We got to the thing at the head of the stairs, turned left, and went into the room where the Orientals had been assembling their machine guns. The assemblers were gone, but their choppers were still there, piled up on a table, lying on their sides, most of them pointing at me.
Ten Eyck slipped a pistol into my hand and said, quietly, “On the way up, don’t worry about Armstrong, he’s a moron and dedicated. But keep an eye on Eustaly. I wouldn’t trust Mortimer any further than I could throw him.”
Pistols are heavier than I’d thought. (Need I say this was the first time in my life I’d ever held one?) The gun sagged from my hand, which sagged from my wrist. I nodded and said, “I’ll watch him. Right” All the while wondering what I’d do if Eustaly did try something.
“It’s just on the way up you’ve got to be careful,” Ten Eyck went on. “When you’re carrying the cash. Plastic explosive isn’t that easy to pawn, so I doubt Mortimer’ll try anything on the way back.”
“Good,” I said. “What about Armstrong? Is he armed?”
“Yes,” he said, and then killed my burgeoning hope by adding, “But don’t count on him, he’s never been in a deal like this before.”
“It’s up to me, then.”
“You’re my right hand in this, Raxford.” He glinted at me, smiling to show his teeth. “We’re the same breed,” he said, patting my shoulder. “We understand each other.”
With that inaccurate thought in mind, I followed him back downstairs, where Mrs. Bodkin approached me with a red-and-black-check hunting jacket, a residue of the late Mr. Bodkin’s, which she insisted I wear. “The nights are still chilly,” she said, “and you don’t have a topcoat.”
Neither had Eustaly, who was stout and dapper in a pearl-gray suit that appeared to reflect the light, but she didn’t push any old horse blankets on him. For some reason she’d taken a liking to me and a dislike to Eustaly; maybe because I ate her pancakes and he wouldn’t eat her mince pie.
In any case, it was impossible for me to refuse the damn coat, so I finally put it on, thanked her for the thought, and went lumbering outside like a combination checkerboard and Smokey the Bear. From the kitchen doorway she called, “You be sure and keep that on, now.”
“I will,” I promised, and past her shoulder I could see Ten Eyck watching it all, smiling to himself. Ten Eyck was a man interested in control, in how it is obtained and how it is lost. In this relatively unimportant situation, the matter of the hunting jacket, I had lost control of the outcome — I was wearing a jacket I obviously didn’t want to wear — and Ten Eyck took a rather clinical enjoyment in watching the process by which I’d been unhorsed and jacketed. (Also, I think, he had a cautious respect for me, thinking me another such as himself, and it pleased him to see me fail in a situation, no matter how unimportant, in which he would not have failed.)
Still promising faithfully to wear the jacket, I’d wear it, I’d wear it, I got into the back seat of the Mercury, which, oddly enough, was the same combination of red and black exterior as the jacket, except that on the car the red was perhaps softer and closer to orange. Eustaly was in the passenger seat up front, and Armstrong was to take the first turn at driving.
The Bodkin driveway connected, near the trees, with a dirt road that went through the trees and led to a blacktop county road on the other side. The county road in turn led to a highway, which led to the Garden State Parkway, which led to the New York State Thruway, which led north.
The three of us were silent as Armstrong steered the car around the house and down the driveway and along the dirt road. As we turned onto the county road, however, Eustaly cautioned him, “Don’t break any traffic laws. We don’t want to get stopped in this car, it’s stolen.”
I closed my eyes.
20
We made good time, all things considered, arriving at the rendezvous point, on Route 9 above Chazy, eight miles from the Canadian border, just as dawn was coming up on our right across Lake Champlain. I had taken the second turn at driving, mostly the Thruway, and Eustaly did the last hundred-odd miles. He got cold and I didn’t, so when we stopped to switch driving chores from me to him I gave him the hunting jacket as well. “Just give it back before we get to the house again,” I said. “I wouldn’t want Mrs. Bodkin to think I’d taken it off.”
“That old crow,” Eustaly said ungraciously, and struggled into the hunting jacket over his pearl-gray suit. On him, even the hunting jacket came close to looking suave; some people have that particular quality, and some others don’t.
Armstrong kept threatening to go to sleep during that final leg, but I’d have none of it. I wanted Eustaly to know he had two wide-awake opponents to contend with, in case he was thinking of starting something. So while Armstrong stretched drowsy and irritable across the back seat, I sat up front next to Eustaly and talked to the two of them — but mostly to Armstrong — about anything that came into my head. It was sheer luck I didn’t at any point drift into a speech on pacifism.
But if Eustaly had made any tentative plans for making away with the suitcases full of money, he gave no sign of it. He devoted his attention to his driving, chuckled politely whenever, in the course of my yammer, I told a joke, and was, all things considered, good as gold.
The rendezvous was a defunct fruit stand on the east side of Route 9, an establishment that had withered away when the former flood of Montreal-bound tourists on this road had been diverted to the new Highway 87, a multi-lane road that by-passed everything in sight.
We arrived at the fruit stand first, pulled the car around behind it, and got out to stretch our legs. “Be sure to wipe fingerprints off,” Eustaly told us, scrubbing away at the steering wheel with a handkerchief. “We’re going to leave this here.” So we wiped our fingerprints off.
The truck arrived about fifteen minutes later, followed closely by a tiny dusty black Sunbeam. The truck looked old and tired and topheavy, one of those wheezing monsters John Garfield and Richard Conte used to drive during the Depression, except those had California plates and this one bore plates from the province of Ontario. (Another small difference; those old trucks usually carried tomatoes, while this one carried enough explosive to take Highway 87 back off the map again.)
A bearded man in a mackinaw got out of the truck, and a weasely man in a black raincoat got out of the Sunbeam. They walked over to us and the weasely man said, “Where is it?”
Armstrong said, “In the trunk. I’ll get it.” He brought the two suitcases over and the bearded man took them, carried them as easily as Armstrong had, and put them into the Sunbeam.
“That’s it,” said the weasely man. “The truck’ll be picked up tonight. You’ve got your jam, we’ve got paid for both jobs.”
Eustaly said, “Both jobs?”
“Right,” said the weasely man. “His nibs called us after you left, said there was some extra in there for a little piece of work he wanted from us.” He grinned, in a weasely way, and took a pistol from his raincoat pocket and fired it at Eustaly three times.
Armstrong and I froze in our tracks. I know I expected to be next, and I’m pretty sure Armstrong had the same pessimistic outlook. My throat became very dry, my fingers began to stretch away from one another as though I were growing webs between them, and for some idiot reason my lower lip got extremely heavy.