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 bristled. “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
I 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, bustling 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?