from his mouth, and I saw his beard move as he spoke, then the slight waggle of the other man's beard as he answered. At this distance they might have been black-bearded twins standing there on the path, each in shiny silk hat, dressed virtually alike, each with the portly figure of the day. Their heads turned as they glanced around, searching the park, and I resisted an impulse to duck from sight. Then Pickering pointed, and they angled across the park, toward me and toward a bench protected from the wind by the high stone base of the statue against which it stood. They reached it, and sat down almost hidden from my view by the statue's base, only the left knee and shoulder of one of them in my line of sight. I had to hear them, had to, and I walked swiftly out the rear doors, ran across the street behind the tail gate of a brewery wagon piled with wooden barrels, then walked into City Hall Park to the base of the statue. I turned around, and with my back nearly touching the base I stood frowning a little, occasionally glancing irritably along the path as though waiting for someone who was late. "...don't understand why," one voice was saying reasonably. "It's below freezing, turning colder momentarily, and there is a wind besides; no one sits in a park on a day like this. If you have no office of your own, there's the Astor House lobby just across the street; I'll stand treat at the bar." "Oh, I have an office of my own," Jake Pickering's voice said; there was a fat chuckle in it. "Not much of an office. Nothing like yours, I'll warrant. But still, you'd like to see it, wouldn't you? You won't, though. Not yet. No one sits in a park on a day like this; true. But that's why we're going to sit here; what I have to say is strictly between the two of us. The subject is Carrara marble; it brought you here. On the run. And it'll keep you here. In the cold. Andrew Carmody, the ever-so-eminent millionaire.""It brought me here," the other man replied levelly. "But not to be played with. So keep your remarks about my eminence to yourself, and say what you want without further ado, or I'll stand up, walk off, and be damned to you." "Good enough. You'll have to forgive me, but I have reached the culmination of several years' work and am enjoying my little triumph." "What do you want?" "Money." "Assuredly. As who does not? Get to the point." "All right. Cigar?" "No, thank you; I'll smoke my own." There was a silence, the strike of a match, the sound of cigars puffed into life; then Pickering spoke again. "I work in City Hall where I am a clerk, the lowest of the low. Yet I sought the job, sir! Leaving employment much more remunerative. Now, why? Why, you ask." "I didn't"—I heard Carmody puff at his cigar—"but continue." Pickering's voice lowered. "Tweed is my reason; are you surprised? He is dead in prison; the Tweed Ring is smashed and already half forgotten. Yet only a few years ago no day passed— remember?—that the Times did not speak of 'the slimy trail of the Tweed Ring.' Well, who stole more than thirty millions from the city? Was it only Tweed? Or Sweeny, Connolly, and A. Oakey Hall? No. Tweed had hundreds of willing helpers still undiscovered, each of whom took his share of the swag, large or small. So why have I spent two years at unsuitable employment, a filing clerk at City Hall?" Pickering's voice lowered even more, dramatically. "Because that's where the slimy trails are." I was alert, intent, breathing shallowly, not missing a word. Yet something nagged at the back of my mind, and when I recognized it I had to smile. In the way Pickering used his voice, in the words and phrases he chose, there was just a little more than drama; it edged toward melodrama. I think all of us generally act as we think we're supposed to. I had not one but two professors at college who would lean back in their chairs, listening and fitting their hands together fingertip to fingertip, professorially. I had a friend, a compulsive gambler, who often stood casually flipping and catching a coin, his face expressionless. And now Pickering and Carmody were acting their roles in time when the melodramatic conventions of the stage were largely accepted as representin(a) g reality. Deadly serious, meaning every word, each of them, I think, was also appreciating his own performance. "The slimy trails," Pickering was saying, "wind through aisle after aisle of filing cases. I realized that!" he said proudly. "I understood that Tweed Ring corruption was so widespread andwith so many ramifications that the evidence could never all be destroyed. It must exist still, I knew, buried among literally tons of old records, if only I were cute enough to recognize it when I came across it, and to fit its pieces together like a Christmas puzzle. So I became City Hall's most industrious clerk!" "Commendable. If you're looking for work, see my head bookkeeper." I heard a sound I'd come to recognize: the metallic snap of the gold protective cover of a watch lifted to reveal the face, then the very slightly different sound of its being snapped shut. Pickering said, "Yes, you're a busy man of affairs. But you have nothing more important, Mr. Carmody, nothing, than to listen to what I have to say. At whatever length I wish to say it!" There was a pause, then Pickering continued quietly, "I've spent endless hours during month after month in the file rooms, hunting those trails through the dust of the years. Discovering and following them as they emerged, losing them, rediscovering them days or weeks later among tens of thousands of false invoices, canceled bank drafts, padded receipts, incriminating messages,............