Your Day In The Barrel

by Alan Furst

  We rent a car for cash, using Genelle’s name, and I call Henrietta from a phonebooth on Route 80 and ask her for a place. She says she has one on West 57th, I say fine, make sure there’s linen on the bed and towels ready and a coffee pot. Can she wait a few days for the bill? I’ve always fronted cash to her before so she says fine.

  We get back to New York at 12:30 having stayed right at the motel for the night, and I drop Genelle and Robbie off at a friend’s house. I haven’t told her much, except that she shouldn’t be around her apartment and to keep Robbie close. I’ll get her some cash when I can. The problem is gonna be solved one way or another in two weeks.

  “Take care of yourself, man,” she says when I drop her off, and she leans across the seat and kisses me. A very nice warm kiss on the lips. I say “Thank you,” in an odd sort of voice, and then she is gone. I return the car and go to the apartment and sleep for ten hours. I want to let my subconscious get into this and let my little men work on it without any interference from me. Typically, I am a great meddler in their affairs.

  When I get up I’ve got lots of questions, and a few plans. First call is to California where it’s eight-thirty on a Sunday morning.

  “Hello, Jim?”

  “Yeah. Who is this?”

  “Jim, I want you to call me from a payphone.” And I give him the number and probably a good case of the scoots. In ten minutes my payphone rings. “Who is this?”

  “It’s the other Jim Adler.”

  “You weren’t ever gonna call me. Some lady in Ohio was suppose to do that.”

  “I know, but that’s uncool right now.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “I don’t really know, that’s the problem. Look, can you take a vacation or sick leave at work on short notice?”

  “If someone’s hip to me, I’ve got to run or otherwise it’s gonna be a long, long vacation.”

  “I don’t know how bad this is. Better not to blow the whole thing yet. Take two weeks off and hide. Stay in the States, but hide. Like at a friend’s house. Don’t call that number in Ohio. Just keep things on ice.”

  “Can I reach you some way?”

  “No, but when you get somewhere, send a phone number in a general delivery telegram to, uh, Steven Kane, at the Columbus Circle Post Office in Manhattan. I’ll check with them from time to time.”

  “Okay. Uh, this is a good arrangement, for both of us. But even so, I appreciate what you did. You know and I know that I don’t wanna get burned, that’s a Leavenworth trip, y’know, but anything I can do, really anything that I can do at all, I’ll do. You decide how safe it is.”

  “That’s pretty good to hear. I can’t think of anything, but if I do, I’ll yell.”

  “Good. Do that. I appreciate what you did.”

  “You take care.”

  “You too. Good luck.”

  Next call is to Kenny Velez, my man in the New York City Department of Welfare. “Hello, Kenny?” “Yeah. You just caught me, I was makin’ it out to the park.”

  “This is Roger.”

  “Roger, for chrissake. How you doin’?”

  “I got a few little problems.”

  “That last pound was beautiful. What do you need?” “Is there some form or other for tracing people? Like fathers who don’t pay for child support?”

  “There’s fouteen million forms like that. Each one in quintuplicate.”

  “Is there a possibility that if you were looking for a father, and all you had was a license plate, that you could put through a form and find out the owner?” “Might take a few days. See what I’d have to do is put it in the case record that Miss Jones now says that Mr. Smith was the father of her kid. So we look for Mr. Smith. Then I got to write in the case record that Mr. Smith’s neighbor at his last known address informs me that Mr. Smith drives a car with the license plate XYZ. So we send to the state and ask for the name and address of the guy who drives license plate XYZ. Now I can do all that in a day, ’cause it sounds to me like time is important to you.”

  “Real important, Kenny.”

  “But the state takes a long time answering unless the special investigations unit is involved; they just get on the phone. Hey, how bad do you want this?”

  “Bad.”

  “Can you score any fancy weed? Vietnamese maybe?” “How much?”

  “A half-pound oughta do it. I know just the guy for you, he’s on that unit, but his favors cost.”

  “Okay. I’ll get it to you tomorrow. Can you stay in the office and wait for a call?”

  “That’s easy. See you later.”

  I go back to the apartment and walk my little men around the brain a few times. First a list:

  1. Go to the farm on Long Island and get the money and the passports.

  2. Rent a safe deposit box and keep it there for a while.

  3. Call Lieberman.

  4. Call Leon and score best Vietnamese for Velez.

  5. See Velez and find out who owns that car.

  6. Send the lady in Ohio a final payment?

  7. See about selling the dealership for cash.

  8. If buyer found, get in touch with Essegian.

  9. How to keep Genelle safe?

  10. Somehow get in touch with Villegas.

  What a list! It’s like picking the flyshit out of the pepper.

  But motion is what I need. First thing is get in a cab and drive all over New York collecting things from people: African masks, Navajo turquoise and silver jewelry, a hand-made sheepskin coat from Pine Tree Trappings in Cle Elum, Washington, Morrocan copper trays, Kurdish hashpipes, and Wes Wilson original plates for Fillmore posters: all the goodies a head picks up in his travels. These are the equivalent of a straight businessman’s art objects, hedge against inflation, the market nose-diving, or the shit hitting the fan. Next, take that same cab back the other way and sell, sell, sell. On some things I get burned pretty bad, others I make out on. By the end of the day I’ve got about 1,808 and change and one or two things I can’t bear to part with and these I stash with a friend.

  Up bright and early the next day and down to the hydrofoil boat people that run the swank service to Long Island for Wall Street types. How much for a private ride? A private ride is crazy. So I’m eccentric. It’s a thousand bucks. So here’s a thousand bucks, when do we leave? Whenever you say. How about right now? And I sit in the back of that thing like Jean-Paul Getty and look back at Manhattan and say out loud “Follow this, you hot-shit spies!”

  Out to the farm by 1:15. By 2:00, with blisters on my hands from the shovel and no explanations to an old high-school friend whose ground I just dug up, I’m at the local cab company. Cab to New York is 50. Let’s go I say. I’ve got 66 thou in my pocket so what the hell. Dropped at Manufacturers Hanover Trust on 57th and Eighth just before the bank closes. Rent a safe deposit box. How long? Ten years. Officer escorts me down, I’m all paid up in cash. In go passports, licenses, registrations, certificates, and money. Ten g’s I keep with me. By 4:30 I’ve located Leon and scored the best Vietnamese and called Kenny and told him to hang tight at the office. I’m there by six. Dope changes hands. He gives me a Xerox copy of a welfare department report from the special investigations division.

  And looky here, the father of that little girl in Canarsie the state of New York is supporting is none other than “Edward Hugh Roosevelt, 20 Crestview Lane, Arlington, Va.” Which proves? I don’t know and I’m moving too fast to think about it, because that’s when the nutty problems usually solve themselves. Like when you get the soap dirty, you just wash it, and yoji don’t get into trips about soap to wash soap that falls on the floor. You want to do dishes and you cut right through the cosmic impossibilities. Happens every day.

  Suddenly I realize I’ve been running my ass off for two days and I’m exactly at item 6 on the list. I go home, watch Cavett, and fall asleep.

  If they had an Olympic Games for Jewish overachievers, Tom Lieberman would do the dash events but not the distance. He started
like wildfire: All-League guard on the Princeton basketball team of the early sixties, top of his class at Columbia Law, Administrative Assistant to one of the swingingest representatives in Congress. He had the Omar Sharif mustache, the bushy black hair, the flare pants, and he gave me the most dynamite grass I’ve smoked yet. Then one day he picked up some little chick in a singles bar and she took him out to a little house in upstate New York, in the mountains, and fed him some acid like you just don’t see any more. Away back in the beginning, around 1964, before the summer of love in the Hashbury and Life magazine and Woodstock and Radical Chic, some very tight and righteous people had a lovely little psychic revolution bubbling along on the back of the cultural stove. Like any good thing, America ate it for breakfast finally, burped once, and went on about its business. But back then some folks made some real Sandoz LSD25 that was gonna change your life if you took it. You were, as they say, gonna climb that mountain.

  Well, Tom Lieberman and this girl spent about twenty hours hovering around in the ether, and, like you can never step into the same river twice, you never land exactly where you went up from: the balloon floats east and the world moves west. So here was this Tibetan Lama, this holy spirit of the Ganges, schlepping around the personality of a hot-shot political lawyer. He wiggled, he surely did, worked with the poor, spent some time in Mexico, a year above Taos, New Mexico, getting a land thing together with some people from California, and finally ran out of money. He dragged his ass back to New York, reinstated himself with the Bar Association and went back to work. But you never come all the way back. Administrative assisting was through. So he fetched up five or six clients like me, handled their problems, gave them financial advice, and became something of a specialist: working for people who managed to accumulate large amounts of “dirty” cash without the killer instincts to go with it. He takes a retainer from me of $12,000 per year, so you can do your own addition, and he lives on the top floor of a building on the lower West Side, looking right across the Hudson. He’s got all the interior walls removed, incredible plants everywhere, and a floor-to-ceiling window through which you can see the lights of all the apartment houses on the shore in Bergen County where people pay to see the bright lights of the apartment houses in the city. It’s traditional stuff in waterfront real estate: I twinkle for you, you twinkle for me, and we’ll both look out at three in the morning and say “I wonder what those people over there are thinking.” This also works for trains and little houses by the tracks. I once crossed the Atlantic on an ocean liner. Midway across, we passed the sister ship going the other way. People took pictures, waved and got all excited and the boats tooted at each other. Six days on mother ocean and the sexiest thing folks saw was their own mirror image.

  I arrive at Tom’s. His hair is short, his mustache is gone, he’s been lifting weights, and he’s wearing a freshly washed white T-shirt and faded khaki pants.

  “Have you had breakfast yet?” he asks.

  “No, I came in a hurry.” So he pours us out two big bowls of Grape Nuts, puts a stoneware pitcher of cream on the table alongside a crock of sugar.

  “I’ll have coffee in a minute.”

  “Good, I need some.” And we commence to talk, all the while eating Grape Nuts and making a marvelous amount of crunch.

  “You seem to be in some very strange kind of trouble.”

  “I guess I am, but there are a lot of things that don’t fit together.” And I tell him—everything. Always tell your lawyer everything, just make sure you got the right lawyer.

  “That sounds odd,” he says when I’m finished, “very odd. I don’t say it can’t happen. Could your friend Villegas possibly be that heavy?”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “One way or another he’s your friend now—he’s gonna have a place inside your head forever, you just have to decide what sort of place.”

  “I’m gonna try and get in touch with him. That’s the feel of it.”

  “Be careful. If you’re both under surveillance, and if it’s professional stuff, it’s doubly hard to evade.”

  “This guy Roosevelt keeps changing his numbers. One minute he’s Sherlock Holmes, next he couldn’t find his asshole with a full set of mirrors.”

  “That might be operative behavior for the CIA.” “You think he’s the CIA?”

  “I can find out.”

  “How fast?”

  “Not fast, that’s the problem. Not fast enough to do you any good. ’Cause see, if he is, you have got a real problem. I’m not telling you to commit murder, but I want you to know where it’s at.”

  “Okay.”

  “Historically, everybody that came to America was hiding out from somebody or other. I suppose a lot of people had right-on reasons, religious persecution ya-di ya-di ya-di etc. But the hustlers knew a good thing when they saw it. People with debts, impossible old ladies, a fight that got a little too serious, shitheaded landlords, rip-offs, family stuff—anything you can name. ’Course paradise made everybody uncomfortable so now we’re livin’ in the biggest, most deluxe privy-hole in recorded history. You know the joke about ‘Don’t make a wave, don’t make a wave’? Well, that joke is getting truer all the time. Anyhow, when we hired people to punish us for havin’ it too fucking good, FBI, CIA, you pick the initials, the genetic sets were right there. They can’t do foreign manipulation, intrigue really isn’t native to them, they aren’t as cold-blooded as they like to think they are, but oh boy can they ever find people. They are terrific at finding people, ’cause they are the descendants of the stone hiders.”

  “So don’t run.”

  “Run, but run fast and far and, most important, get about eight feet from the finish line before you start to run.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, I’m gonna start by finding out where Roosevelt works. I’ve got friends around on the old network. The other guy you say called himself Clyde Moss?” “Yeah.”

  “Meanwhile, you have to do two things. Your friend and her kid have got to be stashed, and I mean stashed. And you’ve got to see Villegas.”

  “You should see the list of things I have to do.” “Screw the list. Concentrate on those two things.” “Where can I put Genelle?”

  “I can take care of that with a phone call.”

  He picks up the phone and in a few minutes it’s set that Genelle, alias Monica Goldblatt, will be a counselor at Camp Ti-Ti-Ga-Wa in the Adirondacks, for what remains of the summer. Robbie can live in one of the bunks and they can both stay for a month after the camp ends. I’m paying the salary, but I can give the money directly to Tom, which I do.

  “Alright,” I say, “that handles one problem. How about the other?”

  “Well, go ahead and pretend you’re gonna kill the guy. Get him off alone and tell him what the story is. Maybe he’s got the key to this thing.”

  “If he just walks right back into his life, they’ll kill me.”

  “If ‘they’ are ‘them,’ yes. But if ‘they’ are ‘them,’ they’ll kill you after you’ve killed Villegas.”

  “I’ve got to persuade him to disappear?”

  “Exactly. Then you’ve got to disappear.”

  “I’ve got all kinds passports.”

  “Okay, but don’t take too many with you. If they’re found, that would make somebody very curious. And keep the hell out of countries like Greece, where it’s police-state time, and Nepal, where all the hippies go to hide.”

  “I was thinking I’d

  He cut me off. “I don’t want to know. Not for a while. When you get there, find an American and have him come to me here and tell me the story.”

  “You think you have help reading your mail?”

  “Who the hell knows these days? It’s not that Big Brother is watching—it’s that he likes to watch. Big Brother is a voyeur, write that down. Do you have a gun?”

  “Roosevelt gave me a gun. A .38 I threw it out the window on the way back to New York.”

  “Well,” he reached int
o a drawer, “here’s a teargas pen. Just unscrew the cap and a little jet of the stuff comes out the other end.”

  “This effective against snipers, or large groups of angry Green Berets?”

  “Don’t overestimate the enemy. Button men wouldn’t have that job if they could be head of IBM.”

  “What about the little old lady in Dayton?”

  “You’re not the only guy in the world who uses un-traceable telephone numbers or accommodation addresses. It’s fucking chic these days. Maybe you just patronize the same store.”

  “What about my supplier? I’m holding a dealer territory that ought to be worth twenty-five or thirty anyhow.”

  “If you can find a buyer.”

  “That’s gonna take some time.”

  “That you don’t have. Leave it where it is.”

  “I’m waiting for all kinds of general delivery telegrams. From Genelle, and a guy in California. Sent to Steve Kane.”

  “Oh, that comes with the service. I can run some errands for you.”

  “Okay. Thanks for the pen. When do you think I oughta go see Villegas?”

  “How about tomorrow? I can’t get anything on Roosevelt until three weeks at the max earliest.” “Tomorrow is very soon.”

  “Hold your nose and jump. I don’t see any other way out.”

  “Who’s got my motor home and my 50 grand?” “Off-hand, I’d say Biscuit the trooper.”

  “Byszka.”

  “Whatever. I think you can kiss that goodby. Maybe the rip-off is protected higher up and maybe it isn’t. It’s gonna be real hard to find out. On balance, I’d say you were ahead of the game not being booked.”

  “I suppose. Okay, I’ll call if I need you. Are you protected, by the way? I don’t want to land you in the shit.”