The Man with the Getaway Face

1

Darkness. Pitch-black darkness, and no sound other than the sounds you make yourself. Blackness and silence and absolute solitude, twenty-two hours a day for two weeks.

Stubbs was lucky. Up and down the country roads of California in the thirties, traveling with the migrant crop-pickers, fighting with the scabs and being stomped every once in a while in a back room by the deputies, had dulled Stubbs’ brain. Whole areas of emotion and understanding were muffled for him now, and his brain was no longer capable of complicated thoughts or abstract ideas, and that was lucky. He could stand up under the silent solitary darkness a lot better than a man with a whole brain.

He didn’t panic, and he didn’t talk to himself, and he didn’t concoct crazy complicated schemes that would have forced Parker to kill him. He’d butt his head against a wall like a rat in a maze. He stopped shaving and he stopped fighting back, because his brain was good enough to tell him there was no reason to shave and no reason to fight back. But other than that he didn’t do anything that a more sensitive man might have done.

Since he was starting with only part of a mind anyway, it was easier for Stubbs to revert to the animal. A man with a whole brain would panic first, do all the idiotic things that come from panic, and if he survived the panic then he would be reverted to the animal. For Stubbs it was simpler and more direct.

When an animal is enclosed, he concentrates on only one thing — getting out. And the first way he tries is by digging. Sometime after Parker left on the third day, Stubbs felt his way across the concrete floor to the nearest wall, and then crawled along the wall, feeling the concrete floor and the concrete blocks of the wall where they angled together, looking for a break in one or the other, but he couldn’t find a thing. Then he went around again, and this time he found a place where the floor had crumbled a little bit, just at the edge of the wall.

He tried to remember the place without being able to see it, and stumbled away to the broken-down shelves where the farmer’s wife had once kept her canning. He got a chunk of wood and went back and for a while he couldn’t find the tiny place where the floor had crumbled, but then he did. He poked at the broken place in the floor with the jagged end of the piece of wood, and for a long while he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere at all. It would have been easier if he could see what he was doing. Every once in a while he felt the broken place with his fingers, and a few more grains of concrete would brush away, and he’d poke at it some more.

By the time he was too exhausted to work any more he had a hole in the floor the size of his fist. Then he fell asleep, and the next thing he knew Parker was kicking at the door and telling him to come out, and it was the fourth day.

The fourth day and the fifth day and the sixth day he worked on the concrete with chunks of wood, and by the sixth day he had a hole more than a foot in diameter, and he’d started scooping out the dirt. Parker never came into the fruit cellar, because there was no light in there and no reason to go in, so Stubbs didn’t try to hide the dirt or the broken rubble of concrete. But on the seventh day he thought to check outside, when Parker let him out, to see just how much digging he had to do.

The land slanted, so that there were only three steps up from the basement level at the back, but around at the side where he’d been working the land slanted up. He judged where the spot would be, and saw that it was impossible. The ground was up the wall on the outside to about shoulder height, judging from inside, and Stubbs knew he’d never be able to get through that. He’d have to dig down first, to get under the wall, and then over, and then up maybe five feet or more. He didn’t have any tools, and he didn’t have any light, and he wouldn’t know whether he was digging in the right direction or not.

After Parker left, that seventh day, Stubbs didn’t do anything at all. He sat on the floor in the blackness, listening to his own breathing because that was all there was to listen to, and after a while he felt like crying but he didn’t. Even with half a brain, an important failure can affect a man.

The eighth day he stopped shaving, and he stopped looking for an opening when Parker let him out for his two hours in the air. He stopped shaving because he felt despair after the failure of the digging, and he stopped looking for an opening because Parker had never given him one and never would. The ninth day, he didn’t do anything.

If an animal can’t dig out, it will try to break out, to force his way through the enclosure. The tenth day, after Parker left, Stubbs tried battering down the door. He hit it with his shoulder, and then he backed off and hit it again. That was the closest he came to panic, because of the rhythmic pattern of movement against the door and because of the pain it made along his arm and shoulder and because the door didn’t give at all. When he came close to panic, he stopped hitting the door and stumbled across the black room and sat down.

First the animal tried to go under, and then through, and then over. The eleventh day, Stubbs attacked the ceiling. It was just low enough so Stubbs could strain up on tiptoe and touch the wood between the beams. He knew the farmhouse was sagging and old, and he thought the flooring might be rotten. He got another piece of the shelving and spent a while ramming at the ceiling, trying to break a hole. Because he couldn’t see, he sometimes hit the beams instead, and it would jar both arms and sometimes make him drop the piece of wood. Dust and dirt fell down on him as he struck upwards, and he couldn’t break through.

Then, on the twelfth day, one of the others gave him a flashlight. At first, he couldn’t really believe it, and he kept the joy in, because he was afraid it was a joke or something and they’d take it away again before putting him back in the fruit cellar.

But then he realized it wasn’t a joke; Parker was impersonal, not cruel. He never did anything without a reason, and there was no reason to taunt Stubbs, so the flashlight was really his. Parker didn’t feel sorry for him because he didn’t feel anything for him at all, with the possible exception of irritation. But Handy felt sorry for him, and that was the break.

They put him back in the fruit cellar, and then they left. Stubbs switched on the flashlight and looked at the enclosure. He found the little pile of rubble and dirt where he’d tried to dig his way out, and when he looked for it he saw the scarred place on the ceiling where he’d tried to force his way out. He saw the broken-down shelving he’d been stumbling over from time to time, and he saw his way out.

If he’d had a light before, he’d have been out by now. The wall was concrete block, practically all the way up. But for the last foot, along the outer wall, it wasn’t concrete block. The beams rested on the top row of blocks, and between them the wall was just wooden siding, ordinary wooden siding. Stubbs inspected that part of the wall all the way along, and saw how old and rotten and warped the wood looked.

He worked that night, and he worked the thirteenth day except when Parker came to let him out for a while. On the fourteenth day he crawled out onto the ground and rolled over on his back and looked up at the sky. The sun was straight up above him, so it was noon. He lay on his back for a while, smelling the world and looking up at the sky and listening to the small sounds the trees and bushes made in the breeze, and then he got to his feet.

He knew Parker always came in the afternoon some time. He remembered vaguely that Parker and Handy had told him they would let him go soon anyway, but he’d stopped paying attention to what they said. And even if it was just tomorrow when they’d let him out, he didn’t want to wait. He wasn’t going back in that cellar again.

He went around back and into the basement because he was hungry. He ate cold beans out of a can and drank some water, and then he saw the small mirror Parker had brought with the razor and the can of lather. He looked at himself and knew he had to take a chance on staying long enough to shave.

He shaved, and that made him feel better. Then he took the automatic from the card table and went back around to the side of the house, where he threw out his jacket and cap before climbing out himself. He brushed them off as best he could, brushed his trouser legs, put on the jacket and the cap, and walked out to the road. The automatic was out of sight under his jacket, tucked under his belt.

The first thing he wanted to do was see if the car was still there in Newark. He had money in his pockets, and if the car was still there he could go ahead and do what he’d set out to do two weeks ago, before Parker had trapped him. He didn’t want to get even with Parker or blow the whistle on Parker. He wasn’t interested in him. He just wanted to get away and continue looking for the man who’d killed Dr. Adler.

A middle-aged man who said he repaired tractors gave Stubbs a lift into New Brunswick, and from there he took a train to Newark. Once he got to Newark he ran into a problem because he didn’t know where the car was. He remembered some street names from when he’d been trailing Parker away from Skimm’s house, so he took a cab to one intersection he remembered and walked from there.

It looked different in the daytime and pretty soon he got lost. But then he caught sight of a railroad bridge crossing a street down to his left, and he remembered the car had been left at the end of a street by a railroad embankment.

He picked a direction, hoping it was right, and walked along parallel to the tracks, a block away, looking down each cross street he came to. After a while he saw a church on a corner that he vaguely remembered, so he thought he must be on the right track. He kept going past the church, and two blocks later he saw the car, still parked where he’d left it.

He sighed with relief, because he’d thought the police might have towed it away by now. The engine didn’t want to start at first, but after a while it did, and Stubbs carefully turned the Lincoln around in the narrow street.

There were two men left to find, and one of them was supposed to be in New York City. These days he was using the name Wells.

2

In 1946, money was loose in the United States. But from another angle, money was tight. That was the year between the war and the cold war, and at the top level money was tight because the men at the top level expected a reduction in government spending now that the war was over. This would mean a reduction in heavy manufacturing and a general tightening of the belt until the nation had made the adjustment from a war to a peace economy. The men at the top gloomily looked forward to a long hard peace, and money with them was tight.

But at the bottom level, money was loose. The servicemen were getting out, and they were getting theirs. The GI Bill let them go to school or buy a house or just sit around on their duffs for fifty-two weeks. The defense plant workers — who’d been getting theirs all along — now had something to spend it on. Cars were being manufactured again and new housing was springing up everywhere, and rationing and other restrictions were disappearing. So the men at the bottom happily looked forward to a long soft peace, and money with them was loose.

There was this man named Wallerbaugh, C. Frederick Wallerbaugh, and he had made a very good living for a number of years by doing the sort of things with stocks that no one is supposed to do. He had a Seat, and his racket was its own respectable front, and no one bothered him. The men at the top ignore the Wallerbaughs for the same reason that a police force retires a graft taker rather than prosecuting him — exposure of dirtiness in a part of the system reflects on the rest of the system. So Wallerbaugh did well, and the only men who could have stopped him ignored him. But in 1946 money at the top was tight, and Wallerbaugh, as usual, had overextended himself.

Wallerbaugh looked around and saw that money at the bottom was loose. He saw what the money was being spent on, and he thought the situation over, and then he became one of the first of the really big-scale Florida land speculators. He had two-color brochures made up, and he sent them out by the bale. There are companies that supply mailing lists of any desired kind — people who own foreign cars; people who belong to correspondence schools; people who have sent for pornography through the mail — and from one of these Wallerbaugh got a list of ex-servicemen who were married and going to college. Thousands of these got the two-color brochure.

It was a good brochure. It told the ex-serviceman of the unlimited potential of Growing Florida. It told him about the new airplane plants, the industrial boom, the fact that Florida was becoming a First Rate employment market in practically every field. It also told him just how cheaply he could own his own plot of land on Florida’s west coast, and how little more it would cost to build a brand new house on that land. The ex-serviceman could start paying for that lot and house right now, then it would be ready for him when he graduated from college, and he and the Missus were ready for the Big Move.

Wallerbaugh took a lot of servicemen. He sold land that was totally inaccessible by car. He sold land that was eight feet under water. He sold land to which he didn’t hold clear title. He sold land that washed back out into the Gulf of Mexico before the ink was dry on the check.

The Land Grab was bad in Florida for a while, with the speculators all trying to grab from each other, so in 1947 Wallerbaugh took on a partner, a man named Grantz. Grantz had just served a rap for income tax evasion. He’d lived off the black market during the war, which wasn’t as easy or as profitable as liquor had once been, and he was happy to bring his know-how into the corporation.

The bubble lasted three years. Wallerbaugh had thought it would last forever, just as the stock game should have lasted forever, but he was wrong. At the top they could afford to ignore him. But now he was working at the bottom, and at the bottom they couldn’t afford to ignore him. It was government money, passed by the GI Bill through the hands of servicemen and then into Wallerbaugh’s hands, and he was being careless. Grease kept the deal alive for a while, but in 1949 the warrants came out. They arrested Grantz, but Wallerbaugh made it out of the country. His profits were safe in a Swiss bank, and his new home was in Lomas de Zamora, a suburb of Buenos Aires.

But after more than a decade, Wallerbaugh hungered for home again, to be able to move freely in the states once more. Passport and other papers proving him to be Charles F. Wells, retired stockbroker, were expensive to come by but certainly not impossible. But Charles F. Wells had the same face as C. Frederick Wallerbaugh, and that face had been plastered all over the newspapers of the nation in 1949. And for all Wallerbaugh knew that face was still featured on the walls of post offices. The face was a problem; it kept him in Lomas de Zamora a while longer.

Finally he couldn’t stand it. Grantz had died of a bad heart in a Federal prison, but some of Grantz’s friends were still around, and Wallerbaugh got in touch with them. A plastic surgeon, somebody good and absolutely trustworthy. The answer came back: Dr. Adler, near Lincoln, Nebraska.

Money made it possible for him to get back into the states, via the Mexican border, without having to test the passport or other papers. Money got him to Nebraska, and more money, to Dr. Adler, got him a new face. After the operation, Charles F. Wells went into Lincoln and bought a new Cadillac and drove it all the way to New York, just for the pure pleasure of being able to look at all that American countryside again.

He had avoided the friends of Grantz, so no one knew that Wallerbaugh was back in the states. The friends of Grantz knew, but they didn’t know what he looked like or where he was or what he was calling himself these days. Only one man in the whole world knew enough about Charles F. Wells to be able to call him C. Frederick Wallerbaugh.

After six months, he began to worry. After one month of worry, he decided to act. He had a newer Cadillac by now, and he drove it back to Nebraska. He didn’t drive this time for the pleasure, he drove so his name would not appear in the files of any commercial transportation. He drove to Nebraska and shot Dr. Adler and then he drove back to New York. He was safe now, absolutely safe. There was no one left in all the world who could pose any sort of threat to him.

3

Until he got to the car, Stubbs had thought he would just keep going forward; he would get the car and then go find the man named Wells and find out if he had killed the doctor, and if it hadn’t been Wells then he’d go on and find the other man, Courtney. But in any case, all in a straight line, with nothing else in the way. That was because his thinking was muffled and hazy with only one clear spot in the center, able to concentrate on just one train of thought at a time.

But when he got to the car, the impossibility of the straight line forced itself upon his attention. He first began to notice when he had trouble driving the car. His hands seemed thicker and slower on the wheel and one foot was heavy and only partially controlled the accelerator and his other foot was totally out of sympathy with the brake. He kept hitting the brake too hard, and making the hood of the Lincoln dip, and knocking his chest against the steering wheel. And he kept pulling away from traffic lights too fast, nearly stalling the car.

After that, because now he kept looking at his hands, he noticed how filthy they were — covered with small scars and ragged places. And his clothing was a mess. Also his stomach was upset and his nerves seemed bad.

So finally he began to realize that it was impossible, that after two weeks of living like an animal he couldn’t just go straight ahead but would have to stop and rest a while. So he stopped. He didn’t know about motels, but he knew how to find a hotel in any city. You find the railroad station.

He’d never gone far from the tracks, so he kept on paralleling them, and after a while he found a third-rate hotel. Since it was a third-rate hotel, it didn’t have a garage, but the man at the desk told him the car would be safe out in front. Stubbs took his word for it, paid for one night, and got his two suitcases from the trunk.

There was no shower in his private bath, but there was a tub. He sat for an hour in water nearly too hot to stand, adding more hot water every time the water in the tub started to cool. After that he went directly to bed, though it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.

He woke at eight-thirty the next morning, and his head was buzzing. His nerves were far worse than yesterday, so bad that his arms and legs were shaking. He lay on his back on the bed, and his forehead was burning up. He felt a dull anger at the symptoms, because they were keeping him from the straight line, and he tried to ignore them. He pushed the covers away and got out of bed, but he immediately became dizzy and fell, hitting his face on the floor.

After a while, he got to the telephone and told the man at the desk that he needed a doctor. The man at the desk was irritated, and showed it, but he did send a doctor. He was a paunchy man with gray hair and a no-nonsense scowl, and when he came in, using the key the desk man had given him, Stubbs was back in bed, not wholly conscious.

The doctor examined him, and asked him questions he had a difficult time answering. Then he closed his black bag with a snap. “You have to stop drinking. You know that, don’t you?”

“I haven’t been drinking,” Stubbs told him. “I never drink.” It was true. Alcohol, even when he was at his best, hurt his head.

The doctor frowned, not sure whether or not to believe him. It being this particular hotel, this particular kind of hotel, the doctor had been prepared to diagnose even before seeing Stubbs. He stood looking down at him, and now he saw that the symptoms were not exactly right. Some of the symptoms that should have been there weren’t, like a craving for water and a special soreness in the joints of the arms. “Then you’ve been working too hard. Some sort of heavy physical labor without proper nutrition. You haven’t been getting enough sleep or enough rest or enough of the right kinds of food. Am I right?”

It was close enough. Stubbs nodded.

The doctor nodded, too, satisfied. “I don’t suppose you want to go to a clinic?”

“No.”

“I thought not. Can you pay for a nurse? You need someone to bring you food, at least for a day or two. You can’t leave that bed.”

“In my wallet,” Stubbs said. He motioned at his pants folded on the chair. “Take some for yourself and a nurse.”

The doctor was surprised at how much money there was in the wallet, and it made him curious as to what this man had been doing to get so run-down and have so much money, but he kept this curiosity to himself. He was a doctor with a small practice in a poor neighborhood, plus work at a clinic, plus being house doctor for this hotel and two others very much like it. He had the constant feeling that violence and evil were all around him, kept just out of sight because these people needed him as a doctor, but if he were ever to turn his head fast and see the evil they would have to kill him, whether they needed him or not. Because of this, he had trained his curiosity to be a small and private thing.

He took some money from Stubbs’ wallet, showed him how much he had taken, and explained what each dollar of it was for. “The man downstairs said you’d only paid for one night. I think you’ll be here four more days at the very least.”

“Pay him for two,” said Stubbs.

The doctor argued with him, but Stubbs ignored him. He concentrated on the straight line and lay quiet in the bed so he’d be well sooner, and after a while the doctor stopped arguing. He shrugged, and took some more money from Stubbs’ wallet, and left.

The nurse was bitter Irish, thin-bodied and sharp-faced, and a rosary rustled in her starched pocket. She fed him, when her watch said it was time and not when he was hungry, and she took good care of him without ever talking to him. It embarrassed him to use the bedpan, but she insisted. She came for two days, because that was how much she’d been paid for. The second day he didn’t really need her, but she came anyway and wouldn’t let him out of the bed. He decided to get up as soon as she left, but he didn’t.

The third day he was on his own again. He got up and stood beside the bed, and he wasn’t dizzy. He felt weak, and very hungry, but that was all, and the trembling in his arms and legs had stopped. He got clean clothing from his suitcase and went out to a restaurant for breakfast.

He walked around a little afterwards, but then the dizziness started to come back, so he went back to the room and lay down on the bed and slept some more. When he woke up it was afternoon, and he went out again for another meal. On the way out the desk clerk stopped him, and he paid for another day.

The fourth day, Friday, he was himself again. He’d nearly forgotten the two weeks at the farmhouse. It was only a dim memory, soft with lost details. In the clear spot in the middle of his brain, the straight line was back.

He packed the two suitcases, stowed the automatic under his coat, and went out to the car. Charles F. Wells lived somewhere in New York.

4

Stubbs closed the phone book and put away his ballpoint pen and the old piece of envelope and walked back out of the drugstore onto 10th Avenue. He stood blinking in the sunshine, not knowing where to go next, where to start. Then he thought of maps, so he went back into the drugstore. “Do you have a map of New York?”

“Manhattan?”

Stubbs frowned. “New York,” he said again, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Manhattan, decided the druggist. He reached behind him and got a small red book. The book was full of the locations of streets and information about subways and places of interest, and pasted in the back of the book was a street map of Manhattan.

Stubbs paid his quarter and took the little red book and started out of the store. Then he stopped again, struck by a sudden suspicion, and went back. “What about the rest?”

The druggist just looked at him. “The rest?”

Stubbs concentrated, and came up with a name. “Brooklyn.”

He was remembering now that New York was in parts. Manhattan was one part, and Brooklyn another. And there were other parts.

“Oh. You want a map of Brooklyn, too?” The druggist started to reach behind him again.

“No,” Stubbs pointed toward the phone booth. “About the phone book,” he said. “Is it just Manhattan?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have the others?”

The druggist shook his head. “Why don’t you try Grand Central. They’ve got books from all the boroughs of Greater New York and the suburbs there.”

Stubbs nodded. “Grand Central,” he repeated. “Where’s Grand Central?”

The druggist opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Look, let me show you. Give me that map.”

Stubbs handed over the little red book. The druggist opened the map in the back, and showed him. He was here, 10th Avenue and 39th Street. Grand Central was over here, 42nd Street, the other side of 5th Avenue.

Stubbs nodded. “Thank you.”

“Not at all.” The druggist folded the map up for him and handed him back the little book. Stubbs went out to the sidewalk.

In his mind, it had seemed simple. He would come to New York and look in the phone book and it would say Charles Wells and give an address, and he would go to that address. So when he came through the Lincoln Tunnel he parked as soon as he saw a drugstore, and he looked in the phone book. There was a “Wells, C.” and a “Wells, C.F.” and two “Wells, Charles.” Four people in New York that might be the man he wanted.

And then at the last minute he’d been reminded that New York had other parts, like Brooklyn. Charles F. Wells might not be any one of these four, he might be somebody else entirely, in Brooklyn, or one of the other parts.

He stood on the sidewalk, and he didn’t know what to do next. He could go look up the four people he already had, or he could go to Grand Central and maybe make the list longer. He thought about it and decided it would be better to try these four people first, and only go to Grand Central if none of the four was the man he wanted. But then he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find Grand Central once he’d left this spot, this spot was the only place he knew how to find Grand Central from. So while he still remembered where it was, he got down on his knees on the sidewalk and opened the map up and made a mark with his ballpoint pen where the druggist had said he could find Grand Central. A woman going by looked at him in surprise and then, seeing the map, she smiled.

After he made the mark, Stubbs got to his feet again, put the pen away, folded up the map, and walked back to where he’d parked the car. He sat in it and took out his list of four names, and with the help of the book he found out where each of them lived.

C. Wells lived on Grove Street. That was downtown, in a section called Greenwich Village, which was not separate like Brooklyn but was really a part of Manhattan. It bothered Stubbs that the city had parts, and even the parts had parts. He put the map away and started the car.

He went the wrong way at first, but then he asked directions of a cop giving out parking tickets, and after that he went the right way. When he got to Greenwich Village he had to stop at the curb almost every block and look at the map, but finally he found Grove Street, and even a parking space.

The building he wanted had a narrow foyer with mailboxes and doorbells, and next to one of the doorbells was the name C. Wells. It was kind of a rundown house for a man as rich as Charles F. Wells had seemed, but you never knew if a rich appearance was just front. Stubbs rang the bell, and a buzzer sounded, releasing the door lock.

It was a walk-up. A door was open on the second floor, and a sharp-featured girl in her twenties was standing in the doorway. She had long black hair hanging straight down her back, and she was wearing a flannel shirt and dungarees. Her face looked dirty the way a face looks when you eat too much fried foods. She watched Stubbs coming up the stairs.

Stubbs came up to the top step. “I’m looking for C. Wells.”

“I’m C. Wells,” she said.

“The C. Wells in the phone book?”

“What is this?” she asked. Her voice and face were both getting sharper.

Stubbs persisted. “Are you the C. Wells in the phone book?”

“Yes, I am,” she said, “and what the hell business is it of yours?”

“All right.” He turned around and started back down the stairs.

She came to the head of the stairs, frowning, and looked down. “What the hell do you want, anyway?”

“Nothing,” he said, not looking back. “It isn’t nothing.”

“Hey, just a goddamn second!”

Stubbs went on down the stairs.

“I’m calling the cops!” she shouted, and stormed back into her apartment.

Stubbs went out to the street and back to the car, and looked at his list and the map again. C. F. Wells lived on West 73rd Street, and when he looked at the map he saw that that was a long way uptown. He sighed and started the car. Once he got above 14th Street, the going was easy, because all the streets were numbered, and as long as the numbers kept getting higher he knew he was going the right way.

It was another apartment house, but a better one, bigger and cleaner and not converted from a brownstone dwelling. But it still wasn’t any place where a rich man would live. Stubbs pressed the button beside the name C. F. Wells, and when the buzzer sounded he went into a quiet foyer with a rug. There was an elevator, self-service, and he rode it up to the fourth floor and then knocked on the door of apartment 4-A.

A young man in khaki pans and an undershirt opened the door, and stood there scratching his head. Stubbs had obviously waked him up. “I’m looking for C. F. Wells,” Stubbs said.

“Clara? She’s at work.”

“That’s the C. F. Wells that’s in the phone book?”

“Yeah, it’s in her name, that’s right.” The young man stopped scratching, and yawned. “You from the phone company?”

“No,” said Stubbs. “I’m looking for a person.”

He turned away and went back to the elevator. The young man stood in the doorway, scratching himself here and there, and frowned at the disappearing Stubbs, but he didn’t say anything. Stubbs got into the elevator and went downstairs and back to the car. Both of them were women, so far. Why didn’t they put their whole names in the book?

He looked at his list. One Charles Wells lived on Central Park West, and the other Charles Wells lived on Fort Washington Avenue. Central Park West was closer, and sounded rich, so he tried that first.

There was a doorman at this building, but he didn’t stop Stubbs or ask him any questions. Stubbs got the apartment number from the mailbox and took the elevator up.

A middle-aged woman answered his knock. She looked severe, and when Stubbs asked her if Charles Wells was home she said, “My husband is at work.”

Stubbs thought about that for a minute, while the woman asked him if he was applying for the chauffeur’s job. “Does this Charles Wells have black hair except gray around the ears and real thick eyebrows?”

The woman looked surprised. “My husband is bald.”

“Been bald long?” Stubbs asked.

“For years. What in the world is this all about?”

“I’m looking for a Charles Wells. But he isn’t the right one.”

Fort Washington Avenue was way uptown, up by the George Washington Bridge. Stubbs found a parking space on 181st Street and walked back to the address. It was a walk-up again, and Charles Wells lived on the third floor.

When Stubbs knocked, the door was opened by a young man in his early twenties. He wore tight black slacks and an orange shirt with the tails tied in a knot over his ribcage, leaving his midriff bare. His hair was far too long, waved, and dyed a rich auburn. He struck a pose in the doorway. “Well, look at you!”

“I’m looking for Charles Wells,” Stubbs said.

“Well, you just come right in, dearie.”

“Are you Charles Wells?”

The boy made a kissing motion. “Come on in, dearie, and we’ll talk about it.”

Stubbs frowned. He remembered this kind of boy, there’d been some in the Party. Not many, but some, and Stubbs had never liked them, because he’d thought they’d given the Party a bad name. Not that it mattered in the long run. But he also remembered that there was only one way to get this flighty type to calm down and make sense, so he reached out and thumped the boy gently on the nose.

The boy’s eyes started to water, and his face squinched up, and made a sound like a mouse when the trap hits it, only smaller.

“Are you Charles Wells?”

“My nose,” said the boy.

Stubbs held up his fist. “Yes or no.”

“Yes! Yes! Don’t you dare—”

“All right,” Stubbs said.

He went back downstairs. Four possibilities, and none of them had been the man he wanted, and two and one half of them had been women. He went back to the car and drove to Grand Central Station.

It was impossible to park anywhere around the area, since it was now five-thirty Friday afternoon and the middle of the week’s worst rush hour. Stubbs pushed the Lincoln around in the traffic for a while until he saw a sign that said, “Park.” He turned in at the garage entrance, and got out of the car. A man came up and asked him how long he’d be and Stubbs said just a little while. When the attendant took the car away, Stubbs walked back to Grand Central.

There was a whole rack of phone books, alphabetical and classified. There was Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Nassau County and some other suburbs. Stubbs got out his old envelope and ballpoint pen. He ignored the suburbs and just looked in the books for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

If Charles F. Wells was in New York, he was in New York and not someplace nearby.

When he was done with the three phone books, Stubbs had eleven more possibilities.

5

It took all of Saturday and most of Sunday for Stubbs to find out that none of these eleven was the right Charles F. Wells either. He had found a hotel on the west side of Manhattan that looked close enough to the one in Newark to be its twin, and when he got back to his room from the Bronx late Sunday afternoon he didn’t know what he was going to do next. He sat on the bed, because there wasn’t any chair, and smoked cigarette after cigarette and tried to think.

Charles F. Wells lived in New York. But he wasn’t in any of the New York phone books. Did that mean he wasn’t in New York after all? Or merely that he didn’t have a telephone? Or that he had an unlisted number?

If he lived in New York that was supposed to mean that he lived in New York. So the thing to do was to figure that he either had no phone at all or a phone with an unlisted number. And since he was a rich man, then he had a phone with an unlisted number.

Stubbs put out his cigarette and immediately started a new one. All right. This Wells, the one Stubbs wanted, had an unlisted telephone number. That meant Stubbs couldn’t find him in the phone book, which meant that Stubbs would have to find him some other way.

Thinking, struggling for an answer, Stubbs remembered the old days when sometimes a situation like this would come up. You’d go into a city and there was a man you were looking for and you had to find; he was with you or against you or you needed him one way or another. But then there had been the Party, and the local contacts. Always the local contacts, either Party people or sympathizers, and you could go to them and tell the problem to them. They knew the local situation, they had an in here or an in there, and they could find your man for you. But now there wasn’t any Party any more. And anyway this situation didn’t have anything to do with the Party. Stubbs rubbed his head and remembered the days in the Party, the good times when thoughts slid through his head like they were on wheels, when he knew the questions and the answers. He didn’t know now what he thought of the Party, whether he thought what had happened to him had been worth it or not, because he never really thought of the Party at all but only of people. He remembered faces from that time, and frozen moments of import in strikes, like the moment when the deputy had driven his car over the little girl. That had been good because it had solidified the workers and made the strike as hard as steel, until some damn fool had killed a foreman over a personal grudge, and then predictably the workers had become afraid and the strike had fizzled out.

It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all.

Charles F. Wells. He brought himself back from remembering, angry at himself for losing the straight line again even for just a minute. He had to find Charles F. Wells. Not with the Party, because that was a dead thing now, but by himself.

Except he didn’t know what to do next.

Wells was in New York, that much he knew. How did he know it? Because May told him. How did May know it? Because Wells had talked with her and with the doctor and with the two nurses, and Wells had said that after the bandages came off he was going to go live in New York.

Buy a house in New York.

Stubbs squinted up his face, and stared at the pattern on the bedspread. Was that what May had said? Charles F. Wells was going to go live in New York, go there and buy a house, and he already had a couple of real estate agents looking around for him. That’s what Charles F. Wells had said, and that’s what May had told Stubbs, and Stubbs had forgotten all of it except the part about New York.

The two weeks in the darkness at the farmhouse had made him forget a lot of things, and this important thing about buying a house was one that he’d forgotten. He thought now of the apartments he’d been to, apartment buildings all over New York, and all that time wasted. One of the people he’d gone to in Brooklyn had lived in a house, and two of the people in Queens, but none of them had lived in the kind of house a rich man would live in. Where in New York would there be the kind of house a rich man would buy and live in?

Then he thought of the suburbs. If a rich man was going to buy a house somewhere right near New York, would he say he was going to New York to buy a house? Yes, he would. And if a man wanted to be handy to New York but also wanted privacy the way Charles F. Wells wanted privacy, would he most likely try to live outside the city limits? Yes, he would.

Stubbs was relieved. He’d thought it out by himself, he’d made his brain go to work after all and remember important things and make important decisions. He put out his latest cigarette and got off the bed, smiling, and left the hotel and walked across town to Grand Central again.

There was a phone book for Nassau County, and the map in the front of the phone book showed that Nassau County was on Long Island, just beyond Brooklyn and Queens. And in the W section there was a listing for “Wells, Chas. F.” Stubbs knew it was the man. He knew without a doubt that this time he’d found the right man. He copied the address and phone number down, and closed the phone book.

Walking across the terminal, he looked ahead and saw Parker. He stopped in his tracks, not believing it, and then other people got in the way and he wasn’t really sure it had been Parker he’d seen. Maybe his brain was playing tricks on him. Nevertheless, he turned around and went off in another direction.

6

At Huntington, twenty miles from the city line, Stubbs stopped and asked directions again. He asked in a bar, because there’d be more people there to work out the right answer among them, and they all cooperated, the way he’d expected, contradicting each other and suggesting alternate routes and finally hammering out a course for him to follow. He thanked them and finished the beer he’d bought just as a token, and went back out to the car.

He followed the directions.

He stayed on 25A through Huntington and out the other side and kept going till he saw the Huntington Crescent Golf Course. After that, he made the left where they’d told him, and two hours later he was on Reardon Road, near the Sound, though he couldn’t see any water. He stayed on Reardon Road, a winding blacktop road with trees surrounding it on either side and occasional breaks where a narrower winding blacktop road went off to one side or the other. At each break he slowed down, till at last he saw what he wanted. There was a rural delivery mailbox on a wooden post by the road, with stone gatepillars behind it and the usual narrow winding blacktop road going in among the trees. This time on the mailbox it said, “Charles F. Wells.”

Stubbs turned the Lincoln slowly and drove through the stone gateposts. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and reached out and removed the automatic from the glove compartment. He put it on the seat, where he could reach it fast.

The blacktop road was barely two car-widths, and it wandered and curved back and forth amid the trees. They were thin-trunked trees, young, with the branches starting high up and with not too much underbrush between them. Stubbs rolled along in the Lincoln at a bare ten miles an hour, peering ahead around the curves to see the house, and when he saw it he hit the brake and stopped.

It was stone, and old. Stubbs could just barely see it ahead and to the right, through the tree trunks. He backed up just a little, till the house was out of sight, and then he turned the engine off. There was no place to pull off the road, so he just left the car where it was and climbed out.

It was nearly evening, seven-thirty or so, and the spaces between the trees were getting dimmer. Stubbs moved away from the car and the road, going in among the trees, moving at an angle toward the house. Soon he could see it again, and then he crouched and moved more slowly.

The house was big, two stories high and rambling. There was a screen-enclosed wooden porch around the first floor and the rest was stone. To the right of the house, the blacktop road ended at a three-car garage, stone like the house and with white doors.

A slate walk joined a small side door in the garage and the side of the house, with an arched roof over the walk, supported by rough unpainted wooden posts. The garage had a second story, with windows in it, but they were dark, without curtains or shades. In the house, two windows on the ground floor showed light, and so did one window upstairs.

Stubbs crept forward toward the house until he came to the edge of the trees, where the blacktop widened in front of the house before coming to a stop at the garage. He could try to cross the bare blacktopped area here, or he could go to the right through the trees and around the garage, to come at the house from the back. That would probably be better.

He remembered how easily Parker and the other one had turned the tables on him, and he didn’t want it to happen again. If Wells wasn’t the one and it was Courtney, it wouldn’t be too bad; but if Wells was the one and he turned the tables on Stubbs it would be the end.

He made his decision, and started to the right. He’d taken two steps when a voice behind him said, “That’s far enough.”

He stopped. In that second, he cursed himself, cursed the brain that had gone rotten and prevented him from doing what he had to do, that made him such a feeble hunter and such easy prey.

“Drop the gun,” said the voice, “and turn slowly around.”

There was nothing else to do. He hoped it was Courtney, and that Wells was in the clear. He dropped the gun and turned around, and saw Wells standing at the edge of the blacktop. The man had been in among the trees even before Stubbs had got there, and had followed him when he left the car. It was still getting darker, but not dark enough to prevent a good shot, and in the hand not holding the gun Wells carried a flashlight.

Wells looked at him, frowning, and then smiled. “The chauffeur,” he said. “I’d forgotten about you.”

Stubbs licked his lips, wanting to ask the question but afraid it had already been answered.

“You shouldn’t have phoned,” Wells went on. “That put me on my guard, you know.”

Stubbs shook his head, and was about to say he hadn’t phoned, but just then Wells shot him. Something heavy, feeling much larger than a bullet, hit him in the chest, knocking him backwards. His mouth was still open. He still wanted to tell Wells that a mistake had been made, that he hadn’t phoned, but he couldn’t manage to exhale. No air came out, he couldn’t make a sound.

He felt himself falling. It was getting darker much more rapidly all of a sudden. Then he saw Wells’ face, and Wells was looking past him, at something behind him. There was on Wells face an expression of astonishment and terror. Stubbs, falling forward toward the blacktop and the spreading blackness, wondered dully why Wells looked so astonished and so terrified.

But he never found out.