others, but they were all people she had on the hook. He said she paid them all, but none of them would tell anyway, because they’d have to say they were in on it.”
“So now you’re dead.”
“I’m dead,” he agreed. “Only it didn’t work, because she’s dead too. All those years. All the waiting and wishing, and then this. She has a heart attack. When the hell did women start having heart attacks?”
There were tears streaming down his face. She could see they were coming from his tear ducts, but that meant nothing. There were no actors and few women who couldn’t cry any time they wanted to. What caught her attention were the lines on his face. As she studied them, she understood something that had distracted her since she had met him. The expressions she had seen on his face didn’t match the lines. He would say something cheerful and the voice didn’t match the words, and then he would smile, and the face would appear to wrinkle across the lines. The expression on his face at this moment made the lines and creases fit perfectly. There was only one expression his face had assumed habitually. For fifty years, he had been in anguish. He was old now. The skin on his temple was getting a thin, almost transparent look, like vellum, so she could see the veins.
She said, “She didn’t choose this time because it was good for her, or for Vincent, did she?”
“No,” he said. In his watery blue eyes was the worst agony of all. It seemed to contain within it all of the pain he had felt for fifty years. But she was sure that there was something new, too. “I was beginning to forget things.”
5
Jane looked at him a moment longer. She began to feel that her pity was what was giving him pain now, like the weight of a soothing hand on a burn. She turned away, walked to the other side of the room, and began to rearrange the magazines.
“You’re still a kid. Maybe my telling you this will help you out.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s a very strange little skill you’ve developed. Rita was telling me about it. Somebody is in trouble, you come along, and—poof!—he vanishes.” Jane turned to look at him, and the sad eyes were on her. “I had a strange little skill too.”
“It’s not a business,” Jane said. “I wasn’t trying to get rich.”
“I know, I know,” said the old man. “I wasn’t either. I did it because my friend Sal Augustino asked me to. I could save a friend from going to jail. I did it because there was no way not to. But it wasn’t over. You do a favor, it doesn’t make you paid up. It just proves you can do it.”
Jane was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He seemed to be able to intuit what had happened to her.
Bernie went on. “But pretty soon, it wasn’t just a favor for Sal. It was friends of Sal’s I never knew existed. That’s how they talk, you know. If the person is just some guy, they call him ‘my friend so-and-so.’ If he’s a made mafioso, they say ‘our friend.’ ”
“What about you?” she asked. “How did you get introduced?”
“Me?” He looked shocked. “I wasn’t even Italian—ineligible by accident of birth. My parents were Polish. Besides, you think they needed to give me a blood oath to convince me I’d get killed if I talked?”
“So you were a mercenary.”
“Haven’t you been listening to me? What the hell did I need with money? I couldn’t leave the house to buy a loaf of bread. In the forties I got salaries for phony jobs. Even then, all I could do was invest it. After that, people gave me presents once in a while, that’s all.”
Jane’s breath caught in her throat. She had never taken money for her services. When someone had insisted, she had answered, “A year from now, or maybe two, when you’re living your new life and haven’t felt afraid for a while, think back on the way you felt tonight. Then, if you still feel like it, send me a present.” She waited a few seconds, then tried to simulate idle curiosity. “What kind of presents?”
“All kinds. Mostly money. But I couldn’t keep it lying around, any more than I could leave their money lying around. So I invested it, and kept the account numbers in my head. In the sixties, I flat refused to take even the presents. They were dangerous. I was handling a lot of money for these people. If they knew that I had millions of dollars of my own, what would it mean to them? Where could it have come from except out of their pockets? Even if they somehow got the records from my brokers, and found out I had invested it before they were born, they would have assumed I had stolen it from their fathers or grandfathers.”
Jane said, “When did you realize you were forgetting things?”
“About a year ago,” he said. “It was a new experience for me, so at first I wasn’t sure that was what it was. I would try to take an inventory, and my mind would feel … tired. I could kind of see the words and numbers like before, but it was an effort to pick one out.”
“Do they know?”
“No,” he said. “I figure I’ve lost maybe five or ten percent of what was in here.” He pointed at his head. “Most of the investments have gone up that much in the past six months. There was never any reason to tell anybody. What got them nervous was that I was getting old. They started talking about computers.”
“You were going to be replaced?”
“A little delegation came to me and we had a talk. They were polite and sympathetic and careful the way those guys never are except when they’re conning somebody. They had it all figured out. Everything in my head could fit on a three-and-a-half-inch disk.”
“Having a disk like that could be a dangerous thing.”
“There are ways around that. The world is full of expert consultants. There’s a system that the government uses called ‘strong encryption.’ Nobody else is supposed to, but a lot of people know how. Each code is different, so if the FBI gets the disk, they still can’t read it. And nothing gets lost, because you can make copies: hide one under a penguin’s nest at the South Pole, shove one up a camel’s ass in Saudi Arabia, tape one in a kid’s lunch box in Peoria. They even explained how my memory would get into the computer.”
“How?”
“I would start writing things down, one page at a time. Then I hand the computer guy the paper. He types it in and encodes it. Another guy shreds the paper, and another guy burns the shreds. There would be two other guys with nothing to do but watch to be sure nobody pockets a paper with an account number on it and burns an empty sheet.”
Jane raised an eyebrow. “It sounds a bit ornate for them.”
“This will show you the mentality. The shredder and burner are going to be guys they bring in specially from other countries—one from Central Europe and one from Asia, because they use different alphabets and can’t read letters in English. They won’t know where they are, or who the rest of us are. The phones will be cut off, and everybody stays until the job is done. When it’s over, they’ll be strip-searched to be sure they take nothing with them, given brand-new clothes, and shipped home, where there’s nobody they could tell who would know what they were talking about. I figure probably when it comes down to it, these two are not going to make it all the way. Once the precautions get elaborate enough, one of the guards is going to say, ‘Oh, what the hell,’ and pull the trigger. The computer guy, I suspect, has problems too. These families are never again going to let themselves get into the position of having a big chunk of their money in one guy’s brain. There will be another disk that holds the program for decoding the encryption.”
“And you?”
“What do you think?” He smiled wearily. “Dead. I looked into their eyes, and I could see they didn’t know it yet. They didn’t know themselves well enough; these are not introspective people. They thought they were making a generous deal with me, and they would stick to it. I would stay on in Florida doing nothing forever. What they didn’t know was that the minute the money was on the disk, I would change. All of a sudden they would notice that I was so old and sick that it would be a favor to put me out of my misery.”
“So she saved you.”
He nodded. “She knew.”
Jane took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she contemplated the old man. She was tired. She knew what was coming and she knew that she would have to let it come before she could move on. “You came here to make a proposal. You’ve taken half the night working your way up to it.”
“I wanted to understand you first, and to let you know who it was making the proposal.”
