“I didn’t want this to happen, John.”
I said nothing.
“I don’t, I can’t, I—”
I waited.
“It has to be real. I don’t want another...I can’t...it has to mean something. It has to—”
I stood up. She hesitated, then got to her feet. I kissed her and held her close. Her body pressed against me all the way. I kissed her again and crushed her closer.
“Yes,” she said.
Afterward she lay on her side with her eyes closed and a lazy grin on her lips. She made a sweet purring sound. I got out of her bed and padded into the living room. The ice had melted. I got fresh ice from the refrigerator and made stiff drinks for both of us. I brought the drinks and our cigarettes back to the bedroom. She had not changed position. She still lay on her side, the same sweet ghost of a smile on her lips. She was still purring.
I put the drinks and the cigarettes on the bedside table and kissed her.
“Mmmmm,” she said. She opened her eyes and yawned luxuriously. “Oh, God,” she said. “I really didn’t want this to happen.”
“Neither did I.”
“But I’m glad it did. What time is it?”
“Almost one.”
“Is it that late already? I thought it was about ten o’clock.”
“That was three hours ago.”
“Maybe you’d better get dressed.”
“I guess so.”
“I wish you could sleep here, but I think you should probably sleep at your hotel. I don’t want Wally to know about this. Actions above and beyond the call of duty. He might even approve, goddamn him. But I don’t want him to know about it, or Doug Rance either.”
“Don’t worry.”
She had a special beauty nude. Most women look better clothed. Bodies are imperfect. Clothes hide, and also promise, and the promise is too often better than the fulfillment of it. Not so with Evvie.
She still wore the jade heart. I touched it, let my fingers trail down to her breasts. She purred again.
“I’ll get dressed and drive you back.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Well, you can’t walk, for God’s sake.”
“Why not? It’s a nice night.”
“It’s a long walk.”
“How far?”
“Nine or ten blocks, I think. All the way down to North Union and then over to the hotel. Let me drive you, John.”
“I feel like walking.”
I dressed. I finished my drink and she worked on hers. It was late and the night outside was cold and quiet.
I said, “He’s going to keep you busy tomorrow morning with a million crazy questions. You know what to tell him. Then he may want to see me, or he may try to stall for more time. I don’t think I should let him stall too much. I’m going to grab a plane tomorrow afternoon.”
“For Toronto?”
“Yes.” I drew on a cigarette. “The more I think about it, the more I think I shouldn’t see him tomorrow. It would be good if he got tied up with something during the morning that kept him busy until two or three in the afternoon, and then by the time he was ready for me it would be too late and I would have already left for the airport. I think that’s the way to do it, to give him the rope so that he can rope himself in a little.”
“What do you have to do in Toronto?”
“A lot of things. I’ll dodge around for about a week to give him time to get answers to his letters. Keep a close watch on him in the meantime. If he starts to go off the track, don’t keep it a secret. Get on the goddamn phone and call us.”
“Where?”
“You have the Barnstable number. It’s on our letterhead. Just call and talk to Doug.”
“Suppose I want to talk to you?”
I told her what hotel I was staying at, and how to reach me. I didn’t spend too much time at the hotel. I told her to leave messages if I wasn’t there, to give her name as Miss Carmody. If there was a message to the effect that Miss Carmody had called, I would try her first at her apartment and then at the office.
“And when will I see you again, John?”
“In about a week, maybe ten days. I think he’ll probably try to get in touch with us, and we’ll give him a short stall and then make contact again, probably with me coming down here to Olean again.”
She didn’t say anything. I knotted my tie and made the knot properly small and neat. I put a foot on a chair and tied my shoe. I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. It was a copper-enameled ashtray with a red and green geometric design on it, the sort of thing women make in Golden-Ager classes at the YWCA.
She said, “I’ll miss you.”
“Evvie—”
She stood up. I turned to her and kissed her. She was all breathless and shaky. There were deep circles under her eyes.
“I hope I’m not just part of the game, John. Cheat the mooch and sleep with the girl, all of it part of a package deal. I hope—”
“You know better.”
“I hope so,” she said.
The air was cool, the sky clear. There was a nearly full moon and a scattering of stars. Irving Street was wide, with tall shade trees lining the curbs on both sides of the street. The houses were set back a good ways from the curb. They were single homes built forty or fifty years ago. Most of them had upstairs porches. Some had bay windows and other gingerbread. I walked eight blocks down Irving to North Union without meeting anyone. A single car passed me, a cab, empty. He slowed, I shook my head, and he went on. All but a few of the houses were completely dark inside. Here and there a light would be on upstairs, and in two houses I could see television screens flickering in darkened living rooms.
I turned left at North Union, crossed the street, found my way back to the Olean House. The lobby was deserted except for a sleepy old man at the desk and a very old woman who sat in one of the chairs opposite the fireplace reading a newspaper. I picked up my key at the desk and took the elevator upstairs.
It happens more often than it doesn’t. You’re caught up in something fast-moving and exciting and secretive, and this sudden common bond masks all of the things that you do not have in common, and moments are infused with a deceptive sort of vitality, and you wind up in the rack. Bells ring, all of that.
I went over to my window. There was nothing in particular to look at. Most of the stores on the main drag didn’t even bother keeping their windows lit. I smoked a cigarette.
It happens all the time. You try not to let it get mixed that way, the business and the pleasure. Like not going where you eat, a similar attempt to separate disparate functions. It is rarely as easy as it sounds, and circumstances can make it harder.
I was an old buck gone long in the tooth with an age-old weakness for pretty girls. And she had had four years of Wallace J. Gunderman, and simple biology could make her ready enough for a change of pace, especially when she could so easily talk herself into thinking that it all meant something. So it was all something to take and enjoy and forget soon after. It was just what she had said she hoped it wasn’t—part of the fruits of the game, her body along with her boss’s money. Take it and enjoy it and kiss it good-bye.
I got undressed and hung everything up neatly. I stood under a too-hot shower. I got out of the shower and sat on the edge of the bed and smoked another cigarette.
I told myself not to think about it. I put out my cigarette and reached for the phone. It took the old man a long time to answer. I gave him my name and my room number and told him to ring me at eleven, and not to put any calls through before then. He asked me to wait a minute. He dug up a pencil and I repeated the instructions to him very slowly while he wrote everything down. Then he read it back to me and I said yes indeed, fine, perfect.
I cradled the phone. I thought about the color of the jade heart against her white skin, and her eyes and hair and the way she smelled and the small sounds she made.
I went to bed and to sleep.
Seven
br />
I’d been up for an hour and a half when the phone rang at eleven. The woman said, “It’s eleven o’clock, Mr. Hayden. You had several phone calls, but I didn’t put them through because there was a message that you weren’t to be disturbed.”
“Fine. Any messages?”
“The calls were all from Mr. Gunderman,” she said. She made the name sound almost holy. “You’re to call him as soon as possible.”
I sat around the hotel room for another half hour. I packed my suitcase, smoked a few cigarettes. I left the suitcase by the side of the bed and went downstairs for breakfast. At noon I called Gunderman’s office from a pay phone across the street.
Evvie answered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hayden,” she said. “Mr. Gunderman is out to lunch.”
“I’m at a pay phone,” I said. “You can talk.”
“He’ll be sorry he missed your call, Mr. Hayden. He’s been trying to reach you all morning, but he had a luncheon appointment and he was called out.”
“Oh, I get it. There’s someone in the office.”
“That’s quite correct, Mr. Hayden.”
“Who is it? Gunderman?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“All right, it doesn’t matter. I’ll give you questions you can answer without any trouble. When do you expect him back?”
“Perhaps an hour, Mr. Hayden.”
“How did he take the line you handed him? Was he with it all the way?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And he’s very anxious to see me?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Then I think it’s just as well that he doesn’t. There’s a plane leaving Ischua Airport at four-thirty this afternoon. When he comes in, tell him I was over to the office. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“And that I was sorry we couldn’t get together, but I had a few things hanging fire that I had to take care of, and that I’d try to get in touch with him in a week or so. Give him the general impression that I’m sorry I wasted my time here but if he wants to sell and take his tax loss the offer is still open. I’m not pushing, but I’m willing. Have you got that?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I could stay another day. I’ll get back as soon as I can, Evvie. There’s no chance of you getting up to Toronto for a day, is there?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“Uh-huh. You might get him to send you on a reconnaissance mission, but that’s probably not that good an idea. I’ll miss you.”
Silence.
“Bye, baby.” I cradled the phone. I picked up a paperback and a couple of magazines and went back to the hotel. I sat around in the room for an hour while Gunderman ate his lunch, then checked out of the hotel and caught a cab to the airport. I got there better than three hours before flight time. I checked my bag and walked down the road a little ways to a tavern. I nursed a few drinks and listened to a juke box. The place was very nearly empty.
At four-thirty my plane left, and I was on it.
Doug had to hear all of it twice through. He made a perfect audience. He hung on every word and grinned at every clever turn of phrase and nodded approvingly at every halfway cute gambit. I kept expecting him to burst into spontaneous applause.
“You roped him,” he said admiringly. “You lassoed that son of a bitch.”
“He’s not branded yet.”
“Now we stick it in and break it off, Johnny. Jesus, this is beautiful. How long do you want to leave him hanging? A week?”
“More or less.”
“Won’t he try to reach us before then?”
“He won’t be able to reach me. If he calls Barnstable, they’ll tell him I’m out. The girl will. The girl doesn’t even know me, does she?”
“She’s met you. I don’t know if she remembers the name.”
“She didn’t meet me as Claude Whittlief, did she?”
“No.”
“Because if she did, we’d have to get rid of her before the payoff. No, I’m sure she didn’t, now that I think about it. So if he tries to reach me he won’t get any place, and I don’t think he’d want to go over my head and talk with you. If he’s as shrewd as I figure him to be, he’ll want to work through me, to use me to get the inside dope and to make whatever pitch he might want to make. Remember, he only has a little bit of the picture now, only as much as Evvie’s given him.”
“How did you like her, incidentally?”
“She’s all right.”
“Get anywheres?”
“I didn’t try,” I said.
“Not interested?”
“Not on a job.”
His grin spread. “That’s the professional attitude, all right. I could go another cup of coffee. You?”
“Fine.”
We were in a booth at an all-night diner on Dundas about a block or so from my hotel. The food was greasy and so were most of the customers. The coffee wasn’t too bad. A bucktoothed waitress with a West Virginia accent brought us more of it. She was a long way from home.
“About those letters,” he said. “How do you want to handle them?”
I had gone over the letters Gunderman had written to those other pigeons. Of the eighteen, ten had been to people we were already in correspondence with, and those Evvie had mailed. I had the other eight. One man lived in Buffalo, two in Cleveland, one in Toledo, one in a Chicago suburb, two in New York City, and one way the hell up in Seattle.
“We throw out the Seattle one, first of all,” I said. “It won’t hurt him if he doesn’t get a reply from everybody, and Seattle is too damn far to run to just to get a postmark.”
“There are remailing services,” he suggested.
I sipped coffee, put the cup down. “The hell with those. I ran one of those myself about twelve years back. Letters Remailed—25¢. Your Secret Address. Mail Forwarded and Received. I opened every letter and sold the interesting ones to a blackmailer. Somehow I don’t think I was the only grifter to run one of those outfits.”
“That’s one racket I never heard of.”
“Everything’s a racket,” I said. “The day after tomorrow, I’ll have the letters ready. I’ll spend tomorrow taking care of the stationery angle. Then I’ll fly to Chicago and mail a letter and work my way back on the trains. The cities spread out in a line, Chicago and Toledo and Cleveland and Buffalo, and then a plane down to New York and back again. That’s no problem.”
“And the detective agency?”
That was a problem, all right. If we didn’t answer that letter at all, Gunderman would get on the phone and call them himself. Evvie couldn’t head off the calls forever. If we did answer, using a fake sheet of the firm’s letterhead (or even a real sheet; it wouldn’t be all that hard to run up to their offices and filch a piece of paper and an envelope) we would run into headwinds when Gunderman called to thank them, or sent along a check in payment.
“Let it lie for a day or two,” Doug suggested. “He won’t expect a report from them by return mail, anyway. We’ll think of something.”
In the morning I got busy on the handful of letters. There was a printer in town who specialized in doing a little work on the wrong side of the law. He did job-printing for the boys who printed up pornography and trucked it across the bridge into the States, and he was supposed to be fairly good at passports and other documents. I could have had him run off a few different batches of stationery for us, but I didn’t want to. We already had a use for him—he was going to draw up the fake deeds for us, deeds to Canadian land which we did not own. I’ve never been very tall on the idea of using the same person too many times in a single job. It’s not a good idea to let one man get that much of a picture of your operation. He would handle the deeds, and do a good job with that, and that was enough.
I went to a batch of printers and a couple of office supply stores. Each printer made up a batch of a hundred sheets and envelopes, and the stationery stores came through with cheaper standard stuff. I had seven let
ters to answer, and I wound up with seven hundred sheets and envelopes, each batch with a different name and address and city, each on different paper and in different ink. I got one-day service from everybody, and by six o’clock that evening I had everything I needed.
We typed out four of the responses and wrote out three by hand. We used the office typewriter, cleaning the keys after the first letter, knocking a letter out of alignment before the third one, and otherwise disguising the fact that all four letters were coming out of the same machine. The hand-written letters were no problem at all. I have five very different styles of handwriting, and Doug has about as many. An expert could find enough similarities to guess that any of my five styles was my writing, but the average person would never see a connection. And Gunderman would not be putting our letters under a microscope. The pens were different, the inks different, the envelopes would be zooming in from different cities—he wasn’t going to run to a handwriting expert as an extra safeguard.
We varied the text of the letters, too. Five of our seven men wrote Gunderman to tell him that they had sold their land to Barnstable, that Barnstable had paid off promptly and legitimately, and would Gunderman tell them what was the matter with the operation? (I guessed that he wouldn’t answer, not wanting to get people curious. If he did, Evvie could simply throw the letters away.) One man replied that he used his land for summer camping and was not interested in selling it to Barnstable, to Gunderman, or to anybody else. The last man, the one in Toledo, wrote that he had turned down Barnstable’s first offer in the hope that they might raise it, and that so far they hadn’t.
Doug and I both worked on the wording. We kept the letters short and to the point. By the time we were through, the letters were set to do their job. They would convey the impression we were aiming at. Our man Gunderman would be left with the impression that the Barnstable Corporation, Ltd., had managed to buy up half of Canada for a song. Our man Gunderman would be starting to drool.