Then Menlo realized what the old man had found. He hadn’t bothered to remove his official identification cards, and these were what the old man had been mumbling over, trying to decipher the foreign printing, until finally some sign or symbol had given the game away.
“Well, well, well!” cried the old man, growing excitement in his voice. “I guess maybe it’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation that’d like you, bud. A big-shot Commie, no licence or registration, carrying around bribe money. I guess the Federal Bureau of Investigation won’t mind seeing you one bit. So you just march, bud. Get on away from that car you stole, and march. To your right. The jail’s just a block away. I’ll come get your car and baggage after I got you locked up good.”
Menlo marched ahead of him down the street to the jail, a one-storey frame structure with a blank faT, save for one small barred window and a door that had Police Headquarterslettered in gold on the glass.
Within, it looked like a set of a Western movie. There was a central corridor, with an office on the right containing, among other things, a roll-top desk. The door on the left was shut, and the old man had Menlo continue straight on down past it to the end, to a barred door.
It was while the old man was unlocking the door that he took his eyes off Menlo for just a second. It was then that Menlo sneaked the derringer from his pocket and fired both bullets into the old man’s head.
First, he took back his wallet. Then he removed the Police Positive from the holster and tucked it inside his belt, on the left side, butt forward, where it was well concealed but he could get at it quickly. Finally, he dragged the old man’s body through the barred doorway around to the other side of a desk to delay its discovery. The cells were back here, but they faced the other way. In one of them someone, probably a Negro, was singing softly and mournfully to himself about nothing in particular.
Menlo was feeling very strange. Until this moment all of his activities had been directed against the criminal elements of society, the outlaws. Kapor. The Outfit. Parker and McKay. He had been betraying his Ministry, true, but that hadn’t bothered him particularly. His activity against the state had been, in a way, indirect, a sin of omission with the money. But now he had shot down a police officer in the performance of his duty. Suddenly the break with his past was total, complete, irrevocable, much broader and deeper than he had ever imagined. Tendrils of fear began tugging at his mind and making his knees unreliable.
He had to be strong. He had made his choice, and so far he had triumphed. Whatever the obstacles, he must continue to prevail. The rules were changed now, and so was he.
He was puffing from exertion by the time he’d finished. He closed the barred door again, paused to catch his breath, and forced himself to walk casually and unconcernedly out of the building. He would not be eating lunch at the diner just ahead. He would not be eating lunch at all today.
The next major city, according to the map, was Columbia, South Carolina. He could risk driving the car that far, but there he would abandon it. He would travel the rest of the way to Miami by train. It was unlikely there would be a plane.
He got into the Pontiac, feeling the bulge of the pistol against his left side as he sat down. He started the engine, backed the car, shifted, avoided the angle-parked police car, and drove sedately out of town at twenty miles an hour.
4
IT LOOKED like a wedding cake. Menlo peered out at it from the cab’s rear seat, his eyes squinting somewhat from the brightness. It was Sunday, and the sun shone bright on the Sunways Hotel, pink and white, with a great white fountain out front that looked like marzipan. The splashing water made a cool sound.
“I hate this lousy town,” said the cab driver, waiting to take his turn at the canopied entrance.
Menlo, who did not answer, was glad of the delay. It gave him an opportunity to study the place, get used to it a little.
Everything was new, everything was different, Menlo’s confidence had been shaken by the incident in the little South Carolina town, and in the back of his mind there was the growing suspicion that he wasn’t going to make it. This was a whole new world in which he had no experience. He had no papers, no satisfactory explanation of who he was or where he came from. He had no real idea even where he was going.
There were too many things he hadn’t thought of, too many things he couldn’t foresee. Even in the mechanics of everyday living he was hampered by the fact that he was so brand new to the United States, and nothing here corresponded exactly with its counterpart in Klastrava. The trains he’d been on he’d had to change twice were unlike those at home; only one class of carriage an open, uncompartmented third-class type, but with upholstered seats of a first-class style. There had been no ticket booth at the entrance to the platform; tickets were taken by uniformed conductors on the train itself. From the important difference of language and currency down to the appearance and customs of restaurants, everything was subtly and jarringly strange. He had to feel his way, groping from one situation to the next, certain that everyone he met must know that he was a foreigner. In Klastrava a foreigner as obvious as he would have been under official surveillance long before this. He knew the United States was much more lax but he couldn’t just blunder along this way for ever, carrying a suitcase full of unexplainable money and hoping for the best.
The currency was beginning to seem more real to him now, and he was beginning to understand why he’d had so much trouble with the old man. Most Americans were suspicious of fifty-dollar bills. He had managed with some difficulty to spend three of them, getting smaller bills in change, and he was using small bills and coins now, hoping they would last until he’d figured out what to do with the rest of the money. He realized, belatedly, that if he’d offered the old man a ten-dollar bill instead of a fifty, there might have been no trouble.
It all depended on whether or not he was given time to get his bearings. He needed it, and at least in the beginning he was going to need assistance. Which meant Bett Harrow, and the statue. Bett Harrow could help him if she chose, and the mourner should put him in the debt of Bett Harrow’s rich and influential father. That was all he needed.
His taxi finally reached the canopy, and the rear door was jerked open. The cab driver was paid and tipped as was the doorman. A bellboy carried his suitcases the one on the left containing the money, the one on the right the mourner wrapped in clothing to the desk and he too was tipped. The respectful but haughty clerk looked him in the eye. “Your name, sir?”
Name?
In panic, Menlo heard himself saying, “Parker, Auguste Parker.”
Why did they want his name, before he’d so much as asked for a room? And why had he said Parker? On the way over from the railroad station he had invented an alias to use in signing the hotel register, but the abruptness of the question had thrown the name right out of his mind. So he had blurted out Parker’s without thinking, adding
