Free The New York Magician by Jacob Zimmerman Page B

able to either. They're not going to be comfortable."
    I laughed. "This wasn't a desk intended to make people comfortable, Kharan. Quite the reverse."
    "Michel-"
    I held up a hand. "No, you're right. I understand. But, seriously, so what? Clients don't need to see me unless they want to do so, specifically. In that case, I have that side table over there by the window." I pointed. "With a coffee service. That's what it's for. This desk is for me."
    Kharan had thrown up his hands and gone away. After that, I had been pleased to note that seeing clients in person wasn't really part of my job description anymore. Since thirty-eight percent of the assets under management were mine that made little difference in terms of my actual position in the firm. It also meant that nobody expected me to be in the office to Deal With Things.
    I like my desk.
    Sitting there, I looked North towards the hazy shape of the George Washington Bridge, lost in the distance some ten miles upstream. There was a McAllister tugboat on the river, shepherding a concrete barge up the middle channel, and three or four private sail yachts visible, their sails angling to catch sunlight up the Manhattan side near the marinas.
    The river looked back at me, placidly. I scowled at it.
    Reaching into my bandolier, I pulled out the spearhead and spun it on the desktop in front of me. Then I pulled a sterile lancet out of another bandolier pocket, unwrapped it and pricked my finger to squeeze the resulting drop of blood onto the spearhead. It stopped spinning instantly, a crackling sensation reaching up off the desk and up my arm, electric cold and acoustic fire crawling into my torso. I opened my hand, palm spread downwards, over the spearhead.
    "Who sent Hapy here?"
    The bit of stone spun indecisively, then coasted to a stop. I poked it, and it spun with no resistance. Damn it.
    "All right." I thought. "Who called Hapy here?"
    The stone spun up of its own accord, but wobbled around a few times. Closer, but not quite.
    " What called Hapy here? Where is it?"
    This time the spearhead swiveled to stop, rock-solid, pointing just west of north. Uptown.
    I dropped it back into the bandolier with a tight smile, opened one of the desk drawers and pulled out a mapping GPS receiver, dropped it in my pocket and swung back out of the office.
    * * *
    Although it's sometimes hard to tell when you walk it, Manhattan isn't flat. There are ridges and hills, not all of which have been smashed flat by urban development into names on a map. Murray Hill, Turtle Bay - even in the older parts of the City, if you look up the cross blocks carefully you'll notice you see sky or earth, not horizon, and a lot closer than you might think. Central Park retains some few preserved ripples.
    The West Side Rail Yard and the west side rail tunnel is a hidden piece of that topography. It's nearly always a surprise for non-natives to approach the upper west side's Hudson River shoreline and suddenly realize that they are more than a hundred feet above sea level. By 96th and Riverside, the Henry Hudson Parkway is thirty feet up and it isn't even atop the rail tunnel. Riverside Park is and it's squatting quietly on top of a massive space that has housed entire sub-cities of inhabitants, sharing their volume intermittently with the blasting thunder of Diesel locomotives back when the line was running.
    Today there was no sound of anyone present. I broke through stagnant construction barriers in the rail yards above Fifty-Seventh, passing beneath the eye of the enormous Trump development that loomed just east of the flat space, and followed the spearhead underground to the north.
    It wasn't dark in here, thanks to numerous gratings facing the river, but it wasn't bright. I walked uptown at a regular pace, noting the unchanging direction of the Spearhead's pointer. Some thirty blocks later, the empty gravel expanse of the tunnels was interrupted by a mass of plywood and debris on the eastern side, formed into