Soft touch (4 page)

"Don't go so damn fast. How good is your information about the courier?"

"I got some of it from Carmela. I've made some contacts in that area, Jerry, and I checked it all out. The

courier is scared witless about the whole thing. He spilled it all to his wife. They have two little girls. I'm convinced he's no problem."

"How about intercepting the money before he gets it?"

"Four of Melendez's agents escort him and it to the airplane."

"Suppose one goes along with him this time?"

"That would be a very sickening situation. Any one of the four would know me by sight. I think if I talked very, very fast I might turn it into a deal. But the odds are small, I mean that one would come along. And in that case, you're still in the clear. If there's a hassle, drive away from it. Ditch the car. Go home."

"Like you came into the water and hauled me out when I got shot in the shoulder?"

"Have I even hinted at that? Have I?"

"No."

"What's the word, Jerry?"

"When do you have to leave?"

"The ticket says one-fifteen tomorrow afternoon."

"Would you leave earlier or later if I said yes or no right now?"

"In any case, I'd have to grab the same airplane."

"So when you leave, you'll know."

"Will you give Lorraine the word?"

"If I say yes? Not a chance."

"Good. What will be the reason for your trip?"

"Job-hunting. Vince, if I say yes, I might need some financing. I'm that broke."

"No problem. I've got it with me."

"If I say yes."

"I heard you, boy. It has to be two. Just two. And I hope it's you. That's damn near a song lyric."

I started the car. "Copyright it, Uncle Vince. Make a mint."

"Somebody beat me to it. It had to be you. Remember?"

"Kindly don't sing it."

"One thing, Jerry. One last thing. Don't get futzed up with the morals of the thing. Peral is a tiger. Melendez 30

is a shark. We are just a couple of cuties who zip in and grab the piece of meat and get out fast. And incidentally stop a nasty little civil war. Keep thinking of that. Hell, I hope you haven't gone too stale for the job, Jamison."

"Look, Vince. One thing. Just one guy in transit with all that money. Is that logical?"

"In the first place, Melendez has him thoroughly cowed. In the second place, it would attract attention to mount a guard on it. In the third place, he is put on at one end, watched at the stop en route, and picked up at this end, so where could he go, even if he got the yen?"

I drove back home. Lorraine had gone out some place, leaving no note or word with Irene. Irene fixed us lunch. We talked about old times and places. At one point I looked across the table at Vince and it struck me that I had never really known him, and never would. And I wondered if anybody had ever gotten close enough to him to be able to think they knew him well, how his mind and heart worked. He had the look of indolence and effectiveness of one of the great carnivores. There was a taint of the tiger in him. The tiger is not a herd beast.

I remembered a night long ago when we had flanked a patrol and sent them wildly down a slope to where our people had set the bamboo stakes at a fatal angle, cruelly barbed. The next day, at midmorning, Vince and I had gone back with some boys. There were still seven of them impaled on the stakes and four held to a thin thread of life. The rain came down. I remembered how Vince set the click of his grease gun to semi-automatic and sauntered down to where they were. I saw him in the haze of the rain curtain, on that morning when all the color had been leached out of the world, the broad brim of the Aussie hat protecting the smolder of the native cigar stub in the corner of his mouth. Like a man picking blooms in a strange garden, he had moved in that easy way from one to the other and shot each one in the head. The sound of the four shots went dead in the rain. Then he signaled and we came down and stripped them of weapons and ammunition and grenades and the contents of their

pockets and any articles of clothing that might be useful to our people, and went back the way we had come.

And I remembered the way he liked to go off alone through the hills, and come back an hour or a day later. "Little friends, I have found a fine brisk little bridge with a permanent guard post." Then he would draw it up, sketching in the terrain and we would discuss ways and means.

All that life had become natural to me. But it was a long time back, and all this talk of planned revolution and millions and couriers seemed, in the quiet setting of my home, to be a rather extravagant and ambitious television spectacular which was falling flat.

But at times I could bring myself to believe it was all true. My tendency to believe, my ability to return to the thought and action patterns of twenty years ago was like a faulty fluorescent tube. It would glow steadily for a time, then falter and flicker.

I waited until I was driving him to the airport on Sunday. He hadn't pressed me for a decision. When I had to stop for a light I said, "Okay, Vince. We're back in business."

Though I heard no sound I had the impression he had exhaled in a long sigh. "Good deal, Jerry. Get to the Tampa Terrace before noon, or at least close to noon on the sixth. Make your own reservation. Pick a name. Something ordinary."

"Robert Martin."

"Okay. If there's any change there'll be a message at the desk for you. If not tell them it will be one or two nights and you'll let them know. Stay in the room and I'll get in touch. Better put the car in a lot somewhere near the hotel."

I let him off at the main entrance to the terminal. As we had approached he had taken five hundred in fifties from his wallet. I had protested, but he said if I didn't have to use it, I could give it back. He walked through the wide doors and out of sight, not looking back. On the way home I had to stop for another fight. Two cops stood

on the corner, talking. I looked at them and felt a barely perceptible quiver of uneasiness. I knew it was but the first of many symptoms.

On Sunday night a pack of Lorraine's special friends trooped in to drink my liquor. I had endured them for years, even tried to like them. Brittle, nervous, flirtatious women with laughter like the breaking of glass. And their dominated husbands, brown, drunk, noisy—masters of the crude double meaning, Don Juans of the locker room.

Now, by reason of the decision I had made, I was through with them. They were strangers.

That night before I went to bed I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. And saw another stranger with a closed and wary face, coarse ginger hair going gray. I snapped the light out. The house was still. They had taken Lorraine off with them to the club, for drinking and groping and fumbling, for funny jokes and laughing, for wide slack kisses, and a fat tab added to the monthly statement.

I woke up when she came in. She turned all the bedroom lights on. I pretended sleep. I heard her leg thud into a chair, and heard her slurred and mumbled, "Son vabish." When she began to snore I got up and turned out the lights she had forgotten. In the darkness there was an odor of her in the room, stale perfume, smoke, liquor, and an acid trace of perspiration.

No place for Lorraine in my new world to be.

But room for Liz?

Chapter

I registered at the Tampa Terrace at ten minutes after noon on Tuesday, the sixth of May, as Robert Martin. I had my suit coat over my arm and my white shirt was pasted to my back from the exertion of walking the two and a half blocks from the parking lot. I was ninety per

cent certain that there would be a note from Vince saying it was all off. But there was nothing at the desk for me.

After the bellhop closed the room door behind him, there was nothing to do but wait. I had left on Saturday morning, allowing three days for the sixteen-hundred-mile trip. I had hit a lot of heavy rains on the way down. Tampa was a blazing steam bath, but the room was air-conditioned.

I tried to read a magazine I had bought in the lobby, but I couldn't focus my mind on it. I walked back and forth, from the windows to the bureau, stubbing out cigarettes with only half an inch smoked from them. I cursed Vince for making me wait.

The twelve days in Vernon since Vince had left had been strange. Lorraine and her parents had the idea that I would get back to my meaningless job as soon as I "came to my senses." But I had gone back to the office only to pick up my final salary check. I had cashed it rather than deposit it. I had done some job-hunting, more as camouflage than anything else.

George Farr, one of the smartest and most successful builders in the entire area, surprised me by wanting to talk to me personally. I had expected the brush-off.

He leaned back and chewed on the bow of his glasses and said, "With all due respects to your father-in-law, Jerry, it's damn well time you cut yourself loose from that operation. Maybe it's a break for both of us. I need a top sergeant. The doc says I've got to shift to a lower gear. I need somebody to ramrod the jobs in progress, goose my supers, ride herd on materials, battle the architects, and asskiss the clients. I'll stay busy enough to feel important, but you'll be driven nuts. Three hundred fifty bucks a week and an annual bonus based on a percentage of the net. And you can start today."

It sounded good. It sounded damn good. And I could take Lorraine's offer. "It ... it sounds fine. But I'll have to think it over."

"Right now we've got a shopping center, two motels, an automobile agency and a co-op apartment house on the 34

books. There's other stuff I want to bid on, but I haven't got the supervisory personnel."

"I'll have to let you know, George."

I felt dazed as I.drove away. Dear Hotel—If anybody should try to leave a message for a fictitious Robert Martin, or ask for him at the desk on May sixth, kindly give him the enclosed envelope.

Dear Vince—Here is your five hundred. I am very sorry. I have decided I have no use for that much money after all. Thanks for yanking me out of the river that time.

When I went home Lorraine kept yapping at me. "What are you going to do? Just hang around the house? What are we going to live on?"

"I've got some plans."

"Fine. Great big brave plans. Mother was here while you were gone. She said Daddy's very upset about this whole thing. They can't understand why you've turned on him this way after all he's done. She cried, even."

"Lorraine. Get off my back."

"But what are you going to do!"

"I'm going to take a little trip."

"Where, for God's sake?"

"Look up some people I used to know. Maybe I'll be able to borrow enough money to get started on my own again."

"Who would lend you money?"

"They come running after me, trying to stuff it in my pocket. Why don't you go get a nice bottle and pass out some place?"

"It's my right to know what you're going to do!"

So I spent as little time as possible around the house. She was belting herself as never before. I learned how to make one beer in a neighborhood bar last a full hour.

On the Friday before I left I went, on impulse, to a drugstore near the office and phoned Liz and asked her if she could sneak out for coffee. She said she was caught up and E. J. was out and she'd be right along. She sat across from me in the booth and told me precisely how everything was going to hell. Even though I had left, I couldn't enjoy hearing that. You put a part of your life

into something and it is a sad thing to hear how a stubborn and stupid old man is ruining it.

She seemed a little sad too. "Miss you around there, Jerry. I really do. It's dull around there. What are you going to do?"

I lied about job-hunting, about looking for backing.

"Hope you can start your own shop, Jerry. And I hope you'll need a gal in the office."

"Lorraine would just scream with joy if I hired you."

She looked at me steadily. "Would you care if she did?"

We were getting into places we had never been before. I looked back at her and said, "No. Maybe she's part of my past."

"What do you mean?"

"Suppose I've been lying, Liz. About job-hunting and setting up shop."

She frowned at me. "I don't follow you."

"I can't tell you much. I don't want to tell you much. Just suppose that I suddenly . . . came into a large chunk of money. Large."

"How nice for you."

"I'm going away for a while. I may come back with it."

There was sudden comprehension and concern. "You wouldn't do anything . . . really stupid?"

"No. It would be safe. Money to keep."

Her hand rested beside her coffee cup. I reached across the booth and took hold of her hand and wrist. I saw from the way the shape of her mouth changed that I had gripped her too tightly and hurt her. She made no protest. I had not touched her before.

"Maybe when I come back with it, we could take off for good."

"Where?"

"There'd be enough to go anywhere."

She looked beyond me, her stare curiously intent. She ran the tip of her tongue across her lower Up. "It's a dull life here, Jerry. It's getting duller instead of better."

"Later we could make it legal." 36

"Later we can talk about it. We can talk about the whole thing. Just get the money."

I released her hand. She sipped her coffee. She looked at me over the rim of the cup. She set it down empty and gave me a wry smile of guilt and promise that quickened my heart. "Get the money," she said in almost a whisper. "Then we'll talk."

I left on Saturday after a messy brawl with Lorraine. I had a little over a thousand dollars with me. I drove southeast through heavy rains. Mr. Robert Martin, lying on sagging beds, watching on old ceilings the light patterns of the traffic and the colored neon, smelling the effluvium of questionable plumbing and the rankness of old linoleum, hearing in the trafficky night the empty bam of a juke box base, a girl-laugh like a shriek of anguish, and beyond the thin wall, the dreary honking of a phlegm-ridden salesman of plastic novelties.

The room phone rang at twenty past three. I answered it and Vince said he'd be right up. He came in striding lithely, taut, brown and grinning. He wore a cocoa straw hat, massive sun glasses. As I closed the door he tossed a brown paper bag on the bed. He went over to the bureau and looked at the brimming ash tray.