God Save the Mark

by Donald E. Westlake

  No, not this. I didn’t have time for this, that’s all. I didn’t know whether or not Sharlene—my God!—had a case against me, and at the moment I really didn’t care. All I knew was that I already had too much to think about and it was time to set the excess wolves at each other’s throats for a change. So, “Excuse me,” I said, and went over to the telephone.

  “You go ahead and call anyone you want to,” she said loudly. “I know my rights. You can’t trifle with my affections.”

  It was five-thirty by now, and no longer normal office hours, but Goodkind had struck me as the sort of man who’d be liable to stay late in the office, gloating over the law volumes dealing with mortgage foreclosures. If he weren’t there, I’d just have to take a chance on calling Reilly.

  Fortunately, Goodkind was true to his character and present in his office. When he answered I identified myself, and he said, “Fred! I’ve been looking all over for you! Where are you?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I want to—”

  “Are you home?”

  “No. I want to—”

  “Fred, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “In a minute. I want to—”

  “This is important! Vital!”

  “I want to—”

  “Can you come to the office?”

  “No. I want to—”

  “We’ve got to meet, and talk. There are things—”

  “God damn it,” I shouted, “shut up for a minute!”

  There was stunned silence all over the world. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sharlene staring at me in blank astonishment.

  Into the silence, I said, “If you’re my attorney, you’ll listen to me for one minute. If you don’t want to listen, you’re not my attorney.”

  “Fred,” said a voice composed entirely of cholesterol, “of course I’ll listen to you. Anything, Fred.”

  “Good. When I was fifteen years old I spent two weeks at a Boy Scout camp.”

  “Wonderful places,” he said, a trifle vaguely, but obviously wanting to please.

  “While there,” I said, “I wrote a letter to a girl I knew in high school. She’s here now, in New York. Her uncle’s a judge in Montana. She claims the letter’s a proposal of marriage, and if I don’t marry her she’ll sue me for breach of promise.”

  I held the phone away from my ear so Sharlene could join me in listening to Goodkind laugh. His laughter reminded me of the witch in Walt Disney’s Snow White.

  Behind her sequined harlequin tortoise-shell spectacles, Sharlene had begun to blink a lot. Her expression had now become nervous, but determined.

  When Goodkind was down to little giggles and chuckles, I put the phone back to my head and said, “What should I do? Should I tell her no?” Then I held the phone out again, so we could both hear his answer.

  I must admit the answer surprised me, because what he said was, “Oh, no, not a bit. Fred? Act worried, boy. Bluster if you can. Act as though you don’t want to marry her, and you’re trying to bluff, and you’re afraid you don’t have a leg to stand on. If we can con these people into actually taking us to court—” Instead of ending the sentence, he began to giggle again.

  I brought the mouthpiece close, and said to my mouthpiece, “What good does that do me?”

  “Does her family have any money?” he asked me. “Do they own their house, have a business of any kind?”

  “Excuse me a second,” I said. “She just left the door open, and there’s a draft coming in.”

  I walked over to the door, and clearly I could hear the tickety-tick of her heels as she raced down the stairs. Then, up the stairwell came the faintly receding cry, “You’ll pay for thiiiiisss!!!”

  With a feeling rare to me in life—the feeling called triumph—I quietly closed the door.

  17

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the phone, Goodkind was saying,

  “Hello? Hello? Hello?”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “There you are. Where are you?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say right now,” I said.

  “Fred, it is imperative that we get together—”

  He was wrong. What was imperative was that I assume control somehow. Steeling myself, I said, “For the last time, don’t call me Fred.”

  “You can call me Marcus,” he said.

  “I don’t want to call you Marcus,” I told him, which may have been the harshest thing I’d ever said to anybody in my life. “I want to call you Mr. Goodkind. I want you to call me Mr. Fitch.”

  “But … but that isn’t the way it’s done. Everybody calls everybody by his first name.”

  “Everybody but you and me,” I said.

  “Well,” he said doubtfully, “you’re in charge.” Which made me glow all over.

  Keeping the smile out of my voice, I said, “The other reason I called, I want some money.”

  “Well, naturally, Fr—uh. Naturally. It’s yours.”

  “Is there any of it you can get hold of without any documents from me?”

  “Well, uh—”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said. “I just want to know if there’s any way you can transfer some funds without my having to sign anything or show up anywhere.”

  “It would be best if you came here, you know. Or if you want I could meet you some—”

  “Is—there—any—way?” Silence, then: “Yes.”

  “Good. I want you to take four thousand dollars and put it into my account at Chase Hanover, the branch at Twenty-fifth and Seventh. Just a second, I’ll get you my account number.”

  I went away and looked for my checkbook, found it at last in my jacket pocket, where it had been for the last five days—I didn’t seem to be able to think about more than one thing at a time—went back to the telephone, and heard Goodkind saying, with some urgency, “Hello? Hello? Hello?”

  “Stop saying hello,” I said.

  “I thought you’d hung up. Ff—uh. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine. My account number is seven six oh, dash, five nine two, space, six two two nine three, space, eight. Have you got that?”

  He read it back to me.

  “Good,” I said. “Transfer the money first thing tomorrow morning. And do it in cash so I can start drawing on it right away.”

  “I will,” he promised. “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes. My uncle’s apartment. Has it been rented to anybody else or can I still get into it?”

  “It’s yours,” he said. “Part of the estate. It’s a co-op, your uncle owned it.”

  “Get a set of keys to the doorman,” I said. “Tonight,” I added, though I had no intention of going there before tomorrow sometime. I was beginning to learn a little bit about subterfuge.

  “Will do,” he said.

  “And when I get there,” I told him, “don’t you be snooping around.”

  “I’m your attorney, Ffuff.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m your attorney. There are important things—”

  “The keys to the doorman,” I said. “That’s the important thing.”

  “I’ll do it,” he promised. “And now we’ve got to talk.”

  “Later,” I said, and hung up. I well knew the dangers in allowing me to be talked to.

  Evening was coming on by now, and it seemed a good idea to show no light at my windows, just in case, so for the next twenty minutes I went about the task of erecting makeshift blackout curtains, composed of blankets and towels and my bedspread and shower curtain. When I was done, the apartment had a strangely underground appearance, possibly a fallout shelter for the Budapest String Quartet, but I was reasonably certain no light would show to any watcher outside, and that was the important part.

  While I’d been at work the phone had rung several times, once continuing for eighteen rings before the caller had given up. This was my first experience at not answering a telephone and I found it surprisingly difficult, much like giving up smoking. My mind kept tryi
ng to betray me, kept insisting that it was unnatural not to answer the telephone (or not to smoke), and I found it physically difficult to stay in the other room. As the evening wore on, the phone sounded a few more times, and it never did get any easier to ignore.

  At any rate, once I’d completed the blackout arrangements I took a look at my incredible stack of mail, now piled up on the drop-leaf table near the door. I began by sorting the one stack into three stacks, separated into bills, personal letters and others, and for the first time in my life the smallest stack was of bills. These I immediately tucked away in the bill pigeonhole in my desk, and then I sat down to see what my personal mail was all about.

  It was all about money, though hardly any of my correspondents actually used the word. There were seven letters from relatives—four cousins, two aunts and a niece-in-law—none of whom had ever written me a letter before in their lives. The letters were chatty and newsy, in a gimme sort of way: Cousin James Fisher had a golden opportunity to buy a Shell station out to the new highway, and Aunt Arabella needed an operation on her back in the worst way, and Cousin Wilhelmina Spofford surely wished she could afford to go to the University of Chicago. And so on.

  I read all the letters, and I began to backslide. I wanted to believe, against all the evidence of the world, that these people were writing to me because they liked me and wanted to be in communication with me, and because I wanted to believe it I came perilously close to letting myself believe it.

  In order to fortify myself against my structural weaknesses, when I finished the last of my relations’ advertisements for themselves I looked up and spoke aloud. “Bah,” I said. “Humbug.” I then used the seven letters to start a wanning little blaze in my fireplace, and sat in front of it to read the third stack of mail, the miscellaneous pile.

  The word miscellaneous has perhaps never been so aptly employed. This stack included an advertisement for a company that was bound and determined to save me money on slacks if I would only send them my measurements and choice of color, and a notice from a bunch of monks in California alerting me to the news that they intended to say Mass for me en masse every day for the next hundred years and if I wished to express my appreciation for this religious frenzy I could use the enclosed envelope no stamp needed, and a newsletter informing me that the Kelp-Chartle Non-Sectarian Orphanage of Augusta, Georgia, is on the brink of bankruptcy won’t I help, and a badly typed note from a man in Baltimore who if I write song lyrics he writes music why don’t we get together, and a notice from an organization called Citizens Against Crime (Senator Earl Dunbar, Honorary Chairman)—and wasn’t that the outfit Uncle Matt was “consultant” for?—telling me that if I wanted to help stamp out racketeers and gangsters all I had to do was send a check to further CAC’s good work, and a form letter from an insurance man who if I would tell him how old I was he would tell me how much money he could save me on life insurance use the enclosed envelope no stamp needed, and half a dozen mixed charity appeals, and a notice that I’d won a free dance lesson, and a notice that I’d won a free crate of Florida oranges, and a letter from a lawyer informing me that his client Miss Linda Lou McBeggle intends to mount a paternity suit against me unless I do right by her having already done wrong by her, and a scented envelope containing a notice about Miss Crystal St. Cyr’s at-home massage service, and a warning that I was in big trouble if I didn’t give all my money to the Saints Triumphant World Universal Church because it’s harder for a rich man to get into Heaven than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye, and a notice that I had a library book overdue.

  You know, if I had been approached by any one of these things separately I would more than likely have fallen for it—if I didn’t have so much else on my mind—but having them all piled up together like this was eye-opening, because for the first time I could see just how ridiculous they were. Just as one nude woman is beautiful but a nudist colony is only silly.

  How the fire roared.

  18

  I SET MY ALARM for nine o’clock, but the telephone woke me at twenty past eight. I was almost groggy enough to answer it, but woke up slowly as I staggered into the living room, and came to consciousness just as my fingers touched the receiver. I jerked my hand back as though the plastic were hot, and stood weaving there until one of the silences between rings stretched and stretched and stretched and changed key and became the silence of an apartment in which no telephone is ringing.

  At that point I had my first coherent thought of Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of May: “Now that I have three hundred thousand dollars, I can get an extension phone.”

  This thought pleased me and I smiled, and then, not to waste the expression, I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth.

  It was hard to believe it was really eight-thirty in the morning, headed for nine o’clock. My blackout curtains were still covering all the windows at both front and rear of the apartment, so that inside it was not very long after midnight. All the while I was preparing breakfast I had to fight the feeling I was actually having a midnight snack, and when at five minutes to ten I went downstairs and out to a bright and sunshiny world, all this glaring light seemed wrong somehow, the way it does when you’ve gone to the movies in the middle of the afternoon and you come outside and it’s still day. It shouldn’t be still day, but it is.

  Combined with this feeling of temporal displacement was another, much worse: an itching between the shoulder blades. Though I didn’t see that long black limousine awaiting me out front, and though both sidewalks seemed conspicuously empty of conspicuously lounging men, I felt very strange and uneasy about going out into all that bright sunlight, exposing myself as the biggest target in the world. Going down the stoop my mind was full of notions of high-powered rifles on roofs across the way, submachine guns jutting out the windows of parked cars, passing pedestrians suddenly whirling about with blazing automatics in their hands. When I got all the way down to the sidewalk with none of this happening, I actually felt a sense of anticlimax. A welcome anticlimax, but an anticlimax just the same.

  I hurried directly to the bank, where I learned that Goodkind had made the exchange of funds for me as I’d asked, and where I cashed a check for a hundred dollars. I also did some heavy peering around, on the possibility that Goodkind might stake out the bank in hopes I’d show up, but he was nowhere in sight. Any number of suspicious characters avoided my eye while I was doing this scanning, but that’s normal for New York and didn’t mean that any of them were following me or had any connection with me.

  I went from the bank to a street-corner phone booth. I had calls to make and I didn’t know but what someone might be tapping my line at home to see if I was there. I was pleased at having thought of this precaution and felt almost cheery as I dialed the operator and asked her to connect me with Police Headquarters.

  I was far less cheery three and a half minutes later when I finally got someone who would listen to me. An emergency would have to happen very slowly in New York City for a telephone call to the police to have any effect on it. The operator had given me a good long stretch of dead air punctuated by tiny faraway clicks before at last a crashingly loud close-up click shattered my eardrum and heralded the start of ringing. Four rings went by, well spaced, as I sweated in the phone booth, and at last I was in contact with a man with a gravel voice and a Brooklyn accent, who would listen to nothing from me other than my location. I pleaded, I shouted, I started a dozen different sentences, and when at last I gave up and told him the intersection I was calling from, he promptly went away, I was treated to another spate of dead air, and I leaned against the phone-booth glass and watched the cabs go by until a sudden voice said, “Fraggis-Steep Frecinct.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I want to report—”

  “Fummation or complaint?” he asked me.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He signed. “You want fummation?” he asked me. “Or you wanna regista complaint?”

  “Oh,” I said, at last understanding.
“Information, you mean!”

  “Fummation? Right.” Click.

  “No!” I cried. “Not fummation! Complaint! Complaint!” But it was too late.

  Dead air again, followed by another male voice, this one saying, “Sergeant Srees, Fummation.”

  “I don’t want fummation,” I said. “I want to register a complaint.”

  “You got the wrong office,” he told me. “Hold on.” And he began clicking very loudly in my ear.

  I held the phone away from my head, listened to the tiny clicking, and finally the tiny voices as a male operator came on and was told by my friend of Fummation to switch me over to Complaint. I brought the phone cautiously back to my ear, and after a little more silence, got yet another voice, this one saying, “Sergeant Srees, Desk.”

  “I want to register a complaint,” I said.

  “Felony or misdemeanor?”

  “What?”

  “You wanna regista felony? Or you wanna regista misdemeanor?”

  “Kidnapping,” I said. “That’s a felony, I think.”

  “You want Tectivision,” he told me. “Hang on.” And clicked to let me know there was no use talking to him any more.

  I did anyway. “You people are crazy,” I said into the dead air. “Somebody could steal the whole city, sell it to Chicago, you wouldn’t even hear about it till a week later.”

  “Srees, Tectivision.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tectivision.”

  I concentrated. “Once more,” I said. “Smatter with you?” he asked me. “You want a Spanish-speakin tective?”

  “Detective Division,” I said, as the light dawned.

  “Hold on,” he said, and clicked.

  “Wait!” I shouted. A young couple walking past my phone booth flinched. I saw them hurry away, trying not to act as though they were walking very fast. They didn’t look back.