Siegel, James - Derailed

This man was so evidently besotted with Lucinda — or whoever she was. He kept grabbing for her hand and gazing lovingly into her eyes.

I hadn’t been wrong about who he was. She was playing him just as she’d once played me. He was next.

How pathetic, I thought. How pitiable.

How exactly like I’d been.

When I’d looked into the picture frame that day in the candy store, I’d asked myself what it was that had made me such a target. But only briefly. Because I knew the answer. In the cold light of day, it was so easy to see just how much I’d been asking for it. For something. Anything. Anything at all to come rescue me from me.

I’d spent a lot of time replaying all the moments I’d spent with her, too, my rescuer. Only now remembering them just a little differently from before. Running them back and forth and back in my head, the way, in the days before computer editing systems, I used to have to run strips of celluloid through Moviolas until they frayed and split. I had to patch them with tape again and again and again, until the images formed actual cracks and nearly disintegrated into dust. Take the first time I met Lucinda. Here, I’ll take care of it, she’d said sweetly on the train that day, but when I looked closely now, I could already see ugly fissures crisscrossing her face as she offered a ten-dollar bill to the pissed-off conductor.

She’d picked me that day.

Lucinda and the man had worked their way over to the open coffee shop, where they sold fat-free peach muffins and doughy bagels. The man ordered coffees, and they stood elbow to elbow across a small table. Steam sometimes obscured their faces.

I kept my back to them. I flipped through newsstand magazines and peeked. I was worried about her seeing me, but less worried than I might have been.

My face had changed.

It had happened gradually, bit by bit. I’d lost weight. As my life seemed to implode, my appetite had lessened, waned, disappeared. My clothes began to hang on me. When Barry Lenge administered the coup de grâce and sent me into the ranks of the unemployed, I’d stopped shaving, too. My goatee had become a beard. A few days ago, I’d looked into the bathroom mirror and seen the kind of face you see in hostage dramas staring back. That haunted-looking overseas government official who’s finally been released after months of dark captivity. I looked like that.

Only I was still a hostage.

I kept peeking now.

It became hard watching them without actually being able to go over and confront them. Because now, in addition to feeling scared and naked and vulnerable, I felt angry. It welled up in me like sudden nausea. The kind of anger I’d up to this point reserved solely for God — on those days I believed in God and on the days I didn’t — for Anna’s disease. The kind of anger that caused me to clench my hands into fists and imagine landing them in Vasquez’s face. And hers.

But I resisted the urge to walk over and tell her that I was on to them. That I knew what she’d done to me. I needed to bide my time. To get Anna’s money back, I needed to find Vasquez; and to find Vasquez, I needed Lucinda.

That was my mantra. This was my mission.

She would lead me to him.

I guessed that Lucinda wasn’t a stockbroker anymore.

I overheard a conversation Lucinda had with the man at Penn Station on Wednesday morning the next week. The man mentioned selling short for a client, how this client was a veritable meal ticket for him, which meant that he was a stockbroker and Lucinda wasn’t. Because another stockbroker might be inclined to know people in other brokerage houses and might be inclined to ask them about their co-worker Lucinda, who, it would turn out, didn’t exist. No, Lucinda obviously had another occupation these days. A lawyer, an insurance agent, a circus clown. And Lucinda, no doubt, wasn’t even her name.

I knew the name of the man she was about to con out of his money, though. I knew this because another man had come up to them while they were having coffee together that same morning and said: Sam, Sam Griffen, how are you doing?

Not too well, actually. Mr. Griffen blanched — his face turning the color of soap, as Lucinda turned away and stared at the price list on the wall.

When Mr. Griffin regained his voice, he said: Fine.

Then Lucinda got up and walked off with her coffee cup — just another commuter on her way to the subway. And Mr. Griffen sat and talked with this unwelcome intruder for five minutes. When he left, Mr. Griffen sighed and wiped his face with a stained napkin.

I thought it was unnerving being this close to a victim without being able to warn him. Like standing next to a child who can’t see the speeding car bearing down on him but being forbidden to tell him to get out of the way. Watching this horrible accident unfold in close-up and super slow motion. The worst kind of voyeur.

I thought she saw me once.

I’d followed them to a coffee shop north of Chinatown one morning.

They’d taken a table by the window, and I saw Sam Griffin reach for her hand and Lucinda give it to him.

I couldn’t help remembering the way that hand had felt in my own. Just briefly. Remembering the things the hand had done to me, the pleasure it had conjured up for me that day at the Fairfax Hotel. Like opening up one Chinese box and finding another inside, and opening that one up, too, and then the next box, each box smaller and tighter than the previous one, opening them faster and faster until there were no boxes left and I was trying to catch my breath.

I was still trying to catch my breath, still lost in memories of guilty pleasure, when they exited the coffee shop. I had to turn and dart across the street. I had to hold my breath, count to ten, then slowly turn back, fingers crossed, and see if I’d been spotted.

No. They’d gone off somewhere in a taxi.

Then I lost them.

One day.

Two days.

Three days.

A week. No Lucinda. No Mr. Griffen. Nowhere.

I scoured Penn Station from one end to the other, coming early, staying late.

But nothing.

I started to panic, to think maybe I’d missed the boat. That she’d already taken Mr. Griffen off someplace for an afternoon of sex and Vasquez had already caught them in the act. That he’d already taken their wallets and asked Mr. Griffen why he was fucking around on his wife. Maybe even called Mr. Griffen at home and stated his dire need for a loan. Just ten thousand dollars, that’s all, and he’d be out of his hair.

When the next week came, and I still couldn’t find them, I was ready to give up. I was ready to admit that a forty-five-year-old ex–advertising executive had no business thinking he could win here. That I was hopelessly out of my element.

I was ready to throw in the towel.

Then I remembered something.

THIRTY-FIVE

Okay,” the deskman said. “How long you want it for?”

This deskman was the very same one who’d given me the key to room 1207 back in November when I’d stood in front of him with Lucinda on my arm.

I was back at the Fairfax Hotel, and the deskman was asking me exactly how long I’d be needing room 1207 for.

Good question.

“How much is it for two weeks?”

“Five hundred and twenty-eight dollars,” the man said.

“Fine,” I said. So far, I was on paid suspension. And $528 was a bargain in New York City, even if the room had bloodstains on the carpeting and the stink of sex in the mattress sheets.

I paid in cash and received my room key. There was a pile of magazines sitting on top of a beat-up couch, the only true piece of furniture in the lobby. I stopped to peruse them: a Sports Illustrated from last year, a Popular Mechanics, two issues of Ebony, and an old U.S. News & World Report: SHOWDOWN IN PALM BEACH COUNTY . I took the Sports Illustrated.