“Think pure thoughts, Paula.”
“Are there any other kind?” She patted his shoulder and stretched out again. He smiled. Her bawdy little remark had been another peace offering, and a token of trust that he would not take it in any sense of offer. And it also told him something important about her. To be truly desirable, he had learned, a woman has to have a quality of animal playfulness about her sexuality. The broody ones who try to make of it a dark and solemn magic are trapped by their own dramatics. She would have that too, but at the right time and right place. The essential woman has the wisdom to know that it is a romp, a joy, a play, a game for grownups.
When he looked back at her again, she slept there in sweet trust, prone, her hands wedged under the small pillow, face turned away from him, long legs sprawled at rest. The sun was low when he went through Texarkana and headed northeast on 67 toward Little Rock.
When he pulled into a service complex on the far side of Little Rock and stopped by the pumps, under the night glare of the white fluorescence, she sat up slowly, blinked at the glare, arched her back, screwed her face up and stretched and yawned with lioness luxury.
“Sleep all right?”
She got out of the car and reached in and got her purse. She pawed her hair back and looked at him with slightly puffy eyes. “Talk to me before I’m awake and I bite.” She went trudging off in search of the ladies’ room. She came back with her hair tidied and wearing a fresh mouth.
“I slept like a bear in January,” she said.
“We can leave it here and go across to the restaurant. The man says it’s okay.”
“Can we keep going a little while until my stomach wakes up, too?”
“Sure.”
“Should I drive now?”
“After we eat.”
Thirty miles further he found an attractive roadside restaurant. It was almost empty. They had a corner booth. After the waitress had gone off with their order, and with their thermos to fill it with coffee, Paula leaned toward him slightly, smiled in an odd way and said, “The invisible man.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re big. You have a very strong face. You can look terribly impressive and important. But in public places, you blur somehow. I saw it in the airport. You sort of fade into the scenery. It’s quite a trick. And I don’t want you to be like that.”
“After I worked so hard learning how? I studied the kind of people you never really see. They move slowly. They speak just loud enough to be heard. They never change expression. They never look at people. They act as if they are tired all the time. I worked at it a long time. Now it’s habit. If you overdo it, you look furtive and people notice you. The easiest way is to pretend you’re exhausted and you have a headache. I won’t have to work so hard at it while I’m with you. They’ll look at you. They won’t remember me. I could walk in on my hands. They wouldn’t see me.”
“Idiot. I’m really quite a plain woman.”
“You don’t realize how that rubber mattress has changed you.”
“I knew something was different. I was whistled at. Back at the station. A very small dirty little man. And a very small dirty little whistle. But I’ve been bursting with morale ever since.” Her expression changed suddenly. “It’s so strange and so unreal, floating through the night past all the towns and the people on that mattress. Nobody knows where we are or who we are. Like a little dark boat in the middle of a dark ocean. I never had such a feeling of anonymity.”
“That’s the feeling of running.”
“Are we running? That’s strange. Now I’ll be looking over my shoulder.”
“Not while we’re running. After you stop, then you get back the habit of looking behind you. When you stop, they can catch up.”
“You’ve traveled like this before?”
“Yes.”
“With a woman?”
“A very rough woman. A very dangerous woman. Miss Dexedrine. She can keep you going for forty hours before you fold.”
“But she wasn’t much for conversation.”
“She had me talking to myself.”
They ate and went back out to the car. He explained the route. He got into the back, took his shoes off and stretched out under the blanket. The car held at cruising speed. The pillow had caught a slight fragrance of her hair. He looked up out of the window at the motionless stars. He heard little songs and rhythms in the drone of tires and engines. When he closed his eyes he could see her face very vividly and distinctly, looking at him across the restaurant table.
six
The executioner stood at the bar of a roadhouse on Route 5 between Albany and Schenectady, nursing a bottle of ale. He was a stocky, sturdy man in his forties, with light brown hair, pale eyes, and a broad, ordinary, unremarkable face. He wore a grey summer-weight suit which needed pressing, a blue shirt, a maroon tie with a soiled knot. He wore a cocoa straw hat pushed back off his forehead.
He stood and wondered how far away this one would be, and how long it would take. He wondered if this would be the one that turned out to be one too many.
At exactly nine o’clock he picked up his change and walked out into the dark parking lot beside the building. His small dark car was parked at the far end of the lot, away from the others. He unlocked it, got in, reached deep under the dash and pulled the small handgun free of its retaining spring. He put it in his lap and made certain the bulky silencer had not worked loose. He rolled the window down and blinked his lights on and off again, briefly, and sat and waited. Soon a man came walking across to the car. He came up to the window. He looked young and nervous. The man behind the wheel did not like them young and he did not like them nervous. “Jones?” the young man asked.
In the cover of darkness the man held the weapon aimed at the middle of the pale blob of face. “What’s the name of Lanti’s wife?”
“Huh? Oh, her name is Bernajean.”
“Come around the back of the car and get in beside me.” As the young man went around the car, the man behind the wheel tucked the gun under his left thigh. As the other got in, he said, “Don’t tell me your name. I don’t want to know your goddam name and I don’t want to see your goddam face.”
“Sure. I understand.”
“Now tell me about it, and if any of it is guesswork, leave it the hell out because I don’t want to be confused.”
“It has to look like an accident.”
“The rate just went up.”
“Where he’ll be, if he shows, is in Bolton, New York. It’s a small town. It’s north of Syracuse someplace.”
“An accident in a small town? The rate just went up again.”
“His name is Shanley. Sidney Shanley. He’s about thirty-four, thirty-five.”
“He expecting it?”
“Yes. For a long time. A couple of years anyway. They haven’t been able to find him.”
“Oh fine! The rate on this one is going to make a record. Has anybody had a try at him?”
“Twice. And they missed twice.”
“Bodyguard?”
“They say probably not. The reason he could show up at Bolton, there’s a grandfather there, Thomas Brower, and the old man is dying, and maybe there’s some money. Maybe he is going to show up, and maybe he has been there all along, at least for the past year. I brought a newspaper picture of him. It’s over two years old.”
“Bring it out of that pocket an inch at a time, friend, and lay it down on the seat between us. That’s nice. You did that just right. What’s the timing?”
“As quick as possible.”
“But he might not show up at all?”
“That’s right.”
“Let me think a minute.” The young man stirred restlessly in the long silence. Finally the executioner said, “I wouldn’t try it for less than twelve five.”
“Jesus, that’s a lot of money.”
“You get sent here to tell me your opinions? You bring me a message from somebody I’ll never know, and you take o
ne back. That’s all. Take back my message. I just don’t want this one very much. I just don’t like the sound of this one. If he doesn’t show, I’ll settle for the down payment, which will be twenty-five hundred.”
“Twenty-five hundred for nothing?”
“You’re all mouth, boy. Here is a little piece of paper for you. Call the number on it at exactly eleven. I’ll say Jones and you say yes or no. If you say no, we both hang up. If you say yes, I’ll tell you where to bring the down payment.”
“All right. All right. Jesus! Like a spy deal.”
“Sonny, I’m alive. I’ve been in business twenty years. Now get out and shut the door.”
As the car door slammed, the man started the car and drove out of the lot. He turned on his lights as he turned into the stream of light traffic, too far away for the man to attempt to read his mud-smeared plates. He slipped the gun back under the retaining spring. He drove two miles. He stopped at another bar, ordered another ale, kept himself to himself, his face bland and closed, his big freckled hands at rest. The answer would be no. He was certain of that. And he had pegged the fee at the exact point where he could be indifferent as to whether the answer was yes or no, risk and profit balanced precisely. The minimum risk venture would be an unsuspecting victim in a big city with no stipulation to make it look like an accident. Poke the shotgun through the kitchen window and drop him between the sink and the stove. But there would be no contracts like that for a specialist. Crude labor could handle those at minimum fees. Ignorant expendables. One did not hire a hydraulics engineer to unstop a drain. Also, he could be contacted only through the highest level, and that, in itself, kept it limited to problems beyond regional disciplines.
At eleven, over a pay phone, the answer was yes, and he set up the contact in the same place, in the same manner as before, took the money, drove away. He would never know who had hired him, just as they would never know the day-by-day identity of the specialist they had hired. He would not know why this Shanley had to be taken. That was of no interest to him. It was an assignment. A contract, a problem requiring care and planning in the solution. The target was wary. It would require extreme care.
By the time Jones had driven back to his home in Troy, he had reverted to the habits of mind and the attitudes of his everyday identity, wherein he was Eldon Bertold, proprietor and sole employee of the Harbor Stamp Company—Appraisals, approvals, cash for collections. He rented half of an old house in a defeated section of town, and lived alone there. There was a side-walk entrance to the tiny shop, a bell that jangled when anyone walked in, and a dusty confusion of stock books, albums, and all manner of philatelic supplies. Behind the shop were many rooms, and over the years each had become adapted to its own special purpose. Most of his stamp business was conducted by mail, and one room was the office where he prepared the approval cards and sheets for mailing to the list of customers he had developed over the years, kept his customer files, and typed his correspondence on the cheap buff letterhead. There was a sorting room with big tables where he made his appraisals and where he dismantled the collections he bought at auction or by direct purchase—throwing away the junk items, transferring the rest to his stock books or approval inventory and, very rarely, finding an item for his own private, specialized collection of United States Issues prior to 1900. He worked upon his own collection in another room, mounting there the prize-winning displays he took to conventions and exhibitions. The rare issues were in excellent safe-files, and on the walls were the framed photographs of special issues and special displays. A glass case held the awards he had received. There was another room, small, cluttered with equipment and lighting fixtures in which he took his superb macro-photographs and slides of rare issues, using bellows and clamps and special lenses on an old Hasselblad. Adjoining his photolab was his converted darkroom.
The kitchen, bedroom and bathroom were in the rear of the house. He had a few cheap clothes, a supply of simple foodstuffs. He put his car in the garage behind the house and went in through the kitchen. He went directly to the room containing the safe files, turned the combination dial on the heaviest one, opened the bottom drawer, removed a tin box from the rear of the drawer and placed it on the nearest table. Under the hooded lamp he counted the money that was in the box, counted what he had been given, put half of the advance payment in the box and replaced it in the bottom drawer of the file.
With a feeling of impatience and excitement he sat down with a note pad and the catalogue of the public auction to be held during two days in August in the rooms of one of the better New York City auction houses. He had previously listed the items he was prepared to bid on, and the maximum bid he was prepared to make on each one. He was weak on the 1857 issues on cover, particularly the various shades of brown, red brown and orange brown on the five cent denomination. They were so rarely included in auctioned collections he had wished he had more money available for this one. Now he could expand his bid list and his alternate list.
He studied the catalogue description of one cover: “5ȼ Indian Red (28A). Tied Philadelphia pmk. on cover ‘pr. Arabia’ to Nova Scotia, 5 transit mark, back-stamped Boston Br. Pkt., Halifax Receiving Mark, Fine.” He looked at the catalogue photograph and wished he had the original print to study with a magnifying glass. Finally, with all value factors clear in his mind, he wrote the catalogue number and his maximum bid for that item, $215. He turned to the next page …
At two A.M. he suddenly realized he was hungry and was still wearing his hat, tie and suit jacket. And he realized that his desire to acquire the items at the auction in August was distracting him from the problem at hand.
He changed to an old bathrobe while the can of pork and beans was heating. The Shanley job, if the man appeared at all, would be delicate. Bolton was not a commuter town for a larger city. It was too far north of Syracuse. Strangers would be noticed and remembered. Conversely, you could expect the police work to be skimpy and clumsy.
When they wanted an object lesson, it was much easier. You come into town. You establish the movement pattern of the target. You fit yourself inconspicuously into some portion of that pattern, selecting the optimum time and place, and the best weapon of opportunity. Then, in a fractional part of a second, you earn your money and walk away from it. Method is of greatest importance. The F.B.I. statistics show a running count of thirty-five murders a day. Eldon Bertold estimated that thirty-four of them were amateur, beneath contempt, crimes of passion and crimes caused by fright and crimes by people of unsound mind. Of the remaining three hundred plus each year, of the murders reported as murders rather than as accidents, possibly twenty to thirty were professional. The others were committed by amateurs with a certain amount of guile and talent. Of the professional kills that were reported, more than half were certainly at the hands of cheap blasters. And so, weeding it down to the small core of genuinely competent work, he estimated that the true professionals of the trade probably accounted for ten reported and ten unreported kills per year. Of these twenty annual victims, the majority were probably aware of danger—thus indicating the need for expert handling. Shanley was aware that it was not to be reported as murder. He counted back. This would be the sixth … no, the seventh accidental death he had arranged. They were easier in an urban environment. In Birmingham in 1953, it had been the easiest one of all. The man had tripped and fallen under the rear duals of a transit mix truck. In Miami in 1957 the man had walked out onto his private dock, boarded his cruiser and tried to start the engines without checking the bilges or starting the blower first. A careless habit, when there might be a quart of gasoline in the bilges creating a vapor as explosive as a sizable charge of dynamite. In Michigan in 1958, if the private plane hadn’t burned when it struck, they might have found the wad of waste that had gotten into the gas tank somehow. The easiest pattern in a mechanized society is through the machines for transportation. Man is frail at high speed.
As he went to sleep, he aligned all aspects of the problem in his mind, k
nowing that in this way, more often than not, he would awake with the beginnings of a plan of action. He tried not to think of the other items he could not make bids upon, and how well they would go with the 10ȼ greens, the 12ȼ blacks, and the superb 24ȼ lilac greys. He tried not to anticipate how it would be, going to the desk, paying the money in cash, walking out with the precious bundle. No other excitement in the world could match that.
It gave him a feeling of ironic satisfaction to realize that the killing had begun, actually, because of the stamps. And, to be fair about it, the fluency of his German had also been a factor. The German had been responsible for his being taken out of the line organization after basic training and ordered to Washington in 1942. After he had passed all their clearances and all their physical and psychological tests, and undergone all their highly specialized training, they had sent him to the unit based in London. Even then there would have been no killing, at least none on a specific assignment basis, had it not been for the stamps, for the alertness of the colonel in command in seeing how splendid a cover story could be fashioned of these materials. They provided him with a compact and valuable collection, gave him new identities and sets of forged papers, sent him in turn to four supposedly neutral countries as a young stamp dealer who had escaped from Germany and was trying to convert his valuable collection into gold or gems. In this way he made contact with those other imitation refugees who were in actuality key espionage and propaganda agents for the Reich. He was provided with special weapons, objects that looked innocent yet, when properly used, were incomparably deadly. During two years of undercover duty, he executed exactly one dozen, eleven men and one woman. In London they had told him it might disturb him to do this sort of work. One could never tell beforehand. One had to try it and see. He expected it would bother him.
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