It was there in the window

Hold it together, he thought. Just a few more minutes and he'll be here.

His back was pressed up against the window of what might have been a store—maybe it was a cafe—but he was nervous, and he hadn't paid enough attention to notice. He stared down each end of the street in turns; for five or six seconds he would watch the people and cars coming at him from one side, then slide his smooth-heeled shoe across the pavement and stare intently to the other. It was February and he was sweating, and he couldn't stop. His handkerchief was cold and damp, and it gave him shivers every time he ran it over his forehead.

Maybe him? A rather well-dressed older man, the type you could call a gentleman and really mean it, was coming towards him from the left. The gentleman wasn't paying any particular attention to anyone or thing around him. It was nothing overt like that that caught his eye. It was the man's glasses that made him seem like the type to be a spook. But no, he walked right on past, just like everyone else who, over the past fifty minutes, had seemed suspicious because of an oddly-colored scarf, unflatteringly curved nose or indelicate walk.

He squeezed the handkerchief for lack of anything else to do. Moisture came out of it as if from a sponge, and he was disgusted to find his hands moistly greased in a way only sweat could do.

If he'd had a watch he would've been checking it obsessively, but he was pretty sure that it had finally been an hour since he'd arrived here. And then, at his wits end, dismayed that a woman across the street whose pink-rhinestone veil he had thought was a dead giveaway, when he had finally persuaded himself to blow the meeting off and find a glass of scotch and a dry napkin, he was shocked by a finger pointedly jabbing his lower back and the unmistakable uneasiness one feels when the animal brain is aware that it is no longer alone.

A voice from over his shoulder said, “You have ten minutes to make it to Clary's. Take even two seconds more and the whole thing's on ice.”

He wanted to run, right then and there, but he needed to know who the finger belonged to and whether he'd been looking for the right signs. Unable to stop his diaphragm from quavering like a sail in a storm, he decided to turn around, and did. Each of the one-hundred eighty degrees between him and his informant was a torture more hideous than the last.

There was nobody there. It would have been a cliché if he had had time to think about it. No, what he was met with instead was that most awful of feelings, one of revelation and powerlessness, because he saw immediately that there was a man—two men, three men, four—walking towards him, and he knew they were coming for him because they were dressed in uncomplicated, neutral-colored suits and their pedestrian anonymity bled a grinning, thuggish malice.

Run, he told himself.

He did. He ran as if he was being chased—and he knew, though he never stopped to look back, that he was. Everything was so unbelievably fast as he ran; he could make out no faces nor details of anyone he passed, the street becoming a layer-cake of grays and metal-paint greens.

His feet were so heavy, so unbearably heavy, that he couldn't stop himself from crashing into everything nearby; and yet he felt as far from the ground as if he was watching his own panicked dash from the clouds.

He might have turned a corner when he found Clary's, but his mind had accelerated with him and had long since lunged beyond the past. Still wild and unfocused, he was ignorant of his surroundings, and would have overshot completely if not for the flicker of a feeling at the periphery of his awareness, a bell-tinkling that made his roaring mind itch.

There it is, his intuition informed him. And, looking to his left, the newspaper was, through a window, indeed there.

He felt profoundly good, and pressed his face to the glass. The reflection of an old man with a lazy stoop filled the edge of the window, and then the street was mercifully empty.

Without him asking it to, his hand had found the envelope that he had tucked into the inside pocket of his overcoat. Looking at it, he realized that his fingertips had left long, damp marks across its face.

Good, he thought, before dropping it onto the street, at least they'll know it was me.