spent on, and he thought the situation over, and then he became one of the first of the really big-scale Florida land speculators. He had two-colour brochures made up, and he sent them out by the bale. There are companies that supply mailing lists of any desired kind — people who own foreign cars; people who belong to correspondence schools; people who have subscriptions to a particular magazine; people who have sent for pornography through the mail — and from one of these Wallerbaugh got a list of ex-servicemen who were married and going to college. Thousands of these got the two-colour brochure.
It was a good brochure. It told the ex-serviceman of the unlimited potential of Growing Florida. It told him about the new aeroplane plants, the industrial boom, the fact that Florida was becoming a First-Rate employment market in practically every field. It also told him just how cheaply he could own his own plot of land on Florida’s west coast, and how little more it would cost to build a brand new house on that land. The ex-serviceman could start paying for that lot and house right now, then it would be ready for him when he graduated from college and he and the Missus were ready for the Big Move.
Wallerbaugh took a lot of servicemen. He sold land that was totally inaccessible by car. He sold land that was eight feet under water. He sold land to which he didn’t hold clear title. He sold land that washed back out into the Gulf of Mexico before the ink was dry on the cheque.
The Land Grab was bad in Florida for a while, with the speculators all trying to grab from each other, so in 1947 Wallerbaugh took on a partner, a man named Grantz. Grantz had just served a rap for income tax evasion. He’d lived off the black market during the war, which wasn’t as easy or as profitable as liquor had once been, and he was happy to bring his know-how into the corporation.
The bubble lasted three years. Wallerbaugh had thought it would last for ever, just as the stock game should have lasted for ever, but he was wrong. At the top they could afford to ignore him. But now he was working at the bottom, and at the bottom they couldn’t afford to ignore him. It was government money, passed by the GI Bill through the hands of servicemen and then into Wallerbaugh’s hands, and he was being careless. Grease kept the deal alive for a while, but in 1949 the warrants came out. They arrested Grantz, but Wallerbaugh made it out of the country. His profits were safe in a Swiss bank, and his new home was in Lomas de Zamora, a suburb of Buenos Aires.
But after more than a decade, Wallerbaugh hungered for home again, to be able to move freely in the States once more. Passport and other papers proving him to be Charles F. Wells, retired stockbroker, were expensive to come by but certainly not impossible. But Charles F. Wells had the same face as C. Frederick Wallerbaugh, and that face had been plastered all over the newspapers of the nation in 1949. And for all Wallerbaugh knew that face was still featured on the walls of post offices. The face was a problem; it kept him in Lomas de Zamora a while longer.
Finally he couldn’t stand it. Grantz had died of a bad heart in a Federal prison, but some of Grantz’s friends were still around, and Wallerbaugh got in touch with them. A plastic surgeon, somebody good and absolutely trustworthy. The answer came back: Dr Adler, near Lincoln, Nebraska.
Money made it possible for him to get back into the States, via the Mexican border, without having to test the passport or other papers. Money got him to Nebraska, and more money, to Dr Adler, got him a new face. After the operation, Charles F. Wells went into Lincoln and bought a new Cadillac and drove it all the way to New York, just for the pure pleasure of being able to look at all that American countryside again.
He had avoided the friends of Grantz, so no one knew that Wallerbaugh was back in the States. The friends of Grantz. knew, but they didn’t know what he looked like or where he was or what he was calling himself these days. Only one man in the whole world knew enough about Charles F. Wells to be able to call him C. Frederick Wallerbaugh.
After six months, he began to worry. After one month of worry, he decided to act. He had a newer Cadillac by now, and he drove it back to Nebraska. He didn’t drive this tune for the pleasure, he drove so his name would not appear in the files of any commercial transportation. He drove to Nebraska and shot Dr Adler and then he drove back to New York. He was safe now, absolutely safe. There was no one left in all the world who could pose any sort of threat to him.
Chapter 3
UNTIL he got to the car, Stubbs had thought he would just keep going forward; he would get the car and then go find the man named Wells and find out if he had killed the doctor, and if it hadn’t been Wells then he’d go on and find the other man, Courtney. But in any case, all in a straight line, with nothing else in the way. That was because his thinking was muffled and hazy with only one clear spot in the centre, able to concentrate on just one train of thought at a time.
But when he got to the car, the impossibility of the straight line forced itself upon his attention. He first began to notice when he had trouble driving the car. His hands seemed thicker and slower on the wheel and one foot was heavy and only partially controlled the accelerator and his other foot was totally out of sympathy with the brake. He kept hitting the brake too hard, and making the hood of the Lincoln dip, and knocking his chest against the steering wheel. And he kept pulling away from traffic lights too fast, nearly stalling the car.
After that, because now he kept looking at his hands, he noticed how filthy they were — covered with small scars and ragged places. And his clothing was a mess. Also his stomach was upset and his nerves seemed bad.
So finally he began to realize that it was impossible, that after two weeks of living like an animal he couldn’t just go straight ahead but would have to stop and rest a while. So he stopped. He didn’t know about motels, but he knew how to find a hotel in any city. You find the railroad station.
He’d never gone far from the tracks, so he kept on paralleling them, and after a while he found a third-rate hotel. Since it was a third-rate hotel, it didn’t have a garage, but the man at the desk told him the car would be safe out in front. Stubbs took his word for it, paid for one night, and got his two suitcases from the trunk.
There was no shower in his private bath, but there was a tub. He sat for an hour in water nearly too hot to stand, adding more hot water every time the water in the tub started to cool. After that he went directly to bed, though it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.
He woke at eight-thirty the next morning, and his head was buzzing. His nerves were far worse than yesterday, so bad that his arms and legs were shaking. He lay on his back on the bed, and his forehead was burning up. He felt a dull anger at the symptoms, because they were keeping him from the straight line, and he tried to ignore them. He pushed the covers away and got out of bed, but he immediately became dizzy and fell, hitting his face on the floor.
After a while, he got to the telephone and told the man at the desk that he needed a doctor. The man at the desk was irritated, and showed it, but he did send a doctor. He was a paunchy man with grey hair and a no- nonsense scowl, and when he came in, using the key the desk man had given him, Stubbs was back in bed, not wholly conscious.
