His headache was worse, and although he had been ravenous earlier, he found he could only pick at his dinner. He slept badly and rose early. He did not whistle as he dressed.
He decided Kirk Penschley and the investigators from Barton were right – the Gypsies would stick to the seacoast. During the summer in Maine, that was where the action was because that was where the tourists were. They came to swim in water that was too cold, to sun themselves (many days remained foggy and drizzly, but the tourist never seemed to remember them), to eat lobsters and clams, to buy ashtrays with seagulls painted on them, to attend the summer theaters in Ogunquit and Brunswick to photograph the lighthouses at Portland and Pemaquid, or just to hang out in trendy places like Rockport, Camden, and, of course, Bar Harbor.
The tourists were along the seacoast, and so were the dollars they were so anxious to roll out of their wallets That's where the Gypsies would be – but where, exactly?
Billy listed better than fifty seacoast towns, and then went downstairs. The bartender was an import from New Jersey who knew from nothing but Asbury Park, but Billy found a waitress who had lived in Maine all her life, was familiar with the seacoast, and loved to talk about it.
'I'm looking for some people, and I'm fairly sure they'll be in a seacoast town – but not a really ritzy one. More of a … a . . .'
'Honk-tonk kind of town?' she asked.
Billy nodded.
She bent over his list. 'Old Orchard Beach,' she said. 'That's the honkiest honky-tonk of them all. The way things are down there until Labor Day, your friends wouldn't get noticed unless they had three heads each.'
'Other ones?'
'Well … most of the seacoast towns get a little honky-tonky in the summer,' she said. 'Take Bar Harbor, for instance. Everybody who's ever heard of it has an image of Bar Harbor as real ritzy … dignified … full of rich people who go around in Rolls-Royces.'
'It's not like that?'
'No. Frenchman's Bay, maybe, but not Bar Harbor. In the winter it's just this dead little town where the ten-twenty-five ferry is the most exciting thing to happen all day. In the summer, Bar Harbor's a crazy town. It's like Fort Lauderdale is during spring break – full of heads and freaks and superannuated hippies. You can stand over the town line in Northeast Harbor, take a deep breath, and get stoned from all the dope in Bar Harbor if the wind's right. And the main drag – until after Labor Day, it's a street carnival. Most of these towns you got on your list are like that, mister, but Bar Harbor is like, top end, you know?'
'I hear you,' Billy said, smiling.
'I used to go up there sometimes in July or August and hang out, but not anymore. I'm too old for that now.'
Billy's smile became wistful. The waitress looked all of twenty-three.
Billy gave her five dollars; she wished him a pleasant summer and good luck finding his friends. Billy nodded, but for the first time he did not feel so sanguine about the possibility.
'You mind a little piece of advice, mister?'
'Not at all,' Billy answered, thinking she meant to give him her idea on the best place to start – and that much he had already decided for himself.
'You ought to fatten yourself up a little,' she said. 'Eat pasta. That's what my mom would tell you. Eat lots of pasta. Put on a few pounds.'
A manila envelope full of photographs and automobile information arrived for Halleck on his third day in South Portland. He shuffled through the photographs slowly, looking at each. Here was the young man who had been juggling the pins; his name was also Lemke, Samuel Lemke. He was looking at the camera with an uncompromising openness that looked as ready for pleasure and friendship as it did anger and sullenness. Here was the pretty young girl who had been setting up the slingshot target-shoot when the cops landed – and yes, she was every bit as lovely as Halleck had surmised from his side of the common. Her name was Angelina Lemke. He put her picture next to the picture of Samuel Lemke. Brother and sister. The grandchildren of Susanna Lemke? he wondered. The great-grandchildren of Taduz Lemke?
Here was the elderly man who had been handing out fliers -Richard Crosskill. Other Crosskills were named. Stanchfields. Starbirds. More Lemkes. And then … near the bottom …
It was him. The eyes, caught in twin nets of wrinkles, were dark and level and filled with clear intelligence. A kerchief was drawn over his head and knotted beside the left cheek. A cigarette was tucked into the deeply cracked lips. The nose was a wet and open horror, festering and terrible.
Billy stared at the picture as if hypnotized. There was something almost familiar about the old man, some connection his mind wasn't quite making. Then it came to him. Taduz Lemke reminded him of those old men in the Dannon yogurt commercials, the ones from Russian Georgia who smoked unfiltered cigarettes, drank popskull vodka, and lived to such staggering ages as a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy. And then a line of a Jerry Jeff Walker song occurred to him, the one about Mr Bojangles: He looked at me to be the eyes of age …
Yes. That was what he saw in the face of Taduz Lemke – he was the very eyes of age. In those eyes Billy saw a deep knowledge that made all the twentieth century a shadow, and he trembled.
That night when he stepped on the scales in the bathroom adjoining his wedge-shaped bedroom, he was down to 137.
Chapter Eighteen. The Search
Old Orchard Beach, the waitress had said. That's the honkiest honky-tonk of them all. The desk clerk agreed.
So did the girl in the tourist-information booth four .miles down the highway, although she refused to put it in such blatantly pejorative terms. Billy turned his rental car toward Old Orchard Beach, which was about eighteen miles south.
Traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper crawl still a mile from the beach. Most of the vehicles in this parade bore Canadian license plates. A lot of them were thyroidal rec-ves which looked big enough to transport entire football teams. Most of the people Billy saw, both in the crawling traffic and walking along the sides of the road, seemed dressed in the least the law would allow and sometimes less – there were a lot of string bikinis, a lot of ball-hugger swim trunks, a lot of oiled flesh on display.
Billy was dressed in blue jeans, an open-collared white shirt, and a sport coat. He sat behind the wheel of his car and sweltered even with the air conditioning on full. But he hadn't forgotten the way the room-service kid had looked at him. This was as undressed as he was going to get, even if he finished the day with his sneakers full of sweat puddles.
The crawling traffic crossed salt marshes, passed two dozen lobster-and-clam shacks, and then wound through an area of summer houses that were crammed together hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Similarly undressed people sat on lawn furniture before most of these houses, eating, reading paperback novels, or simply watching the endless flow of traffic.
Christ, Billy thought, how do they stand the stink of the exhaust? It occurred to him that perhaps they liked it, that perhaps that was why they were sitting here instead of on the beach, that it reminded them of home.
Houses gave way to motels with signs reading ON PARLE FRANCAIS ICI and CANADIAN CURRENCY AT PAR AFTER $250
and WE FEATURE MIDNITE BLUE ON CABLE and 3 MINUTES TO OCEAN BONJOUR A NOS AMIS DE LA BELLE PROVINCE!
The motels gave way to a main drag which seemed to feature mostly cut-rate camera stores, souvenir shops, the dirty-book emporiums. Kids in cut-offs and tank tops idled up and down, some holding hands, some staring into dirty windows with a blank lack of interest, some riding on skateboards and weaving their way through knots of pedestrians with bored elan. To Billy Halleck's fascinated, dismayed eyes, everyone seemed overweight and everyone – even the skateboard kids – seemed to be eating something: a slice of pizza here, a Chipwich there, a bag of Doritos, a bag of popcorn, a cone of cotton candy. He saw a fat man in an untucked white shirt, baggy green Bermudas, and thong sandals gobbling a foot-long dog. A string of something that was either onion or sauerkraut hung from his chin. He held two more dogs between the pudgy finger of his left hand, and to Billy he looked like a stage magician displaying red rubber balls before making them disappear.