When the knives came out, I yanked an empty drawer from the dresser and used it as both a shield and a club, trying to keep them both in front of me. We were making a lot of noise, but I didn’t expect that to draw much of a crowd in this place. Though I tried to keep my self-confidence intact — it’s strategically better to think you’re going to win than to think you’re going to lose — I couldn’t help feeling a certain angry disgust at the prospect of having it all come to an end like this: Under an assumed name, in a stupid little false moustache, in a tiny room in a fleabag at the wrong end of Collins Avenue, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt featuring surfboards. This was worse than flying coach.
And it wasn’t going to happen, dammit. I lunged and parried with the drawer, kicked a few near-misses at kneecaps, and seemed to be holding my own until all at once one of them jumped over the bed and got behind me and tried what should have been a guaranteed winning move: Grab my hair, yank my head back, run the knife across my Adam’s apple. Except that when he grabbed my hair, of course, it came off in his hand and the force of his movement knocked him back ass over teakettle onto the floor and into the wall.
The other one stopped still, astonished, and stared at me. “Pah-karr?” he asked me, unbelieving, and I kicked him twice: First in the crotch and then, as he bent double, in the face.
The guy with my wig in his hand was coming off the floor, not caring who I was. I did a roundhouse swing with the drawer, which shattered into splinters against the side of his head, leaving me with a handle that did very well for brass knuckles. With his head bouncing between the handle and the wall, he decided to become as unconscious as his friend, and did.
They both wore jogging shoes. I took a shoelace from the guy who’d called me Packard and used it to tie his thumbs together, then repeated the operation with the other one; a quick and easy controlling method when you don’t happen to have handcuffs available. Then, with my sleepers immobilized, I turned to the knives.
They were similar but not identical. Each was a three-inch blade, well-sharpened, that folded into a worn handle. I pocketed them both, then went into the bathroom to put myself back together again. First I adjusted the wig in place, then washed my face and hands, put the clear-lens glasses back on (they’d gone flying into a corner at the very beginning of the fight), switched to my money belt, and generally readjusted my clothing. Now I looked a little rougher around the edges than before, which was fine.
I came out to the main room to find my visitors both climbing shakily to their feet, looking sullen and bewildered and in pain. Both had bloody scrapes on their faces and surprise in their eyes. “Just hold it there a second, boys,” I told them, and they blinked at me while I looked over the room’s door, finding — as I’d expected — that it had not been forced.
“Well, well,” I said, and knocked one of them to the floor again, to keep him out of my hair — or wig — while I searched the other. Then I reversed the process. I found a number of useful things, including about eighty dollars which, now that I was in a cash economy, I pocketed. I also found a key to my room. And in addition, I came up with a key to a Chrysler Corporation automobile. “Good,” I said, and kept the car key, and pushed the boys ahead of me out the room and down to the lobby, where the desk clerk looked up with wary surprise as we three approached him. “What’s this?” he said.
I said, “Do you know these fellas?”
“Me?” His innocence was wonderful to behold. “Why would I know these people?”
“One of them says he’s married to your sister,” I said.
The desk clerk’s face flushed with rage. Glaring at my prisoners, he let loose a flood of Spanish that they responded to with their own versions of injured innocence. While this was going on, I took the two knives out of my pocket, opened them, and thumped them one at a time point down into the counter, hard enough to make it a little difficult for anybody to pull them out again. This action ended the discussion; all three stared at the knives. Then the desk clerk gaped wide-eyed at me, wondering what next.
You look the part, Sam, I told myself. Now play it. “I want you to hold onto these knives for me,” I told the desk clerk.
“Hold—? Why?”
“Because,” I told him, putting on my face the kind of mean smile that went with the moustache, “if anybody else gets into my room, I’m going to use them on you. Both of them.”
“Me? What I got to do with it?”
“I just put you in charge,” I told him. “Remember that.”
Then, while the desk clerk stood there and tried to figure out what to say to get himself off the hook, I took by the elbow the one who’d had the car keys. “Now you show me your car,” I said.
23
It was an eleven year old Plymouth Fury, orangy-tan in color and covered with the bumps and scars of a long hard life. It was parked a block and a half from the hotel, and in that distance no one at all had remarked on the oddness of a guy walking along with his thumbs tied together by a long dangling white shoelace.
This wasn’t the guy who’d called me Packard. That one I’d left back at the hotel for the desk clerk to deal with. He couldn’t have been sure he was right about my identity, he would have plenty of time to second-guess himself now that I was gone, and in any case he didn’t strike me as somebody who made much of a habit of passing on information to the national media, so I doubted there’d be much trouble from that front.
Things were looking up.
And I liked the idea that I was about to get a car.
It worked fine, the engine turning over the instant I tried it, while the guy stood in the street beside the open driver’s door and expressionlessly watched me. I have no idea what he thought I was doing; maybe planning to drive him to the police station. In any event, he looked surprised when I shut the driver’s door, opened the window, and said, “Take a walk.”
“This my car,” he said.
“Now it’s mine,” I told him.
“And you got my money.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, and drove away from there.
24
Miami has no legitimate theater area as such, but merely has a few stages scattered here and there along the coast, ranging from Burt Reynolds’ dinner theater up north of Fort Lauderdale down to the Coconut Grove Playhouse. New theatrical enterprises tend to nestle in somewhere near one of the established places, and that’s where Julie Kaplan’s employment had now taken her; to a small new theater in Coconut Grove, doing a revival of a Sam Shepard play. In a bare set supposed to be a motel room somewhere in the farthest boondocks of the empty American west, Julie Kaplan’s small face and heavy helmet of hair seemed more appropriate than in ordinary life; as though she’d been outfitted for this part from birth.
It had taken three calls to reach her from Zack’s ski lodge before I’d flown east, the number she’d originally given me when we were both in New York having been superseded by a second which in its turn had been replaced by the third. When I’d finally tracked her down, she’d agreed to meet with me, and I’d said I would see the show, then talk to her afterward, and that’s what happened. I got lost briefly on the way down, Coconut Grove somehow being half jungle and half city, with entire blocks where you can’t see the sky for all the overhanging trees and vines. But I made it just before curtain time, and took a seat in the small half-empty theater as the lights went down.