Pursuit: A Novel

17

Varney drove the route he had run just twenty-four hours ago. Now it was a different landscape. He had chosen Buffalo a few years ago because it was a town that had everything he wanted. It was big enough to hide in, but not big enough to require a lot of work to stay alive in it. Houses were cheap and sturdy, traffic was sane. The stories about the winter weather had not been exaggerated, but it had been that way forever, so the people could hardly be taken by surprise when it happened. They had plows out beginning their routes while the snow was still three inches deep on the ground, and all the people knew how to handle their own problems. He liked being at the edge of the state, where he could slip over a border to Canada, or be in Pennsylvania in an hour and a half, even Ohio in two.

Now his refuge had been spoiled. Prescott had transformed it in a day, made it into a rotting, deteriorating place that seemed to him to be dirtier and uglier each moment he stayed in it. He wanted to leave, to never have to look at it again. It took an act of discipline for him to travel this landscape of squat, old brick buildings that housed little shops that had spent decades looking as though they were going out of business. It was a hot, humid night, and he drove slowly, studying the people out walking on the sidewalks.

They all looked grotesque to him: a fat old couple, the husband’s big belly jutting out over his belt buckle, almost pendulous, the bottom of his T-shirt stretched not quite long enough to cover it; the wife in a tent dress that hung down loose in front but still made a kind of detour in back to settle on the shelf of her ponderous buttocks. The young men seemed to stare at Varney, drunk and menacing and stupid, some in the baggy shorts that appeared here the second the snow stopped falling and seemed to be worn continuously until the snow returned. Twice Varney went around a block because he saw a tall, rangy man alone on the street. When he got a closer look, the man was not Prescott.

Varney parked across the street from his gym where he could see into the lighted windows. The heart patients were in the back row on the treadmills and stationary bikes as always, plodding along with the same preoccupied look, listening to their pulses in dull fear. He could see the interior window too, where the late class of women were all bobbing up and down on stair-steps in a soundless dance in front of the mirrored wall. The poster he had taken from the bulletin board had not been replaced. Maybe that meant that Prescott would be here soon to put up a new one, but maybe it meant Prescott no longer needed the posters, because someone from the gym had called him. Maybe Prescott was somewhere nearby, waiting for him to come in for a workout. Varney turned his eyes to the streets again, looking for any sign that would indicate which it was. He started the car again and circled the block, searching, and then moved on.

The next place was the small grocery store where he sometimes shopped. It was about a mile from his house. He always walked there because walking was exercise, but also because it took up time in the evening. He could be out and fight the feelings that plagued him when he wasn’t working: that claustrophobic sensation of being young and healthy and free, but locked up on the second floor of an old house while everyone else was out, the sense of loss and sadness he felt when he looked at a young woman walking past, and knew that he couldn’t just begin to walk with her. Women demanded so much—the right circumstances of meeting, a veiled but still distressingly thorough interrogation that was designed to catch him in a lie—that sometimes he began by being attracted, then felt the attraction turning to hatred.

He studied the interior of the market. He could see the man in his fifties that he thought of as Mr. Smolinski because it was called Smolinski’s Market and he seemed to be the boss. He wore a butcher’s apron that was always filthy from the boxes he carried pressed against his stomach. Varney could see him taking cans out of a carton and stacking them on a shelf. The only customer was a young woman with a baby propped in a shopping cart. It was nine o’clock at night, and Varney disapproved. She should have a baby in bed by now, not be pushing him around in that store under the sickly yellow lights. She was too stupid to deserve to have him.

Varney drove past the little parking area in the back. He could see the woman’s stroller parked beside the door, and wondered how she proposed to get the groceries home. Probably she would pile some of them in the rack underneath, and put the overflow on the poor kid’s lap.

He could see Mr. Smolinski’s car, and another that was nearly always there that he guessed belonged to the semiretarded guy who worked in the back, but there was no car nearby that could be Prescott’s. He drove up and down the two streets on either side of the building, but there was nothing that tempted him to look more closely. He turned his car in the direction of the little office where Prescott had tried to trap him.

As Varney drove, he let nothing escape his notice. Every car that passed was a new opportunity, and Varney looked quickly at the head behind each steering wheel, taking a mental snapshot and comparing it with his memory of Prescott.

He drove by Prescott’s building without letting his foot touch the brake pedal. He aimed the car ahead and stared at the place hard once, but did not come around the block for a second look. There seemed to be no police cars around this evening, and there were no lights on in the building, but he knew that stopping would be a bad idea. He had read somewhere that firemen always took a videotape of the crowd around an arson fire because they knew that arsonists often showed up to watch. He wasn’t sure what the police did for bombs, but it was reasonable to suppose they would not do less. He wasn’t interested in having to kill some cop tonight. All he wanted was Prescott.

He passed a pair of young women walking up the street in sandals and short skirts and tank tops, and was almost tempted to stop. He had found that if there were two of them, sometimes things actually went better. They weren’t as frightened of one man that they hadn’t met in the right way. If they were bored tonight, he might be able to talk them into going into a nearby place for a drink with him.

A couple of times, he had even seen something happen with two girls that had at first seemed to him to be a miracle. He had walked down a street in New York one night a year ago and gotten stopped for a moment by a traffic light. Beside him had been two girls. They were each carrying shopping bags from several stores, and they had obviously been out all day. One of them had said something about needing a drink, and Varney had been inspired. He had smiled as well as he could and said, “You know, that sounds wonderful. I’d love to buy you one.”

The light had changed, and they had started walking. The girls kidded each other all the way across the street, and joked themselves into it. The party of two was three now, and there was a big hotel with a bar right in front of them. One of them said her name was Sherry, and the other Lynn. He was fairly sure they were false names, but he didn’t care.

The miracle had come inside the hotel bar. It wasn’t his hotel, but it had been the nearest doorway and it was expensive looking, so he had chosen it. The miracle was that after one drink, Sherry and Lynn developed a more complicated relationship. Neither one wanted to be shown up by the other as being the less attractive one, the less interesting one. After a time, they stopped teasing Varney and turned to teasing each other.

Neither of them had any interest in him. Each wanted to demonstrate to her friend that she was more desirable to him than the friend was. He sensed that the object was to force him to choose one—ask her for a date or something—while ignoring the other. Then the winner would grandly refuse, as though the man who had rejected her friend was, nonetheless, beneath her. This was very tricky—not a novice’s game, and with painful stakes—because it involved getting Varney very interested without having done or said anything that anyone could define as trying.

Varney simply waited, being sure to pay attention to one, then the other, in equal turns. He made sure that each time, it took a bit more for the one who wanted to regain his attention to get it. What he had been waiting for happened after the third drink. Lynn said she was surprised at the way Sherry was throwing herself at him.

The remark made the competition overt. Sherry said that it had been all in fun, and there was no reason to feel rejected and jealous. In five minutes her icy remarks had driven Lynn from the table and into a cab. Victory had a curious effect on Sherry. She seemed shocked to find she was alone with Varney. She had to convince herself that this was what she had always intended, and that Varney was valu-a pble enough to be worth the trouble. In another ten minutes, she and Varney were in a hotel room. She had her clothes coming off, and no reasonable way of calling a halt to the proceedings without proving to herself that she had been an idiot.

Varney looked back on that experience with a warm, pleasurable feeling. He had tried to repeat it a few times, but only twice with similar success. Sex was one of the things that this life of adventure made difficult for him.

Coleman had warned him that it would be that way. Part of staying alive in this business was staying out of situations where some woman felt she had the right to ask as many questions as she could think of until her jaw got tired. Most of them thought that having sex gave them the right. Coleman’s solution had been to employ prostitutes.

Varney had never known exactly how Coleman had managed it, but in every city, he’d seemed to know an address or a telephone number, even the cities he claimed never to have visited before. One night near the end of his time with Coleman Simms, Varney had been in a room in Indianapolis with a girl named Terry. She had looked young, maybe nineteen, and she had said she had not been in the trade very long. He hadn’t believed her at the time, but in retrospect, he decided that maybe she had been telling the truth. She had begun to ask him questions about where a young guy like him got his money, what company he worked for, what city, and so on. Varney was drunk. He stood as much as he could, and in a moment of annoyance, decided to end the questions.

“You know that guy over in Fort Wayne who got his throat cut last night?”

“Yes,” she said. It had been on the television news all day.

“Well, that’s what I do,” Varney said. “I make a lot of money because I’m really good at it.”

The next morning when Varney woke up, Terry was gone. He wasn’t entirely sorry, because he had a headache and wasn’t interested in hearing her voice again. He showered and dressed, then found that Coleman wasn’t in his room. Varney waited for a couple of hours, and when Coleman showed up, he was in a jumpy mood. As they walked to the car in the hotel lot, Coleman’s jaw was set, and he threw his suitcase into the trunk and slammed the lid so hard that the car rocked on its springs. When he took the wheel and Varney was sitting beside him, he said, “Don’t ever do that again.”

“Do what?”

Coleman said, “Don’t tell hookers your life story. They’re not in it to meet interesting people. If you want them to respect you, stay away from them. If you want them to like you, give them some money.”

Varney felt a growing sense of dread. “What happened?”

“About four o’clock I saw her sneaking off down the hall like something was chasing her. I decided to see if something was. When I caught up with her, she told me you hadn’t said anything about Fort Wayne, and if you had, she would never tell anyone.”

“I didn’t tell her anything to prove I really did it,” he said uneasily. “I just couldn’t stand the stupid questions. I decided to shut her up.”

Coleman glared at him. “It’s a business. Get that into your head. If they ask you questions, it’s just like when a waiter asks you questions. None of them gives a shit what the answer is. They’re just trying to make you feel important so you’ll give them a decent tip and they can go on to the next customer.”

“Did you have to give her more money to keep her quiet?”

Coleman took his eyes off the road to turn an irate stare on Varney. “It was a little late for that, kid. I had to break her neck.”

After that, Varney had to sit in silence staring at cornfields and now and then a ramshackle house with dusty old cars in the front yard. The midmorning sun heated the endless, straight road until distant pools of imaginary water appeared on the pavement, then dissolved as the car drew nearer. He thought about the girl Terry, the thin white neck, the little wisps of blond hair that grew at the nape, and felt a confusing retroactive arousal that lasted for a few seconds, until memory moved forward and reminded him that it had all turned ugly, and the girl’s body was cold and already dumped someplace. Each time he forgot that he didn’t want to think about her, the girl’s image returned, and he would find himself falling into the cycle again. She should have kept her mouth shut.

After about an hour, Coleman spoke again. “That’s the only free one you’ll ever get out of me. If I ever have to do it again, I’ll deduct my fee from your pay.”

At that moment, Varney forgot the girl and began to concentrate on Coleman. He was treating Varney as though he were some weak, inferior creature that he had the right to criticize or punish any time Varney displeased him. Varney began to see the events of the night differently. Coleman had not had to kill the girl just because Varney had made a small mistake. He had done it to exert control and stifle him. Coleman had sensed that Varney had taken pleasure in her, and Coleman had decided for that reason alone to find an excuse to take her away. Coleman was like a father who punished a child by strangling the kid’s puppy in front of him.

As the car traversed the hot, flat country, Varney watched the telephone poles go past the window. Coleman was not the wise, generous professional who had taken Varney on as an apprentice. It had seemed that way at first, but from the beginning, the one who had done all the hard, dangerous work had been Varney. Coleman made a phone call or two, acted as Varney’s driver and companion, then kept most of the money. Varney sat there quietly for the rest of the morning, staring out the window at the flat country. There was no reason to argue with Coleman about the girl, no reason to say anything at all. It was settled.

Varney came out of his reminiscence and pulled his car up onto the blacktop margin along the side of a gas station in south Buffalo. He got out, stood at the pay telephone, and opened the book to the yellow pages. There were dozens of hotels listed, but he could safely ignore most of them. He wrote down the addresses and phone numbers of the ten biggest and most expensive in town.

It was thinking about Coleman that had given him the idea. Whenever Coleman had come into a town, he had looked in the yellow pages to find the biggest and the best. Prescott was a lot like Coleman—tall and swaggering, with that cowboy accent and that way of insinuating that he knew everything. They were so much alike that sometimes, when Varney was remembering Coleman, he had caught himself letting Prescott’s features merge with Coleman’s to form a single face.