“Start over.”
“What I thought first was he must be like a numbers banker. Or a bookmaker, you know, a major bookmaker that they might call him a banker so he’s not just another bookie.”
“Start over.”
She turned to him. Her eyes worked into focus. “I’m all right now,” she told him.
“I know. Want to start over?”
“Okay.”
He didn’t interrupt. The hysteria had passed and she was able to tell it straight enough now, and he let her do it her way and just lay there on the double bed nursing his drink and taking it all in. The colonel was right, he found himself thinking. You had to draw a line through mankind, a wavy line but a line, and on one side you had Good and on the other side you had Evil. There was good and bad in everyone, sure, and every shitheel was some mother’s son, and it was all well and good to know this, but when push came to shove, it was just words; there was Good and Evil with no shades of gray and Judgment Day came seven times a week.
When she ran out of words, Manso stood up. “Stay right here,” he said. “You know where the liquor is. Stay here.”
“Eddie, he’s got a gun. He’ll kill you!”
“Oh, hell,” he said. “This is going to kill the image, but all I’m going to do is finish shaving. Because I want to finish shaving, and because I need a few minutes to think about this. Just stay here.”
He ran water, spread fresh lather. He was 28, and the face in the mirror looked a little older. This was unusual; for the past three years he had looked 23 almost all the time. But every once in a while his face put on five years. Generally it was heart-shaped and cherubic, topped by a cap of black curls and dimpled on either side of his mouth. Now the planes of his face were harder, and the eyes had turned, and the general impression was no longer one of a moderator of a daytime television show.
He took his time shaving, rinsed, splashed with cold water and after-shave lotion. He thought about beating Platt up, even killing him. Of course there was always the chance that Donna was building fantasies in her head. He could have told her in advance that it was just an act he went through with hookers, say, and Donna later got carried away with the realism of the whole thing.
But what he kept coming back to was this business of Platt insisting he was a banker. A hood who owns banks?
He went back to the bedroom. She was nursing a new drink and smoking another cigarette. “What bank?”
“Huh?”
“Platt. What’s his bank? You said he was talking about it.”
“He was a hood, Eddie. Believe me. You live in Vegas and you get to know what a hood is.”
“Yeah.”
“There are hoods you’ll meet who talk like bankers, but I never met a banker who—”
“Yeah. Did he mention the bank?”
“I think so. He said he had three of them.”
“Three banks?”
“No, I guess it was two.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t one?”
“No, I’m positive it was two. And he said New Jersey, I remember that much.”
“You remember the city?”
“Two cities, one for each bank.”
“You remember them?” She didn’t. “Hackensack, Jersey City, Newark, Trenton? Camden, uh, New Brunswick, East Orange, uh, Plainfield—”
“I think I’d remember if I heard. Is it important?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know. You’d remember if you heard. Jesus, I think I just named every town there is in Jersey. Princeton? Secaucus?”
“No.” She thought for a moment. “One of them had Commerce in its name.”
“That narrows it down.”
“I guess it doesn’t. You’re not... you act as though I ought to remember.”
“Sorry.”
“He was the same way. The one with Commerce, that was the one he thought I ought to recognize. He asked me what the hell was wrong with me, didn’t I ever listen to a radio? I said yes and he said maybe it wasn’t on yet. I don’t—”
Eddie was out of bed and on his way to the television set. They watched the last reel of the late show and caught fifteen minutes of news. Nothing. What the hell was Platt talking about?
He fed her drinks until the sun came up, then tucked her in and went downstairs to the casino. There was one crap table open, with three shills trying to feign interest in it. He joined them and felt at least as bored as they were. After half an hour he cashed out a few dollars ahead and had breakfast.
When the New York papers came, he went to work on them. The story was on the first page of the second section of the Times. The afternoon before, five masked bandits winged a teller and shot a guard dead and took the Passaic (N.J.) Bank of Commerce and Industry for a sum estimated at slightly in excess of $350,000.
Manso read the brief story twice through, cut it out, read it again, carried it to a phone booth.
“I want to call Tarrytown, New York,” he told the operator. “Person-to-person to Colonel Roger Cross.” He reached into his pocket, came up with a few quarters and a nickel. “And reverse the charges,” he said.
She asked his name and number. “Eddie Manso,” he said, and gave the number, which she read back to him. “Make that Corporal Manso,” he added. “Corporal Edward J. Manso.”
Two
“Extremely interesting,” the colonel said. “It might be worthwhile to know just what you’ve encountered here, Eddie. Now just let me review my thoughts for a moment.” His eyes scanned the sheet of notes he had taken during the conversation. His mind caught at ideas, played with them. “Yes,” he said at length. “Yes. Extremely interesting. You know, Eddie, we haven’t seen you in quite some time. Helen said as much just the other morning. It might be pleasant for all of us if you could arrange a trip east. The day after tomorrow? That’s a Thursday, I doubt you’d have any trouble booking a flight. Good, we’ll expect you.”
The colonel pushed away from his desk, wheeled himself over to the west window. He looked down at the highway and across it to the river below. From that height and distance the Hudson appeared to be as clean and pure as it had been when he had learned to swim in it half a century ago.
But few things seemed as pure after close examination. In April his sister Helen had given him a particularly thoughtful gift on the occasion of his fifty-eighth birthday, a pair of high-quality German binoculars. He enjoyed watching birds through them, but he had learned not to use them when he looked out at the river.
Twenty-five miles to the north on that same river stood West Point, where a sportswriter was the first to name him The Old Rugged Cross. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to recapture the feeling, playing fullback out of the old single-wing formation, hitting the line hard, blocking for the halfbacks, taking the long snap from center and angling a punt deep for the coffin corner. His right foot ached pleasantly with the memory and he grinned hugely at the brief pain, thinking how utterly the mind and the body live at the mercy of one another.
“What’s so funny?”
He turned to smile at his sister. She had a tall drink in her hand and he took it from her. “Time-traveling,” he explained. “All of a sudden my foot hurt. It forgot it was somewhere in Laos.”
“Do you want a pill? I’ll—”
“No, it was just a memory twinge. I was remembering what it was like to kick a football. This” — he raised his glass — “is a superb idea. Aren’t you having one?”
“In a little while. Did the phone ring? I was in the yard.”
“I took it. It was Eddie Manso.”
“Is he in town?”
“No. He’s in Las Vegas, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, dear. And he’s gambled himself into poverty, I suppose. Shall we wire him a few dollars?”
“Not that at all. He’s run into something.”
“Oh?”
“Something rather interesting.”
Helen’s face had clouded briefly when he mentioned his legs, eased when he spoke of Manso. Now as she seated herself in one of the leather chairs she was positively beaming.
“I told Eddie he might come see us on Thursday,” he said.
“How marvelous.”
“Yes. I might be having the rest of the boys as well. It depends on several things. What time is it?”
“Just past four.”
“Do you feel up to some reconnaissance? An hour or so in the library, I should think. You may not get much because I don’t know exactly what you would want to look for.”
“Just what did Eddie tell you?”
“My notes are on the desk. Bring them over and I’ll brief you.”