The Girl With the Long Green Heart (12 page)

“The travel expenses are paid for me.”

“Oh, I know that, naturally. But you still ought to be worth more than that.”

“I manage on my salary.”

“Of course you do. But if you could pick up a piece of change for yourself, why, you wouldn’t complain, would you?”

I didn’t answer that.

“I’m not saying you ought to work against your employers, John.”

“I couldn’t do anything like that.”

“You certainly couldn’t, and if I thought you were the kind of man who could, why, I wouldn’t want to have any dealings with you. But if you could do me a favor without injuring your employers, that might be something else, don’t you think?”

I reached for my drink. He smiled at the gesture, then looked away. Not right now, I thought. Give him a night to think it over some more. Take a little time.

“I’m not sure how much help I could be to you,” I said.

“Why not let me worry about that?”

I lowered my eyes and chewed my lip thoughtfully. “I ought to think about this,” I said.

“Fair enough. Will you be in town a few days, John?”

I took a breath, then expelled it with the air of someone coming to a minor decision. “Wally,” I said, “you must have figured out the main reason I’m here. I don’t have to tell you that, do I? That is, I already realized you weren’t likely to sell out to Barnstable. That was . . . well, an excuse for the trip.”

“You wanted to see Evvie.”

“That’s right.”

“I understand. And why not let the boss pay for the trip, eh?”

I looked very ashamed of myself.

“Perfectly natural,” Gunderman said. He laughed heartily. “But you will stay in town for a few days, won’t you?”

“If I can manage it.”

“Hell, you can manage it, John.” He laughed again. “Why, with all those phone calls I’ve made to your office, your boss will be sure I’m the hottest prospect on earth. He won’t begrudge you a few days in town, and if the deal falls through for him, well, that’s just the breaks of the game. You stay here in town, and you take some time to think things through, because I want you to make your own decision, John. And you drop around here, oh, come by tomorrow afternoon, and maybe the two of us can do some more talking and figure out how things are likely to shape up for us. I think we’ll both come out of this okay, John.”

We both finished our drinks. I rallied a little and told him I was glad we were bringing things out in the open, that the one thing I disliked about the Barnstable job was that I hated to misrepresent myself at all. “The hunting-lodge story,” I said. “I’d rather tell people the truth right off the bat, that we’re prepared to pay so much for their land and that’s all. It’s a good deal for a lot of them, Wally. They can write off their tax loss and get the bad taste of a bad deal out of their mouths. I’d rather just tell them that and leave it at that, and I know that’s how I would handle things if I were a principal in this deal. But I’m just a hired hand.”

He liked the way that sounded. He was very taken with me. I was just the man he wanted me to be. We shook hands and we made arrangements to meet the next afternoon, and I left him there ready to tell Diogenes to put down his lantern and call off his search—Wallace J. Gunderman had just found himself an honest man.

Nine

When Evvie left the office a little after five I was out in front with the motor idling. She came out of the building and over to the car. I stood holding the door for her. She was smiling hugely.

“Aim a kiss at me,” she said, behind the smile. I did. She went on smiling and turned just a little in my arms so that the kiss missed her mouth and caught her cheek. Then in a second she was in the car. I walked around it and got behind the wheel, and away we went.

I said, “You think he was watching?”

“From the front window. That light’s red. Why not stop for it and kiss me proper?”

This time there was no audience for the kiss. She made a little choked-up sound and caught at my shoulders with her hands. Our mouths didn’t miss this time. She held on, and the wheels went around and came up three bars, jackpot. A horn honked behind us. She slipped away reluctantly and I piloted the rented Impala across the intersection.

“Now that was better,” she said. She was too damned good to be true. The halfway kiss in front of Gunderman’s office building would tell him everything she wanted him to know—that I was hot for her, that she was not interested, but that she would play the game through thick and thin to do the right thing for Poppa Wally. I couldn’t have named more than eight women in the country who could have played the scene as well, and those eight were girls who were born to the sport.

I told her how good she was. She glowed a little. I asked her where she felt like going for dinner. Nowhere, she said. She had a pair of filets at the apartment and a hibachi to char them on. How did that sound?

“Home cooking,” I said. “You’ll spoil me.”

“You don’t mind? He wanted me to wine you and dine you. He thinks that’s the most effective treatment. The big show of money and influence. He knows a few variations, but they’re all on the same theme. I told him this would be more intimate.”

“It just might.”

She didn’t answer. I turned a corner and found her block, pulled up a few doors from her building. We went up to her apartment and she unlocked the door. She let me make the drinks while she got the charcoal going in the little Japanese stove. I made stiff drinks. We took them back into the living room with us.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“About what?”

“Everything, I don’t think he’s going to fall for it.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Did he say something?”

She frowned. “No,” she said finally. “It wasn’t anything he said, nothing like that exactly. Right now he’s completely sold. You’ve got him in your pocket, John.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

She thought about it, worked on her drink, looked up at me. “Maybe I’m just worried,” she said. “Stage fright.”

“Could be.”

“It just doesn’t seem possible that he’ll fall for it. He’s not a stupid man, you know. He’s less of a clod than he seems. He’s got a tough streak of sharpness under it all.”

“Then this is tailored for him. A stupid man would never be able to pick up on it.”

“I know, but—” She raised her glass to her lips, lowered it again. “I’ll tell you something, John. I think you’re a little too perfect.”

“How do you mean?”

“Too honest and too square. Right now he believes every bit of it. Right now you could probably tell him you’re the chief holy man of the Ganges and he wouldn’t doubt a word. But he’s no believer in the incorruptibility of mankind. If you stay lily-white, he’ll start to wonder sooner or later.”

“Go on.”

“Let him see that you wouldn’t mind making a buck. Make him draw it out of you a little at a time, but make sure he knows you’re glad to look out for number one as long as it’s safe.”

I thought it over. “You’re right,” I said.

“It was just an idea—”

“No. You’re right. I may have played it a little too angelic. It’s an easy role to fall into.” I finished my drink. “Still worried?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I’ll be worried until this is over. God, if this falls in—” She closed her eyes. “Doug Rance is sitting safe across the border. You can hop on a plane and disappear far enough so that no one will ever find you. And he wouldn’t even try too hard. But me—if he ever finds out, John, I’ve had it. The viper in his bosom.” She managed a somewhat brave smile. “He would only kill me,” she said.

A whole batch of lines didn’t do the job.
Don’t worry, everything’ll be all right, it’s in the bag
—you don’t throw phrases like those at a woman who’s telling you how she stands a fair chance of getting killed. You don’t say anything at all.

I kissed her. She held back at first, too much involved in dreams of doom to ride it all the way. Then the fear broke and she came to me, and the wheels went around again and the slot machine paid off again.

There was nothing casual about it.

I took her on her living room couch with her blouse half off and her skirt bunched up around her waist. The couch was too short, engineered for more sedate pleasures. The lights were all too bright. None of this mattered much.

Afterward, she got up to throw our steaks on the fire. I lit us a couple of cigarettes and made a fresh pair of drinks. We didn’t talk much. It wasn’t necessary.

“What do I do when this is over, John?”

“Take the money and run.”

“And then?”

I had my arm around her. I drummed my fingers against the curve of her shoulder. “According to Doug,” I said, “you’ve got a program figured. Meet a rich man and marry him.”

She was silent.

“Something wrong?”

“I’ve already got a rich man. And it wouldn’t be very different being married to him. I’d just feel like a whore with a license. I don’t know what I’ll wind up doing. Right now I can’t think very much past a day or two after tomorrow.”

We were listening to an Anita O’Day record. Some song about a nightingale. The mood was as mellow as that girl’s voice. We could have used a fireplace with thick logs burning. And some very old cognac.

I said, “You could always stay with the grift.” I made it light.

“Me?” She laughed softly. “I’d shake apart into little pieces.”

“Not you.”

“The way I’ve been?”

“You’ve been beautiful,” I told her. “The nervousness doesn’t mean a thing. Anyone who knows what he’s doing and cares how it turns out gets nervous.”

“Even you?”

“Me more than most.”

“You don’t let it show.”

“It’s there, though.”

She found a cigarette. I lit it for her. “Would you work with me again on something like this? I mean if I weren’t a part of it to begin with. If I was just another hand in the game. Would you want me in on it?”

“Any time.”

“Then maybe I’ve got a career after all. We’ll be partners.”

“You’re forgetting something.”

“Oh?”

“I’m about to retire,” I said. “Remember?”

“I didn’t forget.” She drew on her cigarette, took it from her lips, stared at its tip. “I wasn’t sure whether or not that was the truth. About quitting, buying that roadhouse.”

“Does it sound pipe-dreamish?”

“That’s not it. I thought it might be part of a line. It sounded sincere enough at the time, but later, well, you’re very good at sounding sincere. Will you really do it, John?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure you can make a go of it?” She didn’t have to coax me. I was not exactly playing hard to get. I swung into a reading of The Dream, the unabridged version. She kept her head on my shoulder and said the right words at all of the right places. I was long sold on the dream myself, but now it was coming out rosier than ever.

“Colorado,” she said. “What’s it like out there?”

“You’ve never been West?”

“Well, Las Vegas and Reno. But that’s not the same, is it? All bright lights and no clocks in the casinos and lots of small men with eyes that never show expression. What’s Colorado like?”

“Nothing like Vegas.”

“Tell me about it.”

So I talked about air that lifted you up onto your toes when you filled up your lungs with it, and mountains that climbed straight up and dropped off sharp and clean, and the way the trees turned overnight in early October. I probably sounded very chamber of commerce. I’m apt to get that way. I’ve always loved that kind of country. The grift always kept me in the cities, mostly on the Coast, because that was where the action was. But I never really felt I was breathing in the cities, especially in the smog belt. And in Q there were times, a couple of them, when I found myself gasping like a trout in a net. The prison doctors said it was psychosomatic. They were probably right. It still had felt very damned fine to be back in the mountains.

Anita stopped singing somewhere in the middle of the lecture, and some clown came on the radio with a fast five minutes of news. Evvie switched off the radio and came back and put her head on my shoulder where it belonged and listened some more. When I finally ran out of gas she didn’t say anything. I was a little embarrassed. It’s hard to talk like a poet without feeling like a jackass.

Then she said, “You make it sound pretty.”

“It is.”

“You even make it sound . . .possible. Quitting the racket, doing what you said.”

“It’s more than possible, Evvie.”

She said, “I wish—” And let it hang there.

First in Q, and then on the outside, there had been many versions of The Dream. Step by step it focused itself and narrowed itself down. Finding Bannion’s had been a final touch. Each version of The Dream had become just a shade more specific than the last.

Each version had had The Girl. Sometimes she was formless, and other times she was remarkably well drawn. Sometimes she was a glorious innocent, and she either accepted my past and forgave it or else she knew not a thing about it. In other versions she was a trifle soiled herself—a grifting girl, or a halfway hooker, or any of a dozen shadow-world types. Part of the past, but with me in the future.

But every version had The Girl.

And I heard myself saying, “It wouldn’t be exciting. But excitement wears thin after a while. It’s good country, Evvie. You’d love it out there—”

She stood up, walked across the room. I sat where I was and listened to my words bouncing off the walls.

She said, “You’re not conning me, are you?”

“I don’t think I could.”

“Because that was starting to sound alarmingly like a proposal.”

“Something like that.”

She turned. She looked at me, straight at me, and I drank the depths of her eyes. Then she began to nod, and she said, “Yes. Oh, yes, yes.”

I saw Gunderman in the morning. I did not much want to see him. I was not in the mood to play a part. The night with Evvie had flattened out the hunger pains, and a hungry man makes a better fisherman.

But the hook was already set, the line already strung halfway across the lake. Even a well-fed angler can reel in a big one, especially when the fish practically jumps into the boat. My heart was not exactly in it, but it did not exactly have to be. Gunderman made it easy.