Trader's Wife by T Black

Author:T Black [Black, T. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-203145-7
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1998-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

22

SHE went into the street. She watched three men in hard hats perched high on the scaffolding. A balancing act of cold nerve.

The scent of clove oil in the elevator; the Russian woman had been in the building—a few minutes before her? Or had she just entered the place immediately after?

Sara crossed the street and looked up at the redbrick facade of the place. If the woman hadn’t been in the offices of White Sky, then she must have visited some other floor: Weinstock Holdings, possibly. Sara strolled to the end of the block. She considered the prospect of reentering the building and going to the premises of Weinstock, but she couldn’t see she had anything to gain from such a move. If she went back, and if the woman was still in there, what could come of an encounter with her? She didn’t want to look at that ancient face, the yellow hair, the cruel slit of that mouth. She didn’t want to look into the eyes of the person responsible for the abduction of her father. She sensed violent possibilities within herself—but what would it achieve to claw the crone’s painted mask with your fingernails? She had the feeling skin would peel from bone like corrupt, mummified flesh.

Besides, Sara had something else in mind, something that might ultimately be more constructive than a run-in with the old woman, which would be disagreeable at the very least.

She walked quickly in the direction of Amsterdam Avenue. She entered the first restaurant she found, a vegetarian place with scrubbed wood tables and a massive array of plants and waitresses who smiled as if they were stoned on some derivative of valerian root. She ordered a glass of papaya juice andasked to see the phone book. She took the directory to a table and flipped the pages until she found what she was looking for and jotted an address and phone number down on the back of one of the printout sheets. She left the place. She walked until she found a cab, which she rode as far as Madison and Forty-third.

The day felt like a rubber band stretched behind her to breaking point. She wanted to lie down somewhere and sleep, but she had to keep going because she didn’t have any choices. You move, keep moving, you don’t need to think, you don’t have to entertain images of your father, you go beyond contemplation of all your limited options, you just goddam go, you don’t wilt because of anything as inconvenient as an affliction of weariness.

She walked east along Forty-third. When she came to the address she was looking for, an elegantly restored town house, she paused, saw drapes bunched back neatly at windows, security alarms and video cameras placed over a glossy black front door. Now: either she climbed the steps and rang the doorbell or she turned and walked away. She kept gazing at the windows, wondering if this were the place where her father was being kept.

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