1142 7 March 1943
Dick Canidy stood on the sidewalk in front of a huge stone lion that overlooked Fifth Avenue and held out his right arm, trying to flag down a taxicab. All the ones headed south zipped past him, and it was not until the Forty-second Street traffic light cycled to red that a cabbie heading north did a U-turn and pulled up in front of the library and Canidy.
This is all going too well, he thought as he opened the cab’s back door and got in. The other shoe is bound to drop at any moment.
“Gramercy Park Hotel,” he told the cabbie and put his heavy leather attaché case on the floor as the cab shot south toward Twenty-first Street.
What had been going well was his luck with finding research material on Sicily.
After getting off the phone with Eric Fulmar, he had moved on to taking care of the morning’s three s’s, and in the course of covering the latter two at once—shaving in the shower—he came up with the idea of seeing what the New York Public Library had on the shelf.
And had was the key word, as Canidy’s bag now held what little the NYPL had held on Sicily deep in its dusty stacks.
He hadn’t been greedy per se—where there were duplicates of a title, he took only one—but his cache contained a dozen books, including the expected Michelin Guide, and—a genuine surprise—eighteenth-century British Admiralty charts (“Produced by the Royal Hydrographic Office”) that showed the coastlines of Sicily and Italy and all of their islands, the details of their ports, as well as detailed information on such curious things as caves and the erosion of coastal areas.
It had taken Canidy more effort to fit all of his find into his bag than it had to sneak the loot out of the library. He had not gone out past the front desk but through the janitor’s door that was ajar at the back of the building and had slipped into the stream of pedestrians coming out of Bryant Park.
Next thing he knew, he had been in front of the lion and then in the backseat of the cab that had stopped just for him.
Yeah. Something is going to go to hell at any moment…. The cab arrived at the Gramercy ten minutes later and Canidy paid the fare. He went in the hotel and took the elevator to the sixth floor.
In his room, he turned on the radio and tuned in to the National Broadcasting Corporation’s Blue Network, which was playing jazz. He opened his attaché case and, feeling somewhat like a mischievous underclassman in the lower school at St. Paul’s in Cedar Rapids, brought out his “borrowed” library research and began laying it out.
He unfolded two of the British Admiralty charts on the couch and made a small stack of the books on the coffee table, putting them next to where he had left a pair of socks and the duck call that he’d bought at Leonwood’s.
After studying the charts for a few minutes, he thought he would have a better understanding of the islands if he had Francesco Nola take him on a tour, so to speak, explaining what was what and who was where.
He then picked up the Michelin Guide and went to settle into the armchair. But first, he decided, he’d call room service and ask if the kitchen could put together for delivery one of those nice sliced-steak-on-a-hard-crusted-baguette sandwiches that he had had the night before at the bar and a pot of coffee.
The person answering the room service phone said that a server would have it up to room 601 within the half hour, twelve-thirty at the latest.
Canidy hung up the phone, wondering, Okay, wasthat an undercover Navy guy or was it a member of the mob’s union? And whichever one it was, how soon before my lunch order is passed up the intel line?
Three hours later, as Canidy picked up the fat slice of garlic pickle from the plate on the room service cart that had held his sandwich, there came a knock at the door. He took a bite of the pickle, tossed the remainder of it on the plate, then went to the door.
“Yeah?” he said, standing beside it.
“It’s me,” Fulmar’s voice answered.
Canidy smiled and quickly unlocked, then opened, the door.
Fulmar, blond and lithe, stood there in a nicely cut dark gray J. Press two-piece suit, a white button-down-collar shirt, and a blue-and-silver rep tie. He held a brown suitcase in his right hand and a brown leather briefcase in his left.
“Come in!” Canidy said.
Fulmar came in and put down his bags and they embraced warmly.
Canidy took a step back and looked him over.
“Why do I suddenly feel like there’s going to be a meeting with the headmaster and adults?”
Fulmar grinned.
“I don’t know. We’d have to have done something significant to require one these days. The government pays us to do things we used to get in trouble for.”
Canidy smiled as he grabbed the suitcase. He carried it to the far corner of the room.
“The couch folds out into a bed,” he said. “Have you had lunch?”