Nightwork (14 page)

“I’ve heard worse,” I said.

She shook her head. “It was pure, hard-boiled Washingtonese. Defend yourself at all times. Professional deformation of speech habits. No reason to be used on you. You don’t have to be defended against. I’m sorry.”

I went over to her and kissed the top of her head. Her hair smelled of winter countryside. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I’m not as tender as all that.”

“Maybe I think you are,” she said. “Of course you didn’t call Brenda.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“What a stupid, patronizing thing for me to have said.” She sighed. “On weekends,” she said, “I must learn to leave my armor at home.” She smiled up at me, her face soft and young in the subdued glow of the lamp. “You’ll forget I said it, won’t you?”

“If you want. What else occurred to you in Virginia?”

“It occurred to me that the only time we made love, we both had had too much to drink.”

“That’s for fair.”

“I thought how nice it would be if we made love stone-cold sober. Have you had anything to drink since lunch?”

“No.”

“Neither have I,” she said, standing up and putting her arms around me.

This time she allowed me to undress her.

Sometime in the middle of the night she whispered, “You must leave Washington in the morning. If you stay another day, maybe I’ll never let you out of the city again. And we can’t have that, can we?”

When I woke in the morning, she was gone. She had left a note on the desk in her bold, slanted handwriting. “Weekend blues. It’s Monday now. Don’t take anything the lady said seriously, please. E.”

She had put on her armor for the day’s work. I crumpled the note and threw it in the wastebasket.

I
GOT MY PASSPORT THAT MORNING
. Mr. Hale was not in his office, but he had left all the necessary instructions, Miss Schwartz said. I was fairly certain that Mr. Hale was not in his office because by the end of the weekend he had come to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be comfortable seeing me again. Not in the presence of Miss Schwartz. It was not the first time that a man had regretted in daylight the dark confidences of midnight.

Miss Schwartz was as beautiful and melodious as ever, but I didn’t envy Jeremy Hale.

I cashed the checks from the poker game, and with the bills in my pocket went to a department store and bought two strong, but lightweight suitcases. They were handsome pieces of luggage, dark blue with red piping, one large, the other an overnight bag. They were expensive, but I was looking for security, not bargains, at the moment. I also bought a roomy leather attaché case, with a sturdy lock. The case fit snugly into the larger of the two bags. I was now armed for travel, Ulysses with the black ships caulked and a fair wind behind him, unknown perils beyond the next promontory.

The salesman asked what numbers I wanted to put into the combination. “It’s advisable,” he said, “to use a number that means something to you, that you won’t forget.”

“Six-O-Two,” I said. It was a number that meant quite a bit to me and I doubted that I ever would forget it.

With the new bags in the trunk of the rented car, I was on my way toward New York by three o’clock in the afternoon. I had called my brother and told him to meet me outside my bank at ten o’clock the next morning.

I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Trenton for the night. I wasn’t going to stay in New York any longer than I had to.

Knowing that I was doing the wrong thing, accumulating regrets for the future, I called Evelyn’s number in Washington. I didn’t know what I could say to her, but I wanted to hear the sound of her voice. I let the phone ring a dozen times. Luckily, there was no one home.

When I drove through the New York City traffic up Park Avenue, toward the bank, I was stopped at a light at the corner of the cross street on which the St. Augustine was located. On an impulse, when the light turned green, I turned down the street. I could feel the skin on the back of my neck prickling as I drove slowly past the falsely impressive canopied entrance, and I even played with the idea of going in and asking for Drusack. It was not a case of nostalgia. There were some questions that he might be able to answer by now. And his predictable rage would have brightened my morning. If there had been a place to park, I think I would have been foolish enough to go in. But the whole street was solidly blocked and I drove on.

Hank was huddled down into his overcoat, with the collar turned up, looking cold and miserable in the biting wind, when I walked up to the bank. If I were a policeman, I thought, I would suspect him of
something
, a small, mean crime, petty forgery, abuse of widow’s confidence, peddling fraudulent jewelry.

His face lit up when he saw me as though he had doubted that I would ever arrive, and he took a step toward me, but I didn’t stop. “Meet me at the next corner uptown,” I said as I passed him. “I’ll only be a minute.” Unless someone had been standing near and watching closely, it couldn’t have seemed that there was any connection between us. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the city was one giant eye, focused on me.

In the vault, the same old man, paler than ever, took my key and, using his own along with it, opened my safe and handed me the steel box. He led me back to the curtained cubicle and left me there. I counted out the two hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills and put them in a manila envelope that I had bought in Washington. I was becoming an important consumer of manila envelopes and was no doubt giving a lift to the entire industry.

Hank was waiting for me at the corner, in front of a coffee shop, looking colder than ever. He eyed the manila envelope under my arm fearfully, as though it might explode at any instant. The plate-glass window of the shop was steamed over, but I could see that the place was almost empty. I motioned for Hank to follow me and we went in. I chose a table in the rear and put the manila envelope down and took off my coat. It was suffocatingly hot in the restaurant, but Hank sat down opposite me without taking off his coat or the old, sweat-stained gray slouch hat he was wearing, set squarely and unfashionably on his head. His eyes behind the glasses that dug into the sides of his nose were leaking tears from the cold. He had an old commuter’s face, I thought, the kind of face, weathered by years of anxiety and stale indoor air, that you see on men standing on windy station platforms on dark winter mornings, patient as donkeys, weary long before the day’s work ever begins. I pitied him and could hardly wait to get rid of him.

Whatever happens, I thought, I am not going to look like that when I’m his age. We still didn’t say a word to each other.

When the waitress came over, I asked for a cup of coffee.

“What I need is a drink,” Hank said, but he settled for coffee, too.

Against the partition at the end of the small table, there was a small slot for coins and a selector for the jukebox near the entrance. I put in two dimes and jabbed the selector at random. By the time the waitress came back with our coffees, the jukebox was playing so loudly that nobody could have heard me at the next table unless I shouted.

Hank drank his coffee greedily. It did not smell of cinnamon or rum or oranges. “I puked twice this morning,” he said.

“The money is in there.” I tapped the envelope.

“Christ, Doug,” Hank said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“So do I,” I said. “Anyway, it’s yours now. I’ll leave first. Give me ten minutes and then you can go.” I didn’t want him to see my rented car and note the license number. I hadn’t planned any of this and didn’t believe it was really necessary, but caution was becoming automatic with me.

“You’ll never regret this,” he said.

“No, I won’t,” I said.

With a crumpled handkerchief he wiped at the cold tears streaming from his eyes. “I told the two fellows that I was coming up with the money this week,” he said. “They’re delirious with joy. They’re going for the deal. They didn’t say boo.” He opened his overcoat and fished past an old gray muffler that hung around his neck like a dead snake. He brought out a pen and a small notebook. “I’ll write a receipt.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I know I gave you the money and you know you got the money.” He had never asked for a receipt for any of the sums he had lent me or given me.

“Inside of a year you’ll be a rich man, Doug,” he said.

“Good,” I said. His optimism was forlorn. “I don’t want anything on paper. Not anything. As an accountant, I imagine you know how to arrange to check off whatever may be coming to me without any records being kept.” I remembered what Evelyn Coates had said about Xeroxes. I was reasonably sure there were Xeroxes in Scranton, too.

“Yes, I imagine I do.” He said it sadly. He was in the wrong profession, but it was too late now to do anything about it.

“I don’t want the Internal Revenue Service looking for me.”

“I understand,” he said. “I can’t say I like it, but I understand.” He shook his head somberly. “You’re the last man in the world I’d …”

“That’s enough of that, Hank,” I said.

The first record on the jukebox ended with an ear-shattering climax, and the voice of the waitress giving an order to the counterman sounded unnaturally loud in the lull. “Eggs and bacon, up. One English.”

I took another gulp of my coffee and got up, leaving the envelope on the table. I put on my coat. “I’ll be calling you. From time to time.”

He smiled up at me wanly as he put his hand on the envelope. “Take care of yourself, kid,” he said.

“You, too,” I touched his shoulder and went out into the cold.

The flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until eight Wednesday night.

On Wednesday afternoon, at two thirty, I left a hundred-dollar bill in the safety-deposit box and walked out of the bank with seventy-two thousand, nine hundred dollars in the attaché case I had bought in Washington. I was through with manila envelopes. I couldn’t have explained, even to myself, why I had left the hundred dollars behind. Superstition? A promise to myself that one day I would come back to the country? In any event, I had paid in advance for the rental of the box for a year.

This time I was staying at the Waldorf Astoria. By now, anybody who was looking for me must have decided that I had left the city. I went back to my room and opened the attaché case and took out three thousand dollars, which I put into the new sealskin wallet I had bought for myself. It was large enough to hold my passport and my round-trip charter ticket. At the Christie Ski Club office on Forty-seventh Street, where I had gone after I left Hank in the coffee shop, I had asked for Wales’ friend Miss Mansfield, and the girl had filled out my application form and predated it automatically. She told me I had been lucky to come in just then, as they had two cancellations that morning. Offhandedly, I asked her if the Waleses were also making the flight. She checked her list and to my relief said that they weren’t on it. I still had plenty of cash from my winnings on Ask Gloria and the Washington poker game. Even without the money in the attaché case and after the expenses of the hotels in Washington and Scranton and what it had cost me when I returned the rented car, I still had more money on me than I ever had carried at one time in my whole life. When I checked in at the desk at the Waldorf, I didn’t bother to ask what the room cost. It was a pleasant experience.

I gave Evelyn Coates’s address in Washington as my residence. Now that I was completely alone, all my jokes had to be private ones.

There had been very little opportunity for any kind of laughter at all in the last few days. Washington had been a sobering experience. If, as so many people believed, wealth made for happiness, I was a neophyte at the job. I had made a poor choice of companions in my new estate—Hale, with his blocked career and nervous love affair, Evelyn Coates, with her complex armor, my poor brother.

In Europe, I decided, I was going to seek out people without problems. Europe had always been a place to which the American rich had escaped. I now considered myself a member of that class. I would let others who had preceded me teach me the sweet technique of flight. I would look for joyful faces.

But Tuesday night I stayed in my room, alone, watching television. On this last night in America there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks.

As a last gesture, I put a hundred and fifty dollars in an envelope with a note to the bookie at the St. Augustine that read,

“Sorry I kept you waiting for your money,” and signed my name. There would be one man in America who would vouch for my reputation as an honest man. I mailed the note as I checked out of the hotel.

I got to the airport early, by taxi. The attaché case, with the money inside it, was in the big blue bag with the combination lock. The money would be out of my hands, in the baggage compartment, while we crossed the Atlantic, but there was nothing to be done about it. I knew that every passenger was searched and his hand luggage opened and examined before boarding the plane, as a precaution against hijackers, and it would have been awkward, to say the least, to have to try to explain to an armed guard why I needed more than seventy thousand dollars for a three-week skiing trip.

Wales had been right about the overweight, too. The man at the desk never even looked at the scale as the skycap swung my two bags onto it.

“No skis or boots?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to buy them in Europe.”

“Try Rossignols,” he said. “I hear they’re great.” He had become an expert on equipment at a departure desk at Kennedy.

I showed him my passport, he checked the manifest list and gave me a boarding pass and the formalities were over. “Have a good trip,” he said. “I wish I was going with you.” The other people on the line with me had obviously started celebrating already, and there was a loud holiday air about the entire occasion, with people embracing and calling to each other and skis clattering to the floor.

I was early and went into the restaurant for a sandwich and a glass of beer. I hadn’t eaten lunch and it would be a long time before they served us anything on the plane and I was hungry.