Something twisted in my brain and moments later I stood there, breathing hard. I held one leg of the tailored slacks in each hand. I had ripped them in two, from crotch to waistline.
Back in my own apartment it took me fifteen minutes to find the sleeping pills prescribed that winter I had such a bad sinus attack. They were round and yellow, with cotton stuffed in the top of the bottle. I picked out the cotton and poured all of them into the palm of my hand. Sixteen. Probably enough and more than enough. I poured all but two back into the bottle. I took them. They worked quickly.
She would not talk to me Saturday and Sunday. She would not listen to my promises.
Monday I went a little crazy. I brought her back over twenty thousand dollars. It earned her measured smile. If a large cash deposit hadn’t come through my window at the last minute, it might have been all up. Nairn would have seen how distorted my check-out was when he initialed the running record.
Later, after I had taken what my twenty thousand had earned, and she had left my side, I butted a cigarette in the ash tray on the coffee table. Soon there was a stench of burning cloth. I prodded in the ash tray and found what was burning. A three-inch length of brown shoelace, with a metal tip. I knew I had not lost it. I knew she had no shoes that would use such a lace. I stood up in a fury, and then slowly sat down again. I knew it hadn’t been there Sunday night. I couldn’t see what purpose would be served by accusing her. There was nothing I could do to hurt her. If I tried to hurt her, she would only deny me what had come to be a necessity to me, a thing as essential as breathing. I dropped it behind the day bed.
After she had come back in her robe and we had talked for a time, I said, “Understand you were late getting back from lunch today.”
“How did you know that?”
I shrugged. “Somebody mentioned it. I forget who.”
The end of the month approached. I was worried about the crucial business with the statements. It seemed senseless to keep pushing our luck. But the $135,000 was not enough, she said. We argued interminably. She could not answer my arguments. But she had one that I could not answer. I needed her in a way that could not be sated.
So at last we prepared the dummy statement envelopes. Thirty-eight of them, adding cut newspaper to give the necessary bulk.
The statements were to be mailed on a Thursday. She had made the false statements, finished them by working late Wednesday. Wednesday night she gave them to me and I checked them over. They, of course, overstated the account balances by $135,000. There were forty-nine checks to be recovered.
We worked out a code. She had to work on Limebright for his permission to take a batch of statements out and mail them on her lunch hour. And she had to finish the correct statements in time for them to be checked before her lunch hour.
At eleven o’clock I phoned her for the balance on a mythical account named Mead. “Just a moment, please,” she said in that slow, calm voice. It told me nothing. The phone was sticky in my hand.
“That balance is one hundred and fifteen dollars, sir.”
“Thank you,” I said. My voice was a croak. It meant she had worked it, that she would be leaving by the side door at one-fifteen with the thirty-eight statements. I had the substitute statements in my room, the dummy envelopes in a brown paper bag. At ten after one I went out and got the brown paper bag. Grinter got his lunch break at the same time.
“You’re looking kind of beat, Kyle,” he said.
“I feel fine.”
“Losing a little weight, aren’t you? Want to watch that stuff. Ever hear about the bridegroom who put up the window shade?” He laughed greasily.
“I think I’ll walk over and eat this in the park,” I said. I killed time at the downstairs drinking fountain until I saw her slim ankles on the stairs, and then, slowly, the rest of her. Her face was calm. Too calm. I reached the door with her and gave her the dummy envelope. I slipped the statements into the paper bag, making the exchange with my body.
She walked down the street toward the post office. She would mail them in the trash receptacle inside the post office. I turned toward the apartment, walking as fast as I could.
The tea kettle was on the stove. I turned on the gas. As soon as steam was coming out the spout with sufficient force, I began to steam open the statements. It seemed to take a long time, longer than we had planned.
I arranged them in alphabetical order, the same as the fallacious statements. I went through each envelope and took out the correct statements. Then, using my list, I went through each envelope and took out the forged checks. Two checks remained on my list. Joint account of a Mr. and Mrs. Martin Mallory. That was the same account that had given us a scare the week before. Mrs. Mallory had come in and asked Grinter for her balance figure. Fortunately, Emily had just returned to her desk from lunch. If she had been two minutes later, Miss Rollins would have phoned down a figure that would have given Mrs. Mallory a considerable shock.
My hands started to tremble. I looked stupidly into the empty paper bag. I counted the statements. Thirty-seven. The Mallory statement was missing. I put the false statements in the envelopes, resealed all of them. Just as I finished, I heard Emily coming up the stairs. I had never heard her move so fast. The door was locked. I ran to it, opened it. She came in fast, took the thirty-seven doctored statements out of my hands.
“How about Mallory?” I snapped.
“I know. I didn’t have a chance to tell you. It was an accident. It got mailed. Miss Rollins saw it. She took it along with hers while I was in the women’s room.”
I sat down hard. “What are we going to do?”
“You’re going to be out there tomorrow morning when the mail arrives. I checked the time they get delivery. Ten in the morning. Just Mrs. Mallory will be there. Tell her there’s a mistake or something. Tell her we caught it after the statement was mailed. Tell her the bank didn’t want to worry her, and you’ve brought the correct statement. And get the checks before she gets a look at them. They’ll be the bottom two. Snap out of it, Kyle.”
“It won’t work,” I said.
“You’ve got to make it work! Now get busy and destroy those checks and the statements. Fast. Time is getting short.”
She went down the stairs with the doctored statements, ready for mailing.
Officially I was sick on Friday. I arrived at the Mallory house at nine-thirty. Mrs. Mallory, a gaunt, green-eyed redhead turning gray, said, “Yes?”
“Sorry to trouble you this way, Mrs. Mallory. My name is Cameron. I’m from the bank.”
“Oh, come in! I knew I’d seen you somewhere. But when you see a face sort of … out of context … Don’t tell me there’s trouble on our account again.”
“No, nothing like that. We found that we’d put the wrong statement in the envelope addressed to you, Mrs. Mallory. Here is your statement. The wrong one should arrive in this morning’s mail. If I could just pick it up …”
“Why, of course you can! Come out and have some coffee with me, Mr. Cameron. This is an hour I relax. Once the children are off to school and Martin has left for the office.”
I sat at the table in the breakfast booth at her invitation and she brought me a cup of coffee. I needed it.
She sat across from me and said, “How odd to send the wrong statement to the wrong person! I thought the address was right on the statement and you could see it through one of those little windows.”
Those green eyes were disturbingly shrewd.
“This is just one of those things. Your name got on the other statement and their name got on yours. Fortunately we caught it before the other one was mailed. So we made up this fresh copy of yours with the proper name on it, and made up a new copy of the other person’s from the duplicate in our files.”
“Those things happen, I suppose. But you’d think the checks and everything would be going to the wrong parties, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s a new girl. She got things a little messed up.”
“You
people take a lot of trouble, don’t you? Why didn’t you just phone? I’m going downtown later today. I could have brought it in.”
I took a deep breath. “But you see, a bank statement is a confidential thing. We wouldn’t dream of letting anyone else know your business. And so we naturally don’t want any customer examining any other customer’s statement.”
“But from what you say, I wouldn’t even know whose it was!”
“Oh, yes, you would, Mrs. Mallory. There are two checks in with yours that belong with his. I have to take them over to him with an explanation as soon as I get them out of your envelope.”
She sighed. “Banking must be terribly complicated.”
The mailman arrived a little after ten. I followed her to the door. She leaned down before I could and picked up the mail from the floor inside the front door, under the slot.
I reached out my hand for the statement. The front hallway was small. She gave me a coy smile and hugged the mail. “After all, Mr. Cameron, it is addressed to us.”
My eyes moved downward across her smile to the lean throat. I felt the tightening of my arms and shoulders. The sudden brutal instinct frightened me. I think she felt some of it. It was very quiet in the little hallway.
She quickly thrust the statement at me. “I guess it isn’t a joking matter, after all.” She laughed with a trace of nervousness.
I took the envelope and walked into the living room, thumbing it open as I did so. The yellow statement was wrapped around the checks. I slid the rubber band off, and while my back was still toward her, I found the two checks and pulled them out. I held them so that she could not see the signature and turned, forcing a smile, handing her the rest of the checks.
“These will match the statement I brought you, Mrs. Mallory. And thanks for co-operating with us.”
“I was glad to do it, really.”
I put the checks in my wallet, still holding them so that she could get no chance glimpse of her husband’s forged signature.
“We at the bank will appreciate it if you don’t tell how we made such a boner. It doesn’t help public relations.”
“Certainly, Mr. Cameron.”
I put the statement in my inside jacket pocket, smiled again, said good-by to her after thanking her for the coffee, and walked out on knees that felt too weak to support my weight.
I reported to Tom Nairn at eleven, telling him that my sick headache had faded enough so that I thought I could work. He told me not to force myself but I said I was all right. We got my drawer out of the bin in the vault and I opened the window for business. At two in the afternoon I took $1,800.
Chapter Eleven
The heat wave struck Thrace on the seventh day of August. It turned the downtown streets into airless ovens. The humidity was high, and the jacket I was forced to wear at work was a misery.
Since the statements had been handled and in the week there had been no kickbacks, I had found a new kind of confidence. It wasn’t like the first week of July. It was an apathy that was shattered only by streaks of recklessness, as though I were trying to be caught.
The apartments were hot, airless, without cross ventilation. As mine was a bit cooler than hers, Emily would come down after her shower, wearing nothing under a thin cotton dress. I had bought a fan. She made me move the bed over by the windows. She would take off the dress and stretch out with the fan on a table below her feet, directed at her body. The only times she spoke during that frightful heat were to demand something cool to drink or a fresh cold washcloth for her forehead. Her voice was listless. She reacted to heat the way a cat will. She refused to be touched and resented being spoken to.
I could look at her there, pallid in the light from the air well, without feeling the least touch of desire. I tried to read, but nothing satisfied me except the cheapest and least demanding sort of fiction. I think that if the heat had continued long enough, I would have eventually worked my way down to comic books.
Late on the Sunday before the last week a sudden thunderstorm cooled the air. It brought her up out of her sultry, petulant lethargy to vibrant, demanding life. Afterward, I fell into heavy sleep. When I awakened the heat was worse than before, and she was gone. She was not in her apartment.
I went down onto the street after midnight, looking for coolness. People sat on the steps of buildings. Small children whined sleeplessly. The cars, pulsing by the end of the street, made a sound like the panting of a vast, weary animal. There was the threat of violence in the night.
I saw her come around the corner under the street light, the man tall beside her. She walked slowly. She stopped and faced him. I saw that they intended to finish their conversation there, and she would walk the rest of the way alone.
Heat had destroyed everything but an aimless curiosity. I walked directly up to them. Emily spun around quickly. “Kyle!” she said.
He was big and young and his face under the light had a curiously unfinished look. As though it had been carefully carved, but the maker had tired and given up before doing the final polishing.
“Is this Beckler?” I asked.
“Hello, Cameron,” he said. His voice was deep, lazy, slow.
“Were you following me?” Emily demanded.
“Don’t mind her,” Ralph Beckler said. “She’s got a disposition like a coral snake.” His laugh was deep.
I felt a curious affinity for him. Yet he was better off. I sensed that he had retained more of himself.
“Why don’t you leave her alone?” I asked quietly.
“Me? I’m what you might call an old friend of the family. Isn’t that right, honey?”
“Don’t call me honey.”
“Cameron, what are you kids cooking? I like the place you work.”
“We like it too,” I said.
He laughed again. “I bet you do. Why don’t you make room for old Ralph? Hell, we can all get along. A threesome is better than a twosome.” He prodded me with his elbow. “And there’s enough of it to go around.”
I was standing, half turned toward him. My right hand was at my side. He was on my left. When the heat of the night exploded in me, I brought my right hand up. I swung it with all my strength, coming up on my toes as I did so. He moved his head back an inch or two. My fist slid by his face and he took my wrist easily, made one hard turn. It spun me around, pinned my hand between my shoulder blades.
“Looks like Junior doesn’t want to co-operate, honey.”
“I told you to stop calling me honey!”
“Honey, you take Kylie-Wylie home and tell him about the bees and the flowers.” He put his free hand on the nape of my neck and gave a powerful shove that sent me running head down toward the apartment steps. I tried to regain my balance but I couldn’t. I went down, taking both knees out of my trousers, rolling over and over, burning the back of my hand against the sidewalk.
When I stood up, she was walking slowly toward me, no concern, no interest on her face. Ralph Beckler had already gone back around the corner.
As we went up the stairs, like strangers who happened to be going up at the same time, I wanted to cry like a child. Maybe it was the humiliation. Or the fear of the past few weeks. Or the sordid knowledge of what I had become. But I couldn’t cry. It had to stay bottled up, inside me.
“You went to him,” I said. “He didn’t come after you. You went out and found him.”
“Lower your voice.”
I pushed her ahead of me into my apartment, slammed the door behind us. “Tell me. Did you go to him?”
“Yes.”
“For God’s sake, why? Why do you do a thing like that to me?”
“Does it make any difference?”
“I have to know why.”
She turned her back on me. “I don’t really know why. Maybe because he’s more like me than anyone else I ever met. He thinks the way I do. I don’t like him. I hate him. He knows me too well and he laughs at me. But I have to … go back to him.”
“You’ve got to make
a choice.”
She stared at me. Even with the anger in her face I could see beyond it to the slackness of satiety. “Choice? Choice! What choice? I’m going away with you.”
“Don’t see him again before we go.”
“Fix your hand and your knees. You’re bleeding.”
“You are going to promise not to see him again before we go?”
She yawned, with a little shudder and grimace at the end, like a cat. “It’s too hot to argue. It’s too hot to talk.”
One moment she was standing there. The next moment I saw her reeling backward, turning, falling. I looked at my doubled fist. The knuckles throbbed. I had no remembrance of hitting her, and yet I knew that I had. She lay where she had fallen, on her left side, both knees bent, left cheek against the rug, hair across her eyes, hands slack, together, almost touching her doubled knees. It was as though someone had reached over my shoulder to strike her down.
I stood dumbly and looked at her. Her hands moved first. She rolled onto her back and pushed the hair away from her eyes. Her eyes were not focused. She sighed and felt of her jaw. Then she sat up and looked at me.
“You won’t see him again,” I said.
“Don’t ever hit me like that again. Don’t ever hit me that hard again.”
I took a step toward her. My fists were still doubled. I stared down into her eyes. “You won’t see him again.”
She did not answer for a long time. Rage grew instead of diminished. If she had defied me again I do not think I would have stopped until I had smashed her face beyond recognition.
Her eyes dropped first. “Whatever you say, Kyle.”
I let the anger fade away, and then I picked her up. She smiled at me, almost shyly. “You surprise me, Kyle. I think you’ll be boss for a time.”
I saw the invitation in her eyes. I turned away from her. I didn’t want her, not with the smell of love-making still clinging to her.
“Go upstairs and wash,” I said.
“Yes, Kyle,” she said in a small voice. I did not turn. I heard the door shut and then heard the sound of her familiar step on the stairs.
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