He thought of packing and moving out: going to Mexico or Africa and getting back to work in new surroundings. It was a little unnerving to spend too long in one place. But in this stage it was best to stay inside the United States because it kept him out of Cutter’s technical jurisdiction. It didn’t mean Cutter wasn’t hunting but it meant Cutter couldn’t mobilize much manpower. They’d have to use the FBI. The Bureau had its talents-like establishing Communist cells so that its agents would have something to report on-but the FBI wasn’t likely to track him down unless he stood in Constitution Avenue waving a Soviet flag… And if he stayed in the States he might as well stay here because it would be hard to find a better place.
But he’d need certain things when he began his run and they weren’t obtainable in the backwoods. The nearest cities were Atlanta and Birmingham and he decided on Birmingham because he knew its workings.
It was September seventeenth, a Tuesday. The drive took nearly seven hours. At two in the afternoon he saw the industrial smudge on the sky and at half-past three he was parking the car against the curb on a hill as steep as anything in San Francisco. He spent the next hour buying articles of clothing, luggage, cosmetics, automobile spray-paint, a leather-worker’s sewing awl and a few other items. The city was acrid with coal fumes from the great steel furnaces. Its faces were predominantly black.
He bought a ream of bond paper, carbons, erasers, masking tape, a thick stack of nine-by-twelve manila envelopes; as with all his purchases he paid cash and asked for a receipt because if you did that it meant you had a legitimate business reason for buying things.
He had a meal in a mediocre restaurant and there was still time to kill; he walked back to the car and stored his purchases in the trunk and then he sat through the first hour of The Outfit in a theater redolent of stale buttered popcorn and unwashed feet. When the movie’s climax began to build so that nobody was likely to leave his seat Kendig went into the men’s room and made his few simple cosmetic preparations, darkening his hair with a mascara rinse and poking a few wads of cotton up into his cheeks to fatten his face. Ordinarily he wore his hair parted on the left and combed across his forehead; now he combed it straight back without a part. Then he knotted the tie he’d bought an hour ago and would throw away after this one use; he turned his reversible sports jacket inside out to show the plaid side which clashed stridently with the necktie and then he stood at the urinal until people started coming out of the movie house; he blended into the crowd and went up the street.
He could see the building from several blocks short of it-a fifteen-story office tower and the neon sign was still there, Topknot Club; there wasn’t much chance it had changed hands in seven years, it was too profitable a front. He went through the heavy glass doors into the lobby and the doorman gave him an incurious glance before he got into the express elevator behind an expensively dressed couple who talked excitedly, all the way to the top in accents so relentlessly thick he lost one word in four.
The elevator gave out into a wide foyer with judiciously spaced spots of colored indirect lighting. The carpet was as deep and silent as spring grass. The man at the desk was clean and well dressed but the muscles and the attitudes were there: not exactly a gorilla but not far from it in function.
Kendig waited for the Southern couple to show their membership cards and go through the door beyond the desk and then he said, “I’m from out of town. A friend brought me up here once a few years ago.”
“You can buy a one-night membership. Cost you three dollars.”
Alabama had local-option drinking laws and you had to be a member of the club to drink here but all it did in effect was give every bar the right to skim a cover charge off every customer. Kendig paid the three dollars and the man in the dinner jacket pressed an ultraviolet stamp against the back of his hand and waved him through.
A trio of haggard musicians played sedate cocktail music on a small bandstand bathed in whorehouse-red illumination. Businessmen sat at tables by twos and threes and there was a discreet sprinkling of high-class B-girl doxies but there was no bar as such. The dimension of the half-drawn curtains on either side of the orchestra indicated that the stage could be opened out for floor shows. Three sides of the room were paneled in pane glass for floor shows. Three sides of the room were paneled in pane glass with a southward view of the city’s lamplit mountainsides. Beyond the doors on the fourth wall would be the bar, the kitchen, the managerial offices and a few smaller rooms for banquets and proms and lead-outs. Southerners were early diners and it was only nine o’clock but few of the patrons were eating; it was a place for convivial drinking more than dining out. And for a few people, the insiders who ran the faster tracks, it was something else entirely: a place where if you knew the right names and had the right amount of money you could buy anything at all.
The tables at the windows had been claimed and that was fine; he took a table close to the door marked Private and when the miniskirted waitress came he ordered bourbon in a hoarse prairie twang. “The best you got, honey.” He gave the girl a wink.
When she brought the drink he touched his lips to it and said, “Now that’s sippin’ whisky. Honey I wonder if you’d do me the kindness to ask Mr. Maddox to drop by my table here? Just tell him it’s old Jim Murdison, he’ll most likely remember me.”
“I’m not sure whether Mr. Maddox is in tonight, sir. I didn’t see him come in. But I’ll check for you.”
“Thank you kindly.”
She had other tables to serve and it was five minutes before he saw her slip through the Private door. He glimpsed a blonde girl behind a desk inside; then the door slid shut on a silent pneumatic closer.
After a while the waitress came out. “I’m sorry sir, Mr. Maddox hasn’t come in yet.”
“He likely to be in later on tonight?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t tell you, sir. I’m terribly sorry.” She gave a synthetic smile and glided away, hips oscillating.
But she’d been in the outer office too long; they’d had a little discussion and Mr. Maddox had decided he’d never heard of old Jim Murdison and maybe he’d had a peek out through a Judas-hole and hadn’t been impressed by the look of Kendig. So Kendig had to force the impasse. There might be other ways to obtain what he wanted-even legitimate ways-but it was best to deal with an underworld type like Maddox because he wouldn’t have any ties with the Bureau or with Cutter and because the Maddoxes were in it for profit, they were businessmen, you knew just where you stood with them: they weren’t going to slit your throat or ask the wrong questions. With an ordinary good-citizen amateur running a legit charter business you wouldn’t have that assurance.
A little while later the waitress went into the kitchen and that was when Kendig stood up and walked to the Private door.
The blonde girl looked up from her typing. “Yes sir? May I help you?”
“It’s all right, I know the way.” He went straight across to the door of the private office. When the blonde made to get up he turned. “What’s your name? Are you new? You don’t know me, do you.”
It flustered the girl; she was very young, hired for her ornamental excellences, not her mind. “I–I’m very sorry, sir.”
Kendig went in.
Maddox looked up, burly and muscular, thighs bulging against his trousers, a ledger in his lap. He was tough enough not to look alarmed. The tentative beginnings of a polite smile: “May I help you, friend?”
“Name of Jim Murdison, out of Topeka. Expect you don’t remember me but I was up here a few times seven, eight years back with old Jim-Bob Fredericks from Dallas?” He went booming right across the carpet and pumped Maddox’s hand.