On the Run (7 page)

“This is a personal problem,” George said. “Do you know about the time, over two years ago, I got asked about my kid brother? He got in a mess in Florida and they were looking for him?”

“You got roughed up a little bit, Georgie?”

“Why should they send silly bastards like that? I told those two everything I knew, which wasn’t much, and they thought there should be more, so they bounced me off the walls. They sprained my back and I couldn’t tie my shoes for three weeks.”

“Indignation, George?” Boardman murmured.

“I should think I’d have a little protection from stuff like that.”

“Georgie, you take away maybe forty declared and twenty more under the table in a year, and you drive a big car and have a swimming pool, and you snap your fingers and some broad comes running, but it shouldn’t give you very big ideas. In a three billion dollar take, you are a very small time thing, and you have been shot with luck to get even as big as you are.”

“Are you sore at me about something?”

“Georgie, you get emotional because you are not very bright. I am putting things in perspective for you. Frank Lesca is worth three of you, and he is also expendable. If it was a supermarket, Lesca would be a clerk in the vegetables and you’d be a bag boy. So don’t give me tears about being roughed a little. It’s a business risk. Why was your brother so popular all of a sudden?”

“After they sprained me, then they clued me a little. Sid got somebody in Florida sore at him. Not in the business. A personal thing. Sid was in the automobile business, and it was some kind of static about Sid’s wife with somebody named Wain.”

“I remember it now. He disfigured Jerry Wain. Wain had a try at him and missed, and the man skipped. That was your brother? I didn’t connect it up. Wain wanted him on a completely personal basis, and there was five thousand offered for information.”

“How big is Wain?”

Boardman turned a grey face and stared at George Shanley. “He couldn’t set your brother up without clearing it. And it was a personal matter, and he got it cleared. Shouldn’t that answer your question?”

“But just how big is he?” George asked stubbornly.

“Lesca has this one little corner down here. Wain has Florida, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. And he has the islands. And once upon a time he had Cuba. Also he is on the big board, representing the southeast. Now what’s your problem?”

George wiped his sweaty lip with the back of his hand. “Here’s all I knew about the kid when they bounced me around, Claude. I took off from home, that was in Youngstown, when I was fifteen. Sid was nine, I think. Our old lady was dead. We had a step-mother. The old man worked in a steel mill. I went back there when I was twenty-two. I checked around. I found out the old man had been dead five years, and no trace of Hilda or the kid. I didn’t look too hard. What was the kid to me? We never got along. Right after Korea, or maybe it was still going on, I’m in the Chicago airport and I hear Sergeant Sidney Shanley called, for him to go to the United Airlines desk. I was killing time. It was him, in uniform. We weren’t glad to see each other. We talked three minutes, maybe. He told me how the old man got killed. He told me Hilda ran out on him. I told him I was married and I owned a restaurant in San Diego. Like strangers. He didn’t say where he was going or what he was going to do. That was it. He’d grown bigger than I thought he would, and he looked hard as a stone. That’s all I knew. Then yesterday morning I got this special delivery letter.”

He handed it to Boardman. Boardman read it carefully. “Did they ask you about any other relatives?”

“Yes. I said there weren’t any. Honest to God, I didn’t think there were. Now this old man pops up. My mother’s father. In some place named Bolton. I never saw him, but I think Sid was with him for a little while when Sid was real little. About the time my mother died, and the old man was in the tank for something, D and D probably, that old grandpa came and got him and was going to keep him, but my old man went and got him and brought him back. I was maybe ten years old. I’d forgotten all that. I figured the old grandpa for dead. I couldn’t even remember that Brower was my
mother’s maiden name until I saw it on this letter. I don’t even know how he found out my address.”

“Next question. What happens to you if Wain finds out you were holding out on him? But there are some assumptions there. That’s assuming he never has caught up with your brother, which is a big assumption. And, if he hasn’t, that he’s still eager. It’s hard to stay mad too long. But Wain could stay mad as long as anybody you would ever want to meet.”

“I’m wondering about if I go there and the kid brother is there too.”

Boardman gave him a deathly smile. “So we are down to a question of loyalties?”

George said hastily, “I told you the kid means nothing to me.”

“You want an opinion? If Wain hasn’t found him and still wants him, and if Wain finds out you tried to be cute with him and resents it, it would become a policy matter, and Lesca couldn’t give you an inch of protection. You could find out how far you can swim with some cinder blocks four miles off Imperial Beach.”

“Don’t say a thing like that!”

“You’re not very bright and you have a nervous stomach, Georgie. I read you before you open your mouth. And don’t worry about cinder blocks, I forget the modern improvements. You’d have a heart attack.”

“Claude, please, all I want is …”

“You want me to find out how things stand.”

“I want to go there. Maybe there’s a piece of money in it. Even ten would help a lot, with no tax bite out of it.”

“You five too big, Georgie. It keeps you poor and jumpy.”

“Will you …”

“Shut up,” Boardman said. He looked at the letter again. He handed it back. “Go away, Georgie. I’ll call a friend from here. Go downstairs. Have some coffee. Stop sweating. You smell up the office.”

At the door George turned and moistened his lips and said, “Another thing. If there’s still that … that money for fingering him …”

Boardman sat up slowly. “Your brother? Your own brother?”

“But if I got to do it anyway. I mean as long as I’ve got to do it …”

“What you’ve got, I’d rather have cancer.”

“But …”

“Get out! Get out!”

The anger tired him. After George left he lay back for another few minutes. He went to the desk and took the small notebook from his wallet. He made a call to Miami. He talked for ten minutes. He made another call to Mobile. He stretched out on the red couch again. It amused him to find he enjoyed having a reason to make some of the careful calls, the kind that would mean nothing to anybody who tapped the line. Even on such a dirty little thing like this, it was good to have a reason.

George Shanley waited thirty minutes before Boardman shuffled into the lunch room and sat on the stool beside him.

“They still want him,” Boardman said in an almost inaudible voice. “They missed twice. Wain wants him. Anyway, you’re in the clear now. Go see Grandpa. It will be checked out. Maybe somebody gets there before you do. I wouldn’t know. If he’s there when you get there, the kid brother I mean, and if he should disappear right after you get there, you won’t look very good, Georgie.”

“But I don’t want to be around if there’s going to be any …”

“You better go see Grandpa. They want you to go see Grandpa. Maybe you can help out a little. I don’t know. But they want it to be very quiet. Very quick and quiet and no fuss. Maybe Wain wouldn’t want it that way, and maybe he won’t find out until it’s done. Maybe Wain isn’t quite as big as he used to be because he worries too much about his face and about your brother, and he doesn’t keep his mind on the operation. Maybe people are a little uneasy about him. So it will be like a favor for a friend, and we’ll tell him later. It means no five for you, Georgie, because that was from Wain on a purely personal basis. Cheer up. Maybe you make up for it by getting his share of Grandpa’s money. A fellow getting his brother knocked off should get something for his trouble.”

“Don’t do me that way, Claude. I had to protect myself, didn’t I?”

“You’re protected.”

“Any time I can do anything for you, Claude …”

On Saturday morning, after phoning her room, Sid walked over with his suitcase and they drove over to the airport in her rental car. She wore the blue skirt he had first seen her in, with a fresh white blouse. She seemed subdued and distant, and he imagined her attitude toward him was that same impersonal approach nurses used toward a patient they did not like. After she had turned the car in, and they had put the baggage into the blue station wagon, they went back to the terminal and had breakfast. He noticed dark smudges under her eyes.

“I’d like to call Tom,” she said.

“Can he talk on the phone?”

“There’s an extension by his bed. But it doesn’t ring there. If he’s sleeping, I can try again. It will make him very happy to hear I’m bringing you back.”

“And it fills you with joy, too.”

“I’m just a messenger. I’m glad I’m able to do what he wanted me to do.”

“That’s nice.”

“If he’s awake, do you want to say hello?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Suit yourself.”

“It’s a small place. It would go through a little switchboard, wouldn’t it? I don’t think you ought to be … too specific about who is coming back with you.”

“It’s a small place, and I imagine that everybody in town knows Tom has been trying to locate his grandsons. But nobody would know you’ve been on the run. Or probably care particularly.”

“Try to keep it short and vague.”

She looked at him. Her dark eyes were cool. “Anything you say, Sidney. I guess that being nervous can become
quite a habit. It’s a strange way to live, not trusting anybody.”

He stood outside the booth as she made the call. He saw her face in profile, expressionless in waiting, then suddenly warm and softening, the smile curving, and he knew she was talking to the old man. To see her like that gave him a surprising feeling of loss. She had worn that look for him, for a little while. When she came out, her face was still again.

“He’s very pleased.”

“That’s nice.”

He went to a news stand and bought a road atlas. She had no sun glasses. He bought her a pair.

As he headed north out of the city on Route 59, she said, “You said we’d have to buy some things.”

“We’ll get them up the line.”

The wagon was heavy and powerful. After it had cooled off, he turned the air-conditioning to low. It had been a long time since he had taken a trip. He liked the feel of the car, the way it snugged to the road at high speed. She sat far from him, looking out her side window at the baked land. The silence between them seemed to be an uncomfortable truce.

He was curious about her driving, so when they reached Lufkin, a little over an hour out of Houston, he had her take the wheel. She was erratic at first, picking up too much speed and then glancing at the meter and dropping back, going into the gentle curves too fast, wandering slightly. But then she found the rhythm of the car and the road. She held the wheel high, her hands clenched at two o’clock and ten o’clock, chin high, lips slightly compressed. He lounged back against the passenger door, elbow hooked over the back of the seat and studied her. The blue skirt was hiked above her knees. Her forearms had that little-girl look. Her breasts were high and firm under the white material of her blouse. The line of her throat was lovely. There was, he thought, something obscurely erotic about an attractive woman driving a big car at high speed, an interest composed of contrast. There she sat, the vulnerable animal, perched on her soft and useful hindquarters, all her flesh humming to the vibration of the road speed, with one dainty foot and ankle urging the hammering ton of metal along. Her
face held a gravity and a sadness, and he thought it wasteful that after being shut up so long with the dying, she had lost any flavor of holiday in this long trip.

“I want to say some things without you saying a word,” he said.

“You certainly …”

“That’s two words, and this is something that won’t work if we turn it into a discussion group. You just keep driving and you won’t be able to keep from listening. Maybe it won’t work no matter how I say it. I don’t want to make any apology about last night.”

He paused and watched her mouth. It looked as if she was going to speak, but then she compressed her lips more tightly.

“I thought about it after you went back to your room, Paula. I wondered why I should have done such a crude and lousy thing. I don’t have anything against you personally. This isn’t an apology. It’s just sort of … exploring the things behind it. That means understanding me a little bit. I don’t have the instincts of a loner. From my background, I guess I should have. But I’ve always wanted roots. I’ve wanted my own people around me. A nest-builder or something. So for over two and a half years I’ve had to live with the realization that I can’t afford roots. In the first year I made a couple of very close and very warm contacts with decent human beings. But I had to fake a history for them. And I had to leave without warning. And it hurt. It hurt like hell. Like tearing out little bits of yourself. From the moment you walked into the shack yesterday, I felt that warmth in you, and I felt my own response to it. You seemed to be a symbol of the kind of thing, the kind of relationship I can’t have. And as I felt us getting closer … I don’t know whether you felt it or not … I had to slam the door. I had to do something to make it impossible. I remember part of a college psychology course, about insecure children breaking favorite toys to punish themselves. Okay. I broke any chances we had the first time I had a chance. I know how it made you feel, I think. Cheap and humiliated. I got you heated up when you didn’t want to be heated up. The funny thing about it, I knew I could do it. I didn’t have any question in my mind. I would have looked like an idiot if I couldn’t. I
think I was able to because, by then, we were already carrying on a second conversation, aside from the one we were saying to each other. I guess I spoiled things, but perhaps that was the smartest thing to do. I wasn’t tracking right. From the moment you showed me that jade box, the whole day was unreal. I can put on an act. Hard and cynical and so on. Probably I’ve made you believe it. But look. I don’t think you were humiliated, and I was the only one there to see it. You’re a healthy woman, but if there hadn’t been something starting between us, it wouldn’t have happened. I couldn’t have made it happen. I thought of taking you. Maybe I could have. I don’t know. You asked me why I quit. You meant it as a bitter question. I think I quit for the same reason I started, that I sensed a strong attraction and I wanted to knock it off before it got a fair start. I have to protect myself and you, because there’s no offer I can make. Okay. Now we have to be together for a time. And I don’t want it to be lousy for you. I want you to have a better idea of me, a better opinion of me than what you’ve got right now. I was an insecure kid breaking toys. And having that jade box appear out of nowhere, I felt as if I’d been turned inside out. I felt raw and scared. I’m still scared. I’d built a pretty good wall and it started to crumble. I don’t want the kind of a truce we have right now. I want you to feel better. And I guess the only way you can is if you try to understand why it happened. I’ve been trying to be honest with you. But nobody knows the whole truth about himself, I guess. All I can do is give you some clues. But now suppose you just keep still and think about it for a few minutes, and then say what you think. I … I want you to have a better time than you’re having. I think you deserve it.”