Nightwork

4

I took a taxi home after telling the day man what had happened, or most of what had happened. I left the envelope for my bookie friend, as usual, with the note inside telling him I Was betting five dollars on Ask Gloria at Hialeah in the second. For as long as possible it was wise to make it seem that today was just like every other day.

Even in the East Eighties, where I lived, muggings, at all hours, were not infrequent. The taxi was a luxury, but this Was no day to be mugged. I had gotten the tube down from the shelf when the day man was busy in the front office. There had been no one in the lobby when I went out, and, even if there had been, there was nothing remarkable about a man carrying a cardboard tube wrapped in brown paper in broad daylight.

My head was clear and I wasn’t in the least bit sleepy. Ordinarily, when the weather was good I would walk the thirty-odd blocks to my apartment, stopping for breakfast at a coffee shop on Second Avenue, before getting into bed and sleeping until two o’clock in the afternoon. But today I knew I couldn’t sleep, no need of sleep.

When I opened the door of the one-room apartment, its windows gray in the cold north light, I went to the refrigerator in the kitchenette and took out and opened a bottle of beer. I didn’t bother to take off my overcoat. Then, occasionally taking a sip of beer, I tore the paper from the cardboard tube. Using a knife, I managed to slit the tube down one side. It was stuffed from top to bottom with one-hundred-dollar bills.

I took the bills out one by one, smoothed them, and arranged them in piles of ten on the kitchen table. When I finished, there were a hundred piles. One hundred thousand dollars. They covered the table.

I stared silently at the bills spread out on the table. I finished the beer. I wasn’t conscious of feeling any emotion, not fear, or exhilaration, or regret. I looked at my watch. It was just eight-forty. The banks wouldn’t open for another twenty minutes.

I got a small bag from the closet and stacked the money in it. There was no one else who had a key to the apartment, but there was no sense in taking any chances. Carrying the bag, I went downstairs and walked to the avenue. There was a stationery store on the next block and I bought a packet of rubber bands and three thick manila envelopes, the largest in the shop.

Then I went back to the apartment, locked the door, took off my overcoat and jacket, and methodically slipped the rubber bands around each batch of bills before putting it into one of the manila envelopes. I kept one thousand dollars, which I put in my wallet, for immediate use.

I sealed the envelopes, grimacing at the taste of the glue as I licked the flaps. Then I took another bottle of beer from the refrigerator, poured the beer into a glass, and sipped at it, sitting in front of the table, in front of the neat pile of thick brown envelopes.

I had taken the apartment furnished and only the books in the room were mine. And there weren’t many of those. When I finished a book, I usually threw it away. There was never enough heat and when I sat in the one frayed easy chair to read, I usually wore the padded ski-jacket that hung on a hook on the back of the front door. This morning, while it was as cold as usual, and even though I was now in my shirt-sleeves, I felt perfectly comfortable.

I knew that I was going to have to move out. And quit the job. And get out of the city. I had no plan beyond that, but I knew that one day or another somebody was going to appear, looking for one hundred thousand dollars.

At the bank I had to write out two specimen signatures on separate cards. My hand was absolutely steady. The sealed manila envelopes with the money in lay on the desk at which I was sitting, facing the young assistant manager who was serving me. He had the bland, sexless face of a seminarian. The conversation between us was short and businesslike. I’d shaved and was neatly dressed. I still had a couple of decent suits left over from the old days, and today I had put on a sober, quiet, gray Glen plaid with a blue Oxford shirt and solid blue tie. I wanted to give the impression of being a solid citizen, perhaps not wealthy, certainly not wealthy, but modestly prosperous, a careful, industrious man who might have some bonds and some legal papers that were too valuable to leave lying around the house.

“Your address, please, Mr. Grimes,” the assistant manager was saying.

I gave him the address of the St Augustine. If anybody got as far as the bank in the search for me, which was unlikely in any case, there would be no useful information to be found.

“Will you be the sole person authorized to have access to the safety-deposit box?”

That’s for sure, brother, I thought. But all I said was, “Yes.”

“That will be twenty-three dollars for the year. Do you wish to pay by cash or by check?”

“Cash.” I gave him a hundred-dollar bill. His expression did not change. Obviously, he thought that I looked like a man who might normally carry a hundred-dollar bill loose in his pocket. I took this as a good sign. The assistant, manager smoothed the bill carefully, with a churchly gesture, went over to a teller’s window to break the bill down into smaller denominations.

I sat relaxedly at the desk, touching one of the manila envelopes with the tips of my fingers. I hadn’t stuttered once all morning.

The assistant manager came back and handed me my change and made out a receipt. I folded it neatly and put it into my wallet. Then I followed the man down to the vault. There was a hygienical, almost religious hush there that made you hesitate to speak above a whisper. Stained-glass windows would not have been out of place. The parable of the talents. The vault attendant gave me a key and led me down a silent aisle of money.

With the three thick manila envelopes under my arm, I couldn’t help wondering how all the treasure lying in those locked boxes, the greenbacks, the stocks and bonds, the jewelry, had been accumulated, what sweat expended, what crimes enacted, through whose hands all those stones and all that luxuriously printed paper had passed before coming to rest in this sanctified cold steel cave. I looked at the attendant’s face as he used the two keys, his and mine, and pulled out a box for me. He was an old man, pale from his underground existence. He didn’t look as though he had ever speculated about anything. Perhaps such people were chosen for their lack of curiosity. A curious man would go mad here. I followed the attendant back to a little curtained cubbyhole with a desk in it, and the attendant left me there with my box, respecting the privacy of wealth.

I tore open the manila envelopes and laid the piles of bills in the box. I looked at the neatly stacked notes, trying without success to foresee what they finally would mean for me.

It was like looking at a huge engine, quiet now, but capable of sudden, brutal force. I closed the box with a decisive little click. I tossed the envelopes into a wastepaper bucket and went back along the row of safes with the attendant and watched him slide the box into my own slot. The attendant used both keys once more to lock the safe. I dropped my key into my pocket, said “Thank you,” to the man. “Have a good day,” courteous as any policeman. “Hah,” the man said. He hadn’t had a good day since he was twelve. I went up the steps and out onto the sunny, cold avenue.

Okay for today, I thought. Chemical Bank and Trust, with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

I walked home briskly and packed. Beside the small bag I had carried the money in, I had a flight bag and everything I owned fitted in, with room to spare. I left the old parka hanging in the closet. Whoever moved in next would need it more than I. Then I wrote a note to the landlord saying that I was giving up the apartment. I had no lease and was on a month-to-month arrangement, so there wouldn’t be any difficulties there. I folded the note and stuck it in an envelope and dropped the key in with the note. Downstairs I put the envelope in the landlord’s mailbox. Carrying the two bags, I left the building without looking back. I wouldn’t ever again have to worry about keeping warm at that particular address. I hailed a cab and gave the driver the name of a hotel on Central Park West. It was a neighborhood I had never lived in and had only rarely visited. Even with my night-time job and my reclusive habits, in my old neighborhood on the East Side there were bound to be people who had come to recognize me, my bookie, the bartender in the saloon around the corner I sometimes drank in, a waitress in a nearby Italian restaurant, others, who could point me out to someone who might come around making inquiries about me. Eventually, I knew, I would put a great deal more distance behind me, but for the time being crossing Central Park would have to do. But I didn’t want to flee blindly. I knew that I needed at least one day to think and plan. The hotel was a busy one, but middle-class and commercial, and not the sort of place a man who had entered into sudden wealth would choose to celebrate in.

I asked for a single room with bath, registered under the name of Theodore Brown, gave as my home address Camden, New Jersey, a city I had never visited, and followed the bellboy with the bags into the elevator. On the way up, I studied the man’s sullen, narrow face. He was young, but there was no trace of innocence in the guarded eyes, the tightly closed lips. It was a face designed specifically by nature for corruption. What wonders a man with a face like that could perform with a hundred thousand dollars.

In the room, which overlooked the park, the bellboy put the big bag in a chair, turned on the light in the bathroom, ostentatiously earning his tip.

“I wonder if you could do me a favor,” I said, taking out a five-dollar bill.

The bellboy eyed the bill. “Depends on what the favor is,” the bellboy said. “The management, don’t like whores coming in and out.”

“Nothing like that,” I said. “I’d just like to make a bet on a horse and I’m new in town and…” I had entered a new life, but I was taking some baggage along with me. Ask Gloria cantered out of the stables of my past.

The bellboy showed his teeth in what he imagined were an accommodating smile. “We have a house bookie,” he said. “I can have him up here in fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks.” I gave him the five-dollar bill.

“Very good of you, sir,” the bellboy said. The bill disappeared. “Do you mind telling me what you’re going to play?”

“Ask Gloria in the second,” I said. “At Hialeah.”

“It’s a fifteen-to-one shot,” he said. He was a student of the sport.

“So it is,” I said.

“Interesting,” he said. There was no doubt about what he was going to do with my five dollars. Dishonest as he was, he would live and die a poor man.

When he left the room, I loosened my tie and lay down on the bed, although I still wasn’t tired. Try money, I thought grinning, for that run-down feeling, that midmorning sag.

More and more, thinking these days is in the form of a television commercial.

The house bookie appeared promptly. He was a huge fat man in a rumpled suit, with three ball-point pens slipped into the breast pocket of his jacket. He panted when he moved and spoke in a high, almost soprano voice, surprising coming out of all that bulk. “Hi, pal,” he said as he came into the room. He looked around the room swiftly, taking everything in. He was a man prepared for ambush. Although he performed in daylight, he lived in the same world as the cop in the prowl car. “Morris said you were looking for a little action.”

“A little,” I said. “I like Ask Gloria…” I hesitated for a moment. “For three hundred to win in the second at Hialeah. The morning line has her at fifteen to one.” I had a peculiar. feeling of lightheartedness, as though I were in an open plane, without oxygen, and had suddenly climbed from the deck to twenty thousand feet.

The fat man took a creased sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, ran a finger down it. “I can give you twelve to one,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I gave him three bills.

The bookie took the bills, examined them closely, glanced briefly at me. I detected respect, a certain delicate wariness.

“My name is…” I started to say.

“I know your name, Mr. Brown. Morris told me,” the bookie said. He made a note with one of the pens on the sheet of paper. “I pay off at six o’clock in the bar downstairs.”

“See you at six,” I said.

“You hope.” the fat man said, without smiling. He placed the notes that I had given him on the outside of a roll of bills, snapped a rubber band deftly around it. He had small, fat, nimble hands. “Morris always knows where to find me, Mr. Brown,” he said as he went out.

After that, I unpacked and started to put my clothes away. As I was taking my toothbrush and shaving things out of the kit, my razor fell to the floor and skidded beneath the chest of drawers. I knelt to retrieve it, running my hand under the chest. Along with the razor and a small pile of dust, I brought out a coin. It was a silver dollar. I blew the dust off the coin and put it in my pocket. They don’t clean very thoroughly in this hotel, I thought. Good for them. Today, I was definitely ahead of the game.

I looked at my watch. It was almost noon. I picked up the telephone and gave the number of the St Augustine to the operator. As usual, it was nearly thirty seconds before there was an answer. Clara, the operator, regarded all calls as wanton interruptions in her private life, which consisted, as – far as I could ever tell, of reading magazines on astrology. She used delay as a means of protest and punishment for electronic interrupters of her search for the perfect horoscope, wealth, fame, a young and handsome dark stranger.

“Hello, Clara,” I said. “Is Mr. Drusack there?”

“He sure is,” Clara said. “He’s been on my neck all morning to call you. What the hell is your number anyway? I couldn’t find it anywhere. I called the hotel we have here as your address and they say they never heard of you.”

“That was two years ago. I moved.” Actually, I had moved four times since then. A typical American, I had continually pushed toward new frontiers, always farther north. The wealth of the Yukon, by way of the East Eighties, Harlem, Riverdale, the frozen tundra. “I don’t have a number, Clara.”

“What do you mean, you don’t have a number?”

“I don’t have a telephone.”

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Grimes.”

“You can say that again, Clara. Now give me Mr. Drusack.”

“My God, Grimes,” Drusack said when he got on the phone, “you sure left me a mess. You better get right on down here and help me straighten it out.”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Drusack,” I said. I tried to sound genuinely grieved. “I’m busy today. What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” Drusack was shouting now. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter. The goddamn Western Union called at ten o’clock. There’s no John Ferris at that address you gave them, that’s what’s the matter.”

“That’s the address he registered under.”

“You come and tell that to the police. They were in here for an hour this morning. And there were two characters in here asking for him, and if they weren’t packing guns I’m Miss Rheingold of 1983. They talked to me as if I was hiding the sonofabitch or something. They asked me if the guy left a message for them. Did he leave a message?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, they want to talk to you.”

“Why me?” I asked, although I knew why.

“I told them the night man found the guy. I told them you’d be in at eleven pm, but they said they couldn’t wait that long, what was your address. Grimes, do you know that nobody in this goddamn hotel knows where you live? Naturally, those two fuckers wouldn’t believe that. They said they’re coming back here at three o’clock and I’d better damn well produce you. Scary. They weren’t any small-time hoods. Short hair, dressed like stockbrokers. Quiet. Like spies in the movies. They weren’t kidding. Not at all kidding. So you be here. Because I’m going to be out on a long, long lunch.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Drusack,” I said smoothly, enjoying a conversation with the manager for the first time since I started working for him. “I called to say good-bye.”

“What do you mean, good-bye?” Drusack was really shouting now. “Good-bye, good-bye, who says good-bye like that?”

“I do, Mr. Drusack. I decided last night I don’t like the way you run your hotel. I’m quitting… I have quit.”

“Quit! Nobody quits like that. For Christ’s sake, it’s only Tuesday. You got things here. You got a half bottle of bourbon, you got your goddamn Bible, you…”

“I’m donating it to the hotel library,” I said.

“Grimes,” Drusack roared. “You can’t do this to me. I’ll have the police bring you in. I’ll…”

I put the telephone gently down on its cradle. Then I went out to lunch. I went to a good sea-food restaurant near Lincoln Center and had a large grilled lobster that cost eight dollars, with two bottles of Heineken.

As I sat there in the warm restaurant, eating the good food and drinking the imported beer, I realized that it was the first moment since the whore had come running down from the sixth floor of the hotel that I had time to think about what I was doing. Everything up to now had been almost mechanical, act following act unhesitatingly, my movements ordered and precise, as though I had been following a program learned, assimilated, long ago. Now I had to make decisions, consider possibilities, scan the horizon for danger. Even as I was thinking this, I saw that something in my subconscious had made me choose a table where I could sit with my back against the wall, with a clear view of the entrance to the restaurant and of everybody who came in. I was amused by the realization. Given half a chance, every man becomes the hero of his own detective story.

Amusement or not, the hour had come to take stock, think about my position. I could no longer depend on simple reflexes or on anything in my past to guide me for the future, had always been completely law-abiding. I had never done anything to make enemies. Certainly not enemies like them two men who had frightened Drusack that morning. Naturally, I thought, men who came to a hotel where they expected to receive a hundred thousand dollars in cash from someone who was registered most probably under a false name and certainly with a false address might very likely be carrying guns or at least look like men who were in the habit of carrying guns. Drusack might have been a little hysterical that morning, but he was no fool and he had been in the hotel business a long time and had a feeling about who meant trouble when he arrived at the front desk and who didn’t. Drusack couldn’t possibly know just what trouble the two men represented and in all probability would never know.

One thing was sure, or almost sure – the police wouldn’t be brought in, although an individual crooked policeman here or there might be in on it. So I wouldn’t have that to worry about. There was no possibility that the man who had registered under the name of John Ferris and the two men who had come to meet him at the hotel were engaged in a legal business transaction. It had to be bribery of some sort, a payoff, blackmail. This was when the scandals of the second Nixon administration were just beginning to surface, when we all discovered that perfectly respectable people, pillars of the community, had developed the habit of secretly carrying huge sums of money around in attaché cases and stuffing hundreds of thousands of dollars in office desks, so it didn’t occur to me, as it could have later, that I might have stumbled on an amateurish and comparatively undangerous political technique. What I had to deal with, I was sure, was grim professionalism, men who killed for money. Like spies in the movies, Drusack had said. I discounted that. I had seen the body.

Gangsters, I thought. The Mob. Despite the occasional movies and magazine pieces about the underworld I had seen and read, like most people, I had only the vaguest notion of what was meant by the Mob and a perhaps exaggerated respect for its omnipotence, its system of intelligence, its power to seek out and destroy, the lengths it was likely to go to exact vengeance.

One thing I was sure of. I was on its side of the fence now, whoever it might turn out to be, and I was playing by its rules. In one moment in the tag end of a cold winter night, I had become an outlaw who could look only to himself for safety.

Rule one was simple. I could not sit still. I would have to keep moving, disappear. New York was a big city and there were undoubtedly thousands of people hiding out in it successfully for years, but the men who even now were probably on my trail would have my name, my age, a description of my appearance, could, without too much trouble and with a minimum of cunning, discover where I had gone to college, where I had worked before, what my family connections were. Lucky me, I thought, I am not married, there are no children, neither my brothers nor my sister have the faintest notion of where I am. Still, in New York, there was always the chance of running into someone I knew, who would somehow be overheard saying the wrong thing to the wrong man.

And just this very morning there was the bellboy. I had made my first mistake there. He would remember me. And from the look of him, he would sell his sister for a twenty-dollar bill. And the bookie in the hotel. Mistake number two. I could easily imagine what sort of connections he had.

I didn’t know what I was eventually going to do with the money now lying in the hush of the vault, but I certainly intended to enjoy it. And I wouldn’t enjoy it in New York. I had always wanted to travel, and now traveling would be both a pleasure and a necessity.

Luxuriously, I lit a cigar and leaned back in my chair and thought of all the places I would like to see. Europe. The words London, Paris, Rome rang pleasantly in my mind.

But before I could cross the ocean I had things to do, people to see, closer to home. First I would have to get a passport. I had never needed one before, but I was going to need one now. I knew I could get it at the State Department office in New York, but whoever might be looking for me could very well figure out that that would be the first place I would go to and could be there waiting for me. It was an outside chance but I was in no mood to take even that much of a chance.

Tomorrow, I decided, I would go to Washington. By bus. I looked at my watch. It was nearly three o’clock. The two men who had confronted Drusack that morning would be approaching the St Augustine, eager to ask questions and no doubt with the means to compel answers. I flicked the ashes off the end of my cigar and smiled gently. Why, this is the best day I’ve had in years, I thought.

I paid my bill and left the restaurant, found a small photographer’s shop and sat for passport photos. The photographer told me that they would be ready at five-thirty, and I spent the time watching a French movie. I might as well start getting used to the sound of the language, I thought, as I settled comfortably in my seat, admiring the views of the bridges across the Seine.

When I got back to my hotel with the photographs in my pocket (I looked boyish), it was nearly six o’clock. I remembered the bookie and went into the bar to look for him. The bookie was in a corner, alone, sitting at a table, drinking a glass of milk.

“How’d I do?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” the bookie said.

“No. Honest.”

“You won,” the bookie said. The silver dollar had been a reliable omen. Speak again, Oracle. My debt to my man at the Hotel St Augustine was reduced by sixty dollars. All-in-all a useful afternoon’s work.

The bookie did not look happy. “You came in by a length and a half. Next time tell me where you get your information from. And that little shit, Morris. You had to let him in on it. That’s what I call adding insult to injury.”

“I’m a friend of the working man,” I said.

“Working man,” the bookie snorted. “Let me give you a piece of advice, brother, about that particular working man. Don’t leave your wallet where he can spot it. Or even your false teeth.” He took a few envelopes out of his pocket, shuffled through them, gave me one and put the rest back in his pocket. “Thirty-six hundred bucks,” the bookie said. “Count it.”

I put the envelope away. “No need,” I said. “You look like an honest man.”

“Yeah.” The bookie sipped at his milk.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“I can only stand so much milk,” the bookie said. He belched.

“You’re in the wrong business for a man with a bad stomach,” I said.

“You can say that again. You want to bet on the hockey game tonight?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not really a gambling man. So long, pal.”

The bookie didn’t say anything.

I went over to the bar and had a Scotch and soda, then went out into the lobby. Morris, the bellboy, was standing near the front desk. “I hear you hit it big,” he said.

“Not so big,” I said airily. “Still, it wasn’t a bad day’s work. Did you take my tip?”

“No,” the bellboy said. He was a man who lied for the sheer pleasure of lying. “I was too busy on the floors.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Better luck next time.”

I had a steak for dinner in the hotel dining room, and another cigar with the coffee and brandy and then went up to my room, undressed, and got into bed. I slept without dreaming for twelve hours and woke up with the sun streaming into the room. I hadn’t slept that well since I was a small boy.