Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  “Was that the first time you were caught?”

  He looked at her, not answering, letting her drink him in, until she laughed and said, “Sorry, you’re right. Stupid question. Okay, next time, I’ll represent you. But try not to be caught quite so red-handed.”

  He looked at his hands, pitying them. “Black-handed, this time.”

  “I have towelettes in the glove compartment,” she said. ccWhen you’re done.”

  A car or a truck went by from time to time, but nobody stopped to see if any help was needed. It was clear that Frank was doing the job. And the lady lawyer wasn’t afraid of him any more. That’s all it took, a little conversation, spend some time, see what Frank Hillfen’s really like. Not a nice guy, maybe, not pretty, but not dangerous.

  She said her name was Mary Ann Kelleny, and he told her he was Frank Hillfen, and she said, “Frank. Good. That fits you.”

  “I don’t know about that Mary Ann stuff,” he said. “How can a lawyer be named Mary Ann?”

  “Why not?” she asked him. ‘There’s lawyers named Randolph, aren’t there?”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” He tightened the last lug nut.

  “What was your attorney’s name?” she asked. “The one with the necktie.”

  “Gower.”

  She smiled and spread her hands. “I rest my case.”

  He hadn’t known what she meant when she said “towelettes,” but they turned out to be those folded wet paper towels in a packet that restaurants give you after you eat the lobster. He used three of them from her glove compartment supply; a well-prepared lady. He would have thrown the towelettes away into the weeds but she pointed at the plastic trash bag she’d hung from the dashboard cigarette lighter. “You’re a good influence on me,” he said, and disposed of his trash properly.

  The bus stop was less than a mile farther on, at an intersection containing two gas stations, a diner, and a squat modern one-story “professional building”: the professionals were a dentist, a real estate agent, and a stockbroker. Down the road to the right were a few houses, new but shabby, as though for a town that hadn’t quite happened. Up to the left was a long, wide, gray two-story factory building with very few windows. TEXTECH in blue was along the blank wall facing this way. Frank said, “What’s that?”

  “Clothing,” she told him. “Sweaters, T-shirts. Sweatshirts that say Property of Alcatraz?

  “I never saw a sweatshirt like that,” Frank said. He couldn’t help it, his mouth was pursed in disapproval. Property of Alcatraz; that was bad taste.

  “They don’t sell them in America,” she explained. “Only overseas.”

  “Where?”

  “Asia. Europe.”

  “Property of Alcatraz.” Frank saw a teenager in Tokyo, walking down a crowded street, wearing a sweatshirt that says, Property of Alcatraz. Doesn’t speak ten words of English. Was the kid somebody’s property in Alcatraz, wouldn’t last a day. People wearing the words, don’t know what they say. Don’t know what they mean.

  “The global village,” Mary Ann Kelleny said.

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “But do they get it? I don’t think so.”

  “Does it matter? As long as they’re happy.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “Fll bite. Are they happy?”

  She glanced at him as she drove, curious and amused. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

  “Because they don’t know who they are,” he said. “They don’t know who anybody is. They mosdy sound bewildered.”

  “I don’t follow,” she said.

  “You put your clothes on,” Frank told her, “they’re your flag for the day. The public announcement, who you think you are. What we all do. You gonna walk into court with words on you? Property of Alcatraz?”

  She smiled and gave him another look. “So you’re dressed as the humble workman,” she said. “Is that it?”

  “I’m dressed like I just walked out of prison,” he answered. ccWhen I get a couple of dollars, I’ll dress a litde different. Like a guy ready to party.”

  She’d stopped smiling when he mentioned the “couple dollars,” and now she said, sounding fatalistic but worried for him, “You’re going back, aren’t you, Frank?”

  He pretended he didn’t know what she meant. “Back where? A life of crime?”

  “The wrong crime,” she said. “So back to prison. You’re an intelligent man, Frank, you know it yourself. There’s a rubber band on you, and the other end is still in your cell.”

  “I’ve learned stuff,” he said, trying to sound competent and confident. ‘Whatever happens, I’m not gonna be that easy to find.”

  “Oh, sure you are,” she said.

  He hadn’t expected this conversation with anybody but himself, and he sure hadn’t expected it with a good-looking woman lawyer in an air-conditioned white Saab doing sixty down the highway. He said, ‘What do you mean, the wrong crime?”

  “Little stuff,” she said. “Burglaries. Breaking into houses and stealing wall safes, for heaven’s sake.”

  Defensive, he said, ‘What’s the complaint? Wall safes, that’s where they keep the valuables. That’s what I’m after.”

  “How much in valuables?” she demanded. ‘What do you mean, valuables?” She must be a pretty good lawyer. She said, “Are you talking about three or four thousand dollars? Jewelry, and what do you get from your fence? Ten percent?”

  “Sometimes more,” he muttered.

  “You can live a week, or a month if you’re lucky, and then you have to go out and do it again. Every time you do it, you’re at the same risk. Every time. It doesn’t matter how many times you don’t get caught, because they don’t count in your favor the time you do get caught. So the odds are against you, and sooner or later you will get caught. That’s the only way it can end, cycle after cycle.”

  “Okay, then, I’ll reform,” he said, bored with the conversation, and looked out the window at the passing scenery: trees, farms, trees.

  But she wouldn’t let it go. “You won’t reform, Frank,” she said. “You’re who you are, and you know it.”

  “Habitual,” he said, like the word was a joke.

  “But you could retireshe said. “That’s not the same thing as reform, you know. If you reform, you have to get a job somewhere, live in a house somewhere...”

  “No can do.”

  “I know,” Frank, that’s what I’m saying. If you do a burglary and you make five thousand dollars on it, you don’t go right back out the next night, do you?”

  “No need to.”

  “Exactly. You retire, short-term. Then, when the money’s gone, you come out of retirement.”

  He laughed, seeing himself as a guy constantly bouncing out of retirement. “I guess that’s me, okay.”

  “But if you committed just one crime,” she went on, “and you got five million dollars, you’d never have to come out of retirement, would you?”

  This time, he laughed out of surprise. “Five million? Where is this score?”

  “Don’t ask me, Frank,” she said half kidding but also half on the square. “I’m not a criminal. And I’m not suggesting any crime to you, either. What I’m saying is, if you keep doing the five-thousand-dollar crimes, you’ll definitely go back to prison.” He knew what she was doing. It was a lawyer’s trick, that, to make you think you’ve got two alternatives, but then the first one’s no good and the second one’s impossible, so you wind up doing exactly what lawyers always want everybody to do, anyway, which is nothing. “So instead of the five-grand hits,” he said, “I should stay home and dream up a five-mil hit. And not go out till I got it. Right?”

  “You’ll never reform, Frank,” she said. “You know that. So the best thing to do is retire.”

  “With my five million.”

  “Or whatever.”

  * * *

  They came into Omaha around seven in the evening, the city rising out of the landscape like children’s toys in a sandbox, the reddening sun still partway up the western
sky but the children gone home to dinner. As the country road became city street, the streetlights automatically switched on, anemic in the rosy light of the sun.

  They’d been talking law, anecdotes, him telling her some of his court experiences, she talking about clients and how it seemed that everybody had a crooked streak in them somewhere. She wasn’t herself a criminal lawyer, or a courtroom lawyer, but flew a desk in a big corporate law firm, so the clients were businessmen, all looking for an edge. It began to seem to Frank that it was unfair of society to single him out this way, keep riding him so hard when everybody else was up to something, too. But nobody ever said it was supposed to be fair, life.

  The first time they were stopped at a red light, she pointed at her purse, a big brown soft-leather thing on the seat between them, and said, “There’s money in there. Take three hundred.”

  He brisded. “What’s this about?”

  “To get you started. You need money to get you moving. If I don’t give it to you, you’ll start right in trying to beat the odds. The first day on parole.”

  “I can’t take your money,” he said. The fact was, three hundred wouldn’t do it. Three grand was closer to what he needed, with the flight to New York, and some clothes, and a hotel, and this and that and the other. Four or five grand, more like. But he wasn’t going to say that. “I appreciate the thought,” he went on, “but I just wouldn’t feel right.”

  She sighed. The light turned green, and they drove on. She tapped fairly short fingernails against the steering wheel, and at last she said, “All right, then. Look in there, you’ll see my wallet.”

  “I really won’t—”

  “Not money,” she said. “Hold on a second.”

  Another red light. She picked up the bag, braced it between the steering wheel and her lap, took out a thick wallet, unclasped it, brought out a business card, handed it to him. “I can’t come to court for you,” she said, “but I can find you somebody better than the wet necktie.”

  Taking the card, reading her name and the firm name and the business address and the phone number and the telex number and the cable word and the fax number, he said, “You don’t have much confidence in me.”

  “I have confidence in the mathematics.” The light was green; she shoved the bag onto the seat and drove. “The five-thousand- dollar crimes will get you right back in trouble.”

  “I’ll look for the five-million job,” he promised.

  “Good. In the meantime, hold on to that card.”

  “I will.” He tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  “Where do you want me to drop you off?”

  “Oh, any well-off neighborhood will do,” he said.

  She laughed. He was glad she did.

  Ananayel

  X must say it was touching when Frank wouldn’t take the money. Humans do have this capacity to be appealing, when you deal with them one at a time and avoid the ghastly overview That a creature like Frank Hillfen, so utterly without hope, so totally enmired in slow self-destruction, so devoid of any experience of using free will, should refuse Mary Ann Kelleny’s three hundred dollars, made me feel quite kindly toward him, for that moment.

  Will he do what’s necessary when the time comes? Oh, yes. We can arrange that, we can manipulate that. The group I’m assembling will do what I want—that is, what He wants done—but it will be their choice, their idea, their free will in action. The human race will freely choose to end itself.

  Well? They’ve been rehearsing for it quite long enough, haven’t they?

  Not the entire human race, no, of course not, we are not conducting a referendum on this. His will be done. But representatives of them all, carefully chosen representatives. From every race, from every continent. No one left out.

  We’re playing fair here.

  8

  The thinner she got, the more the Europeans liked her. At home they had their soft pale cushion women; in Nairobi, they wanted something lean and mean and dark. That was Pami: lean and mean and very dark. So easy, and so good for business; when you’ve got slim, you never have to diet.

  Pami’s stroll was up Mama Ngina Street past the European embassies and down Kimathi Street beyond the New Stanley Hotel, where the tourists sit beneath the famous huge thorn tree spiked all over with messages. To whom? From whom? Nothing to do with Pami, anyway, nothing to do with an illiterate twenty-three-year-old Luo from up above Lake Naivasu. She’d come to Nairobi at fifteen because she wasn’t wanted at home and had already outlasted her reasonable life expectancy. In Nairobi she knew no one except a few policemen, “protectors,” and colleague whores. No person in this world had a message for Pami Njoroge, a twenty-shilling Kenyan whore with cold eyes, a twisted mouth from a jaw long ago badly broken and ineptly mended, and a recently diagnosed case of slim, the African familiar name for AIDS. *

  At first he didn’t look that much like a john: too big and self-confident and well-built. But then she was distracted by a beggar with deformed legs that she almost fell over, and when she looked up again along crowded, busding Kimathi Street the big European with yellow hair was closer, and fewer other people were in the way, and she could see he was fatter and sweatier than she’d thought.

  He was probably fifty years old, well over six feet tall, with a bulging soft torso contained in a white business shirt large enough to be a tent in the up-country where Pami was born. His dark tie was pulled down from his thick neck, the shirt collar open. His dark blue suit, like a banker or a diplomat, was rumpled and desperate looking, the coat dangling open like double doors. He walked heavily, feet slapping the pavement, like a ritual bullock plodding toward the place of sacrifice, and when he saw Pami his pale eyes sparkled and his cheeks grew round when he smiled, wet-lipped.

  She gave him back her own twisted, mean, secret smile, knowing it would excite him with its dangerousness—he’d have no idea how dangerous—and when he passed her, the two of them momentarily very close, pushed together by the jostling crowd of pedestrians, he looked down at her with those bright eyes—they were the palest blue she’d ever seen—and said, “Oh, you come with me.” He spoke English with some kind of thick accent, in a deep guttural voice. Was he German? Somehow he didn’t seem quite like a German. And in any case, what did it matter?

  His hotel was three blocks away, one of the newer American- designed ones, the same anonymous but lavish cell repeated one hundred sixteen times. By day, the rear door from the parking lot was left unlocked, so the john took her around that way, to avoid the problems of bringing this alley cat through the lobby.

  His room was on the second floor, with no view except another wing of the hotel. There were two beds, a single and a double, both neatly and smoothly covered with Mondrian- influenced spreads. The maid had been through, to put a strip of paper around the toilet seat and distribute fresh plastic glasses in sealed plastic bags, all of these tiny ways to deny the great teeming filthiness of the world just out there, just beyond that double-paned permanently shut window. What did sealed plastic bags and droning vacuum cleaners mean, when these big blond residents brought their skinny dirty Pamis inside?

  “I am Danish,” he said, locking the door. “Am I your first Danish man?”

  How would she know? “Yes,” she said.

  “Good.” He smiled, and crossed the room to close the drapes over that broad rectangle of plate glass. She stripped off the small plastic shoulder bag and loose pale green cotton shift and low black plastic boots that were all she ever wore at work, and the big man turned from the window to beam at her dark nakedness, the small loose breasts with their large areolas, the narrow muscular hips, the lush foliage of her bush. The room was dimmer now that the drapes were drawn, everything in it touched by a pale grayness, in which his eyes gleamed like tiny signal lights from a ship far out at sea. “You will be rough?” he asked, with a hopeful rising inflection.

  Her jaw produced another nasty smile. “As rough as you want,” she said.

  He walked toward her,
undoing his belt, then reached around to clasp her buttock hard with one hand. “No ass at all,” he said.

  “I got enough ass,” she told him. “And it cost twenty shillin.”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” He released her, took off his suit coat, reached into its inside pocket, pulled out a large thick billfold, and tossed the coat carelessly onto the single bed. He stood weaving slighdy, as though he were drunk, breathing audibly through his open mouth, as he leafed through crackling currencies in the billfold, muttering to himself: “Francs. Krone. Marks. Oh, I spent it all.”

  People had tried to pay her in other currencies before, but she wouldn’t do it. She had great trouble finding a bank to change the money, usually had to give some hotel desk clerk a blowjob in return for switching dollars or marks into Kenyan shillings; and then she would be cheated on the exchange rate, as well. She was about to tell this man her policy—she’d put her dress and boots and bag back on and walk out if he had no shillings—when he tossed the billfold onto the coat on the bed and said, “I get. Okay.” And plodded heavily over to the closet.

  Pami looked at all the paper money stuffed into the billfold, lying open on the coat. All different kinds of money, and lots of it. Probably more than she earned in a month, if you added it all together. And didn’t cheat on the exchange rate.

  The big man slid open the mirrored closet door, stooped with a grunt, and brought out a black attache case with gleaming chrome locks. This he put on the low dresser, took a key ring from his pocket, unlocked the case, and lifted the top. He made no effort to hide the stacks of money that almost filled the interior. Again, there were four or five different currencies, but this time including shillings; she saw stacks of one hundreds, five hundreds. And on top of it all, in a brown leather case, was a hunting knife.