Vanishing Act

8

Jane pretended to look down into her leather bag, but her eyes slipped to the side to confirm that Jake Reinert was where she had thought he would be, in his corner window.

"Where am I supposed to drive?" Felker asked.

"Go north along River Road while we talk."

"All right."

"While I was packing I noticed that you had searched my room. You went through the papers in my desk. Why?"

"I wanted to be sure that you were the woman Harry said you were. Even if you were, people move."

"What did you find?"

"You have some credit cards that aren’t in your name. Finding your bills was a big relief." He watched her closely for a moment, and she seemed satisfied. He asked, "Where are we going?"

"We’re going to change cars."

"Before we start?"

"This is a rented car. If somebody saw the company name on it already, then they’re not looking for one out of sixty million cars anymore, it’s one out of ten thousand or so. Say ten percent have New York plates. Now it’s down to one thousand. Half are this model? Five hundred. Half are this color? Two-fifty. If they have the company’s records, they’ll know where it gets turned in."

He drove in silence a couple of blocks west before he reached the river. It looked big and dark in the early evening. Across the channel, the shore of Grand Island was dark except for the bright grid of windows on a hotel. He turned right and followed the road. "Do you really think they could get the car company’s records? It used to take us a couple of days to do that, and we needed a court order."

"If they can get into your company’s records, why not any company?"

"Yeah," he said glumly. "Why not?"

"I’m not trying to ruin your morale. I’m just being as careful as I can. We don’t know who they are or why they did it to you. But we do know they probably got, or are getting, a lot of money, and they think if you die, they can keep it. So they’ll spend as much as they have to."

Felker sighed. Then he seemed to remember something. He turned toward her. "Money," he said. "It’s funny how when your life is in danger you stop thinking about it. What do you charge for this? What’s your fee?"

She looked out the side window and watched the familiar buildings going by: the pizza parlor where she and her friends used to spend about half their evenings. It was Jimmy Connolly’s skinny ankles that had made her fall in love with him. She could see them now, but somehow she had lost the ability to bring back why they had seemed so attractive. A few doors down was the big old movie house that was called the Berliner until the First World War and the Tivoli for sixty years after that. It had closed twenty years ago and been broken up into little stores. The upper stories of the building still had the elaborate scrollwork because it was carved in the stone, and she could still remember the smell of ancient popcorn and the feel of the worn velvet seats. They used to show Tarzan movies on Saturdays for a quarter, so children had watched them without complaint. She had sensed that it was always a big moment when Jane got wet, but at the time the significance was lost on her. "I don’t have a fee," she said. "Sometimes people send me presents."

"You mean you live off presents?"

"I didn’t say they were small presents." She smiled slyly.

He frowned. "Just give me some idea. I want to be fair."

He was such a ... man. Things had to be decided, nailed down and certified. He probably wanted to have each of them say it and then shake on it, give her hand one of those single, hard shakes. She turned toward him and said, "Okay, I’ll tell you how it’s going to work. When this is over, you’re going to sleep for a day or so, and then you’ll take a week or two getting used to a new place, and then a month getting used to being somebody different. One day—maybe then, maybe a year from then—you’ll sit down and think about how it happened, and you’ll send me a present."

She let him think about that, and stared past him at the river. The road was good and fast, through the quiet old towns that had grown up along the Niagara in the 1790s, after the Revolutionary War. From the beginning of time, all of this land had been a place where people lived. As a little girl she had walked along the river and found arrowheads, and they were still finding them, three hundred years after the metal brought in by the fur trade had replaced them.

As they crossed city lines, a stranger like Felker probably didn’t even know he wasn’t in Deganawida anymore, because the distinctions between these little towns were subtle and had to do with things that had happened through time. They weren’t boundaries, they were stories.

As they passed the long grassy strip on the way out of North Tonawanda and the brush began again, she caught herself watching for the marker along the river, where the river widened and she could see past the tip of Grand Island. The marker was old, almost invisible thirty feet from the road in the grove of trees that had grown up around it, so she tried to look fast, but it was too dark to spot it. That didn’t matter, because what was worth looking at was something that couldn’t be seen with the eyes anymore.

On this spot one summer in the 1670s the Frenchman La Salle had built the Griffon, the first ship to sail the Great Lakes. It must have looked strange to the Seneca staring at it from the dense forest beyond the stumps of the trees the Frenchmen had cut for lumber. The keel and ribs of the half-finished hull would have loomed just at the shore like the skeleton of an enormous fish, and the Seneca, who were still invincible in this part of the world, must have been more curious than threatened.

Beyond the town named after La Salle, the road grew into a parkway that took them past the congestion that had grown up around the Falls. Hennepin, the Jesuit priest on La Salle’s expedition, had been the first white man to blunder out of the woods and lay eyes on them, so people remembered his name. That had always struck her as funny. Here were these falls, well over a half mile wide and 180 feet high, so loud you could barely hear anything else and throwing big clouds of mist far into the sky that you could see for miles. In the 1670s every Indian from Minnesota to the Atlantic knew all about them, because they were the only serious interruption in the ancient trade routes. And those were the days when gods still had addresses. Heno the Thunderer lived in a cave right behind that wall of water.

As they continued on up the parkway, she glanced at Felker again. He was doing pretty well, considering the fact that his whole life had been destroyed in a couple of days and he had been on the run ever since. There was no whining, no questions she couldn’t answer. She supposed that if he had lasted eight years as a cop, the least he could be was tough. She had felt a little alarm when she had seen that he had searched her room, but he was a cop and that was the way cops were trained to find out who they were dealing with. And he had, at least once, been in the position she was in. He had seen a harmless little guy like Harry, with enemies closing in on him, and he had thought about it and decided to save him. She would do her best for him.

She tried to prepare herself. This was one of the hard ones, and she was tired. It was one thing when two social workers were at a convention and they were sitting at a bar in a city strange to both of them and confiding in each other, and one of them said she had a case that was horrible and the system just couldn’t be made to work, and the other one looked down into the bottom of her glass and said, "I know a woman..." But it had long ago grown into something else. She had been out six times in the past year. She forced herself to forget what had gone before. She needed to keep thinking ahead.

She could see they were only a couple of miles from Ridge Road, where the Tuscarora Reservation started. She looked at the signs, watching for the garage, built outside the border of the reservation so people couldn’t watch its proprietor too closely. Finally, she saw it and said, "Pull in up here, away from the gas pumps." Felker drove the car up onto the cracked blacktop and kept the engine running.

"Want me to fill the tank?" he asked.

"No," she said. "Just wait for me." Jane walked to the little lighted building beside the garage and went inside, away from the sounds of the cars flashing by on the road.

The man sitting on the stool behind the counter was watching a small television set next to the cash register. He smiled when he looked up to acknowledge that he had seen her, and his eyes returned to the television set. He said to it, "Hi, Janie."

"Hello, Cliff," she answered. "Nice night."

"You come to watch the game with me?" Clifford Tarkington smiled his special smile, and his broad Tuscarora face seemed to widen and his dark eyes narrowed, but his mouth didn’t move. "Big night. The Indians are playing the Yankees."

The Tuscarora all had names like Wallace or Clifford or Clinton, just the way the Seneca did. The Seneca had never given children the names of Christian saints. The Mohawk at Caughnawaga, on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence, had been called the Praying Indians. There had never been any praying Seneca, and if there had been any praying Tuscarora, they would have gotten cured of it in 1712. That was the year when a Swiss mercenary had led an army of South Carolina colonists and enemy tribes to take their homeland in North Carolina. The winners had feasted on the body of a dead Tuscarora and then sold their prisoners at the slave markets. The survivors had been taken in by the Seneca and given the village of Ga-a-noga to live in.

"I came to relieve you of one of those old junkers you keep around here," said Jane. "I can see you need the space."

"I might be able to part with something elegant yet understated," said Clifford. "What kind?"

"Mid-size," she said. "Nothing eye-catching, not just out of the box."

"But not too old either?" he guessed. "I got a ’ninety-two Ford. Cherry, runs good, low miles."

"What color? I don’t want one of those cars put together in the Ford plant in Hamilton with Canadian two-tone colors on it so everybody thinks I just came out of the woods."

"Pearl-gray. Hell, they’re all gray now, or white. Five a week if it comes back the same color."

Two years ago, she had been taking a twelve-year-old boy out of Ohio where two sets of cousins who had let him stay in foster homes all his life had learned he had an inheritance coming. They had put a description of the car on television. She had run the car through a one-hour painting shop and had them put the two-hundred-dollar special on it. Clifford had sometimes thought to mention it during subsequent negotiations.

"Five hundred?" she exclaimed. "You misunderstood. I don’t want to own it. How about two hundred?"

"Four-fifty," he muttered at the television. "It’s a T-bird. It’s loaded."

"Two and a half, and I won’t play with the power seats."

"Hasn’t got them."

"And you said it was loaded?"

"Three-fifty, and I throw in a full tank."

"It’s already on full if it’s sitting back there. You’re afraid it’ll get water vapor in the tank. Three hundred, and I’ll forget about what you owe me for the paint job on the other one."

"Three twenty-five and I’ll take back the rental you got parked out there."

"Done," she said, and handed him a check she had already written.

He looked at the amount and said, "It’s always an education to do business with you, Janie."

"Yeah," she said. "Except I always pay the tuition."

He handed her a ring with two keys on it. "Later, Janie."

"Later," she said, and walked out onto the pavement. She kept going around to the back of the building and found the car sitting on the cracked cement foundation of an old, vanished building that Cliff used as a parking lot. The Ford wasn’t bad to begin with, and when she started it she could hear and feel that he must have just tuned the engine. She let it idle and walked back around to find Felker standing beside the rented car, leaning on the door.

As they got in, she said quietly, "It’s better at this stage of the trip not to stand around under a light unless you have to."

"Why? Did you see somebody?" He checked his impulse to whirl and look behind him.

"I don’t know," she said. "At least fifty cars have gone by here since we stopped, but I don’t know who I’m looking for. They do."

She drove around to the back of the building, where the other car sat running. "Pull that one out so I can put this one in its place."

He got in behind the wheel of the Ford and pulled it out, waited for Jane to stop, and lifted their two bags out of her car, then opened the door of the Ford to set them in.

Jane said, "It’s cash, isn’t it?"

He shrugged. "Well, yeah. I didn’t think I’d be in a position to cash a check or something."

"Put it in the trunk. It won’t be any safer two feet closer to you on the back seat."

He opened the trunk and put the two bags inside, then started to close it, but hesitated. "I don’t want to keep guessing wrong. Is it all right to keep the gun up front with us?"

She was at the rear of the rented car, opening the trunk. She said, "It’s fine with me. Keep the trunk open." When she slammed the trunk and came around to the new car, she was carrying a backpack and a short-barreled shotgun. She put them in beside the bags.

"You still want me to drive?" he asked.

"If you don’t mind. People always take a second look if the woman is driving. It looks like the man is drunk or something." She set the keys on the hood of the rented car and got in beside Felker.

"Drive straight north again. When you come to the intersection with Ridge Road, take a right."

He bumped the car slowly around Clifford’s building and glanced past it to gauge the speed and distance of the next set of headlights coming toward them. She saw that his eyes focused on her for a second before he stepped on the gas.

"What’s wrong?" she said.

"It’s typical Harry. He didn’t bother to tell me what you looked like."

"Why? What do I look like?"

He shrugged. "Well, you don’t look like a bodyguard."

She regretted having asked that way, as though she wanted him to tell her she was pretty. She regretted saying anything at all. She should have ignored it. She hadn’t been given enough time to prepare for that too, the special strain of traveling with a man who wasn’t too old and wasn’t too young and had gotten used to the fact that most of the attention he had given women was welcome. She had to keep him thinking in another way, so she pretended to misunderstand, as though the whole idea had never entered her head. "That’s the way it’s done," she said. "You’ve got to get used to thinking one way and looking another way. Turn right at that light up there."

He made the turn and accelerated onto the eastbound highway. Then he looked at her again. "It’s a beautiful disguise." He seemed to realize he had gone too far. "Very smart."

"Yours has got to be better. It has to come from inside your head. When was the last time you were afraid for your life?"

"That’s easy," he said. "When I was a cop."

"Cops are dogs. Try to think in rabbit."

"What?"

She said it carefully, so he would understand. ’’This is like dogs chasing a rabbit. When the rabbit wins, he doesn’t get to kill the dogs and eat them. He doesn’t get to be a dog. He just gets to keep being a rabbit."

He opened his shirt and held out the pistol. "You mean rabbits don’t need one of these."

"It’s an asset if you think of it as a last resort. Just don’t imagine that a shoot-out with the people who are looking for us is going to help you. Once anybody has discharged a firearm, sooner or later everybody left standing has to talk to the police."

"And we can’t talk to the police."

"A few days in a jail cell won’t hurt me. I’ve done it before. But if these people are any of the things you think they are, then you can’t." She paused for a moment, then said, "Or any of the people you haven’t thought of yet."

"What people?"

"I don’t know."

"Why aren’t you saying it straight out? What is it?"

"Whoever it is wants you killed in jail before a trial. Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it?"

He answered too quickly: "No."

"So you have thought of it."

"I’ve thought of everything. I’ve heard those stories too, but not from anybody who would know. And not in St. Louis."

"The contract on you is being circulated in prisons. Money doesn’t do a lifer much good. Other things do."

"It’s not cops."

"Nobody seems to be afraid that a prisoner who hears about it will take it to the authorities. It does make you wonder."

He was irritated now. "I wasn’t a dirty cop who knew things about other dirty cops. I did my job until the day I quit, and when I left, as far as I know, everybody else did his job too." He simmered for a few minutes while she waited in silence. Then he said quietly, "I’m sorry. I just... my life just kind of blew up. It’s taken a few days to get used to the idea that the last five years, when I was an accountant, were a waste. I was probably just being set up. I’m ready to give up everything I ever was, but I’m not ready to decide that everything I’ve ever done was worthless. Does that make sense?"

"Of course it does," she said. She had gone as far as she could for the moment. Some of the rabbits took to it instantly because they had been hiding and ducking all of their lives. Some took longer.

As they drove along Ridge Road, the dense thickets of bright electric lights along the river faded and threw no illumination in front of them. Ridge Road had been laid out on the northern branch of the Waagwenneyu, the great central trail of the Iroquois that ran from the Hudson to the Niagara. The north branch had been placed just below Lake Ontario on the long, flat escarpment that was the prehistoric edge of the lake.

As she looked out into the darkness past the little pool of light that the headlamps threw, she could feel the Waagwenneyu under them, just below the pavement. In the dark, the road sliced through the middle of the property of some rich guy who thought of himself as a country gentleman. Her view was blocked by a dense second-growth of trees that the owner’s farmer ancestor must have left there to protect his crops from the wind. The thick trunks presented themselves one after the other and swept by, and the overarching branches fifty feet above nearly touched each other in the middle, and looking up at them put Jane a few inches lower, below the pavement on the Waagwenneyu. The path was mostly straight, winding here and there to avoid a thick tree or a muddy depression. It was narrow, only eighteen inches wide, but deep—sometimes worn a foot below the surface by hundreds of years of moccasins. This was the branch of the trail that took the Seneca from the Genesee valley and the Finger Lakes northwest into Canada. The other branch was now Main Street in Buffalo, and it ran to the shore of Lake Erie and continued along it into Ohio and beyond. Those were the paths to war.

In the direction they were traveling now, it was the trail home, to the soft, rolling country where the Seneca felt most safe. The world then was all tall forests that had never been cut, oak and maple and elm and hickory and hemlock and pine, alternating in stands and mixed together. Sometimes runners would move along this trail eastward to tell something urgent—alarms or councils. They ran day and night, naked except for a breech-cloth and belt, their war clubs stuck in the belt at the back and their bows strung across their chests. They always ran in pairs, one behind the other, silent, never speaking. They could cover a hundred miles a day, so the trip from Neahga, the mouth of the Niagara, to Albany, in the country of the Mohawk, took three days. In all that distance there was no point where the trail emerged from the forest. It was marked at intervals by hatchet gouges on the biggest trees, but the runners didn’t need to look. Sometimes they would glance up and to the left to navigate by the constellation of the loon, but most of the time they could feel the trail with the balls of their feet.

When the trees had thinned out again, Jane replaced them with ghost trees beyond the range of the headlights, so that what was beyond eyesight could be the great forest again, deep and thick and shadowy. The secret was that the forest was still here, the descendants standing tall in parks and groves and windbreaks. The Seneca were still here too, driving this road to jobs in Lockport or Niagara Falls, dreaming Seneca dreams.

There was a disturbance coming from outside her, a light that rushed up from behind and pushed the forest back on both sides, where she couldn’t feel it around her anymore. She sat up. "How long has that car been behind us?" she asked.

"I don’t know," said Felker. "He just switched his brights on."

"Think for a second," she said. "Was it there when we made the turn?" She knew the answer. It wouldn’t have been so dark if the other car had been behind them. It must be all right. They hadn’t been followed.

"I don’t think so," he said.

The car came closer and closer, catching up quickly, but the driver didn’t dim his lights. Felker reached up and moved the rearview mirror to cut the glare of the rectangle of light that it threw across his eyes.

"There’s a long, straight stretch in a minute," said Jane. "When we get there, let him pass."

"I’d be delighted." He reached the section where the road straightened. On both sides were low, crooked fieldstone walls and houses built far back from the road, as houses had been when these were still farms. Felker slowed to forty, then thirty, but the car slowed too and stayed behind. Finally, he coasted off onto the shoulder and the car came up behind. When he had nearly stopped, the other car pulled to the left, its glaring headlights merging now with his to illuminate the slight decline ahead and then halfway up the compensating slope. The car slowly slid past and gained speed.

Jane stared at the back window while it was still in the beam of the headlights. There were four heads in it. That usually meant it was kids, probably farm kids who had spent the day in the city. Her eyes moved downward. It had New York plates, and that was a relief. But there was a license-plate holder around it with the name of a dealer.

"Does Star-Greendale mean anything to you?" she asked.

"Where did you see that?"

"People from around here buy their cars around here. I never heard of it."

"St. Louis," he said, frowning. "Greendale is a town outside St. Louis. But it’s not Star, it’s Starleson Chevrolet."

"Stop," she said. "Leave the lights on, but give me the keys. Somebody saw you get on the bus in St. Louis."

She slipped out and closed the door, then ran to the trunk. She pulled everything out and tossed it into the back seat, then climbed over it. He watched her in the back seat as she opened the backpack. "What are you doing?"

"The car has New York plates. They must have damaged them prying them off somebody else’s, so they left their holder on to cover it." She was busy pushing shells into the long tubular magazine of the shotgun. "They’re waiting for us up there somewhere. If we go back the way we came, we’re a half hour from anywhere crowded enough to lose them."

He checked the load of his pistol and then snapped the cylinder back into place. "There’s a box of ammo in my suitcase," he said. "I’d like to have that where I can reach it before we go ahead."

"We’re not going ahead. We’re not dogs, remember?"

"What, then?"

"Take the backpack. Put your money in it, or whatever else you think is worth saving. Don’t leave anything here that will tell who you are—I mean tell anybody, even the police. Wipe off everything you touched."

"We’re going to walk?"

She didn’t answer, so he quickly did what she had told him to. The money wouldn’t all fit in the knapsack, so he put some of it in his pockets. Jane put her leather bag over her shoulder and held her shotgun in her right hand. "Time to go," she said, and walked across the road. She swung her legs over the stone fence and into the empty cornfield beside it, then stood still as he hurried to catch up.

"All right," she said. "Walk only on the trenches between the rows. That’s the way the farmers do it because the corn is planted in the raised places."

"You care about their corn?"

"No, I care about leaving footprints you can see with a flashlight."

She started off across the cornfield, taking two rows at a step, and Felker followed. She could hear him coming along behind her, and it made her comfortable, because if he had stepped on the soft ridges of dirt, it would have been silent. Now and then he stopped to glance up the highway, and that put him behind, but she didn’t care. He was tall and strong, and he wouldn’t have any trouble keeping up.

She angled away from the barnyard, where there would be animals to smell them and bring the farmer out. When they reached the windbreak of trees at the north end of the field, she stopped and touched Felker. He leaned down and she put her lips to his ear. "We’ll watch from here."

She set down her bag and sat on it, leaning against a tree trunk, the shotgun butt on the ground and the barrel upward. Felker slipped the backpack off his shoulders and sat by the next tree. It took five minutes. The Chevrolet’s headlights came over the horizon, aimed first up into the sky and then dipping at the crest of the hill. The car was moving fast, at least seventy, judging from the way it gobbled up the space between the telephone poles.

When the driver saw the car parked by the side of the road, he slowed down. There were no heads visible in the borrowed Ford, so the driver had a decision to make. The Chevrolet veered to the center of the road and passed the parked car at about the speed of a walking man. It proceeded a hundred yards farther, and then its lights went out before it stopped. The doors opened and three of the four men got out and started to walk back along the road.

Jane didn’t see the dome light go on, and she didn’t hear any door slam. None of this was reassuring. The one in the car left the lights off and kept going down the road, then stopped and turned around. It was too far from the parked car for Jane and Felker to have heard it if they were hiding on the floor. The three men on foot spread out when they were still a hundred feet behind the parked car. Two of them went into the fields behind the stone fences on either side of the road, and all three slowly approached the car. When one was in front of it and one on each side, they stopped, pulled guns out of their coats, and aimed them at the Ford.

Felker leaned close to Jane’s ear and whispered, "If we’re going, shouldn’t we get started?"

She shook her head. "I want to see one more thing."

The Chevrolet began to move slowly up the road toward the parked car, its lights still off. When it was almost bumper to bumper with the Ford, it suddenly shot forward and rammed the back bumper to knock whoever was inside out of their crouch. The man on the road flung the back door open and aimed his gun. After a second he slammed the door in frustration, and the light went out before he turned his head.

"Now," Jane said. She turned and crawled a few feet deeper into the windbreak and then stood up.