Fiddle Game (10 page)

The frown changed to a look of open admiration. “In the bar,” she said. “Two hours, tops. You can pretend you’re picking me up.”

“I did that once. I think it was a mistake.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek which I had to admit was rather nice. The techie-type stared in obvious envy and possible astonishment.

“Show me about this e-mess business,” I said.

He showed me, and also set me up with a “handle” for the chat sites, in case I felt chatty. I decided to be “Gypsy,” but that turned out to be taken already. So was “Hermes,” with or without an apostrophe. After several other tries, I settled for being “Numbersman.” As if that weren’t enough of an ordeal, I also needed an eight-digit or longer password. I picked MI5KGBCIA. If you’re going to play at cloak-and-dagger, you might as well go all the way. Besides, I thought I could remember it.

“Can I get messages here after I leave?”

The techie gave me a funny look. “How can you get anything here after you leave, man? That’s like spooky. And you said
I
asked trick questions?”

“What I mean is, if I come back here tomorrow and buy some more time, will I be able to get any messages that came in the meantime?”

“Oh, like that. Well, of course. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Anything else?”

“Show me where there’s an outside public phone.”

“What do you want a phone for, if you’ve got e-messaging?”

“I’m a renaissance man.”

“Wow, I don’t know that one, either. Is that a Microsoft program?”

***

I took the number off a pay phone at the end of the parking lot, in front of a bagel store, and then came back and sat down at the computer. I emailed Agnes first, remembering to add the cute little red envelope that seemed to be the key to all things urgent in her world. My return address, of course, was out of my control, but I could type in a subject title that she would see before she opened the message. I used “Detroit refugee calls home,” and typed in the following message:

I added the number from the pay phone and clicked the mouse on the phony picture of a SEND button. The “collateral” business, of course, referred to the possibility that somebody was looking over Agnes’ shoulder when she opened my message, and the pay phone number was therefore compromised. If that happened, I was giving myself a couple hours to set up an alternate one and/or get the hell out of there, since we both knew that Agnes really got into the office at 6:00, not 8:00. Pretty clever, us spooks.

I thought about what to say in the reply to the message about the violin, but I really needed to see it again first. Like Agnes, I don’t do video games or surf the web, and I was wondering what to do with the rest of my time on the terminal, when to my wondering eyes a message from Agnes appeared, complete with cute little red envelope. She was working late, apparently. I wondered why.

I decided not to tell her that her advice about loose women was a bit late. I typed in a quick thank you and attaboy note and no sooner had it sent than the forwarded message popped up on my screen, again with the red envelope. Agnes really liked those red envelopes.

Can we talk, indeed. I decided to cut right to the chase.

That was putting it mildly. If Jimmy Cox skipped out on his next court appearance, it was mine, no question about it. But if he showed up and my bond was released, I was legally obliged to return the violin to a person who was no longer alive. And there was no use asking if she had a will, because she might not have been the real Amy Cox, if there even was a real Amy Cox. Jimmy Cox was supposed to have said he had no sister, but I only knew this from a phony cop who might also sometimes be a phony Jimmy Cox and who might or might not be the person who was arrested for careless Ludding. So whom did it revert to? The guy writing the email? The kid in jail, as I was sure he would be? I decided not to make any promises I might regret.

Once again, I had nothing to do but wait for a reply that I wasn’t likely to get very soon. I thought about what I had just sent to the mysterious person with the instrument-owning family and also about something my Uncle Fred had said to me back at Redrock. Suddenly, I felt an irresistible urge to get to a phone. I called over to my friendly clerk-technician.

“I have to go make a call, okay?”

“You’ve got time left on the machine.”

“That’s why I’m telling you. I want it back.”

“Oh, I get it. I won’t let anybody else use it until you come back. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s it.” Maybe it has nothing to do with being a dinosaur.

I walked down the strip to a Snyder drug store and bought a phone card, then headed over to the booth by the bagel shop. Agnes tells me at least once a day that I ought to get a cell phone, of course. Since I don’t want to hurt her feelings, I mostly pretend I don’t hear her. The truth is, I would rather die than have one of those damned electronic leashes stuck on my ear like an alien parasite. That probably makes me some kind of techno-curmudgeon, and if I think about it, I might even like that title. In any case, I headed for the booth.

We must not have been very far into the Chicago metro area yet, because the phone was intact and working. I punched in a number I knew by heart.

Nickel Pete closes his pawn shop for the day anywhere from five to eleven, as the spirit moves him and depending on whether he’s made any money yet. But he lives in an apartment above the place, and that’s where I called him, letting the phone ring a dozen times before he finally picked up. I said hello, and he recognized my voice, which I found touching.

“You’re a lot of damn trouble for the amount of business you bring me, Herman.”

“It’s nice to talk to you, too, Pete.”

“Of course it’s nice. That’s because I’m not dragging you out of bed in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not exactly the middle of the night, for most people. Were you really in bed?”

“Would you believe with a hot little redhead who’s trying to persuade me to give back her heirloom wedding rings?”

“No.”

“No. Well, it was worth a try. With a bowl of popcorn and a dirty video, then. What the hell do you want?”

“You know the Amati violin I left with you?”

“Is this a memory test? Of course I know it. What do you want me to do with it?”

“I don’t want you to do anything with it. Just go see if it’s still there.”

“Believe me, it’s there. Fort Knox would kill for the alarm systems I got. If I was broke into, I’d know it.”

“Would you take a look, as a favor? And take a flashlight with you. Shine it in the f-holes, see if there’s a label.”

“Now he not only wants a favor, he wants to tell me my business.”

“Indulge me, will you? I’ll owe you one.”

“Damn right you will. You want to hold on, or should I call you back?”

“I’ll hold.” A lot of my profession consists of nothing more than waiting for a phone to ring, but I didn’t seem to be wired for it just then. I waited through dim background noises of grunts and coughs, doors opening and slamming, and a soundtrack that really might have been from a dirty movie, at that. That, or Pete had a very large cat with serious hairball problems.

He was gone a long time, and I spent it looking around at the parking lot, memorizing the ways in and out and the possible places from which the booth could be watched. It wasn’t a bad setup, for a random pick. Easy to spot somebody in the booth, but not so easy to trap him there. I wondered if the bagel shop had a back door. I would find out before I left. I also wondered if they had filet mignon with mushroom caps and bordelaise sauce. The pizza rolls were starting to feel a bit inadequate for the demands of the night.

Finally I heard the clunking sounds of the receiver being bounced off the floor and picked up again, and Pete’s wheezing breath.

“I can’t figure it out, Herman.”

I felt a knot begin to form in my stomach. “What?”

“I swear, nobody’s ever pulled anything like this on me before. And mind you, they’ve tried.”

“Will you please just spit it out? Is the violin there or isn’t it?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, that certainly clears it all up. Sort of. Are you having a senility attack, or are you capable of explaining that to me?” The knot in my stomach somehow got tighter and turned to ice, all at the same time.

“The case is there. The same case we both saw. I’m sure of it. And there’s an old violin in it.”

“But.”

“But when I looked in the f-hole, like you told me?”

“You have to be coaxed for every damn word, don’t you? What did you see, termites?”

“I saw a label that says Yamaha.”

Pigeon drop.

Chapter Ten

You’ve Got Mail

I checked out the rear exit of the bagel shop, pretending to be looking for the restroom. I bought half a dozen bagels first, on the theory that regular customers are less likely to be remembered clearly than sneaky-looking idiots who just wander in and look for the back door. Behind the place was a wide gravel service drive and then a steep berm covered with untended weeds and brush. A chain link fence about half way up would be climbable, but a car couldn’t get through it without major damage to itself.

I hiked up as far as the fence and looked over the ridge. Beyond it were several train tracks and then a clutter of warehouses and freight yards. There was an opening in the fence, opposite the end of the mall buildings, overgrown and hard to see from below. I went through it and up to the top, for a better look. In the black sky above, a big airliner suddenly switched on its landing lights and came screaming straight at me, like a fighter jet on a strafing run, only nose-high and with all its flaps and wheels hanging out. It passed over my head in a metallic storm of noise and flashing lights and then was suddenly gone, eager to flatten its tires on the tarmac at Midway or O’Hare.

A thousand yards farther ahead of me, a freeway passed by on elevated pylons, the lights of the cars giving an eerie internal illumination to a linear cloud of exhaust and aerated road grime. Service ladders went up some of the pylons, and twisted paths went away into dark places. All around, a thoroughly nasty landscape. It had complexity, distraction, and chaos. If I had to run, this would be the place to go.

I went back down the hill and walked around the outside of the bagel shop and back towards the main shopping center. The strip was laid out like a big horseshoe, with the bagels on one prong, a store selling dumpy shirts with the label sewn on the outside on the other, and the Kinko’s down at the cleat in the middle. I imagined Rosie went someplace else altogether to do her shopping.

Rosie. I thought about what I had told her about the license number on the rented car. Did I really believe all that clandestine crap? If not, why did I make it up?
Because you wanted to impress her.
I did not. Where the hell was that coming from?
Denial is the surest indicator of a lie.
Sometimes I hate being so damn smart.

At least two thirds of the stores were closed for the night, and the parking lot was mostly deserted. A couple of semis were pulled up in the middle of it, the drivers taking a sleep break, and a squad car lazily cruising the perimeter didn’t seem to care. I suppose the world always has a lot of cops in the background in public places. Somehow, I never noticed before. Now, I seemed to run into them constantly.

Maybe it was another example of what Uncle Fred used to call “The Green Volvo Syndrome.” There isn’t a single green Volvo in your neighborhood, the theory goes, until you go out and buy one. Then the whole world is instantly full of the stupid things. It’s a morphing thing. Chevrolets and Fords morph into Volvos and ordinary citizens morph into cops. There’s an automatic Nobel Prize in physics there, if I could just figure out where to publish my findings.

The short odds were that neither the morphed nor the regular cops would be looking for me here in Almost-Chicago, but I didn’t want to count on that assumption. I decided a bold diagonal across the lot was a bit conspicuous, and I walked across the gap between the prongs of the horseshoe instead, where I could stay on the fringe of the light island. I wondered who I would be, if I got asked, and I realized I should have worked that out with Rosie before she went off. “Rosie’s husband” didn’t sound like a very convincing alias. James Stroud was probably even worse. Herman Jackson was still what most of the stuff in my wallet said, and I decided I had better do something about that. That was as far as my thinking went just then.

The squad car moved even more slowly than I walked, and I made it back to the Kinko’s before he managed to get interested in me. But he did seem to be interested in the phone booth I had so recently occupied. He cruised over to it, then got out and had a look at the “instrument,” as the former Ma Bell employees insist on calling it. That bothered the hell out of me.

***

“You got a message,” said my friendly techie. He didn’t know the half of it. I could hardly wait to see the one that he knew about.

“What’s it say?” I said. I wanted to watch the cop a while longer before I went back to the terminal.

“Hey, I wouldn’t open your mail. But it makes a little ‘ding!’ noise for ‘Incoming.’”

“Better than a whoosh and then a big boom.”

“Huh?”

Talking with young people is so refreshing.

The email message was longer than the first one. Apparently, my mystery man had found my reply stimulating.

Well. Not exactly a threatening letter, but close enough. And on the surface, at least, not part of the original scam. If this guy was the equivalent of the bogus “collector” in the classic hustle, he should have offered me more money, for one thing. Enough to be irresistible, but not enough to sound phony. Twenty years worth of inflation on a starting value of sixty thou was about a hundred and sixty or so, by my fast and dirty mental arithmetic. So someplace within about fifteen or twenty of that figure would be the right…

“Ding!” More incoming. Get your head down, soldier. This was from a different address, one I hadn’t seen before:

A friend, was it? Sounded awfully hostile to me. Also awfully convenient. Could the timing of the second message have been a coincidence? I didn’t know anybody except the Proph who would think so. I looked out the glass storefront again and saw the cop still over by the pay phone. Then I went back to my newfound technical advisor.

“You seem to know a lot about computers, um”—I snuck a quick look at his employee name tag—“Brian.” I lied. He didn’t really seem to know what time of day it was, but I wanted some advice, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to stroke him a little.

“It’s like totally what I do, is all. My parents don’t understand that, you know? They actually think I should go to college. They can’t see that all the, you know, knowledge and stuff in the world is just right there on your keyboard, waiting to be downloaded.”

“Maybe they want you to get some kind of knowledge that doesn’t download.” Parents get silly ideas like that sometimes.

“They want me to study law. Can you believe that?”

“No way.”
You bet I can. They want you in a profession where being brain damaged is not a handicap
.

“I mean, the law is just so totally stupid,” he said.

“I think Dickens said something like that, too.”

“Is he a hacker?”

“Depends on who you ask.” I wasn’t going to go down that road.

“Listen,” I said, “this stuff I’ve been getting and sending here is completely secure, right? I mean, nobody can trace it back to this site?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, duh-uuh. That’s the whole point, you know?”

“They can trace it back to this place?”

“You said this site, not this place.”

“Oh.” Isn’t semantics fun? “So what about this place?”

“No way.”

“And nobody else can read it, either? I mean, without having access to the computer on one end of the message or the other?”

He shook his head. “Not unless they’ve got a sniffer.”

I was afraid he was going to say something like that. I looked out the window and saw the cop leaving the phone booth and going back to his car.

“What’s a sniffer?”

“It’s like a wiretap, only for computers. But it has to have a dedicated phone line. Too many signals to sort out, otherwise.”

“How comforting. And who would have one of these sniffers?”

“Them.”

“Them.”

“Yeah, you know. Men in Black, the Forces of Evil, aliens, the government, all like that.
Them
.”

“Oh, Them.”

“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”

“Perish the thought, Brian. Who else could have a sniffer?”

“Rich people, I guess. And industrial spies. It’s illegal for anybody, of course. Even the cops are supposed to get a court order first. But if you’ve got enough money, you can get any kind of hardware you want.”

“And somebody like you to make it work.”

He stood a little straighter and smiled around a stud.

“Sure, I could do that.”

And if
he
could, the world was full of people who could. And one of them could have definitely asked the local fuzz to check out a phone number. I looked out the store window and saw the squad car leave the phone booth and head straight for us, though still in no hurry. Ahead of him, though, a brownish-red Pontiac stopped at the curb in front of the door.

At first I didn’t recognize the blonde at the steering wheel. Rosie was wearing a low-cut white dress and lipstick, and she had her hair pulled back into some kind of roll. She looked five years younger than when we had last talked and a lot cuter, and her crooked smile told me she knew as much. She leaned over to look in the plate glass window, searching. I caught her eye and held up a hand that I hoped said, “Wait right there.” Three seconds later, I was getting in the passenger door, ignoring the comments from young Brian that followed me out.

“Kiss me,” I said.

“Why, Herman, I thought you’d never…”

“Kiss me like I’m your loving spouse, finally done copying the work he always takes home with him.”

“Like this?”

“Mmph.” I had been going to say, “Too passionate,” but her tongue got in the way. She had a very talented tongue. Quite possibly electric, also, since it definitely activated things far removed from my mouth. I wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved, though. Above her shoulder, I could see the squad car slow and hesitate, having to rethink the scenario he had just worked out. This was good. We held the kiss for a while longer, and then I got the rest of the way into the car and buckled my seat belt.

“Now cruise on out of here, nice and smooth and respectable. If that cop stares at you, give him a pretty smile and a wave.”

But he didn’t. He kept heading for the print shop. “Go out around the end of the mall by the shirt store, and watch your mirror.”

“Hey, it was a great kiss for me, too, but you don’t have to get all gushy about it.”

“Is he following us?”

“No.” She watched the mirror for a couple seconds. “Oops, yes, now he is. But not fast. Aren’t you going to tell me I look stunning?”

“Actually, you do. How far back?”

“All the way to my irresistible round ass, what do you think?”

“How far back is the cop?”

“Oh, him. Half the length of the parking lot. Thanks for the compliment.”

“My pleasure.”

She turned by the trendy rag store, and by the time we got to the service drive entrance, the cop still hadn’t made the corner behind us. “Turn in here,” I said, pointing. “Put on a little speed, but don’t spin your wheels. We don’t want to leave a lot of dust.”

We turned down the service road and accelerated, and we were almost to the next corner, where we could turn again and be out of sight behind the main mall, when the cop swung in behind us and turned on his flashers.

“So much for finesse.”

“You want me to lose him?”

“Are you serious?” I asked. “You know what you’re doing?”

“Watch me.”

“All right, I will.”

“Really?”

“Punch it.”

She stood on the brakes first, and when the I’m-smarter-than-you-are system wouldn’t lock up the wheels, she hit the hand brake.

“Lots of dust,” she said, by way of explanation.

“I noticed.”

As soon as the brown cloud started to roll around us, she killed the lights and hit the gas, hard, taking the corner around the mall in a power slide and continuing to accelerate out of it. Halfway down the back service drive, the speedometer was passing sixty.

“I don’t want to tell you your business,” I said, “but for what it’s worth, there’s a break in that fence up there that a car could get through.”

“Where?”

“Right by the back door of the bagel joint.”

“Perfect. Hold tight. I think you’ll like this.”

We flew past the fence opening at seventy-plus. She spotted it and hit the hand brake again, throwing the car into a one-eighty half spin on the gravel.

“More dust,” she said. I just nodded and hung on. We came out of our own cloud, slowly and smoothly now, turned up the berm, and went through the fence. Down at the far end of the mall, the way we had just come from, the cop’s lights were just starting to emerge from the first dust cloud, slowly, tentatively. Before he was clear of it, we were gone, over the crest. In another world. Literally vanished in a cloud of dust. I was impressed.

The back side of the berm was less impressive. You wouldn’t exactly call it a drivable surface, but the fact that it was downhill made it easier to jolt over the rocks and leap the chasms. The fact that it wasn’t my own car whose undercarriage we were destroying didn’t hurt my feelings any, either. I just hoped we didn’t trip any air bags.

At the bottom was another service road, this one paved with cinders, that paralleled the railroad tracks. Rosie followed it for a quarter mile or so, until we came to a sort of crossing, and then we went over a bunch of tracks and down into the industrial backwaters. We were well out of sight of the mall now, even from the top of the berm, and she put the headlights back on and settled into an easy twenty-five. I toggled down my window and listened for sirens. Nothing. Just distant freeway noise and an occasional airplane.