Pursuit: A Novel

22

Varney awoke and lay still for a moment, staring up at the old, irregular plaster ceiling. It had taken him an hour the first night to determine that the texture of it was intentional, and not just the work of some plasterer in the old days who’d had no idea what he was doing. It was supposed to have all those raised places and lower ones, to show it was handmade. It must have been a style sometime in the 1920s, just like the weird tarnished golden light fixture in the center that held one weak bulb behind a whitish half globe, and the lights on the walls that looked like candles with pointed bulbs.

He sat up in bed and picked up his watch: ten o’clock. He rubbed his hands over his eyes, and felt despair. He was letting go of his discipline, losing his will. For fifteen years he had kept himself under control, fighting to make a tiny bit of progress every day. When he had gone to bed each night, he had closed his eyes knowing that he had done his best to make himself stronger, faster, smarter than he had been in the morning. When he had awoken eight hours later he had not needed to prod himself to get started. He had felt eager to build on the small improvements won the day before.

Every second day he had lifted weights, and every day he had done his stretches and crunches and push-ups and pull-ups, practiced the punches, kicks, feints, and combinations he had been working on that month, then gone out to run. By this time of the morning, he would have had his shower and his breakfast, and been ready to go out again. He would go into the day feeling as though he had his edge, and everything he did after that was extra.

Varney had possessed incredible energy, and taken every opportunity to make the rest of the day as good as the beginning. If he had to go to the library to find everything they had on some topic—say, the habits and attitudes of some business guy he had been hired to take out—he would walk miles to the main branch to increase his stamina. He would stare for a long time at the man’s photographs and memorize all the details he had read, then test himself on the way home. On the street, he would study everything he saw, trying to notice things that would help him in other places and other times: how new buildings were locked and protected, where the surveillance cameras were placed, and how they were disguised. He watched policemen and security guards, searching for routines that had become sloppy and predictable.

This morning Varney slowly pulled himself out of bed and walked to the window, trying to avoid the mirror on the dresser so he would not have to look into his own eyes. He was ashamed. He had been here over a week, and every day he had let himself slip a little bit further. He supposed that the first day or two he had been tired from his lack of sleep and his long drive. He had been angry and upset and disoriented. Those were the things he had told himself. He had used them to convince himself that what he needed was to give himself a rest.

He had slept in the next morning. The day after that, he had told himself that he was still tired, and the day after that he’d said he needed time to get used to his surroundings and make observations of the area for security’s sake. Then, there were more practical matters: groceries to buy, getting rid of the car he had driven here from Buffalo. On the fifth day he had found himself moving furniture around, as though this room were going to be a permanent residence.

He was afraid he was losing himself. He was losing the man he had built from nothing, and the process was frightening to him. The deterioration seemed to happen so quickly. Suddenly, he felt lazy, tired all the time. He seemed to be breathing in shallow drafts, not getting enough oxygen to allow him to move the way he always had.

It had been a hot, humid week, and the sunlight looked strange and dull to him, filtered through a thin gray haze so that the glare came from every direction and nothing stood out in sharp relief, or had a definite shadow.

He turned from the window, determined to save himself. It was too late to salvage the past week, but today was a new start. He dropped to the floor and did push-ups, counting as he went. When he reached forty, a part of his brain said, “Why fifty? Why isn’t forty enough? It’s the first day. I can do more in my second set, after the sit-ups.” The internal, unvoiced sound of his thoughts horrified him. That was the way of weakness, the way losers thought. He pumped out the fifty, then rolled to his back and rushed into the sit-ups. As he worked, he could feel the effect of his lazy week. Two hundred was going to be too many. Why not a hundred now and a hundred later? The words were so distasteful that he felt disgust and shame. When he had finished the two hundred he punished his abdominal muscles by doing fifty slow, agonizing crunches. Next he went to the empty closet, pushed aside the hangers, and did fifty pull-ups on the clothes pole, and did his second set of push-ups with his eyes already searching the room for his running shoes and shorts. He put on a heavy sweatshirt with them so he would sweat harder when he ran.

He had degenerated so badly that in the seven days, he had not even selected a route for his daily run. He found a way that kept him off the crowded business streets, and eventually came to a large high school field where other people too old to be students were jogging and some kids were playing basketball on a blacktop square with a row of baskets on poles. He used the quarter-mile track to make sure he had covered five miles before he jogged out the gate.

Varney jogged back to his apartment building on a street parallel to the one he had used before, short of breath and feeling a tightness in his calves and thighs that he had not felt in years. That made him more angry. He had been living in a stream, swimming against the current. The moment he had rested, he had begun to drift backward, losing what he had accomplished in the past two months.

When he had dressed and eaten, he walked downtown to the office building. As he walked, he began to feel better. The idiotic interlude with Prescott had not killed him, and the disappointment he had felt since could not be allowed to destroy him.

He climbed the stairs, walked along the hallway, and opened the door to Crestview Wholesale to find Tracy at her desk again. As she looked up at him, her eyelids half-closed wearily.

“Hello, sugar. Nice of you to grace us with your presence this afternoon.”

He knew that look, that tired, quiet look as though she had tried to help him and failed a hundred times. He had grown up with it. He had spent his early childhood trying to fight it, to remove it from his mother’s face by trying to do things that would please her. After that had failed, he had tried to avoid the look, to keep from attracting her attention, or simply to evade her and be somewhere else. “I was working out.”

“You mean lifting weights and all that?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t bring any weights when I came. But that’s the sort of thing.”

She raised her eyes and made a cradle for her chin out of the backs of her hands. She blinked once and smiled sweetly. “I always wondered about that. Why would a person do such heavy work for nothing? Why not just get a job running around and lifting heavy things?”

Varney said, “It’s part of the life. You have to be stronger and faster, or the other guy will kill you.” He was pleased that she had given him the chance to remind her that he was not just some sap who was paid to listen to her. She seemed to feel it too. She wrinkled her forehead further and shook her dyed red hair in a manner that suggested that the ways of men were far too mysterious for a young girl to understand, and returned her eyes to her bookkeeping.

He stood and waited until she looked up again. “Is there something you needed, sugar?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want you to help me change some things.”

“Like what?”

“I want to look different—change my hair, get some new clothes, that sort of thing. You probably know the best places in Cincinnati.”

She compressed her face into a worried, vexed expression. “I could do better than give you a list of stores and stylists,” she said. “I have some experience with this kind of thing, but you know, to do it right, it runs into a bit of money.”

“I can pay.”

“Really?” She pretended to be uneasy. “I didn’t like to embarrass you or anything, because I thought you must be broke. I didn’t mention it, but that apartment usually rents for a hundred dollars a day.”

Varney watched her face. It had changed from a disapproving irony that was cautious, because she was delicately testing how far she could go without being in danger, to a still-cautious hopefulness, the greed she was feeling rapidly beginning to overwhelm her. He said, “Oh,” in a toneless voice. “Here.” He watched her eyes when she saw the thick sheaf of folded hundreds emerge from his pocket. “Here’s for the time I’ve been in it.” He tossed the three bills on the desk and watched her eyes follow the rest of the bills back to his pocket, then linger there.

Pointed red fingernails that grew into little curves like claws scraped on the wood as her fingertips touched the money lightly and drew it back into her lap. It was not until the money was out of sight that she said disingenuously, “I didn’t mean to sound inhospitable, sugar. I could have waited. Now, about the changes you’re making. We can get started this afternoon, if you like. You come back here around three, will you?”

“Sure.” He turned and left the office. As he walked down the hallway two of the brothers were coming in the other way, but they weren’t walking together. The older one, Marty, was almost to the door. Varney smiled and said hello to him, but Marty seemed to pass through the greeting, not slowing, just making a barely perceptible nod as he continued on his course. The second brother, Nick, seemed to have noticed the exchange and decided that if his older brother had been cool, it must be the wrong decision.

He was warm. “Hey, buddy,” he said with a grin that seemed to be an unfortunate inheritance from some ancestor who had lived in the hills and eaten raccoons. “How you getting by? Everything comfortable over there?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Varney. “I appreciate everything you folks have done.” He had used the word “folks” with no time lost in calculation. He had always had an ear for other people’s diction and a tendency to fall easily into it that was almost a weakness. He kept walking because it was not the time, and certainly not the place, for the conversation he was considering. Tracy and Marty were too close, just beyond the door.

Nick said, “Glad to do it. Is she in there?”

Varney nodded. “I just left her.”

Nick disappeared inside the door and Varney went on. He wondered if he should have come to Cincinnati. It had seemed to be the best way to counter Prescott’s latest stratagem. Prescott had made Buffalo an impossible place for him, then abruptly disengaged. Varney could wear himself out looking for Prescott and hiding from a horde of cops while Prescott rested up and concocted some grand plan to take him by surprise after he had defeated himself. It had seemed to Varney that he had been brilliant in sidestepping before any of that happened. He had selected Cincinnati because it was far enough away to keep the Buffalo police from being a problem but close enough to reach in a day. There were other people in other cities who had served as front men to bring him jobs from time to time, but there were none he would have come to like this; each of them had some quality he didn’t like. They were too unpredictable, or too closely connected with the powerful, or too involved in some business that brought with it worse risks than his did—schemes like bringing drugs into the country or shipping stolen cars out of it.

But now he wondered if the wholesalers might create problems he had not expected. He amended the thought: Tracy was going to be a problem. He had been here a week, and she had already begun looking at him with that bored, detached expression that showed she was wondering when he was going to leave. And now Marty, the oldest son, had begun to look at him with a debased, cruder version of it. He wasn’t sure whether Nick had simply not yet had the conversation with his mother that would make him do the same, or if he had, and had decided that a separate relationship with a man like Varney might be a good idea.

For Varney, being in a place that Prescott didn’t know about, and where he could not find him, was not a mistake. Every minute that Varney stayed out of sight, Prescott would be forced to consider the possibility that Varney was nearby, preparing to kill him. Maybe Prescott would be curious enough to begin searching, and not doing whatever he had intended to do. But Cincinnati had not been what Varney had expected. He was going to need to be watchful.

He went to a big discount store off Beechmont Avenue near the mall, bought some supplies, and brought them back to the apartment. He spent the next three hours making small improvements. He installed dead bolts on the doors. He fitted sawed-off sections of broom handles to the windows so they could not easily be opened from outside. He installed shades. Then he wrapped the handles of the set of steak knives he had bought with electrical tape to improve the grip and hid them in convenient places: in the bathroom cabinet, in the refrigerator, taped to the wall of the closet. If an intruder got very lucky sometime and managed to get between Varney and the gun he’d hidden under the bed, the luck would not necessarily bring a lasting advantage.

He walked back to the office building at three, and found the boys had gone off again. They had to deal with the messengers and mules, who kept arriving in town at intervals known only to the family. Tracy liked to have the boys and their helpers handle buys and payoffs and exchanges away from the building in hotels and apartments, and then bring her only the proceeds.

Tracy was not visible in the Crestview Wholesale office, so he sat down in one of the guest chairs in front of her desk and pretended to wait patiently and politely while he listened for sounds coming from the other offices.

After about ten minutes, he heard Tracy’s distinctive shriek and cackle, then another, softer female voice. They seemed to be coming closer. A door opened at the end of the big room, and Tracy came in. She was wearing a different outfit, this one a business suit with small white gloves of the sort that women had not worn for a generation. She tottered forward on her spike heels, the hoops hanging from her earlobes bouncing as she came. “Here we are, sugar,” she said. “Right on time!” Varney didn’t bother to correct her, because he could see she was aware of what the clock said.

The door opened again. A young woman he thought of as foreign-looking, with long, thick black hair, and wearing a white lab coat, appeared. She lingered in the open doorway, looking in his direction.

Tracy clutched his arm to make him stand up, and held it tightly to her bosom as she conducted him past the rows of empty desks toward the door. “Honey, this is Mae. She’s an expert cosmetologist and hair stylist, and she’s going to handle everything you need for your makeover.” She released him at the door. “I’ve got to go out, but I’ll be back around seven to see how you look.” He felt her hand settle in the space between his shoulder blades and give him a push, then heard the pock-pock-pock of her heels taking her out to the hallway.

The woman she had called Mae smiled faintly and held her door open for him to enter. As he moved past her, he got a very close look at her. He judged that she was what Tracy had said. Her skin was extremely smooth, but her makeup was elaborate and, he supposed, artful. She wore silver-blue eye shadow and dark mascara that made her eyelashes long and curved upward. He had noticed before that the women who worked behind the cosmetics counters in department stores seemed to work there just to be near the stuff, and to get the first shot at the latest shipments. His impression that she was foreign had been from her eyes, which from a distance had looked like the almond-shaped eyes of Egyptian women in ancient paintings, but that he could see now had simply been shaped by the use of some dark pencil at the corners, and by her cheekbones, which had been accentuated with some kind of coloring. Now that he was close, he could see that the eyes were blue, and the expression in them was amused and maybe a little contemptuous. He tried to analyze it, and realized it was the attitude girls in school had shown who were a couple of years older.

She had a soft, musical voice, but the pronunciation was in the local accent, and he suspected that if she had wanted to, she could still scream at a football game. “Sit down over here,” she said, and pulled a swivel chair away from a desk.

He sat down and looked up at her. “Do you do Tracy’s makeup?”

“Shit, no,” she said, and her accent seemed to become more pronounced. “I wouldn’t do that to anybody. I just get the white out of her hair and glue on the nails.”

He decided that he didn’t mind the fact that she wasn’t impressed with him. It was part of being a couple of years older. “What I’d like—”

She interrupted, but she did it by putting her hand lightly on his shoulder near his neck, so he didn’t mind. “I know what you need. I’m going to strip your hair and dye it, and then I’m going to style it differently. Have you ever worn glasses?”

“No.”

“Good. We’ll pick out some for you later. Then we’ll work on some other things.”

He looked around the room. There was a counter with a sink like one in a kitchen, a hand-held hair dryer, and a large mirror. There were barber’s instruments, and a collection of bottles and jars and packages on the counter. “What is this place? The door says it’s a travel agency.”

She looked around her as though she were looking at it through eyes that had never seen it before. “I don’t know what they use it for when I’m not here. It’s where she gets herself done up. The boys get haircuts in here, too. That sort of thing. I’ve cut hair for a few of their road men in here, too.”

“Road men?”

“Those guys who travel around and do . . .” She hesitated, as though searching for terms but finding nothing. “Whatever it is they do.” She combed his hair quickly, with darting movements.

“Tracy hates it when they don’t look nice—you know, like they’re supposed to be traveling salesmen. Meeting the public, and all that. One time I had to fit one with a wig.”

“What for?”

“Oh, she was pissed!” said Mae delightedly. “He walked into the office, and his head was shaved. She was expecting him, so she started talking to him before she looked up from her desk. So it was like, ‘Put it right over there, sugar.’ ” Mae perfectly imitated the high, saccharine voice. “And she looked up, and without even taking a breath, she goes, ‘You dare come into my office looking like skinhead trash!’ ” Mae managed to reach a tone an octave higher. “ ‘You get your sorry ass right in that room and stay there until I figure out what to do!’ Then she turned to me. All I could do was measure his head and go buy a hairpiece for him. It was about four thousand bucks, and she deducted it from his pay.”

“What made him shave his head?”

“It was really hot earlier this summer, and he said it made him feel better. But then he had to wear the wig, and it was worse than his own hair. Another one got a tattoo this spring. Him she didn’t even bother with. She made Nicky pay him off and fire him. Come over to the sink. Bring the chair.”

She wrapped towels around Varney’s neck, leaned his head back against the sink, and washed his hair. He listened to her words, but only so he could keep responding and prevent her from falling silent. He liked the sound of her voice. He liked even better the feel of her fingers massaging his scalp and the smell of her perfume.

He was aware that a long period of time was passing, but he liked it. He was only half aware of what she was doing to his hair, but was always aware of her person—when a hip brushed against his shoulder as she moved to the counter to get something, or a thigh touched his when she leaned close to snip his hair. Finally, she looked at him sharply, stepping around him to see him from every angle. Then she turned him around in the chair and let him look into the mirror.

He was shocked. His hair was light brown and short, but the brown was not uniform, like a dye job. It had some lighter highlights and some darker parts, like the real hair of a man who spent some time outdoors. “That’s something,” he said. “I really look different.” He had seen men who looked like him. He had seen hundreds of them. It was like looking into the mirror and finding that he was invisible.

“Do you like it?” she asked, trying to seem indifferent.

“It’s . . . perfect,” he said, looking at her in the mirror.

She was behind him, and their eyes met in reflection, but hers lowered to avoid his. She put both hands on his shoulders and began to turn him around. “Oooh,” she breathed.

“What?”

“You’re so tense. I guess I kept you in the chair too long. We’d better take a break before we go on with this.”

“I’m okay,” he said.

She began to knead his shoulders and the cord of muscle on each side of his neck. “You just sit back and relax for a minute, and let me take care of you. Close your eyes.” She worked on his shoulders and upper back. It felt soothing, the small hands moving tirelessly on him.

He felt awkward. After a short time, he said, “Thanks,” to end it. “That’s fine.”

She said, “We have to wait for an hour or so while your color sets.” She pointed to a high, narrow table across the room that he had not noticed. It had a thick mat on it. “Why don’t you get up on the massage table? I’ll give you the full treatment. Take off your shirt.”

He went to the table, took off his shirt, and sat on the edge. She removed her lab coat and laid it across a desk. She was wearing a halter top and a pair of blue jeans. He began to wish . . . he didn’t allow himself to form a specific image. She walked to the table and immediately began to unbuckle his belt, her eyes on his to gauge his reaction. “I said I’d give you the full treatment.”

Two hours later, when Tracy returned, she knocked on the door to the outer office. Mae went and turned the knob to unlock it, then went back to the sink. Tracy stepped inside and said to Mae, “Did you two make good use of your time?” Mae stopped putting away bottles and cleaning the sink long enough to nod slightly. She began putting things back into her traveling bag.

Tracy looked at Varney. “Why, sugar! Look at you! I thought it was my boy Nicky for a minute. Come out here with me!” She had her arm around his shoulder, and she pulled him quickly through the doorway to her office. Varney had only a second to look back at Mae and try to smile, but she was looking in the other direction, as though he had already gone.

Tracy closed the door on her and kept him moving toward her desk. “You look great, like a different man, and a good-looking man, too. That’s the tricky part. Most disguises make you look uglier, not better. That Mae really is an artist, isn’t she?”

He nodded. It seemed that she had said everything that was necessary.

“Did you like her?”

He supposed that he had to say it. “Yes. Like you said, she’s really good at hairstyling.”

“No,” she said, and pinched the back of his arm. “Did you like her?”

Varney hesitated, but the look on Tracy’s face was almost a leer, the half-averted eyes bright and knowing, the coy smile making the cheeks wrinkle like the skins of overripe tomatoes.

“Yes,” he said. “I liked her a lot.”

“Good,” said Tracy. “Good. Then you can keep her for a while. It’ll make it easier for her to get the rest of your changes done—take you shopping and so on. Whoever this person is that’s after you, he isn’t looking for a couple.”

“You mean, she’ll stay with me?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Is she a hooker?”

Tracy stopped and put her hands on her hips, her head tilted. “How could you say such a thing? Of course not!” She pulled him, leaning close to him. “Don’t think that way. It would hurt her feelings. A girl can’t get by on cutting a little hair and doing makeup consultations. Once in a while she does little favors for close friends, and maybe they’ll give her a few extra dollars, that’s all. Nothing that’s not perfectly tasteful and refined. I could tell she liked you and would be willing to make you one of those close friends.”

“How could you tell that?”

“Women have ways of communicating without cupping our hands around our mouths and shouting like hog callers, you know. You don’t have to engage in any embarrassing discussion about this. If you’d like, she’ll just go home with you now. You’ll pay me, not her.”

His curiosity easily overwhelmed his revulsion at Tracy.

“What’s her fee?”

“Give me five hundred for each day that you keep her, and I pass it on. And don’t worry about extras. No big tip or something later. I have to be careful with Mae. If she had that much all at once, she’d go right out and buy enough cocaine to kill herself. You’d be trying to do her a favor, and in about three days, they’d be pulling a sheet over her head in the emergency room. So as a favor and a mercy, I just dole money out to her. It stretches the money for her, so she always has plenty to get by, even when she’s not working at all. And she never has enough to hurt herself.”

Varney thought for a moment. “All right.”

“Good,” said Tracy. She hesitated, to show there was something else on her mind.

“Something else?”

She looked at the closed door across the room in mock concern, then leaned closer to him. He could feel her breath on his cheek. “She’s . . . a little short right now. She didn’t say it, but I called her only about an hour before you were supposed to be here, and she wasn’t doing anything. Rushed right over, just to get some hairstyling work. And the . . . extras, they weren’t my idea, I can assure you. She saw you and asked me if it was okay if she went a little further in being nice to you. So I think we should try to give her a little advance, don’t you?” When Varney stared at her without answering, she prompted, “It’ll put her in a much better mood, I promise.”

Varney was aware that he was being fleeced, but he remembered the sight of Mae after the clothes were gone. In spite of himself, he wondered what a better mood would be like.

“How much?”

Tracy shrugged apologetically. “Let’s see. I already paid for the makeover she just did. That was eight hundred, but I’ll just make that my present to you. Let’s give her a week’s worth on account. Thirty-five hundred. I’ll give her some in advance, and show her I’ve got the rest in hand for her.”

Varney took the roll of bills he had brought out of his pocket and counted thirty-five of them. He was being robbed, but he decided for the moment not to care. Tracy took the money, disappeared into the other room for a couple of minutes, then came back in and shut the door, and waved good-bye to him.

When Varney stepped out into the hallway, he found Mae standing near the other door, leaning against the wall with the strap of her travel bag over her shoulder. When he came to within a few feet of her, she wordlessly pushed off, turned, and began to walk with him. When they were out of sight in the stairwell, she put her hand lightly on his arm. It was a comfortable gesture, just as though she were his girlfriend, and they were walking home together from a day at the office.