Free Escape the Night by Richard North Patterson Page A

small apartment on Waverly Place, a few blocks from Washington Square. Sometimes he would meet her in the square at dusk; she waited beneath the ornate arch—spotlights grazing its white marble, the park and trees dim shadows—looking lonely and slight and vulnerable, until he came. She smiled and took his arm, and they would walk, talking and laughing, intoxicated by borrowed freedom, through the hustle of Macdougal Street for dinner at the Minetta Tavern, or up Cornelia to Bedford Street and Chumley’s—its entrance still an unmarked door from its speakeasy days—and sit in a dark corner listening to the loud talk of poets and artists and hangers-on, or to the Lion’s Head, passing Jimmy Walker’s home on what Charles called “the best block in Manhattan,” St. Luke’s Place, a narrow, cobblestoned street flanked by gaslights and over-arching trees, its south side a row of scrubbed brick town houses from which Ruth selected favorites, all lined up in perfect symmetry, their black, wrought-iron railings rising with the steps to carved oak doors. Sometimes they might walk to the end of the Wharton Street Pier, watching the Hudson flow south toward Ellis Island, where Ruth’s great-grandfather had arrived from Russia. Once, at the foot of the pier, she took his picture.
    Always they would go to Ruth’s.
    Charles knew that they were still being followed, and resolved not to care.
    He loved recapturing the feel of a single woman’s apartment, the smell of perfume and candle smoke, the clutter of books, antique lamps, recordings of Beethoven and Bach and manuscripts strewn on the bed and on top of her refrigerator. Finally, against all odds and knowing their incongruity, he loved her .
    Naked, she was comic as a child, laughing as their passion overtook them, and joyous after. “You’re beautiful,” she would say then, and her open, unforced wanting touched him beyond anything he’d known. Losing her awe of him, she learned something of his childhood and the humiliation of his marriage. She made love to him, and made him laugh. He grew to understand her humor and fear and radicalism, her uncanny sensitivity and the way she lectured herself aloud, “Come on, Ruthie, shape up,” as if she were her own parent. She had never satisfied her father. Her mother had killed herself when Ruth was thirteen.
    They could speak of this, he found, as they could speak of her brother with a shared affection that brought them closer. Levy and Charles remained warm friends, perhaps warmer for a shared affection too fraught with the possibility of sadness to be easily discussed: Charles knew that Levy, knowing, understood that Charles lived with such complexity because he truly cared for Ruth.
    â€œWhat do you think?” he often asked her. He listened more than talked, smiled when she swore, saw the harshness she affected for what it was. “This city dries women out,” he told her. “They fight the hustle and competition and men who only want to screw them until they turn to leather, all drive and double martinis and ‘he’s such a schmuck.’ I suppose it has to be.” He smiled a little. “You’re one of the smartest people I know, Ruthie—be as tough as you like and take no shit from anyone. Just don’t defend yourself so bitterly there’s no softness left to defend.”
    She took his hand. “These men are so afraid ,” she said intently. “There’s no one else like you.”
    He smiled at her certainty. “Then it’s for me to guard the sweetness in you.”
    She touched his face. Abruptly, she smiled. “And listen to my shit, Carey.”
    He laughed out loud.
    Feeling good for her, he grew better for himself. They dissected the manuscripts she worked on, sniffed out clues for helping her career, selected the first Charles Carey books. She bought Bombay gin for his martinis, insisting when