Watch Your Back (24 page)

The Enorma had a capacious trunk and a pretty roomy back seat, so Alan eventually got everything stowed. Then, constantly checking the map the car–rental woman had given him, he found his way out of Miami International Airport and, after one misstep on state Route 41, which wanted to take him through the Everglades to Naples over on Florida’s west coast, he managed to turn south, drop down to Route 1, and, by barely four in the afternoon, two and a half hours after landing, there, by God, was the Key Largo Holiday Inn, where — or nearly where — Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had been treated so badly by Edward G. Robinson. None of them seemed to be around at the moment, but wasn’t that —? No! The
African Queen?

The person at the desk, being female, was unlikely to be Duane. In fact, the name tag on her left breast announced that at least that much of her was named DeeDee. “DeeDee,” Alan said, approaching the desk, “is that the real
African Queen
out there? From the movie?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, with a happy smile, glad to be part of an operation that would have the
African Queen
in its parking lot.

“It looks smaller than in the movie,” Alan said.

She nodded. “Everybody says that. May I help you, sir?”

“Oh, they do, huh? I have a reservation, I’m —” But then he drew a blank for just a second, remembering that the person he was
not
was Alan Pinkleton. “Duane Smith,” he remembered.

“Oh, yes, sir,” she said, “I think we have a message for you. Yes, here it is, sir.”

The message was from Preston: “Call me before you check in, room 211.”

“Where’s the house phone?”

“Just over there, sir. Are you checking in now, sir?”

“Not yet.”

“Shall we get your luggage from your car, sir?”

You don’t know what you’re asking, he thought, and said, as he headed for the house phone, “Let’s wait on that, too.”

Preston answered so promptly, it was clear he’d been sitting right next to the phone, or possibly on top of it. “Yes!”

“Preston?”

“Bring me some clothing. Not all the luggage, just one piece, with clothing.”

Alan might have pointed out that he had packed this morning in semidarkness and a mad rush and wasn’t certain which of those many bags contained the clothing Preston might most prize at this moment, but Preston had already hung up. So Alan swung by the desk to assure DeeDee he’d be back, and then went out to the hot, bright sun to open the Enorma’s trunk and root through suitcases until he found one that seemed to have the variety Preston might have in mind. He carried this into the building, found 211, knocked, and Preston yanked open the door.

“Where have you been?”

“Traveling. Here.”

Preston really was wearing nothing but that skimpy bathing suit. Grabbing the suitcase Alan offered him, he waved a hand at the room service table over by the window and said as he receded toward the bathroom, “Have some leftover lunch if you want. Wait here, we have to talk.” And into the bathroom he went, slamming the door.

Preston had done well for himself with his room service lunch. Salmon, asparagus, some sort of white pudding. Most of it was no longer in a state Alan found appetizing, but the coffee in the thermos was still at least warm, and the untouched roll was fresh, with sesame seeds. All much better than the little cardboard box of semi–edibles he’d rejected on the flight to Miami, featuring, as it had, a suspiciously blemish–free apple, as large and red and round and perfect as the one the witch had carted about in
Snow White.

Alan had consumed half a roll and half a cup of coffee when Preston returned, arrayed in bright green polo shirt, mauve slacks, and tasseled gray loafers. “I have thrown those swim trunks away,” he announced.

“You didn’t tell me about the
African Queen.
”

“Some things are best as surprises,” Preston assured him. “Speaking of which, we’ve had a change of plan.”

“We have?”

“My initial concept was,” Preston said, “we could secrete ourselves within the bland vastness of Florida a while. Offseason, easy to move about, you could be the official presence with your credit cards and driver’s license and all that. But shortly before our young friend Duane went off duty this morning, he phoned me to say a man had just come through, showing a photo of
me
and asking if I had been sighted by anyone. He didn’t claim to be a policeman, but he tried to leave that impression.”

“Private detective, I suppose,” Alan said.

“One of who knows how many, fanned across the state,” Preston said, with a gesture like someone dealing out a lot of fans. “I can’t stay here,” he said. “But to go back to that island would be folly. So I’ve decided on the only thing I can possibly do.”

“Yes?”

“Go home,” Preston said.

Surprised, Alan said, “New York? Are you sure?”

“Where else is there for me? Anywhere else, I’m a hunted man. I’ve been safe till now, but they smell blood, Alan, they know they’ve got me on the run. The safest place for me right now is my own apartment in New York City. Nobody can get me there.”

“Preston, I’m not sure how you hope to make it from here to there.”

Preston paused to study his reflection in the mirror over the dresser. Pleased, he smiled as he patted his shirt over his paunch. “That’s where I’ve been brilliant,” he said. “I know I can’t fly to New York. One has to show identification to board an airplane, and they’ll be watching for my name on flights to New York. But they can’t watch all flights everywhere, Alan.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“There’s a flight this evening at eight–thirteen,” Preston said, “that arrives in Philadelphia at ten fifty–nine. We rent a car
there,
Alan. An hour and a half on the Jersey Turnpike, through the Lincoln Tunnel, and we’re home. At one or two in the morning, surely I can slip into that building undetected.”

“We have a lot of luggage, Preston. Maybe we should put the rental car in that garage of yours, run everything up in the elevator.”

Preston looked scornful. “A dreadful idea, Alan,” he said. “I think you’d best leave the generaling to me.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. A lot of activity around that garage, Alan, and my personal automobile suddenly parked on the street, would be a
dead
giveaway. I want to be home, Alan, but I do not want every private detective in the employ of my ex–wives to
know
I am home.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do, then,” Alan agreed.

Easier said than done. Alan checked Preston out, using his own name and credit card, while Preston prepared an envelope for DeeDee to pass on to Duane, containing, Alan had no doubt, less than Duane would be pleased by, and then Alan, having just driven all the way down here from Miami International, turned around and drove all the way back again.

Next, at the airport, having just checked out all this luggage, he proceeded, with minimal help from Preston, to check it all back in again. Having rid themselves of baggage and rental car, they did have time for a rather awful dinner with a Spanish overcast before boarding their flight, where, once they were safely seated in first class, Alan was happy to forget dinner with another complimentary Bloody Mary.

And then, for quite some time, nothing happened. The pilot did occasionally come onto the sound system with that sedated–frog pilot voice to explain the delay — something about traffic backed up at Chicago O’Hare, though what that had to do with a flight between Miami and Philadelphia, Alan did not feel competent to say — but the effect was, they left the ground not at 8:13 but at 9:45, more or less, which put them in the sky over Philadelphia not at 10:59 but at nearly one in the morning. Since they had arrived at Philadelphia at the wrong time, throwing everybody’s schedule off, they had to spend an additional fifteen minutes circling in the sky above that city until at last a niche was found for them among all those millions and millions of summer travelers, and the plane
finally
landed.

Luggage. More luggage. Wait, still more luggage. It was quarter to two when the last of the three carts of luggage reached the car rental desk, where, astonishingly enough, the reservation Preston had made this morning in Alan’s name was still good. Not only that, they had another Lexus Enorma, this one in bright yellow.

Alan had to fight to stay awake on the long drive up through New Jersey, which meant he had to have the radio on loud. Preston also had to stay awake, because of the loud radio but also to monitor Alan’s wakefulness, so by a quarter to four, when they at last drove through the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan, both were feeling rather shredded. The only good part of it was that neither had the strength to start a fight, even though both of them wanted with all their hearts to start a fight.

But a fight very nearly did break out anyway, when Preston insisted, as they were driving through Central Park, that Alan turn the Enorma back in to its owners
tonight.
“We have to have this trip behind us,” he announced, “as though it had never existed. We cannot have this vehicle, in
your
name, in front of
my
home until God knows what time tomorrow. It won’t be difficult for you at all, Alan.”

Of course it would be difficult, as they both knew, but Preston didn’t care. However, they did finally get to the apartment building, where they put most of the on–duty staff to work emptying the car and transporting everything up the regular elevator to the penthouse, once they’d convinced the staff that Preston was really Preston. No one employed here now had been here in that prehistory when Preston had been an actual presence in the building.

Once everything was in and up, it was established that the doorman would recognize Alan whenever he returned from his Enorma unloading, and would deliver him to the penthouse. So all that was left for Alan to do was get back in the car, drive to the rental agency’s office on Eleventh Avenue, turn the car in, roam the streets a while in search of a taxi, find one, ride it back to Fifth Avenue, ride, wilting, up in the elevator to the penthouse, and walk into a place of a million lights, where Preston paced back and forth on the living room floor.

“Where have you
been?
”

“Everywhere,” Alan said. “I would like to sleep now, if I may.”

“It’s always about you, Alan,” Preston said. “I’ve noticed that. Come along, I’ll show you your guest room. That’s why I’ve been waiting up for you, Alan, to be your host. There’s the guest room there, it has its own bath, I’ve had your bags put in there higgledy–piggledy, I shall now turn out every light and go straight to bed and I do not want to know the world again for hours and hours and
hours.
”

“I’ll second that,” Alan said around a yawn.

When, a few minutes later, too tired to do anything but wash his face and brush his teeth, Alan turned off his own last light and declined gratefully onto Preston’s extremely comfortable guest–room bed, the red LED of the bedside alarm read 04:47.

Seeing this, Stan said, “The previous owner give up the ministry?”

“Something like that,” Max said.

Already at eight in the morning, Max’s shirtfront was streaked with gray from leaning on cars, talking over their tops at potential customers, of whom a few straggled around the lot at the moment, hoping to find something that could take them to work today. Harriet had a perky nephew who played salesman sometimes, when the customer load backed up, and he was out there now, fetching thrown sticks and talking up the merchandise and otherwise making himself useful, while Max and Stan discussed the trade at issue.

So Stan took one wary step back from the Ford and said, “Something like what, Max? Does this vehicle blow up?”

“Nothing like that at all,” Max assured him. “I’ll tell you the story in the office. For now, I understand you got a free gift for me.”

“Stockbroker’s special,” Stan said, pointing at the BMW. “It’s all yours except the plates.”

“The plates?”

“I’ll switch with the truck. I wouldn’t want to drive around New York with Vermont plates. Somebody might stop and ask to borrow a ski.”

“Mm hm.” Max walked around the BMW to the other side, leaned on it, looked over its top, and said, “You got any papers with this thing?”

“Nothing you’d want to hold in your hands.”

“We’re talking virgin birth here.”

“It’s a miracle, Max. And it’s all yours, if the truck’s story doesn’t scare me too much.”

“I’ll wanna hear the BMW story, too,” Max said. “Come on in.”

As they stepped into the office building, Harriet was typing and the phone was ringing — nothing new. “We get more privacy inside,” Max said, as Harriet at last paused in her typing and grabbed the phone:

“Maximilian’s Used Cars, Miss Caroline speaking. I’m sorry, you want to do
what
with it? Yes, I remember that vehicle, I typed up the paperwork on it. You’re the rubber man in the carnival, aren’t you?
So
amusing, we all — Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Flexo, was it? All sales are final.”

Max and Stan should have been in the other room by now, but both had stopped to listen to how the phone conversation would come out. Harriet listened, smiled pityingly, and said, “Well, ‘final’ means we don’t take them back. There’s a forwardness to the story of life, Mr. Flexo. That vehicle came to us, we passed it on to you, if you are finished with it, you pass — Well, it drove off the lot, if you recall. Mr. Flexo, there are strange sounds in the background, just where are you? Setting up the county fair? Where, Mr. Flexo?”

Harriet’s light trilling laughter filled the little office like bouquets of roses. “In Kentucky, Mr. Flexo? I tell you what. You
get
that car here, then we’ll talk.” Hanging up, she shook her head, turned her smile toward Stan and Max, and said, “They
know
they’re scrap iron, and still they rely on them.”

“If buyer’s remorse ever accomplished anything in this world,” Max said, “we’d all still be living in caves. Come in before Harriet makes any more friends.”

Max’s inner office was mostly tall fireproof metal filing cabinets, variously locked with keys and hasps and iron bars, because what they contained was more precious than gold, or anyway on an equal par of preciousness with gold; in those filing cabinets were the customers’ signatures. With them in existence, Maximilian’s Used Cars could go on forever.

There was also space in this room grudgingly allowed for furniture other than filing cabinets, in the corner farthest from the door and near a barred window with views of weeds and anonymous vinyl buildings. Here crouched Max’s desk, smaller than Harriet’s and much messier, with everything on it from empty soda bottles to various newspapers folded open to partly done crossword puzzles, to a V–shaped metal spring–operated object meant to improve the operator’s grip. As though Max needed his grip improved.

“Siddown,” Max said, involving the last of the room’s furniture, being his own wooden swivel desk chair and the small, sagging brown mohair sofa facing it.

Stan sat on the sofa arm, that being as much of that sofa as he cared to know, and said, “The truck had a life in Vermont.”

“It did. It was an undercover for the feds.”

This was a surprise. “The feds had that truck.”

“And here’s a fact you may not have considered before this, Stan,” Max said, raising a pedagogical finger. “At all levels of law enforcement, they take very good care of their vehicles. I’ve had undercover narc cars come through here, look on the outside like they been run off cliffs, but the insides and the wheels are better than when they came out of the factory.”

“When they need to drive, I guess,” Stan said, “they really need to drive.”

“You’ve got it.”

“But why do the feds need to drive in Vermont?”

“Smuggling.”

“Oh. Canada. What, whiskey?”

“Chinamen,” Max told him. “And also Chinawomen. And I believe sometimes Chinachildren, too.”

Stan said, “Chinese? From Canada?”

“Asians, anyway,” Max said. “And yes, from Canada. The same like you got all these Hispanics coming up to the border down south, you got these other people coming down from Canada. A Chinaman can go to Toronto and you’ll never notice him, they already got a Chinatown. That same Chinaman in Guadalajara? Not your best idea.”

“So they used this truck,” Stan said, “to infiltrate the smugglers.”

“Worked like a charm,” Max told him. “From what I understand, they used this truck to send a whole lot of people back where they didn’t wanna go, and even put some of the coyotes, you know, the smugglers, in the can in Canada.”

“So now the truck is retired. Why?”

“Well, it got burned. The word got around up there, you do business with this truck, all of a sudden you meet a lotta people that don’t smile.”

“Not good,” Stan suggested.

“You’re okay if you stay away from that border,” Max assured him. “But the thing is, the way it got outed, the feds can’t do the normal way to get it back into civilian life. It still has some of its previous life on it.”

“Meaning what?”

“The truth is,” Max said, “it has very strange papers. The fella had it, he deals in big trucks mostly, sends em overseas so nobody
ever
tries to bring them back, I envy that guy, he tells me, you get a cop, he runs a check on the registration on this truck, he gets like an asterisk, says, don’t worry, keep your nose clean, good–bye.”

“Pretty good.”

“For you, Stan,” Max said, “it couldn’t be better. For a furniture dealer, maybe, somebody in the legit world, a little freaky. So my friend and I worked out a deal, and now, depending on this BMW, you and me are gonna work out a deal, and what I think, Stan, whatever you want that truck for, afterward you might as well keep it. You’ll never find a better mace. Now, about your offering.”

Stan told him about the owner of the BMW, off for years now in a Club Med, hiding out from process servers, nobody checking the garage where the BMW’s stored. Just give it a new christening, it’s gold.

“This sounds good,” Max admitted.

“It is good.”

“I would say, Stan, you and me, we’ve done a good morning’s work.”

“No, you have,” Stan said, getting up from the sofa arm. “My work starts now. I gotta meet my guys at nine–thirty in the city.”

A small amount of paperwork adjustment, and Stan was on his way, the nephew waving bye–bye. The truck felt fine. And keep it around after the job, eh? Hmmm.

And who knew the feds listened to Schubert?