On the Run

by John D. MacDonald

  But after the first one, in Barcelona, he knew he would be all right. The victim sipped the scalding coffee, lowered the cup carefully, stared at Bertold with an odd intensity, as though about to ask a question. Abruptly the eyes lost focus and the single spasm twisted the face out of shape. Then there was the unmistakable slackness, oddly like a still photograph of someone asleep.

  He felt no pleasure, no concern, no regret. One less adult human animal in the world, and there seemed to be so many of them that the loss of one was infinitesimal. The business of the woman bothered him slightly. He dreamed about it once. And he remembered her after he had forgotten some who came later.

  After the killing was over, he was sent to Germany, on special duty with the military government, translating, interpreting security clearances. There he met Silvana. On the only night in his life he had ever gotten drunk, he told Silvana what he had done. Silvana said later he had talked quite a lot about the woman. Lieutenant Silvana did not talk about what he had done in civilian life. He was older than most lieutenants. Bertold understood that Silvana had been in city government somewhere in California. When Silvana had paid him an unexpected visit in Troy, New York, in 1946, Bertold’s mother was still alive. He was living with her in that same old rented house and trying to build up the stamp business. But he had begun to think he could never get enough return out of it. Silvana paid him five thousand dollars to go down to Mexico City and quietly kill a man named Kelly who, as an employee in charge of a smuggling operation, had developed a nasty habit of hijacking organization merchandise from time to time.

  Bertold went to Mexico City, located Kelly and learned some of his habits. Then he bought an ice pick in one store and a file in another. The ice pick had a round wooden handle about the size of a golf ball. He cut the metal down to a two inch length and sharpened it. When he closed his fist around the ball, an inch and a half of metal stuck out between his second and third finger. He went to the bull fights on Sunday, in a loud shirt and a straw hat, with a cheap camera hung around his neck. When the last bull was killed, the crowds moved slowly, tightly packed, through the narrow cement tunnels. He moved in behind Kelly and his group. He was pressed against Kelly. In the darkest part of the fifty foot tunnel, masking his motion by making an awkward show of getting his camera strap off, he punched Kelly solidly, high in the nape of the neck, at the juncture of neck and skull. The compacted throng shuffled a dozen feet further while Kelly was slipping down. Bertold forced himself a little to one side. He began to hear the shouts behind him as others tripped on the body and were forced along and fell. Soon he was in the sunlight. He dropped the weapon down a storm drain. There was a small item in the English language newspaper the next day saying that an American resident named Kelly had died of a cerebral hemorrhage while leaving the bull ring. It said he had been the local representative of an import-export firm with offices in St. Louis.

  Now Silvana was dead too. And Bertold lived alone in the house. When Silvana had learned he was dying, he had set up another method of contact. Bertold’s business mail came to a post office box. He maintained a smaller box nearby under the name of K. Jones. He went to the post office every day. He always glanced into the other box. The only letters he ever found there were the ones, unsigned, which merely gave the date and time and identifications for someone to meet him and explain an assignment. Silvana had apparently made his stipulations clear. Careful contacts. Jobs one man could handle. Top rates, with a substantial down payment and the balance on completion. And, in the event anything ever did go wrong, there would be absolutely no way to trace the connection back through to the people who paid so well for the service. Once it had almost gone wrong. The woman had appeared at exactly the wrong moment, out there in Minneapolis, and she had given the police a very good description, so good that even with all the methods of travel he had used, they had traced him back to Troy. But there they had lost him. As they had no reason to assume he had stayed in Troy, he decided it was safe to stay. But he felt uneasy until, two years later, he saw a small wire service news item datelined Minneapolis, saying, “Eye witness to the Keogh murder, Hazel Vanichek, age 31, was fatally injured last night when struck by a stray bullet during an attempted holdup of the Plantation Club where she had been employed for the past year as a hat check girl. The holdup man, Richard Paris, age 19, was taken into custody in the parking lot of the club after having been felled by a bullet in the left leg fired by Detective Lucas Cammer of the City Police, who was in the club at the time of the holdup attempt. The Vanichek woman, struck in the chest by the 38 caliber bullet, was pronounced dead on arrival at City Memorial Hospital. Paris, running from the club, turned and fired in the direction of Lieutenant Cammer who was in pursuit of him. Hazel Vanichek will be remembered as the eye-witness to the shooting of Abner Keogh on June 20th, 1951, at his hunting lodge on Rum River near Mille Lacs Lake, shortly before Keogh was to be recalled to give additional testimony before the Grand Jury in connection with a gambling probe. She was held in protective custody as a material witness for over seven months following the shooting, and was released when all leads to the possible identity of the killer were exhausted.”

  It had been simple carelessness. He had known the lodge had been empty for three days. He saw Keogh arrive alone. He had assumed Keogh would either bring the girl, or she would be along later. He had not realized the girl had arrived earlier that same afternoon, sometime during the one hour he had not had the lodge under observation, had shut her car in the garage and gone in to take a nap while awaiting her middle-aged lover. Thinking the place empty and wanting to get it over with before the girl arrived, he’d gone in quickly through the French door he had previously jimmied and, in the instant Keogh turned, before he could speak, Bertold had put three small slugs into the meat of the man’s chest, high and just enough off center to the left. (At the school in Washington, long ago, they made you fire unaimed shots at surprise targets until, finally, it became as simple as pointing your finger.) Keogh fell solidly, dying as he went down, the impact bursting the air out of his lungs with a mindless retching sound. And the girl ran out of the bedroom into the short wide hallway, stared at him and ran back in again and snapped the bolt on the heavy door. Bertold went out of the lodge at a dead run and stopped at a point where he could see the bedroom windows without being seen. First she would try to phone. There was an extension in the master bedroom. He had removed the units from the mouthpieces during his inspection of the inside of the lodge. He reviewed the advantages and disadvantages of killing her. She had seen him for a few moments in reasonably good light, but she had never seen him before, and he looked very ordinary, and few people could give good descriptions. He circled the lodge in the opposite direction, yanked the distributor wires loose on both cars and began walking swiftly across rough country toward the main highway. He dropped the gun into the heart of a hollow rotten tree and put the canvas gloves under a wide flat stone in a creek. He recovered his suitcase from dense brush near the highway. He abandoned his junk automobile near Milaca, walked into town and had a four minute wait before hailing the bus to Duluth. It was on schedule.

  Carelessness, he thought. The girl had recorded him like a camera. Shanley would be as wary as Keogh had been. And his reflexes were probably much better. Keogh had taken a risk because he had thought the girl worth a risk. And had his oyster white silk shirt stapled into his chest by three bullets within a diameter no larger than that of a coffee cup.

  He mentally reviewed the information about Shanley. Sleep took him.

  seven

  The sun was high. Tom Brower studied his younger grandson. “My dear boy, at ninety-two one wishes to conserve the smallest effort, even that of keeping one’s head in a slightly awkward position. So if you would move to the right end of the window seat?”

  “Of course.”

  “And tilt the blinds so I am not looking at a silhouette. Thank you. Sidney, you are a mature and rather imposing looking fellow, in a certain crag
gy and impassive way. As a small boy you had a very … gentle face. Withdrawn and wary, but gentle. Do you remember the house?”

  “More than I thought I would, sir.”

  “Your presence must be due to considerable tact on Miss Paula’s part.”

  “And the jade box. Without that I couldn’t have bought it. Without that the whole thing would have been too far out. The box made the connection.”

  “Did you leave it behind on purpose, Sidney?”

  “I forgot it. I remembered it when we were getting into the car, but he wouldn’t let me come back.”

  “I want to ask questions, many questions, but inasmuch as I tire very easily these days, I prefer to use the time telling you about … my contemptible part in the first years of your life.”

  “I don’t blame anybody for anything.”

  “Not consciously perhaps. I shall not embroider this narrative. My only child, Alicia, was born in 1900. She was very like her mother, sweet, vague, imaginative, and not physically strong. I was thirty when she was born, and Margaret, your grandmother, was ten years younger. It was a difficult birth, and a full year before your grandmother was herself once more. As a small family of three, we had nineteen marvelously happy years, though my wife’s health was failing toward the end of that time. When Alicia was nineteen she met and fell in love with Clyde Shanley. In those days it was still possible for people to talk about marrying beneath one’s self. Shanley was completely impossible. He had no background. He was a strange, violent, bitter young man, given to strong drink and strong language. But he had a kind of wild and reckless gaiety and, for Alicia I suppose, a raw charm unlike anyone she had ever met before. When she persisted in seeing him, in direct disobedience of my orders, her mother and I took her on an extended trip. We had to return prematurely when my wife became less well. Alicia was twenty when we returned to this house. I thought she knew the seriousness of her mother’s condition. Two weeks after we returned she ran away with Clyde Shanley. Her mother’s condition worsened. I blamed this upon Alicia’s cruelty and thoughtlessness. I was a harsher man forty years ago, my boy. Margaret became bedridden. I learned Alicia and Shanley had been married. I should have gone after her then. Perhaps she would have come back. I think that by that time she knew she had made a mistake. I had the fatuous idea she would come crawling back, begging forgiveness. I forgot, or ignored, that terrible pride of hers. I can give Shanley credit for one thing. We were reasonably well off in the twenties, but he had not married her with the idea of receiving monies from me. She wrote us some letters. I did not answer them. I did not let my wife know I had received them. Ah, I was a righteous man, puffed with my own sense of injured self-importance, quelling any feeling of love and sympathy as being a kind of weakness.

  “Your brother George was born in 1921. Shanley was moving from job to job, from one industrial city to another. He was a brawler, and found it difficult to keep any job very long. I knew it was only a matter of time until he abandoned my daughter and my first grandson, and then she would come home. I would wait. I lost track of them entirely in 1925. I could have instituted a search, but I thought that would be a sign of weakness. You were born in 1927, I learned later. This was a bleak unhappy house, Sidney. Quite suddenly the world moved into a monstrous era called the Depression. No values were ever the same again. All the security I’d worked for, it all crumbled away, boy. Margaret died in her sleep in 1930. Jane Weese came here to take care of me and the house. I was sixty years old, and I did not give a damn. I was certain I would not live long. I was going through the motions of trying to ward off the ultimate financial disaster, because that was habit, the familiarity of things to do. In 1931 I received a phone call. Your father was in a city jail serving ninety days. Alicia had died after a long illness. They found my address among her papers. Your father’s term still had a few weeks to run, I peddled some jewelry that had belonged to your grandmother in order to get the extra money to go there and bring my daughter’s body back for burial here. I brought you back too. I would have brought George back, but I could not find him. Two weeks later your father came storming in here when I was out. He pushed Jane to the floor, grabbed you and took you away. I knew that a man like that should not, could not have custody of you. I would take you and George away from him, legally. But it costs money to accomplish such a thing. And I set about my work with a new goal, Sidney. But they were black years. It took time. So much time. I made mistakes. It was almost eight years before I reestablished myself. It took time to get information about you. I learned that Clyde Shanley had been killed in an industrial accident in Youngstown. I learned he had married again. My people could not trace the woman. Where were you?”

  “I was eleven when he died. George had run away two years before that. Hilda got some money when my father died. We went to Atlantic City. When the money was gone, she took off. I was twelve. I hitch-hiked back to Youngstown because, I guess, that was the place I remembered best. They picked me up after I was there about three days, and the juvenile court put me in a foster home. It wasn’t too bad. They, the couple who took me in, usually had three or four kids at all times. It was a business deal, extra income for sheltering kids.”

  “We’ll talk more, Sidney, later on. I’ve gotten too tired. Every part of this mechanism is ninety-two years old, full of flaws and fragilities. I’m a passenger in a rackety old vehicle, and I must not force it beyond its limits. But I want you to know I am ashamed of myself, Sidney. A large segment of my life is shadowed by an attitude I now find despicable.”

  “What else could you have done?”

  “Come now, my boy. Don’t try to present me with ready-made rationalizations. Out of pride I suppressed my love and denied my only child, giving her no opportunity to admit her marriage was a mistake, forcing her to live with it and die with it.” He closed his eyes. His voice became faint. “If I had only …”

  The voice stopped. Shanley stared at him. He hurried to find Paula and met her as she was coming through the living room toward the study.

  “I was coming to break it up,” she said.

  “He doesn’t look right.”

  Her smile vanished. She hurried to the bed. He stood in the doorway. When she turned toward him she was smiling again. They walked out into the side yard. Summer clouds had moved across the sun. She sat on the stone wall and looked up at him. “He goes to sleep like that.”

  “My God, he’s sharp.”

  “Sometimes he goes a little off. Not often. And it makes him very angry when he does. He goes into the past, and becomes confused about who I am and why he’s in bed.”

  “What are you doing for him?”

  She shrugged. “Keeping him clean and comfortable and entertained. What else is there to do? Ward Marriner is an excellent doctor. The malignancy is slow and localized and not pain-making. He’ll die easily, Sid.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. But I have a very unprofessional opinion about that. It won’t be tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Because he wants to talk to you and listen to you. And to George.”

  “When does George get here?”

  “This evening or tomorrow. Do you mind listening to the old man?”

  “Funny question, Paula. I don’t mind. It’s a very strange feeling. I didn’t think I had anybody. Then there’s this link, going so damned far back. Way back. For God’s sake, his father knew Lincoln!”

  “Don’t you want roots like that?”

  “What good do they do me?”

  “A sense of belonging, Sid. Small towns are full of all the tangled roots. When your mother was a little girl she played in the yard. She sat on this wall. That was her room up there. She looked out of those windows. When I was eleven years old I fell out of that crab apple tree on the other side of the road and chipped this tooth. See? My best friend lived in that house over there.”

  He looked at the stones of the wall. “Stop trying to do it,” he said. “Stop trying to pull me into all this �
�� damned identification. Last night wasn’t any lifetime guarantee.” He heard the words after he said them, knowing how deeply they could hurt her, and he was aware of her stillness and afraid to look at her. When he did look at her, he saw what effort the smile cost her, saw the tears standing in her eyes, and marveled that she could smile.

  “Oh, Sid,” she said. “That damned door, with the rusty hinges. I pry it open a little way, trying to let some fresh air in, and then you suddenly get terrified and you slam it shut. And you try to slam it on my hands, don’t you?”

  “I just want you to understand …”

  “You don’t give me credit for understanding. What am I supposed to be? Some sort of dangerous swamp? Last night was complete in itself. I won’t let you spoil it.”

  He tried to answer her smile. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to spoil it.”

  It had not been anything planned. By Sunday noon he had realized they were getting ahead of schedule. He had stopped at a second rate motel and dickered with the owner-manager and they had been charged a dollar apiece for the use of one unit in which to take showers. She had gone first. When she had come out, in her fresh yellow blouse, she had acted odd in a way he could not identify. He went in, carrying fresh clothing. The little bathroom was humid with steam, mildly pungent with the characteristic scents of her. And on the big misted mirror she had left him a message, written with her finger. A bloated heart, a crooked arrow. P.L. loves S.S. It was both wry game and delicate overture. It was funny, and curiously touching.

  Five miles up the road she said primly, “Send a message and nobody answers.”

  “You see that sort of thing everywhere. Peter Lorre loves Sylvia Sydney. It’s one of the true romances of show biz.”

  “I hate people who think up lines to take themselves off the hook.”