It happened, owing to Country Club contacts, that Beau knew an officer in the Ferndale Branch of the Owen National Bank of Commerce, who was a “good man to go to in a tight spot.”
His name was Wesley Martinson. Beau had cultivated the man, played a few rounds of golf with him, come to call him “Wes”—probably because his subconscious mind invariably noted down the fact that a fellow useful in a tight spot might someday be handy to him. Beau had that kind of foresight—quantities of it.
Wes greeted him without surprise, ushered him into a private room in the branch bank, sat, performed smoking amenities and said, “Well, Beau, what can we do for you?”
Beau had pretty much taken the measure of his man, through the medium of a hundred off-color stories retailed by Wes with almost writhing relish. Beau therefore chuckled and said,
“Frankly, I want you to help me perform a small robbery.”
Wes chortled. “Son, that’s what banks are for. And you’ve come to the right banker.”
Beau took the bonds from a very old and battered big envelope which bore his name and in which for years he had kept unpaid bills. It looked exactly like something that had lain in a vault a long while, holding bonds. He threw the parchment-stiff, aging paper on Wesley Martinson’s desk. “Want to borrow on these.”
Wes picked them up, studied them and said, “They don’t look counterfeit.”
Beau chuckled. “Nope. Something I stashed before the tax rate knifed us. Trouble is, I don’t want the little woman to realize I’m borrowing on them.”
The other man frowned. “I see.”
“The hell you do see! However, I’ll let you in on the sight, one of these days. She has”—Beau made curves with his hands. “All blonde, and when I say all, I mean all.”
Wes unconsciously ran his tongue along the underside of his long top lip. “Isn’t that kind of skidding around, for the cashier of Sloan?”
“With her you don’t skid, son. She’s safely married.”
As Beau knew, the invention suited his own need for cover as well as the other man’s mind. Wes chuckled. “I guess Owen National can help you maintain your little relationship. Security’s okay. You know the rates.”
“I should!” Beau said and took the proffered pen.
Not that evening, but the next, Beau made his way to The Block. He was determined, having obtained the needed money, and a few hundreds extra, for private use when and if and as needed, to expose himself to no further risks. So he approached by bus, then taxi, and then a second taxi and at last on foot.
Jake was there, in his littered office. He took the five one-thousand-dollar bills without comment. He dug in a greasy file for some time, produced Beau’s I.O.U.’s, handed them over, and then looked across his cigar stub. “Where’d you get the dough?”
“Borrowed it,” Beau answered cheerfully.
“Off who?”
“Friend.”
“What friend?”
“I can’t say. It was—a woman.” Beau was suddenly very nervous. He had entered the gambling place confidently, whistling a little. He had thought that all Jake wanted was the money. He realized, in a new way, that he was in the windowless back room of a stone building which once had been a house and was now empty, pretty much. At least the big downstairs room, with the wheels and dice tables under dusty canvas, was empty and had been for months-since the latest police cleanup.
“What woman?” Jake said.
“I told you…. Look! I paid. We’re square. So what?”
Jake didn’t have a mean face, a vicious face, even a very Italian face. He looked like every other man who stands in a dirty white apron beside a green-grocery stall in an open market. He hardly lifted his voice. “Toledo,” he called, and Toledo, who did have a vicious face, came in from the dark hall.
It was not necessary to say anything to Beau about the meaning of Toledo’s summons.
Toledo had, a month before, landed three crashing blows on Beau’s face, flooding him with agony, weakening his knees, almost making him throw up.
“I just want to know,” Jake said, “if this is hot money. I don’t care whether it’s hot or not. I take it, either way. I just want to know. Ask him, Toledo.”
Before Beau could cry, “No!” the first blow knocked him off his feet and halfway across the dirty, worn carpet. He got up. He got out a handkerchief. Shaking like a rabbit in a snake’s mouth, he said gaspingly, “Okay. I had to borrow a couple of bonds from a dead account at the bank. You guys won’t wait. The bank can.”
“Whose account?”
“I forget,” Beau said.
“Ask him whose account, Toledo.”
Beau managed to stave it off this time by darting to the farthest corner as he said, “John Jessup.” Jake nodded thoughtfully. “So okay. What are you hanging around here for?”
Beau ran out of the room, ran down the stairs, tripped, almost fell, and found the gloomy sanctuary of night. He hadn’t gone many blocks before he realized, clearly, rather than in a horror-strewn corner of his brain, that now—and forever—Jake really had him by the short hair.
Sweat broke out over him; for several blocks he couldn’t remember which street led back to Market.
Beau was one of the luckless….
Two weeks after the termination of his dealings with Jake, two weeks of blessed relief after an at least temporary termination, Beau walked across the marble floor of the bank, on the way to lunch. He had decided, as usual—after a struggle, as usual—that he’d have two Manhattans and pork chops: weather was really cold now.
His eye detected a singular customer amongst the hurrying, queued scores, the dozens writing and blotting at the desk.
It was a very, very tall man, wearing two pairs of glasses, waiting in line at one of the “Trust Funds” windows.
It was John Jessup.
X-Day Minus Thirty
1
Some undistinguished men are heroes; some distinguished heroes are not men at all in the good sense of the name; and such a person was Kit Sloan. He was unaware of the defect as are thousands.
From his ancestors, he had taken his lithe, big body and the resilient “constitution” that went with it. From a forgotten forebear, probably a carefully forgotten one, he’d come by the
“Sloan darkness,” the coloring of eyes and hair and skin which had suggested to Nora Conner a Latin actor. Some said the Sloans had Italian blood, others said gypsy, and some, of course, hit upon the truth—commonplace in the west: an Indian squaw had participated in combining the Sloan genes.
No one who had lived a long life in either of the Sister Cities would deny that the Sloans had brains; any native of vintage age could add, often from harsh experience, that Minerva brought to the family an additional measure of shrewdness and force besides. Kittridge Sloan, in whom these elements presumably reposed, conceived of himself as so imbued and endowed with every needful quality as to make demonstration unnecessary save when he chose. He did not often choose. To be sure, he was obliged to do a certain amount of work to graduate from Princeton, where he’d been sent at nineteen. He enjoyed sports, however, and was so proficient at them that professors who might otherwise have failed him were possibly persuaded not to do so by anxious coaches. Besides, Kit invariably elected the easiest courses: he had a definite knack for finding paths of least resistance. Whether he could have exhibited, under pressure, the acumen of his parents remained unknown; he chose not to try, deeming it unnecessary.
He interrupted his undergraduate career for military service. His mother preferred the Navy, but Kit, for once opposing her wishes, went into the Air Force. Athletes have an affinity for flying, often, and Kit, who’d ridden the fastest horses and driven the fastest cars (with several mishaps in the Sister Cities which had been expensive to his family and more than bruising to his fellow citizens), took easily to flying.