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“No, but I know the neighborhood. It’s the garment district. The West Side below Times Square,” I said, ushering Emily to the door. “Tell your buddies downstairs to lower the drawbridge, because we need to get uptown and pop this Russian clown before he wakes up
and we lose him again.”
Chapter 96
Siren cranking, we raced up the West Side Highway all the way to midtown. I got off at 34th and gunned it five blocks to Macy’s. The light was red on Eighth Avenue, but there were no cars coming from the east or south, so I hooked a shrieking, fishtailing left around a shocked-looking DOT parking-ticket lady standing in the intersection.
I’d turned off the siren by the time we arrived to a skidding stop six blocks north, at 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. If Yevdokimov was in the area and still sleeping, the one thing I didn’t want to do was wake him up.
We parked by the southeast corner of the intersection, where the statues were. One was a bronze eight-foot structure called The Garment Worker that depicted a sad, old-looking, wrinkly guy in a yarmulke bent over a sewing machine, working on some fabric. Next to him was a gigantic button with a needle stuck through it. Between the two sculptures stood a dozen NYPD uniforms from the Midtown South task force, whom I’d called for help in finding Yevdokimov’s hideout.
We rushed over to them, and I quickly took a radio from the task force sergeant, Rowe, before handing out photographs of both Yevdokimov and the building in his window.
“Remember, guys. You need to look up,” I said. “This fleur-de-lis architectural design on the building we’re looking for is going to be on the tenth floor or so.”
We sectored out the district and split up on foot into two-person teams. Emily and I walked south down the east side of Seventh Avenue. We passed a gimcrack tourist gift place and a seedy-looking barbershop with a sign that said it bought gold. Fifth Avenue this was not.
As we walked, we looked east and west, up and down the side streets. Every one of them was extremely congested. Double-parked delivery trucks in the streets, loading and unloading. Guys on sidewalks pushing racks of plastic-wrapped clothes. It was coming on the lunch rush now, and clusters of workers were spilling out of the old buildings and jamming up the already crowded dirty sidewalks.
“These buildings are tremendous,” Emily said as we walked with our necks craned and eyes up, like Iowa tourists fresh off the farm. “They almost look like a cross between art deco skyscrapers and factories.”
“That’s exactly what they used to be,” I said. “All these buildings are mostly offices now, but back in the old days, they were vertical clothing factories. The art deco–like setbacks were required so workers on the upper stories would have light and air.
“It’s hard to believe, but before manufacturing went to Asia, New York City was an industrial powerhouse. In the thirties and forties, seventy-five percent of women’s clothes in the country were made right here between Sixth and Ninth Avenues, from Forty-Second down to Thirtieth. They were stitched up and put on racks and then rolled over to Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth for sale. Everything was centered around Penn Station, so people from out of town could come in and shop. The garment district here is why New York’s fashion industry still leads the world and Seventh Avenue means fashion.”
“But if these were just factories, why so elaborate? Why all the architectural stuff, especially on the upper floors? You can’t even really see it from down here,” Emily said.
“The people who built them were poor Lower East Side Jews who came up out of the sweatshops and made good,” I said, remembering something I’d read. “They wanted to make their mark by building factories that had over-the-top class. Also, they had a heart and wanted the mostly female workers stuck in the buildings all day to have something pretty to look at out the window, hence the stringcourses and volutes and egg-and-dart molding on the upper floors.”
“How do you know so much about all this?” Emily said, giving me a baffled look.
“I’m not all brawn. I actually have a library card,” I said with a shrug. “I also used to walk an evening beat here when I was fresh out of the academy, and I used to wonder about the buildings, so I did some homework. You quickly run out of things to look at after all the pretty secretaries go home.”
We were at 36th Street, staring up at the setbacks of an old telephone-company building, when Chuck Jordan called.
“Mike, we’ve been monitoring the room, and it sounds like the person snoring just woke up and left.”
“Is the laptop still there?”
“Yes,” Chuck said. “No change with that. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe he just went out to get something to eat.”
I’d just hung up with Chuck when one of the uniforms hailed me on the radio.
“Hey, Detective. This is Sergeant Rowe,” he said. “I think you should head over here to Thirty-Seventh Street near Eighth. I’m not positive, but I think I found that doodad you’re looking for on a building about a quarter of the way toward Seventh.”
“Good job, Rowe,” I said as I grabbed Emily’s arm and immediately started hustling her west toward Eighth Avenue. “We’re about a block away. Don’t leave yet, and try to stay out of sight. Keep your eyes peeled for Yevdokimov coming out of the building across the street. It looks like he’s on the move.”
We heard the yelling right as we made it to the corner of Eighth.
A block to the north, at the intersection of 37th, there was some kind of commotion in the street between a guy in a car and some guys on a motorcycle.
The car was a silver Mercedes double-parked beside a sidewalk construction shed, its bald driver half out of its window as he yelled. The two guys on the motorcycle beside him were dressed in black and wearing black full-face helmets. The big glossy orange Japanese motorcycle they sat on was so close to the Benz it seemed to be leaning on its left rear quarter panel.
Had the bike tapped the Benz? I thought, staring, as I started crossing 36th. A fender bender?
As I reached the other corner of 36th, the motorcycle’s engine suddenly screamed as it roared away from the Benz like a rocket east up 37th.
East up westbound 37th! I thought as the driver threw open his door.
