Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (56 page)

“I know I’ve said this over and over, but it bears repeating: he has very limited choices; all of us have to try to put ourselves in his place and figure out what he’s going to do, what he
can
do. You’re the only people I have to call on. That’s why I’ve kept every one of you fully informed about everything we’ve found out and everything we’re trying to do. I realize how hard you’re working and how frustrating it is, but I’m counting on you. Together we’re going to succeed, and I don’t have to tell you what that will mean for us.”

Having finished his exhortation, Jenkins looked at Clellan, who began to speak.

“As you all know by now, I ran into Halloway on Monday. In addition, we have fairly good evidence of several other places he’s been in the last two weeks, and a pretty clear picture of his movements is emerging…”

Clellan related a more sober version of our encounter, indicating the location of the building on the first map. He had pictures of the apartment that they had decided I must have been staying in. Everything he said seemed correct. He indicated the location of two other buildings where there had been reports of activity in empty apartments. There were more photographs of apartments and floor plans. There were descriptions of what I had probably eaten and drunk, what my hours might have been. It all seemed quite accurate. Accurate and useful.

Clellan went on to relate the recovery of certain missing school reports and what they said about me. He described the odd telephone call made by a Howard Dickison to my office and the subsequent interview of Dickison, in which he had denied having made the call and had tried to disclaim any knowledge of me.

“Do you have the write-up of that interview there?” interrupted Jenkins. “I haven’t had a chance to go over it.”

Clellan leafed through a stack of papers, pulled out the report, and handed it over. Clellan began to describe what Gomez had contrived to trap me.

Jenkins was reading the report. His eyes would travel quickly down each page and then he would fold the stapled sheet back. When he got to the end, he went back and reread two passages, locating them immediately.

Gomez was now standing at the end of the table, showing everyone a section of a door. It contained some sort of battery-driven device that drove home a dead bolt and locked it in place. While he talked, Jenkins turned to Clellan and asked in a lowered voice whether he had the transcript of Dickison’s telephone call to my office. Clellan leafed through a folder until he found what he was looking for. Holding his finger on the middle of a page, he slid it over to Jenkins, who took it and read it through intently. Gomez was pointing at the floor plan of an apartment. If you moved any of several interior doors in the apartment, the locking mechanism in the front door would be triggered. Jenkins opened the interview and began reading it again, the creases in his face contorting into a frown. Clellan was standing next to Gomez now. They were showing on a map the locations of the apartments that had already been fitted with Gomez’s device and of those that were going to be fitted. It was information I very much wanted.

Jenkins put down the report of the interview and picked up the transcript of the call, reading it through from beginning to end once more. He narrowed his eyes and tapped his mouth with his forefinger. He looked up from the transcript to Clellan and interrupted him.

“Excuse me, but do we have the tape of this phone call or just this transcript?”

“Just the transcript. But I can have the tape sent over if you like.” Clellan had an inquiring look on his face. He waited for Jenkins’s reply.

“Yes, I think you’d better do that.” Jenkins made a little gesture with his hand for Clellan and Gomez to continue. Gomez was holding some sort of transmitting device, but I was having trouble paying attention to what he was saying. Jenkins had laid both hands flat on the table and had closed his eyes in thought. Gomez glanced at him uneasily but continued to speak. The eyes opened, and Jenkins, ignoring Gomez and his speech, asked Clellan directly, “How do they send over these reports?” He placed his forefinger perpendicularly on the two reports lying on the table in front of him.

Clellan blinked uncomprehendingly. The room was silent.

Jenkins spoke again. “Do they mail them, or have one of their people deliver them, or what?”

Tyler answered the question. “We arrange for a commercial messenger service to pick everything up and bring it over. Their internal service is slow and unreliable…”

Jenkins nodded. He was pressing two fingertips hard against his forehead so that the skin turned white under them, and his eyes were closed again. Gomez looked at him with a slightly uncertain expression and resumed speaking. Jenkins sat like that for several minutes. Then he opened his eyes suddenly and took a long, careful look around the room. He stood up and walked over to the door. I edged carefully along the wall until I was nearly next to him. He turned so that his back was to the door and he was facing the others. He spoke rapidly but very clearly.

“I want you to pay very careful attention to me. We’ve overlooked something important, and it is possible that it will have immediate consequences. By the way, are any of you carrying guns? Just out of curiosity, could you show them to me?”

The effect of this was that suddenly both Tyler and Morrissey, although they seemed a bit mystified, were holding guns in their hands.

“Good. Halloway may be right—”

I hit him as hard as I could just below the breastbone so that he made a nasty grunting sound and his head and shoulders jerked forward. I got one hand behind him and the other on the back of his neck and pitched him forward, away from the door, with as much force as I had. As I pulled open the door and charged out into the corridor, I saw Jenkins diving head first against the edge of the table, while the others stared at him astonished. Blood was pouring over his face, and I was running down the corridor and pulling open the door to the front office. As I entered the room, the two women looked up, startled to see the door swing violently open on its own. Someone was behind me. I heard a gunshot. The women were both screaming. Another gunshot. I pulled open the door out to the public corridor. Morrissey and then Tyler were in the front office with me now, both holding guns in their hands. When they saw the open door, they raced out through it into the hall.

I stepped aside to let them pass and moved quietly back across the room. I could hear Morrissey and Tyler charging around outside in the hallway. A moment later Jenkins appeared with Clellan and Gomez on either side steadying him. He was holding what looked like a shirt crumpled up against his face. Blood was dripping from it.

“My God! What happened?” one of the secretaries shrieked. “My God!”

Jenkins turned to the other secretary and asked calmly, “Do you have a pocket mirror?”

She fumbled in her bag. Gomez said, “We should go into the men’s room.” The other woman continued to chant, “My God. My God.”

Jenkins took the mirror that was extended anxiously to him. He looked up at the open door to the hall and said, “Could you close that door, please?” He removed the wad of fabric from his face and began to study himself in the small mirror appraisingly. There was blood everywhere. It streamed down his face and dribbled over his shirt and necktie. He blotted his cheek with the crumpled cloth, and for a moment a patch of white bone appeared below his eye and was then flooded with blood again.

“You’ll have to go to a doctor,” Clellan said.

Jenkins nodded. He pushed the wad of material up against the side of his face again. It covered one eye. With the other, he peered around the room. The woman was still chanting, “My God. My God.”

Morrissey and Tyler reappeared in the doorway looking out of breath and unhappy.

“Anything?” Jenkins asked.

The men both shook their heads. “We followed him into one of the stairways, but after that we lost him,” said Morrissey. “It’s no use. All the exit doors are kept unlocked, and it’s only six flights to the lobby, anyway. Is there anything you want us to try?”

“No. Any indication that you might have hit him?”

“Can’t tell.”

“All right,” said Jenkins. “Come inside and keep that door shut. And get those guns out of sight. Tyler, I’d like you to come with me to the hospital. Someone in the building may have heard the shots and called the police. Clellan, you stay here and deal with them. Also, get all the locks changed today. And then start looking for new office space. I want to be out of here as soon as possible. In the meantime, someone should be guarding that door at all times, including during the night. We have all our records here. I want to be sure that he doesn’t get back in.”

“My God, who was it? What happened?”

Jenkins turned toward the woman and asked her, “What did you see?”

“Nothing! I saw the doors fly open like anything, and there was nobody there, and then you all came running out and shooting.”

Jenkins turned to the other woman.

“I didn’t see anyone!” she said. “Who were you shooting at? What happened?”

There was a long silence. The men looked at each other. Then Clellan spoke, a little tentatively.

“He’s very fast.”

There was another little silence and Gomez spoke.

“Fast?
Fast isn’t hardly the word for him. Fast is not the half of it. He is one fast mother.”

“Lord, he is fast,” said Clellan. He turned to the woman who had been babbling. “You say you didn’t get a real look at him? But would you say he was medium build, light brown hair?”

“I really didn’t see him. I couldn’t say anything for sure,” she said uncertainly.

“Gomez,” said Jenkins, “could you see that Jean and Carmen get home all right? As soon as possible. This has been very trying for them. Tyler, could you take these keys and lock up my office before we go?”

I was right down the corridor ahead of Tyler and through the open door into Jenkins’s office. He pulled shut the door, fitted in the key, and turned the lock. It did not matter to me. There was a simple knob to unlock it from the inside.

Fifteen, thirty-seven, eighteen, five.

I waited several minutes to give Jenkins a chance to leave and then went to the safe. Three full turns to the right to fifteen. Back around all the way to thirty-seven. Eighteen. Five. The door clicked open. I pulled out a stack of photographs of the invisible building and then ran my hands over the shelves until I found the invisible objects. I slipped the ashtray, the bullet, and the screwdriver into my pocket. Just as I thought, Jenkins had kept something in reserve. On another shelf there was a pair of scissors. I pocketed them too.

I went over and crumpled up several sheets of paper on Jenkins’s desk and, with my new pocket lighter, set them on fire. I added the photographs to the blaze, one by one.

There was a strong, acrid burning smell. I opened the window. Then I pulled open the desk drawers and the drawers of the filing cabinets, and emptied their contents onto the fire. Seeing that everything was well in hand, I unlocked the door and slipped into the corridor. The door into the front office was closed, so I went up to it and waited.

I could hear their voices on the other side. Clellan was talking on the telephone to a locksmith. Morrissey was saying that he was sure he smelled something burning. After a while Clellan said that actually he smelled something burning too. In a moment the door swung open and the two men charged through.

“It’s in one of the offices!”

As soon as they passed, I slipped into the outer office, which was completely empty now. I unlatched the outer door and opened it. I could hear Clellan and Morrissey behind me.

“It must be in the Colonel’s office!”

“Tyler locked it.”

“Wait, try the doorknob.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Since they were leaving me the free time, I set fires in the two waste-paper baskets in the front office and dumped whatever papers I could find into them.

“He must still be—”

“The main door!”

They were running back down the corridor towards me. Best to run now. It would be a difficult moment for Jenkins when they told him what I had done. I scurried down the stairs and out through the lobby into the street.

I
had done Jenkins as much harm as I could contrive in the limited time available to me, and I knew that I had made his situation far more precarious. But as I thought it through, I saw that I had done almost nothing to slow him down. They would have to abandon the apartments that Gomez had prepared for me, but they would set up others soon enough. And in fact, by destroying his invisible objects and making him more vulnerable, I had only made it that much more important that he catch me as soon as possible. At least for the present, I had only put more pressure on myself. They would now step up their efforts, and I had to step up mine if I hoped to say ahead of them.

The first thing I did was to begin reconnoitering buildings like the Olympic Tower and the Galleria, which are full of apartments belonging to South Americans and Europeans who are almost never in residence. There is never enough food in these places, and the building security is oppressive, but they might provide me with shelter through the worst of the winter.

My most urgent task, however, was to get Jonathan Crosby solidly established in the world, and to do that I had to find some way to open a bank account. It was not just that I had no way to get at the money accumulating in my brokerage account. Almost everything I wanted to do would require bank references. Without a bank reference I could not get a credit card or open a cash management account or even qualify for a department store charge account, much less enter into a real estate transaction. But a bank officer would not want to open an account without first meeting me in person. And when the bank ran a credit check and found that my entire financial history consisted of a brokerage account opened a few months earlier, the discomfort would become acute. If I showed the slightest reluctance to come in and say hello, they would be convinced that they were dealing with some major new drug dealer — and the banks will only do business with the old, established drug dealers. The only way around all this was to have an introduction from someone the bank knew. I needed an accountant or lawyer who regularly handled other people’s affairs and who already had the right relationship with a bank.