Afterward, I sat down with an official at the bank and the two of us subtracted my uncashed checks from my bank balance and figured out what I had coming. He asked me if I wanted a cashier’s check for the amount, or traveler’s checks, or what. I told him cash would do fine. He stared at me as though I were a throwback to pioneer days and told me what teller to see. I saw the teller and took the cash and left. I stopped at the car place and paid the balance due on the Ford. Then I headed out Main Street toward the river, picked up the highway, pointed the car eastward and shoved the gas pedal to the floor. I had to force myself not to speed, especially after I reached the Thruway. There you can do five miles an hour over the limit with total impunity, but the red column on the Ford’s speedometer kept edging up around seventy-five and I had trouble easing up. I kept telling myself an extra five or ten miles an hour wouldn’t do any good. My foot wouldn’t listen.
New York would do for a starter, I assured myself. Only for a starter—New York would be the first place Murray Rogers would look and, large as the city is, you can never completely disappear there. But New York was a good place to make a preliminary connection and put some wheels into motion. After that, I could go anywhere.
And Murray could follow me. He had the time and the money and the patience and the incentive. With those four components you can find anyone anywhere. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Eichmann.
It had been a pretty little frame while it had lasted. Very neat, very clever. But the frame had been a gamble that had caved in little by little until less than nothing had remained. First the reward had lost its glitter, then the machinery of the frame had lost a few wheels, and finally Murray Rogers had tipped all the way and the whole house of marked cards had fallen in on itself.
Now I was marked for murder.
Somewhere, there was a moral. Not the Golden Rule bit—you can’t apply that to life in the shadow world because the Golden Rule cancels out everything. No, the charm here was a sharper, hipper, dirtier moral.
Like, Don’t gamble. Stick to your trade—cheat and steal but never take a genuine chance. Don’t cheat in a game with professional gamblers—that can result in your teeth being chipped and your thumbs torn out of joint. And don’t set a man up for a murder rap. That can kill you.
So I thought about these things for around two hundred miles. At the service area outside of Syracuse I stopped for gas and coffee. I gulped coffee and the Ford gulped Esso and we hit the road again.
It was dark by the time I pulled into New York. I took the Saw Mill exit off the Thruway, picked up the West Side Drive, wound up driving a little too fast through midtown Manhattan. I stuck the Ford into a lot on Ninth Avenue and lugged the bags a block east and two blocks uptown to a third-rate hotel. I signed in as Mr. Floyd Collins of Barnum, Kentucky. I paid cash in advance, undertipped the bellhop, and wound up in a shabby windowless room.
I had bad dreams.
In the morning I washed and shaved and dressed and grabbed breakfast. I made my calls from the restaurant, not through the hotel switchboard. I used up six dimes before I reached the man I wanted. His name was Marty Dreyer.
“This is Maynard,” I said.
“Wizard?”
“Right.”
“You just hit town? Hey, I heard stories about you, kid. Something about Chicago.”
“That was a while ago,” I said.
“Uh-huh. What happened?”
“I was stupid,” I said.
“That’s the damn truth,” Marty said. “What I hear, you don’t want to go back to Chicago again. Not for awhile, anyway. Maybe never.”
“Maybe never. I’m done being stupid, Marty.”
“So?”
“I can use some action.”
“Yeah?” I waited while he thought it over. “You’re damn good,” Marty said. “Maybe somebody can use you, Wizard. Meet me at the Senator, Ninety-Sixth and Broadway. The cafeteria. You know the place?”
“I know it.”
“Good,” Marty said.
17
There was poker, mostly, with a little gin when somebody arranged it. I moved to a different hotel and sold the Ford to a used-car dealer out in Brooklyn. Sometimes, during the tight parts of a game, I forgot all about Murray Rogers. Sometimes. Not often.
Every afternoon at the out-of-town newspaper stand behind the Times Tower I picked up papers. Every afternoon I checked them out. During the third week Murray’s case came up for trial. The trial didn’t take long, and neither did the jury of his peers. They found him guilty by reason of temporary insanity and let him go. That day there was a picture of him on the back page of the second section, a shot of Murray shaking hands with the foreman of the jury. The tax lawyer also had one arm around an uncertain-looking Joyce.
Murray wore a victor’s smile. I couldn’t help thinking the smile was for me.
Two days later there was mail for me at the hotel desk. I was using the name Robert Lyons, to whom the envelope was addressed. There was the fatal postmark, no return address. I shook all the way upstairs, locked the door and opened the envelope.
Inside, on a piece of plain white paper: “Soon.”
Corny as a field in Iowa, melodramatic as The Perils of Pauline. I left the room and spent the rest of the day peering over my shoulder to see if anybody were tailing me. I couldn’t spot anybody.
That night I took a jet to Cincinnati. I bought my ticket as Howard Foley and registered at a main-stem Cincy hotel as Louis Mapes. Cincy is a quiet town, with all of the action tucked across the river in Newport and Covington. I knew people there. I met one of them and moved into the swing of things.
The hell, Murray had to find me in New York. It was too obvious a place, and I couldn’t stay there forever. Newport was safer.
It took Murray ten days. Then another envelope came, addressed to Louis Mapes, postmarked New York. No message. Just a sheet of the same paper, and, folded into it, a small capsule marked Demerol.
I spent close to a month in Seattle. I was a little cuter about it this time. I flew from Cinci to Dallas under one name, caught a jet from Dallas to San Francisco under another, and rode north on a train to Seattle. I didn’t even play cards there. I laid low and stayed at the hotel. The money started to thin out, but I figured to stay put long enough for the heat to die down before I tried somewhere else and found a way to make a living.
I started feeling safe again. Murray Rogers was a human being, not a superman. He wasn’t even a particularly knowledgeable individual when it came to my side of life. He was a solid citizen, a mark, a square. He had stuck with me neatly, but now I had slipped him and he would stay lost. I was safe.
Until the letter came. More corn—an advertisement for an east coast funeral home enclosed in an envelope postmarked Los Angeles. I threw it away. I sweated. I called the desk and asked them to send up a bottle of Cutty Sark, and I sat on the edge of the bed drinking the scotch. Murray Rogers just didn’t give up. He just wouldn’t get lost.
So many cities. East, west, north, south—after a while each of the cities is pretty much the same. The weather is different and the names are different and the hotel rooms vary somewhat, but in time these subtle distinctions blur and it’s all one town, all one room.
In Kansas City, a truck backfired while I was strolling down the street. I fell to the ground and waited for the second shot. It didn’t come, of course. People looked at me as though I was crazy.
Maybe I was.
Running, always running. Running frenetically from a heavyset tax lawyer with nothing in the world but plenty of money and plenty of time, plenty of patience and plenty of drive.
Running.
You run for so long and then the string spins out. The money goes, but the money is only a very small part of the scene. You become tired, so very damned tired, and you run and run and search for a way out, and there isn’t one.