I awoke at Hudson, with the dim gray of pre-dawn on the bus windows. It was sprinkling, and the long wipers smacked back and forth across the windshield. I sat midway down the aisle, on the right side. There were only about four other passengers. I had both seats all the way back and I was sprawled at an angle on them, head against the windowpane and shoeless feet in the aisle. I was cramped and muggy. I’d been in that position too long. I felt like wet wool.
What woke me up, the bus had stopped. A man came running across the sidewalk from the store-front bus depot. He had a slick black raincoat draped over his head. The driver pushed the door open and the other man stood in the gutter, and they shouted back and forth over the sound of the rain. Then the man turned and ran back in, and the driver closed the door, and we started out of Hudson. They always do that, whenever it rains. I don’t know what they say to one another.
I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was sitting on the wrong side to see the dawn, so I looked out at the darkness and wished the bus were going to Binghamton.
It got lighter and lighter outside the window. The towns passed by. Red Hook and Rhineland and back across the river to Kingston. Then West Park and Highland and across the river again to Poughkeepsie. Then Wappingers Falls and Fishkill and Beacon, Peekskill and Ossining and Tarrytown, White Plains and Yonkers and New York.
I got off at 50th Street. I walked a ways and went into the Cuttington Hotel on 52nd Street.
They would all be looking for me now, so I’d have to register under a phony name. Walking up from the bus terminal, I chose Matthew Allen. A reasonable but forgettable name, and it didn’t use my initials.
Stupid things happen. I got terrified when the register was turned toward me. I’d never given a false name before. My hand shook as I wrote the name, so bad it wasn’t my writing at all. And I couldn’t look the woman desk clerk in the eye. She spent a lot of time explaining to me that I was signing in at an unusual hour and she would have to charge me for last night because the day ended at three p.m. I told her it was all right, and got away from her as soon as I could, following the bellboy.
Once in the room, alone, it struck me funny. After all that had happened, to practically faint when I had to write a phony name. I lay down on the bed and laughed, and the laughter got out of control. Down in a corner of my mind the laughing frightened me. Then the laughter got mixed around and turned upside down and I was crying. Then I laughed because it was funny to be crying, and cried because it was sad to be laughing. When I was empty, I fell asleep.
I woke up at one with smarting feet. I hadn’t taken my shoes off. I stripped and showered, and walked around the room naked while the last of the stiffness went away. Then I got dressed, and sat down at the writing table, and wrote a little letter to my Uncle Henry, telling him to write me as Matthew Allen at this hotel. Not in care of Matthew Allen, but as Matthew Allen. Then I left the room.
I made it to the bank on time, where a little more than half of Bill’s three thousand dollars still waited in our joint account to be spent. I took out two hundred, and went to a luncheonette and had breakfast, surrounded by people eating a late lunch. And then I had nothing in the world to do. I bought four paperback books and a deck of cards and went back to the room.
I knew that Kapp was right, that I should wait before going after Ganolese. If I were to get to him, without myself being killed, it would be better to wait till his attention was distracted. Kapp and his junta would make a fine distraction. Once they had made their move, I could make mine.
The thing was, it wouldn’t be sufficient for me to be killed attempting my revenge. I wasn’t trying to sacrifice myself. I wanted to come out alive on the other side. So it was best to wait.
But I’m not good at waiting. That first afternoon, I read a while and then I ripped up all four of the books. They were action mysteries, and they were supposed to help me stop thinking about myself. But all they managed to do was keep prodding the open wound I’d been trying to ignore. All they did was remind me that, if all went well, I would be alive when this was over. That was the part, most of all, that I didn’t want to think about.
Life uses people up. When I was finished with what I had to do, I could hardly be the same person I’d been the day the Air Force had made me a civilian and I had re-met Dad. Who I would be, what use or purpose I might find—I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. Yet I had to live, or it would be their triumph after all, and my defeat, even if I were to kill them all and then be killed myself, by my hand or theirs.
It was simpler for the lead characters in the books. They suffered, they involved themselves with tense and driven people, they handled sudden death like a commodity in a secondary market. But when it was all finished, they were unchanged. What they had walked through had left no mark at all on them.
It would be nice to believe that. But the writers were blandly lying. They weren’t using up their lead character, because they needed him in the next book in the series.
So I went out and bought a bottle of Old Mr. Boston, and on Friday I went to the newspaper library and wasted the day reading about Ed Ganolese. Every once in a while, it seemed, he was served a subpoena and he answered questions before an investigating body of some sort or another. The investigators were always after someone else and usually they asked Ganolese about his relationship with that someone else as of twenty years before. His answers were never informative, but he always managed to be just barely cooperative enough to avoid the legal wrath of the investigators.
Once, there was a photograph. It showed a man somewhat older than fifty, well fed but still strong-looking. He had a kind of brutal handsomeness, softened by time and weight, and the waist-up dignity of the nouveau riche. He sat before a microphone shaped like a hooded snake, and he brooded at his inquisitors.
Another time, a reporter explained that the name was pronounced “Jan-o-lease,” and was originally spelled Gianolliese, but the family had shortened and somewhat Anglicized it.
No one had ever done a profile on him.
Friday night, I saw two science-fiction horror movies on 42nd Street. The weekend inched by. Sunday morning, I awoke with a bitter headache at eight o’clock, with less than four hours sleep. But I couldn’t drop off again, and it took me an hour to understand why. Then, feeling like a fool, I got up and dressed and found a Catholic Church, and prayed for Bill, who wasn’t here. It wasn’t that I attended Mass. Bill’s stand-in came to Mass, and he was me. When Mass was over, I left with no more interest in the place, my duty done. I went back to the hotel, and to bed, and to sleep.
Starting Monday, I read the papers, all of them. It was five days since the meeting at Lake George. The coup d’etat should begin soon.
It began on Wednesday night. Reading Thursday morning’s papers, I nearly missed it. I took a cab back to the hotel from the Daily News building on East 42nd Street, where I had bought the Brooklyn and Queens and Bronx editions of that paper. I bought the other morning papers in the hotel lobby and went upstairs and worked my way through them. I sat cross-legged on the bed, turning pages with my left hand, holding the Old Mr. Boston bottle in my right.
I went all the way through, and something was bothering me. Something in the News. I took the Queens edition and went through it again, and this time when I came to the candy store explosion I stopped.
It was a small candy store in a bad section of Queens. At ten-thirty last night, a gas heater in the back of the store exploded, killing the proprietor. It was the proprietor’s brother, a man named Gus Porophorus, who told the firemen about the gas heater.
There was a photograph of the burned and jumbled back part of the store. The photograph showed a blackboard along one wall.
I got up from the bed and lit a cigarette and walked around the room, laughing. I’d seen posters in subway stations, advertising the Daily News. The poster would have a big blowup of an unusual photograph, and the caption, “No one says it like the News.”
A blackboard in the back room of a candy store! No one says it like the News. The horseplayers wouldn’t have anywhere to place their bets in that neighborhood for a few days.
I’d been expecting something like the movies. Banner headlines screaming, gangland slaying. I’d forgotten what Kapp had said to Irving Baumheiler: “Quiet hits. Hits, but quiet hits.”
I went through all the papers again, and this time I knew what to look for. A stationery store fire in the Bronx, owner killed in the blaze. And a man named Anthony Manizetsky, 36, unemployed, killed when his car rammed into a steel support under the West Side Drive at 22nd Street. There was a photo of the car, last year’s Buick. And an import firm’s warehouse burned down on Third Avenue in Brooklyn.
I got yesterday’s papers out of the closet, wondering if I’d missed the opening gun. But I hadn’t. It had started last night.
I felt twenty pounds lighter. I had been hating the hotel room. I put the top on the Old Mr. Boston bottle and called Ed Johnson. When I told him who it was he said, “I wondered what happened to you. It’s been almost a month now.”
I said, “Have they been asking you questions about me any more?”
“No, thank God. Just the one time. I had a tail for about three days after that. He was lousy, but I figured it would be a bad move to lose him. Since he left, nothing at all.”
“Good. I’ve got a job for you, if you want it. Can I trust you?”
“If you think you can trust my answer to that,” he said, “you think you can trust me.”
“All right. I want a man’s address. I want to know where I can find him for sure.”
“Is this number one, or are you still poking around?”
“If I don’t tell you, you can’t tell anybody else.”
“All right, I’m not very brave. I don’t get paid enough to be brave. What’s the name?”
“Ed Ganolese.” I spelled it for him. “I’m not sure what the Ed is short for.”
“All right. He’s in New York, for sure?”
“Somewhere around here. Maybe he commutes.”
“Wait a second, I’ve seen this name somewhere.”
“He’s one of the people who run the local syndicate.”
“Oh. Well—I’m not sure. I can’t guarantee anything.”
“I know that.”
“I’ll have to be careful who I ask.”
“More than last time.”
“I know who it was that time. I wish I had the guts to do something about it. Where do I call you?”
“I’ll call you Saturday. Three in the afternoon. At your office.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “This isn’t my league.”
“Then don’t kick yourself for it. I’ll call you Saturday.”
Then I went out and bought a pair of scissors. I came back and clipped the war news.