Michael Ledwidge: Alert

“A what in the what?” I said.

Emily rolled her eyes.

“Does it matter, Mike? They went around it with some computer stuff. Bottom line, we can look at a bad guy’s files, even turn on his webcam and microphone, which is what they did here.”

“And you searched their files?” I said to Chuck. “Did you find the ransom video?”

“No, it’s not there. They must have removed it,” he said, squinting.

“What about encryption? This guy is a hacker himself,” I said. “He has to use encryption, right?”

“He had layers upon layers of it, but we looked at the PC’s recorded keystrokes and got the passwords to the encryption software he used.”

“Got it,” I said, gazing at the picture again.

I concentrated on the building beyond the window. It had setbacks and some fairly elaborate ornamentation in the stonework. Some stone wreaths and a lot of fleurs-de-lis. Where was this building? It definitely seemed familiar.

“Hey, wait. Did you get any audio?” Emily said.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Chuck said with a mischievous smile as he clicked a terminal’s button.

“We picked this up just three minutes ago,” he said. “This is a live feed. Listen carefully.”

We did. There were sirens and traffic, and then we heard it. A soft, rhythmic buzzing sound.

“No,” I said. “That’s not what it sounds like, is it?”

“Oh, yes, it is,” said Chuck, rubbing his hands together. “Someone is close to that computer, and they’re snoring. We heard a door open ten minutes ago, then somebody creaking down onto what has to be a bed or something.”

“Yevdokimov! Has to be!” Emily said. “He’s there right now!”

“Wherever the hell ‘there’ is,” I said as I gazed at the photo again. “This building in the window here. I feel like I know it. I just can’t place it.”

“It’s definitely in Manhattan, definitely somewhere below Ninety-Sixth Street,” Chuck offered.

“Old, dirty, once-grand office buildings. Where in the city do you have these old, dirty buildings? Basically all over the damn place,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Tribeca, maybe?” Chuck said. “Or SoHo?”

“Yes, kind of,” I said. “But in SoHo, the buildings are usually older and have elaborate fire escapes and all that painted castiron cladding. With all these setbacks, this building is prewar — classic- Superman era.”

“It looks huge,” said Emily.

“It also looks high up,” Chuck said. “Ten or twelve stories, maybe.”

“Wait. I got it!” I said, violently shaking the photograph. “The fleurs-de-lis!”

“The what?” said Chuck.

“The fleurs-de-lis. The intricate stonework design here under the windows. And the setbacks. I used to work in Midtown South. I know where this is!”

“You know the building?” Emily said.

“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.”

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.