by Thomas Perry
“It’s just a style. Didn’t you have style when you were young?”
“Of course we did. The important thing about styles is that they change. Tattoos don’t change.” He sighed. “Most men aren’t out searching for a woman who matches some particular picture.” He noticed she was looking at him skeptically. “Keep your eyes on the road, or you won’t have to worry about it.”
“I was looking to see if you could say that with a straight face.”
“Of course there are exceptions,” Bernie admitted. “If one of them happens to pick you out, run like hell.”
“I would,” she said. “It would have to be because he recognized me and thought I knew where the money was.”
“I mean because he’s trouble in his own right,” said Bernie. “It’s just something I’ve observed over the years, and believe me, my role in the whole issue has been mostly observation, so I got good at it. Poochie Calamato was like that. Ever hear of him? I suppose not. Every time I saw him, he’d have his arm around the waist of a different woman, only they weren’t different. It would always be the same type—big and blond, the hair sort of like Marilyn Monroe used to wear it—and each one would be dressed the same as the last one. I don’t know if he found them that way, or he got them to change. It’s possible he took them to the stores himself and picked the clothes off the rack for them.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Rita. Jane could hear a little embarrassment in her voice as she added, “It sounds like he looked at them, anyway, and he must have cared about making them feel good.”
“You wouldn’t have liked him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean if the clothes weren’t—you know—weird or something.”
“About once a year, maybe two, he would find another one that he thought was closer to the ideal picture. Then he’d dump the last one. See, when Poochie dumped you, he dumped you. They found one in the Cuyahoga River, and another one in a ditch outside Memphis.”
Jane sat up and looked around her. “Where are we now?”
Bernie said, “Still on 40. We just left Shamrock, Texas, next stop Texola, Oklahoma.”
“I must have been out a long time,” said Jane. “Rita, I’ll take over at Texola.”
They took the exit at Texola and pulled into a gas station to fill the tank and use the rest rooms. When they came back, Jane took the wheel. Rita climbed in beside her, folding a new stick of gum onto her tongue. “Don’t you want to sleep?” Jane asked.
Rita shook her head. “Bernie drove longer than I did.”
Bernie climbed into the back seat and lay down. He said, “Keep on 40 until Oklahoma City. There you’ll want exit 146, which will take you onto 44 northbound.”
“What are the exits just before it comes up?”
“MacArthur Boulevard, then Meridian Avenue. That’s 145. If you miss 146, you can pick up 44 a few miles on at exit 153.”
“Thanks, Bernie,” said Jane.
Rita rolled her eyes. “I’ll never get used to that,” she whispered.
Jane drove on into Oklahoma, always watching her rearview mirror for signs of cars that might be following. She matched her speed to the traffic and changed lanes only when she needed to. After a half hour, she could hear Bernie snoring.
Rita asked, “Were you listening to what Bernie said?”
Jane nodded.
“You agree with what he said?”
“I agree with what I heard.” She gave Rita a sympathetic look. “He’s been around for a long time, and he seems to have had his eyes open through most of it.”
“I mean about men.”
“The ones he knew probably weren’t an appetizing set of specimens, but I think he has the picture.” Jane looked at Rita again.
She was slouching now, looking down. “Not that I’ll ever know.”
Jane sighed. “Right now, we’re trying to keep you isolated and invisible, and you’re an eighteen-year-old girl who would like to go out and be seen and meet a nice boy and have fun. I’m sorry, but it won’t last forever.”
“I’m not complaining about that,” said Rita. “This is something I wanted to do. But when the money’s gone … ”
“The job isn’t just giving away the money,” said Jane. “It’s surviving afterward. That’s the hard part.”
“If I had your life, I guess I’d feel better about it.” Rita was silent for a moment. “What’s your husband’s name?”
Jane hesitated. “This is another time I’m going to have to say I’m sorry. You’ve already found out more about me on your own than I’ve ever let any runner know.” She looked at Rita, her brows knitted. “If those men—say, Frank Delfina—caught you five years from now, then you would have enough in your head to kill me. They already have a picture of me. I can’t do anything about that, but I don’t think I should make it worse.”
Rita shook her head. “I wouldn’t tell. I never would.”
“I know,” said Jane. “I had … have a nice, quiet life.” She smiled. “That’s my secret.”
“Huh?”
“Staying invisible is hard. The secret is to find a place in the world where you’re surrounded by other people who don’t appear to be very different from you, and spend some time working at making yourself happy.”
“Why? What does that do?”
“It means you won’t take risks because you’re restless or bored. You won’t move around much. Very soon, people around you get used to you. They don’t remember when they first noticed you or how long you’ve been there. Without knowing it at first, you begin to forget too. Time begins to work for you.”
“You told me that in San Diego.”
“It was true,” said Jane. “You have a lot of advantages, but time is the biggest. The men we have to worry about are career criminals. That means our immediate problems are as bad as they can be—they know what they’re doing, and they won’t hesitate to kill you. But time will help a lot. Career criminals spend a lot of their lives moving in and out of jails. Some get killed. The reason they became criminals in the first place is that they wanted quick profits without working very hard, so they don’t have the patience to keep at something that’s not paying off for years.”
“You keep talking about years. You mean I have to hide indoors all that time? How long?”
“It’s not what I mean at all. What you have to do is make yourself a real life, so that while those men are standing in the rain outside some airport day after day watching for you, you’re in some pleasant town having dinner with friends and sleeping in a comfortable bed.”
“I don’t know how to do those things,” said Rita. “I’ve never done that.”
“The good thing about having to give up being the person you’ve always been is that you get to choose who you’ll be next,” Jane said. “It’s not an impersonation. The new person has your qualities—not your looks, but the things nobody can see. You’re a pretty unusual young woman. You took over your own life and began acting like an adult a couple of years ago, at least. You’ve worked hard and supported yourself and taken care of your own needs. I’ve been watching you through this whole mess, and you have more courage than is actually good for you. My guess is that all you’re going to need is a new town and a good cover story.”
“You already did that for me. But I was just hiding. I don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want my big accomplishment in life to be staying alive.”
“What can I do?”
“I want to be with Bernie. And he wants to be with me. Then at least we’ll both have somebody to talk to, to do things for.”
“We’ll work on it. Maybe you’ll go to college, if you’re interested. I’ve cooked up some pretty convincing academic records in my time, and I could do it again.”
Rita was silent, as though she was considering it.
“That way you wouldn’t just be hiding. Of course, there are some simple precautions that you’ll always have to take. The Mafia makes most of its money on
vices—drugs, gambling, prostitution, and so on. You’ll have to stay far away from the places where those things happen. And you can never tell anyone the name you were born with, or anything that’s happened to you up to now.”
“If I get married, I can’t tell my husband?”
Jane shook her head. “The last thing you want to do is to hurt the person you love. There’s nothing about this story that will make him any happier, any stronger, any safer. He’ll never know it, but part of what you’ll bring to the relationship is that you didn’t make him afraid.”
Jane was silent for a long time, until she felt Rita staring at her with curiosity. Rita asked, “Does your husband know?”
“That’s not something I’m going to talk about,” said Jane.
Rita lapsed into silence, and before long, Jane saw her take the gum out of her mouth and settle back into the seat to sleep.
It was only one more day before the road swung up into Missouri and merged into Interstate 70, which took them into Illinois, then Indiana. They slept in shifts, stopping only to eat and buy gas for the Explorer. Jane insisted that they pull off the big interstate and drive into a small town each time. On the second day at two-thirty in the afternoon, they were driving past the hotel where Jane had stayed in Toledo, Ohio.
Jane stopped the van and let Rita out to mail letters at a box a few blocks away, then turned onto Navarre Avenue, stayed on it after it became Route 2, and drove along the south shore of Lake Erie. At four-thirty, they reached Sandusky, where Bernie put some letters into the mailbox beside a newsstand, then drove eastward toward Cleveland while Rita slept and Jane skimmed the newspapers he had bought.
“What are you looking for?” Bernie asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “It could be anything—some sign that Henry was spotted, some sign that people are beginning to notice the big donations, bad weather that could hold us up.”
“I heard you tell Rita they had a picture of you.”
“It’s a drawing. Would you like to see it?”
Bernie held out his hand as he stared ahead at the road. Jane pulled out the flyer she had gotten from the mailbox rental in Chicago. He took it, looked down at it for a second, then handed it back without speaking.
“Well?” said Jane. “What do you think?”
“It explains your hair. Rita said it was a disguise. I was thinking it was just … bad hair. I don’t know why you have to look in the papers for bad news. The picture ought to be enough bad news for you.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” said Jane.
“I’m sorry, honey,” said Bernie. “I wish we hadn’t talked you into going on with this.”
“You didn’t,” said Jane. “I would have done things differently—tried to get you and Rita settled before I mailed the rest of the letters, probably—but I wouldn’t have given up.” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have gotten less dangerous. It would have given the other side more time to figure out what’s going on while I was still out. I just wish I knew where the picture came from.”
“Niagara Falls,” said Bernie. “The day I met you.”
“How do you know that?”
“The picture. It’s not just your face. It shows the collar of the blouse you were wearing. It was white. But whoever described you to the artist must have noticed there was a faint pattern woven into the cloth, see? The artist put the flowers in, but you could only see them close-up. That’s the only time you wore that one.”
“It must have been the desk clerk,” said Jane. “I’m not surprised you remember, but I didn’t think she was in your league.”
“Money has a way of getting some people to play over their heads.”
Route 2 merged into Interstate 90 at Clearview, and then the traffic moved more quickly until five-thirty, when the cars began to show brake lights and they found themselves in the evening rush hour. Bernie left the interstate at Pearl Road.
“Where are you going?” asked Rita.
“There’s a big post office up near the train station,” said Jane. “It’s on the map.”
“What map?”
“The one in his head.”
After fifteen minutes of driving, the post office appeared a block ahead. Jane and Rita pulled all of the stacks of Cleveland letters out of the suitcases, and Jane slipped them into a big grocery bag. “Pull up somewhere, I’ll jump out and get them into the slots inside,” said Jane. “Rita, keep your head down.”
Bernie stopped at the curb, but as Jane was about to open the door, Rita grabbed her arm. “Wait,” she said. “That man over there.”
Jane looked up the steps of the building and saw a tall man standing near the door lighting a cigarette. “Do you know him?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “He looks a little bit like one of the men who came to Bernie’s house after he was gone.”
Bernie stared out the window. “She’s right,” he said. “I’ve seen him.”
“Keep going,” said Jane.
Bernie pulled back out and merged into the line of cars. “I don’t know his name. But he was in a picture I saw once. It was a snapshot of Joe Langusto’s son’s wedding. He was in the last row, third one from the end.”
“Great,” said Jane. “There are New York thugs watching a post office in Cleveland.”
“There may be,” said Bernie. “But he wasn’t in the Langusto family. He works for Frank Delfina.”
Jane craned her neck to get a better look at the man, but he was only a tiny gray dot in front of the big gray building now. “I guess we’ll have to do this differently,” she said. “Keep driving until you find a mailbox—any mailbox on a street.”
Ten minutes later, Bernie pulled the Explorer over in front of a row of shops. Jane got out and dumped her bag of letters into the box, then hurried back to the car.
When Bernie got the car moving again, he said, “We’ve got a problem.”
“A new one?”
“You’ve been going all over the country. Henry’s been going around the country. But you quit for about five days to go pull us out of New Mexico. I think what happened during that time was that everything you had mailed must have arrived, and made a splash.”
“What do you mean?”
“They must know all the places you’ve been. They don’t have enough guys to put one or two in front of every post office in the country, but they’ve got them here. They know where you haven’t been yet.”
“You think they’ve moved all their people into our path?”
“I do.”
“Then we’d better change our path. Get us out of town while Rita and I look at the letters we’ve got left. Head south for now.”
Jane and Rita went to work examining the return addresses of the stacks of letters in the back of the Explorer. Rita would read the name of a city, and Jane would put the stack on the floor. After a while, all of the stacks were arranged on the floor.
Jane said, “Okay, I think I know how to do this. They may have enough men to put one at each post office in big cities. So let’s skirt the big cities—just pull into the suburbs and back on the road. If we stop even less often than we have been, keep out of the obvious places, and take turns at the wheel, I think we have a chance.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked Bernie.
“Head for Akron.”
The thirty-nine-mile drive south to the west side of Akron took until nearly seven. Rita mailed some letters there and then climbed into the driver’s seat. “Where next?”
“Youngstown,” said Jane.
“Switch to the 76 Interstate just ahead,” said Bernie. “It’s fifty miles. Stop when you get to the Southern Park Mall.”
When they reached the mall, Jane mailed the Youngstown letters and took a turn at the wheel. “That was the last of the Ohio letters,” she said. She glanced back at the sun as she crossed the line onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was still a few degrees above the horizon, and she was glad. They were still moving, still a lit
tle bit ahead of the hunters.
It was nearly nine in the evening when Jane skirted the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh and left the turnpike at Monroeville. On a summer night like this one, the traffic was thin, and the people who were out were mostly young. She thought they walked in a leisurely, languorous way, as though the sights on the other side of her window were in a different universe, where things moved at half speed. Jane’s foot was always nudging the gas pedal to keep the needle of the speedometer two or three ticks above the speed limit, and her mind was always on the next city.
The three took turns driving through the night, letting mailboxes and gas stations represent the cities: Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, Bethlehem. Jane awoke in the passenger seat just as they crossed the Delaware into New Jersey at 3:30 a.m. She was elated. She sat up and looked into the back seat to see Bernie sleeping peacefully. She tried to dissect the feeling as Rita drove. She felt the way she used to in college when she was running on the track team. She remembered being strained, breathless, her mouth set in an unattractive grimace and her nostrils flared like a horse’s. But the moment when she had seen her foot touch the fine gravel on the first step at the beginning of the final lap, she had felt a change. Her strides would lengthen and her head go up to straighten the airway, and her limp, tired arms would begin to pump faster. Tonight was like that. She was just coming around the short end of the track, and she would see the last lap ahead of her.
She resisted the urge to take the wheel. It was only about fifty miles across the top of New Jersey to Newark, the weather was clear and the road was fast, and at this hour the traffic was light. She gave Rita’s shoulder a friendly pat. “How are you holding up?”
“Fine,” said Rita.
“When you get to Newark, find a place to stop, and I’ll take over.” Jane lay back in her seat and closed her eyes. She had already driven to most of the major cities in about a dozen states and mailed an enormous number of envelopes before she’d gone back for Rita and Bernie. Now, hour by hour, the envelopes were still going out. She had no idea how much money had been mailed since she had taken on her last load in Chicago, but there had been thousands of envelopes. Each time they had emptied a box, she had crushed it flat and laid it on the floor behind the back seat, so now the floor of the cargo bay was littered with them, and there were only five more boxes to go.
