“Why don’t we finance ourselves?”
Parker said, “If the money man is involved it tends to make for trouble. He starts acting like he’s got extra votes. It’s better to have it done on the outside.”
Fusco said, “The reason I thought you ought to handle that, Parker, money men tend to shy away from somebody been on the inside. Superstitious or something.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Parker said. To Stan he said, “How can we mount a night watch on the South Gate, same as what Fusco just did?”
“That’s easy,” Stan said. “I just sit there in a car. Nobody’ll bother about me.”
“We’ll need it from eleven-thirty tonight till about four tomorrow morning,” Parker said.
“Tonight?” Stan’s grin turned pained. “I forgot,” he said, “about never volunteering.”
Fusco said, “I’ll come long if you want, Stan, help keep you company.”
Stan pointed a finger at him. “You just volunteered, pal,” he said.
Parker said, “One of you can drive me back to the motel first, and come pick me up in the morning.”
Ellen said, “You could stay here tonight.” There was nothing suggestive in her voice, or in her face when Fusco looked at her, nothing but a flat statement and an expressionless face, but Fusco felt the shock go through the room, felt Stan tensing, felt himself going taut, and he was amazed at how relieved he was when Parker answered, just as flatly, “I’d rather stick to the routine.”
Fusco got to his feet, suddenly in a hurry to break up this meeting. “I’ll take you, Parker,” he said.
“Good,” Parker said, “See you in the morning, Stan.”
“See you,” said Stan. The moment was over.
5
Do you know what strikes me as significant?” Dr Godden said.
Ellen had been silent the last three or four minutes, just sitting there with her arms around herself, her eyes fixed on the patterns in the carpet, her mind churning as she tried to find something to talk about and there continued to be nothing, nothing at all. Dr Godden always told her not to worry about the silences, to be silent when she felt like being silent and talk only when she felt like talking, but she hated to have the time go by and her not saying anything to him, not accomplishing anything with him. They’d done so much good together already she was impatient to get on with the job, to accomplish everything, to make everything as good as it could possibly be.
This was one of the few times he’d ever broken into one of her silences, and it surprised her almost enough to make her look at him. She checked the head movement in time, turned it into a negative shake, and said, “No, I don’t.”
“You can’t think of anything to talk about,” he said. “And I would guess that’s because you’re trying very hard not to think about a particular subject. Do you think that’s possible?”
“I don’t know,” she said, though the suggestion did make her tense. “I can’t think of any subject.”
“You can’t? Well, here it is Monday the twenty-first, and do you know the last time you mentioned the robbery to me? Exactly one week ago. Last Monday. Not a word since then. Wednesday you talked about your mother, Friday you talked about your baby, and today you haven’t been able to talk about anything. But the robbery is a scant ten days away, and up until last Monday it was a very strong and important subject to you.”
He stopped talking and that meant she had to say something, had to respond in some way. She searched frantically for words, finally muttered, “I don’t know, I guess I just don’t have anything to say about it any more.”
“Have you been attending their meetings, as I suggested?”
“Yes.”
“Listening to their plans?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that something to talk about? Their plans?”
“I guess so.” She shrugged awkwardly, her face twisted by concentration. “I guess I just don’t want to think about it anymore,” she said.
“You mean you don’t listen to their plans?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then you still are interested, you do still think about it. But you don’t want to talk about it. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He began to throw out hypotheses, the way he always did. “Could it be because you don’t trust me? Or because you now think the plan will work and you were foolish to have worried so much? Or because you now feel attraction again for your husband? Or perhaps for the other man, Parker?”
“No!” she said, so loudly and abruptly she surprised herself. Then she sat there and listened to the word, echoing and reverberating and revealing her to herself, and she saw that she had been staring at one corner of carpet because a line there, a series of lines there, reminded her vaguely of Parker’s face in profile, cold and hard and aloof.
“What is Parker to you?” Dr Godden said, “Is he the Parent, the stern parent? Is he the father?”
‘Cold,” she said, not entirely sure if she meant Parker or herself or both, or even how many different ways she might mean it about either of them.
”The one you don’t deserve?”
“Wednesday,” she said, talking in a monotone, almost a whisper, “Stan was going to be out all night. I asked Parker to stay overnight. I didn’t make it sexy, I just asked him. I didn’t know that’s what I meant, but it was. I’m not sure if he knew.”
“Did he stay?”
“No. He left, and I felt relieved. I was glad he hadn’t stayed, but I’d had to ask him.”
“You were relieved to discover you were still unworthy?”
“I suppose so, I’m not sure.”
“What do you feel about this man Parker now?”
“I think I hate him,” she said. “I’m afraid of him.”
“Because he would be justified in punishing you for your hatred,” he suggested. “Because he has done nothing to you directly to justify your hating him. That’s why you’re afraid, the fear is a way of feeling guilt.”
Sometimes the answers were too complicated for her. All she could do now was shake her head.
“Perhaps on Wednesday,” he said, “you’ll feel like talking about the robbery again. Perhaps you’ll understand your feelings better then.”
“I’ll talk about it now,” she said. “Now that I understand this, I want to talk about it, honestly.”
“There’s no time now,” he said, and his voice didn’t sound quite as sympathetic as usual. “We’ll see what happens on Wednesday.”
Now she did feel guilty. She’d been keeping the plans from Dr Godden for no reason, making him feel she didn’t trust him, causing a rift between them just when she needed him the most. “I’ll tell you the whole thing on Wednesday,” she promised.
“If you feel like it,” he said.
6
Norman Berridge surveyed the body and found it good. The rouge on the cheeks was perhaps a trifle too noticeable, particularly for a sixty-three-year-old man, but relatives tended not to be overly particular about things like that. Just so none of the lip stitching showed or anything actually disastrous along that line, almost any kind of slapdash cosmetology was acceptable. And with the kind of assistant one had to rely on these days, that was just as well.
Ah, well, no need to raise a fuss. It was acceptable. Good, in fact. He said so to the assistant standing proudly beside the body, a young Puerto Rican apprentice—Puerto Ricans were about the only ones who would accept proper apprentice wages any more, in this mollycoddled twentieth-century USA—who accepted the compliment with a good deal of pleased hand-fluttering and head-bowing, while his own cheeks got as red as the corpse’s.
The wall phone in the corner buzzed. Norman Berridge walked around the remains and the assistant, picked up the phone, and his secretary said, “There’s a man here to see you, Mr Berridge. He says his name is Lynch, he says it’s about the annuities.”
Berridge pursed his lips. He recognized t
he name, and the use of the word “annuities”. Lynch was one of the men who came to him from time to time for financing of their activities. It was pleasant to have an area of investment offering—at some financial risk, of course—one hundred per cent profit and no involvement other than the initial outlay, but the men with whom he dealt in these matters never failed to unnerve him, and Lynch was possibly the most unnerving of them all. A cold man, as self-contained and silent as a panther, he seemed to Berridge always to be looking on him with contempt for his flabby body and bad nerves and jumbled mind. Lynch himself was as clean and cold and empty as the interior of a new coffin.
Lynch was not of course the man’s real name. One time when he had come with another man, the other had called him by a different name, which Berridge could no longer be sure he remembered. Porter, Walker, Archer . . . something like that.
No matter. It wasn’t the man’s name that counted, it was the opportunity he presented for investment. “I’ll be right up,” Berridge said into the phone, hung it up, and turned back to see the assistant dabbing at his body’s cheek, apparently having himself noticed it was a bit too red for someone not a habitue of Moulin Rouge. “Very good,” Berridge said. “Very good.”
He turned away from the assistant’s redoubled smile of pleasure and went over to the elevator, a small cage barely large enough for two. Shutting the gate, riding up to the main floor, Berridge reminded himself of his frequent vow to start using the stairs. Exercise was all he needed, and soon he’d have back the body of his twenties. Exercise, and some small restraint in diet. Nothing to it.
But he didn’t want to be panting when he walked into the room containing Lynch. Next time he was in the basement would be soon enough to start the new regimen. For now, his self-possession in Lynch’s presence would be greatly improved if his breathing were normal. Thus, the elevator.
Lynch was standing by the window when Berridge entered his office, gazing without expression at the formal garden Mrs Berridge maintained behind the house. It seemed to Berridge that Lynch never sat down, that their infrequent meetings in this office were always held with Lynch on his feet, as hard as a post.
This time, Berridge decided, he would also remain standing. It would make up a bit for the elevator.
“Lynch,” he said, as though pleased to see the man. “It’s been quite some time.” The false amiability and unction he had learned in dealing with bereaved relatives stood him well in other situations as well, most particularly this one. None of his true ambivalence about Lynch—money versus discomfort—showed in his voice or face.
Lynch turned away from the window, nodded briefly, and said, “I need three thousand.”
There was no small talk in Lynch, no social nicety. The man was as stripped and purposeful as a racing car or a fighter plane.
Which was just as well, actually. The last thing Berridge wanted was to know the specifics of the usage to which his money was to be put, and the next to the last thing was idle conversation with this man over some standard subject tike the weather.
So Berridge, ordinarily an expansive and loquacious man, matched Lynch’s brevity with his own, saying, “No problem at all. The usual terms, I suppose?”
“Right. If it comes off, you’ll hear in about ten days.”
“About the first of the month?”
“Just after. Second or third, something like that.”
“Excellent. You want it now, I suppose.”
“Yes.” “Care to come with me to the bank?”
Lynch nodded, and moved away from the window. Berridge, pleased with himself for not having seated himself behind his mahogany desk, led the way out of the office and down the rear hall to the garage, where he pushed the button that opened the third door along, the one for the Toronado. Past that was his daughter’s Mustang, while on this side were the Cadillac and his wife’s Volkswagen. The hearse and flower car were kept in another garage, beside the house.
Berridge felt good behind the wheel of his Toronado, young and vital. He had noticed that just about every other Toronado driver he had ever seen was, like himself, middle-aged and portly, but this didn’t interfere with the infusion of youth the car gave him. He was as capable of doublethink as anyone.
His money, for instance. He considered himself an honest and upright and patriotic man, he detested beatniks and peaceniks and other antisocial freaks as much as anyone, and if his income-tax statements were annual pieces of remarkably baroque fiction that was no contradiction at all, but merely another facet of his character, the hardheaded businessman facet. Poorer families tended to pay morticians in cash; cash was untraceable; untraceable income would only be reported by fools; Norman Berridge was nobody’s fool. If in a safety-deposit box in a bank downtown there were wads of wrinkled bills, just as they had come to him from the hands of his clientele, that was simply one way of an ordinary person’s defending himself from the encroachments of Big Government.
And if that money was occasionally doubled—and occasionally lost, too—by investment in the unspecified activities of men like Lynch, so what? Since when was investment a crime?
There was no conversation on the ride downtown. Berridge was painfully conscious of Lynch on the seat beside him, but he knew none of the awareness or discomfort showed. He drove, a little too slowly and too cautiously, through the slight mid-morning traffic, angle-parked the car at a parking meter just down the block from the bank, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Lynch said nothing to that, which was typical of the man.
Berridge agonized over whether or not to put a dime in the meter. Would Lynch consider him effete if he did, or slovenly if he didn’t? Contempt seemed possible in either case.
The problem was solved for him when he put his hand in his change pocket; he had no dimes. He walked on by the meter and down to the bank.
He enjoyed the complexity involved in reaching his box, the gates to be gone through, the form to sign, the dignified obsequiousness of the guard, the necessity of both the guard’s key and his own being inserted in the box at the same time, all gave him a feeling of importance, and of safety. And the value so obviously conferred on his safety deposit box seemed to rub off on him as well, giving him a feeling that he himself was considered valuable. All in all, a satisfying experience and a welcome antidote to ten minutes in the silent company of Lynch.
Berridge requested and got a large manila envelope. Carrying this and his box, he entered one of the private chambers, sat at the table there, and counted out fifties and twenties and an occasional ten until he had reached three thousand. The bills stuffed the manila envelope, which he could barely seal shut. Then there was the reverse procedure to go through, returning the box to its place and himself to the outside air.
When he returned to the car, Lynch was smoking, the air inside the car acrid with the smell of smoke. Unobtrusively Berridge turned on the air conditioner when he started the engine. Meantime Lynch ripped open the envelope and began to count the bills. He counted as Berridge drove homeward again, his absorption undisturbed by Berridge’s progress through the streets. Each little handful, when counted, went into another of Lynch’s pockets until when he was done, the envelope was empty, the money was out of sight, and Lynch looked exactly the same as before.
When Berridge was stopped by a red light, Lynch extended a crumpled twenty towards him, saying, “You counted wrong.”
“I did?” Surprised, Berridge took the bill, and didn’t notice the light had turned green until the car behind him sounded its horn. Then he drove the rest of the way with the bill clutched in his right hand.
When they reached the house—large, white stucco, with well-tended plantings all around and a discreet black-with-gray-letters sign on the lawn—Lynch said, “Let me off in front.”
“Certainly.”
Lynch didn’t say goodbye. Berridge watched him cross the street and get into a Pontiac with a New York State plate. Stolen? He had no idea.
After Lynch d
rove away, Berridge drove the Toronado back into the garage, the door opening for him at his approach. Once inside, seeing the manila envelope crumpled on the seat beside him, he permitted himself to become annoyed at Lynch, at his silence, his cold arrogance, his sloppiness in leaving that envelope there.
Berridge looked at the twenty-dollar bill still in his hand. Lynch had only counted the money once. Why had he been so sure it was Berridge who had made the error?
Berridge’s stomach felt bad.
7
I’m not upset about Parker any more,” Ellen said. “Oh? Very good.”
“All I feel for him now is dislike,” she said, and she knew her voice was calm with her certainty.
“I’m glad things are simpler now,” Dr Godden said. “What made the change?”
“Different things,” she said. “I know that. There was a time when I would have known only one of them, but now I know there’s others.”
“What’s the one you would have known?”
“What he did with the guns,” she said. Then, realizing she’d started somewhere in the middle and he couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about, she hurried on, “You remember Wednesday I told you he’d gone somewhere and gotten a lot of money. The money to finance things.”
“Yes. I found that very interesting. The reasons for getting the financing on the outside and so on.”
“Well, yesterday,” she said, “he got the guns. They’re in toy boxes, model auto racing sets and like that.”
“How many guns?”
“Two machine guns and four pistols. All so innocent, packed up in toy boxes. Stan said he got them from a man who runs a hobby shop as a cover for selling illegal guns.”
“And the guns bothered you?”
“Not the guns,” she said. “What he did with them”
“What did he do with them?”
“He put them on the shelf in Pam’s closet.” Ellen closed her eyes, hugged herself closer. She could see them sitting there, on the shelf in her baby’s room, surrounded by truly innocent toys, all that lethal metal hidden away inside cardboard boxes covered with bright colors and gay lettering and pictures of happy things.
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