Gordon was a pleasant enough man but, like so many Americans, utterly without cultivation.
All the way, he had been very careful to watch the way Gordon drove the car. He had not driven himself in over forty years, but perhaps, like riding a bicycle, it was something one did not forget. In any case, he supposed he could do well enough when the moment came.
Of course, he would never have a chance like this again. He had very carefully cultivated an impression of harmlessness. He was an old man, no problem to anyone. And, gradually, they had begun to relax.
There had been no point in attempting escape before; he hadn’t even had any clear idea where he was being held, except that it was a wooded area near a body of salt water. If he had been able to get loose, where would he have gone? But this was different. Wilmington, Philadelphia. . . These names were familiar to him. If he could just get away from Gordon, take the car somehow and get away. . . And, in the end, it was far easier than he had expected.
“I gotta take a leak.” Gordon had pulled into a Standard filling station and parked the car by the side of the building. He didn’t need any gas; they had already stopped for that on the outskirts of New Brunswick. “How ‘bout you, Mr. Yegorov? It’s still another twenty miles to Newark.”
He smiled. He was an old man, with an old man’s bladder, and his friend Gordon was simply being thoughtful. “Thank you, yes. As you say—it is a long way yet.”
There was only a single urinal against the wall and a toilet behind a metal partition. He used the toilet, trying to be quick lest the opportunity be gone before he had had a chance to take advantage of it. As he came out, he was glad to see that Gordon was still standing in front of the urinal, fully occupied.
“I’ll just be a sec, Mr. Yegorov.”
A short, sharp kick to the back of the left knee, and Gordon careened toward the wall, collapsing almost as quickly as if the leg had been cut out from under him. The cry he made lasted only a second and was barely audible. A blow on the side of the neck with both hands together—at eighty, one cannot trust absolutely to one’s strength—and he fell to the floor, striking his head against the tile. He was unconscious; he would not rise again for many minutes.
Yegorov pressed the tips of his fingers against the carotid artery. Yes, the poor fool was still alive. That was good; he would not like to have killed Gordon.
In the pockets of the sailor’s jacket he found a handkerchief, some change, the keys to the station wagon. In the back pocket of the trousers was Gordon’s wallet. He took everything except the handkerchief, which was soiled, not bothering to see whether there was any money in the wallet. It made little difference now, since he had committed himself.
Gordon had had to borrow the washroom keys from the attendant, and they were on a large brass hoop that now lay on the floor. He left them there, allowing the door to lock behind him. It might give him a few more minutes’ head start if the attendant became curious before Gordon returned from his slumbers.
The great difficulty with the car was the steering. Everything else was reasonably straightforward—the automatic transmission even simplified things—but the very first time he touched the wheel he nearly skidded into another parked car. There had been no power steering in 1941. He had heard of it, of course, but he had never imagined it was anything like this. And, to be sure, the brakes took some adjusting to.
He got away from the main road as quickly as he could, both to give himself an opportunity to accustom himself to the car—he had no desire to learn the fine points at sixty miles an hour—and to avoid detection. There might be an alarm out on him in as short a time as half an hour, and he didn’t wish to make it too easy for them. There was a highway map in the glove compartment; he would find his way easily enough.
It took him about an hour and fifteen minutes to reach the outskirts of Elizabeth.
Now the car had become a liability. It was necessary to abandon it, to proceed by some other way, on foot if necessary. He left it in the parking lot of a grocery store—possibly no one would notice it there for several hours—and started walking in a direction picked at random, carrying his suitcase and hoping to find some main artery of city traffic.
The wallet, now that he had the leisure to examine it, was found to contain forty-seven dollars—a twenty, two tens, a five, and two ones. There was also a MasterCard, a driver’s license, a social security card, and an oil company credit card, all made out to “Gordon Winesap,” and the business card of a garage in a place called “Salisbury,” with the address and telephone number of “Dave’s Body Shop” printed by hand on the back. The money was more than sufficient, but he would keep everything. One never knew, and he might hit upon a way to turn the credit cards to account.
By that time he had developed the outline of a plan, which consisted of little more than attempting to reach New York City. His ten fine sons had been nurtured with the expectation that they would rise in the world, and New York, he had been led to believe, was the center of almost everything in this country. Certainly New York would be the place to begin his inquiries. If he failed there, it was unlikely he could travel very much farther with his limited resources. Perhaps it was better not to think beyond that point.
In the meantime, if he was to remain safe and free, he needed to protect himself. It was already late in the afternoon, and an old man alone would be decidedly at hazard on the streets after dark.
A pistol, of course, was out of the question—where would he obtain one, and how could he have paid for it out of forty-seven dollars? Something less expensive, and less obvious, would do just as well.
He found his solution in a pharmacy on Spring Street, where for seven dollars and sixty-three cents he purchased a walking cane. It was of heavy wood, perhaps an inch and a quarter in diameter, and would serve quite nicely. The MasterCard was accepted without question; the woman behind the counter never even glanced at his signature.
As he stepped out onto the sidewalk again, he saw a bus approaching marked “Airport.” He stepped aboard, asked about the fare, received thirty-five cents change from his dollar, and sat down. Airports, as a rule, provided excellent means of transportation—doubtless he would be able to take a taxi or another bus into New York. He leaned back against the seat, his hands folded over the top of his cane, and fell promptly asleep.
. . . . .
All his previous experience had been with military airfields, and nothing, not even television, could have prepared him for the sheer size of the terminal, the seemingly endless lines of passenger counters, the linoleum floors that stretched on forever. And this was merely Newark—what must Chicago or New York be like? After twenty minutes of walking in a perfectly straight line, he glided to rest on a lounge chair, exhausted.
When he found he could face the prospect, he got back on his feet and walked diagonally across the great central plaza of the terminal to a concession stand, where he purchased a Milky Way candy bar. Somewhat restored, he hunted up a bank of telephones and found the Yellow Pages for Manhattan. There was nothing more he could do today; he was simply too tired. He would find the name of a hotel, call for a reservation, and then hit upon some means of transporting himself there.
Three or four calls to places chosen at random brought him face to face with the discouraging fact that hotel rooms in New York cost a good deal more than the remaining thirty-eight dollars he carried in Gordon Winesap’s wallet. Something as small as a cane he could probably manage safely on the credit card, but wouldn’t a hotel wish for confirmation of his identity? He could hardly use Gordon’s driver’s license, since both the physical description and the photograph would be ludicrously at odds with the bearer. Perhaps, under the circumstances, it might be best if he simply spent the night where he was, sleeping in a lounge chair. He could move every few hours; no one would have reason to notice. He would merely be waiting for a late flight.
However, thanks to the ingenious decadence of American capitalism, nothing so drastically aus
tere was called for.
Attracted by a sign that read “Anytime Banking,” Yegorov found a grid of square metal buttons and concave slots. There were step-bystep instructions: 1) Insert card, stripe down. 2) Punch in personal code number. 3) Punch in amount desired advance [Limit, $100.00].
He examined Gordon’s MasterCard and discovered a black stripe, approximately half an inch wide, running the length of the back. As to the “personal code number,” of course, he hadn’t a clue. But Gordon had never struck him as a man with much of a memory for numerical sequences. Sure enough, tucked behind a loose flap of lining in the billfold, he found a small slip of paper with six digits carefully printed in ink. In any case, it was worth the attempt.
He followed the instructions and received for his trouble the return of his card and an envelope containing one hundred dollars in crisp new bills.
He was not so extravagant as to travel to New York by taxi. The bus deposited him at Thirty-fourth Street, next to Pennsylvania Station, and he asked directions to Eighth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, the address of his hotel.
“One long block up, pal,” the bus driver said, pointing back in the direction from which they had come. “Then just turn right—the streets are numbered; you can’t miss it. Better take a cab, though.”
Yegorov thanked him but decided to walk. It was only a few minutes after eight o’clock in the evening, his suitcase was small and light, and the walk would provide him with an opportunity to convince himself yet again that no one was following him.
He had never before set foot in New York. For all the Americans prided themselves on their wealth, the bus had driven through some slums worthy of Madrid at the height of the Civil War.
In the yellow light from the streetlamps, as he walked under the protective scaffolding around the cement shell of some incomprehensible structure that might have been destined to be anything—a parking tower, a cathedral, anything—he felt around him a faint atmosphere of indefinable menace. The people crowding the sidewalks wore expressions of hurried, self-absorbed anxiety, as if the struggle of life here had slowly bled away their souls; the noise, the traffic, the blended murmur of innumerable raised voices, the driving chatter of music from every doorway and window, the sheer deafening complexity of it was at once dreamlike and strangely threatening.
In the early days, on his foreign assignments to Berlin and Vienna and even London, he had learned to prefer reflex over analysis, to listen with his nerve endings instead of his mind. He had been good in the field, but all that had ended in the late twenties, a victim first of promotion and then of the endless decades of captivity. Was there anything now, or was it simply an old man’s fretfulness? He couldn’t tell.
“Awright, Gran’pa, you jes’ come along.”
It was almost a relief to hear the voice and feel the strong push against his shoulder as he was crowded into a narrow alleyway between two buildings. He dropped the suitcase, because it was only in the way now, and allowed himself to be guided, squeezed along unprotestingly between ash cans and piles of empty pasteboard boxes.
“Okay now. You c’n turn aroun’ an’ gimme you watch an’ wallet.”
His antagonist was a young Negro, perhaps a shade under six feet, tall and heavily built. His face was hidden in the shadow, but the point of the knife he was carrying was clearly visible. Yegorov realized, with amused astonishment, that he was being mugged. This was neither the police nor the CIA—merely some amateur thief with a cheap stiletto.
He allowed his hand to slip a few inches down the handle of his cane, so that he was holding the shaft rather than the crook, and smiled. He was going to enjoy this. “I have no watch,” he said, allowing his voice to quaver. “And I have almost no money. Leave an old man alone.”
“No, man. You gotta gimme—you gotta.” The Negro made an awkward little pass with his knife, as if he meant to cut his elderly victim open from one shoulder to the other. He even laughed.
They weren’t more than four or five feet apart, but the mugger would have had to step forward if he meant to do any harm. His feet were firmly planted and wide apart, so he had no plans in that direction. He was feeling safe and powerful, content for the moment merely to inspire fear.
Yegorov reached up to his inside jacket pocket. His hand was shaking, but that was perfectly deliberate. At the same time he held his other arm straight down against his body, bending his wrist back slightly so that the cane pointed behind him. When he brought it up, he wanted it to have the necessary momentum.
Then, quite suddenly, twisting his body sideways at the same time, he drove the cane between his attacker’s legs, catching him in the groin. He heard a sharp intake of breath—the blow wasn’t enough to have stopped anyone, but it gave him a few seconds’ purchase.
He raised the cane over his head, holding it at the bottom now with both hands, and struck out again, hitting at random at the shape in the darkness. There was the heavy sound of contact, and the cane glanced away toward the wall. He raised it again and struck again, and then again, and now, as the other man began to go down to his knees, he could see to aim.
Three, four times he brought the cane down against the black head, until there was nothing except a body stretched out on the paved floor of the alley, lying perfectly still. After that it was like beating a pillow.
The man still held his knife clutched loosely in his right hand. Yegorov took it, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket. He also took the man’s wallet, which contained close to three hundred dollars; apparently it had been a good night. In a second he was back on Eighth Avenue. No one had noticed, or if they had it hadn’t occurred to them to interfere. He picked up his suitcase again and continued on his way, wondering, indifferently, whether the man he had left behind him was alive or dead.
. . . . .
They had tracked him to the Forty-second Street library, where he was sitting at one of the long tables in the Reference Room, reading a large volume with a red cover. It was the best shadowing job Austen had ever seen.
“You’re sure he hasn’t spotted anyone?” Austen fiddled nervously with his hat. He disliked hats, but the weather had turned unexpectedly cold that morning, and besides, a hat made his reddish-brown hair harder to see.
George nodded. “We stayed well back. Most of the time we were tracking him by radio anyway.”
“Where did you plant the transmitter?”
“It’s embedded in one of the buttons of his coat.”
That was clever; there was no doubt about it. Austen supposed there was something to be said for having access to all the latest technology. At least they knew they wouldn’t lose him.
It was a Sunday morning, very overcast and gloomy. Bits of newspaper and old handbills skipped along the sidewalk, driven by a fitful northerly wind. The ice cream store across the street was closed; they couldn’t be doing a very brisk business in the middle of February.
The two of them had shared a room at the Holiday Inn on Eighth Avenue, simply because that way they could stay close to Yegorov and be ready if their agents in the street indicated that he was on the move again. Austen slept only in snatches; there was too much noise from the girlish laughter and the clatter of high-heeled shoes out on the landing, and beyond that, he couldn’t seem to turn his mind off.
Yegorov, at least, had the advantage of knowing what he was about. It was wonderful, really; after forty years in the jug, there was still a perfect clarity of purpose behind every move he made. He was looking for something, the directions to which he could think to discover in the New York Public Library.
Or someone. After forty years, could it possibly still be a person? Who could this walking museum piece possibly know after such a time, in New York or anywhere else?
“I’ll shadow him myself when he comes out,” Austen said suddenly; the idea had just popped into his mind. “I think this may be the end game, and I want to be in a position to call the shots directly if anything unexpected happens.”
G
eorge cocked his head a little to one side, closing one eye slightly in some very attenuated version of surprise. “You sure, Frank? You sure you don’t want to leave it to my thugs? Remember that monkey last night—Earl tells me he really turned the guy inside out.”
“Not to worry, little mother,” Austen replied, smiling again. “I’m probably safer than any of you; after all, he’s never seen me before. And I’ll try to stay far enough away so that Methuselah won’t get a chance to club me to death. Relax, pal.”
“Okay, you’re the boss. Just don’t underestimate him, is all. You’re not even carrying a piece.” He reached into, his pocket and took out a small nickel-plated automatic, but Austen shook his head.
“I won’t need it, George. Besides, I can summon all the help I’ll need in an instant, remember?” He opened his hand and revealed a duplicate of Timmler’s own walkie-talkie.
“Then you might as well get going—I just got the hand signal from across the street. He’s on his way out.”
Austen got out of the car and watched it heading up the Avenue of the Americas, where George would turn into a side street so he could be there as soon as he was called. George was a good man, but he worried too much.
The walkie-talkie, which he kept in his left hand, began to vibrate slightly, an inaudible signal that someone was trying to get in touch with him. He switched on the receiver and held the thing up close to his face, so he could hear.
“Frank?” It was Timmler’s voice. “Frank, it was Who’s Who. The book he’s been reading was Who’s Who. What do you make of that?”
“Nothing,” he answered, almost like a man talking to himself. “I don’t know, George. See you later.”
So it was a someone after all.
He could see Yegorov now, coming out of the Forty-second Street door, walking down the cement steps with the aid of his cane, looking just as harmless as the thousands of other old men you saw hobbling around this city. Austen crossed over to the uptown side and began to move in the direction of Fifth Avenue. He stopped at a shop window to give Yegorov time to develop a lead, and then followed him up toward Central Park.
The President's Man Page 25
