Strangers (54 page)

The writer’s gaze drifted back to the window. “I don’t know. But those are some of the questions we’ve got to answer if we’ve any hope of relieving the subconscious anxiety that this experience left in us, if we’ve any hope of getting on with normal lives.”

Connecticut to New York City

After the money had been removed from the armored car, Jack and his men drove only nine miles and parked the two phony Department of Highway vans in a four-stall rented garage leased with fake IDs, where they had left their cars. The garage was one of a long row that faced both sides of a litter-strewn alley in a shabby neighborhood, where relaxed zoning laws permitted intermingling of commercial and industrial facilities with residences. The area was characterized by peeling paint, grime, broken streetlamps, empty storefronts, and mean-looking mongrel dogs on the loose.

They emptied the contents of the canvas bags on the oily concrete floor of the garage and did a hasty count of the cash. They split it quickly into five shares of approximately three hundred fifty thousand dollars each, all in used bills that could never be traced.

Jack felt no triumph, no thrill. Nothing.

In five minutes, the gang had dispersed like dandelion fluff on a brisk wind. Clockwork.

As Jack headed home to Manhattan, spits of snow fell in brief squalls, though not enough to dust the highway or interfere with travel.

During the drive from Connecticut, in a strange mood, he underwent a change he could not have anticipated. Minute by minute and mile by
mile, the grayness in him began at last to be colored by emotion; his ennui gave way to feelings that surprised him. He would not have been surprised by a new welling-up of grief or loneliness, for Jenny had been dead only seventeen days. But the emotion that steadily tightened its grip on him was
guilt.
The stolen money in the trunk of the car began to weigh on his conscience as heavily as if it were the first ill-gotten goods ever to fall into his hands.

Through eight busy years of meticulously planned and triumphantly executed larcenies, several on an even grander scale than the armored car, he had never experienced the mildest quiver of guilt. Until now. He had seen himself as a just avenger. Until now.

Cruising to Manhattan through the blustery winter night, he began to see himself as little more than a common thief. Guilt wrapped him like flypaper. He tried repeatedly to shake it off. It clung.

Sudden as it seemed, the guilt had actually been building for a long time; that was where his growing dissatisfaction had been leading for months. Disillusionment had set in noticeably with the jewelry-store job last October, and he’d thought the changes had begun then. But now, forced into self-analysis, he realized he had stopped getting a full measure of pleasure from his work long ago. As he scrolled backward in his memory, seeking the most recent job that had left him fulfilled, he was startled to discover it was the McAllister burglary in Marin County, north of San Francisco, the summer before last.

Ordinarily, he worked only in the East near Jenny, but Branch Pollard—with whom he had pulled off the just-completed Guardmaster heist—had settled in California for a while, and during that Pacific sojourn he had spotted Avril McAllister, a sheep waiting to be sheared. McAllister, an industrialist worth two hundred million, lived on an eight-acre estate in Marin County, protected by stone walls, a complex electronic security system, and guard dogs. With information developed from a half-dozen sources, Branch had determined that McAllister was a collector of rare stamps and coins, two eminently fenceable commodities. Besides, the industrialist was a gambler who went to Vegas three times a year, usually dropping a quarter of a million each visit, but sometimes winning big; he always took his winnings in cash to avoid the taxman, and some of that cash was surely in the mansion. Branch needed Jack’s sense of strategy and expertise in electronics, and Jack needed a change of scenery, so they pulled it off with the help of a third man.

After considerable planning, getting onto the estate and into the house went smoothly. They were prepared with an electronic listening device that could detect the soft tick of a safe’s tumblers and amplify them,
which made deducing the combination mere child’s play, but as insurance they also took a full set of safe-cracking tools
and
a plastic explosive. The problem was that Avril McAllister had no mere safe. He had a damn
vault.
The industrialist was so certain of the vault door’s inviolability that he’d made no effort to conceal it with a sliding partition or tapestry; it was in one wall of the immense game room, a massive stainless-steel portal as big as anything in a first-class bank. The listening device Jack had brought was not sensitive enough to detect the movement of tumblers through twenty inches of stainless steel. The plastic explosive would have peeled any safe, but the vault was blast-proof. The set of safecracker’s tools was a joke.

They left the estate with no stamps or coins, but with sterling silver, a complete collection of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett first editions, a few jewels that Mrs. McAllister carelessly left out of the vault, and a handful of other items, which they fenced for only sixty thousand dollars, split three ways. The take was by no means a pittance, but it was far less than anticipated, insufficient to cover their expenses and to make their time, planning, and risks worthwhile.

In spite of this debacle, Jack had gotten a kick out of the job. Once they had safely fled the McAllister estate, he and Branch had seen the humor in the catastrophe and had been able to laugh about it. They spent two days relaxing in the California sun; then, on a whim, Jack took his twenty thousand to Reno to see if he could do better at craps and blackjack than he had done at burglary. Twenty-four hours after checking into Harrah’s, he checked out, the twenty thousand having grown to an amazing $107,455. The exquisite symmetry of bad-luck money bringing good luck was enormously appealing. Deciding to extend his vacation, he rented a car and drove back to New York, all the way across the country, in a splendid mood, eager to see Jenny.

Now, more than eighteen months later, as he entered Manhattan on his return trip from Connecticut, Jack realized that, curiously, the fiasco at the McAllister estate had been the last enterprise to provide untainted satisfaction. At that point he had begun a long journey from dead-end amorality all the way across the moral spectrum until he had become, once more, capable of guilt.

But
why
? What had initiated the change in him? What continued to power it? He had no answers.

All he knew was that he was no longer able to think of himself as a melancholy and romantic bandit with a just mission to redress the wrongs done to him and to his beloved wife. He was merely a thief. For eight years he had been deluding himself. Now he saw himself for what he really was, and the sudden insight was devastating.

He had not merely become a man without purpose. Worse, without realizing it, he had been lacking a worthwhile purpose
for eight years.

He drove aimlessly through the streets of Manhattan, going nowhere in particular, unwilling to return straightaway to the apartment.

He soon found himself on Fifth Avenue, approaching St. Patrick’s, and on impulse he pulled to the curb, parked illegally before the main doors of the immense cathedral. He got out of the car, went around to the trunk, opened it, and pulled half a dozen banded stacks of twenty-dollar bills from the plastic garbage bag.

It was foolhardy to leave the car illegally parked in so prominent a location when its trunk contained more than a third of a million dollars in stolen money, an illegally obtained device like SLICKS, and guns. If a cop stopped to give him a ticket and became suspicious and demanded to search the car, Jack would be finished. But he had ceased to care. In some ways, he was a dead man who still walked, just as Jenny had been a dead woman who still breathed.

Though not a Catholic, he pulled open one of the sculpted bronze doors of St. Patrick’s, went inside, into the nave, where a handful of people knelt in the front pews, praying or saying the rosary, and where an old man was lighting a votive candle even at this hour. Jack stood for a moment looking up at the elegant baldachin above the main altar. Then he located the poor-boxes, removed the bundles of twenty-dollar bills from inside his winter jacket, broke the paper bands that bound them, and stuffed the money into the containers as if he were jamming garbage into trash receptacles.

Outside again, as he was descending the granite steps, he stopped abruptly and blinked at the night-draped cityscape, for something was different about Fifth Avenue. As a few huge snowflakes spiraled lazily through the glow of streetlamps and through the lights of cars moving along the thoroughfare, Jack gradually realized the city had reacquired a fraction of the glitter, glamour, and mystery that it always had for him before he’d gone to Central America but which it had not possessed in ages. It seemed
cleaner
now than it had been in a long time, and the air was crisper, less polluted.

Staring around in amazement, he slowly understood that the city had not undergone a metamorphosis during the past few minutes. It was the same city that it had been an hour ago—and yesterday. But when he had come back from Central America, he had been a different man from the one who had gone away, and on returning he had been unable to see anything good in the metropolis or in any other works of the society he hated. Much of the Big Apple’s dreariness and degeneration had been merely a reflection of his own blasted, burnt-out, corrupted inner landscape.

Jack returned to the Camaro, went west to Sixth Avenue, north to Central Park, made a right turn, then another right onto Fifth Avenue again, heading south, not sure where he was going until he reached the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Once more, he parked illegally, took cash from the trunk, and went into the church.

There was no poor-box as in St. Patrick’s, but Jack found a young assistant minister in the process of closing the place for the night. From various pockets, Jack produced bundles of ten-and twenty-dollar bills wrapped with rubber bands, and handed them to the startled cleric, claiming to have won a fortune in the casinos of Atlantic City.

In two stops, he had given away thirty thousand dollars. But that was not even one-tenth of what he had brought back from Connecticut, and those dispensations did not allay his guilt. In fact, his newfound shame was growing stronger by the minute. The bag of money in the trunk was, to him, like the telltale heart buried under the floorboards in the story by Poe, a throbbing annunciator of his guilt, and he was as anxious to be rid of it as Poe’s narrator had been anxious to silence the incriminating heartbeat of his dismembered victim.

Three hundred thirty thousand dollars remained. For some New Yorkers, Christmas was about to come two and a half weeks late.

Elko County, Nevada

The summer before last, Dom had stayed in Room 20. He remembered it well because it was the last unit in the motel’s L-shaped east wing.

Ernie Block’s curiosity was more compelling than his nyctophobia, so he decided to accompany Faye and Dom to Room 20, where it was hoped that Dom’s memories would be stirred by the sight of the familiar walls and furnishings. Ernie walked between Faye and Dom, who held his arms. During the trip along the breezeway, the frigid night wind made Dom glad for his fleece-lined jacket. More concerned about the black night than the chill, Ernie kept his eyes shut for the entire journey.

Faye went in first, snapping on the lights, closing drapes. Dom followed with Ernie, who opened his eyes only when Faye shut the door.

Upon entering the room, Dom was filled with apprehension. He walked to the queen-sized bed, stared down at it. He tried to remember lying here, drugged and helpless.

Faye said, “The bedspread’s not the same, of course.”

The Polaroid had shown the corner of a floral-patterned spread. The current model was brown-and blue-striped.

“The bed itself is the same, and all the furniture,” Ernie said.

The padded headboard was upholstered with a coarse brown fabric, slightly snagged and worn. The nightstands were plain two-drawer chests with laminated walnut veneer. The bases of the lamps resembled large hurricane lanterns, black metal with two panes of smoky amber glass in each side; the cloth shades were the same amber hue as the glass in the base. Each lamp had two bulbs: The main one, under the shade, provided most of the light; the second bulb, inside the base, was shaped like a candle flame and gave off a dim flickering glow that imitated a real flame and was used only for its decorative effect, to enhance the illusion of hurricane lanterns.

Dom remembered every detail of the place now that he was standing in it, and he had the impression that a multitude of ghosts flitted teasingly through the room, staying just at the periphery of his vision. The ghosts were actually bad memories rather than spirits, and they haunted not the room but the shadowy corners of his own mind.

“Remember anything?” Ernie asked. “Is it coming back to you?”

“I want to have a look at the john,” Dom said.

It was small and strictly functional, with a shower stall but no bathtub, a speckled tile floor, and durable Formica counter tops.

Dom was interested in the sink, for it was surely the one in his recurring nightmare. But when he looked into the bowl, he was surprised to see a mechanical stopper. And an inch below the rim of the bowl, the overflow drain consisted of three round holes, a more modern design than the six slanted lozenge-shaped outlets in the sink of his dreams.

“This isn’t the same,” he said. “The sink was old, with a rubber stopper attached to a bead-chain and hung from the cold-water faucet.”

“We’re always upgrading the place,” Ernie said from the doorway.

“We took that sink out eight or nine months ago,” Faye said. “We replaced the Formica then, too, although it’s the same color as before.”

Dom was disappointed because he had been convinced that at least some memories from those lost days would begin to return to him when he touched the sink. After all, judging from the stark terror of the nightmare, something particularly frightening had happened to him at that very spot; therefore, it seemed likely that the sink might act as a lightning rod upon the supercharged memories that drifted in the darkness of his subconscious, drawing them back in a sudden crackling blaze of recollection. He put his hands on the new sink, but he felt only cold porcelain.