done his best to make himself stronger, faster, smarter than he had been in the morning. When he had awoken eight hours later he had not needed to prod himself to get started. He had felt eager to build on the small improvements won the day before.
Every second day he had lifted weights, and every day he had done his stretches and crunches and push-ups and pull-ups, practiced the punches, kicks, feints, and combinations he had been working on that month, then gone out to run. By this time of the morning, he would have had his shower and his breakfast, and been ready to go out again. He would go into the day feeling as though he had his edge, and everything he did after that was extra.
Varney had possessed incredible energy, and taken every opportunity to make the rest of the day as good as the beginning. If he had to go to the library to find everything they had on some topic—say, the habits and attitudes of some business guy he had been hired to take out—he would walk miles to the main branch to increase his stamina. He would stare for a long time at the man’s photographs and memorize all the details he had read, then test himself on the way home. On the street, he would study everything he saw, trying to notice things that would help him in other places and other times: how new buildings were locked and protected, where the surveillance cameras were placed, and how they were disguised. He watched policemen and security guards, searching for routines that had become sloppy and predictable.
This morning Varney slowly pulled himself out of bed and walked to the window, trying to avoid the mirror on the dresser so he would not have to look into his own eyes. He was ashamed. He had been here over a week, and every day he had let himself slip a little bit further. He supposed that the first day or two he had been tired from his lack of sleep and his long drive. He had been angry and upset and disoriented. Those were the things he had told himself. He had used them to convince himself that what he needed was to give himself a rest.
He had slept in the next morning. The day after that, he had told himself that he was still tired, and the day after that he’d said he needed time to get used to his surroundings and make observations of the area for security’s sake. Then, there were more practical matters: groceries to buy, getting rid of the car he had driven here from Buffalo. On the fifth day he had found himself moving furniture around, as though this room were going to be a permanent residence.
He was afraid he was losing himself. He was losing the man he had built from nothing, and the process was frightening to him. The deterioration seemed to happen so quickly. Suddenly, he felt lazy, tired all the time. He seemed to be breathing in shallow drafts, not getting enough oxygen to allow him to move the way he always had.
It had been a hot, humid week, and the sunlight looked strange and dull to him, filtered through a thin gray haze so that the glare came from every direction and nothing stood out in sharp relief, or had a definite shadow.
He turned from the window, determined to save himself. It was too late to salvage the past week, but today was a new start. He dropped to the floor and did push-ups, counting as he went. When he reached forty, a part of his brain said, “Why fifty? Why isn’t forty enough? It’s the first day. I can do more in my second set, after the sit- ups.” The internal, unvoiced sound of his thoughts horrified him. That was the way of weakness, the way losers thought. He pumped out the fifty, then rolled to his back and rushed into the sit-ups. As he worked, he could feel the effect of his lazy week. Two hundred was going to be too many. Why not a hundred now and a hundred later? The words were so distasteful that he felt disgust and shame. When he had finished the two hundred he punished his abdominal muscles by doing fifty slow, agonizing crunches. Next he went to the empty closet, pushed aside the hangers, and did fifty pull-ups on the clothes pole, and did his second set of push-ups with his eyes already searching the room for his running shoes and shorts. He put on a heavy sweatshirt with them so he would sweat harder when he ran.
He had degenerated so badly that in the seven days, he had not even selected a route for his daily run. He found a way that kept him off the crowded business streets, and eventually came to a large high school field where other people too old to be students were jogging and some kids were playing basketball on a blacktop square with a row of baskets on poles. He used the quarter-mile track to make sure he had covered five miles before he jogged out the gate.
Varney jogged back to his apartment building on a street parallel to the one he had used before, short of breath and feeling a tightness in his calves and thighs that he had not felt in years. That made him more angry. He had been living in a stream, swimming against the current. The moment he had rested, he had begun to drift backward, losing what he had accomplished in the past two months.
When he had dressed and eaten, he walked downtown to the office building. As he walked, he began to feel better. The idiotic interlude with Prescott had not killed him, and the disappointment he had felt since could not be allowed to destroy him.
He climbed the stairs, walked along the hallway, and opened the door to Crestview Wholesale to find Tracy at her desk again. As she looked up at him, her eyelids half-closed wearily.
“Hello, sugar. Nice of you to grace us with your presence this afternoon.”
He knew that look, that tired, quiet look as though she had tried to help him and failed a hundred times. He had grown up with it. He had spent his early childhood trying to fight it, to remove it from his mother’s face by trying to do things that would please her. After that had failed, he had tried to avoid the look, to keep from attracting her attention, or simply to evade her and be somewhere else. “I was working out.”
“You mean lifting weights and all that?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t bring any weights when I came. But that’s the sort of thing.”
She raised her eyes and made a cradle for her chin out of the backs of her hands. She blinked once and smiled sweetly. “I always wondered about that. Why would a person do such heavy work for nothing? Why not just get a job running around and lifting heavy things?”
Varney said, “It’s part of the life. You have to be stronger and faster, or the other guy will kill you.” He was pleased that she had given him the chance to remind her that he was not just some sap who was paid to listen to her. She seemed to feel it too. She wrinkled her forehead further and shook her dyed red hair in a manner that suggested that the ways of men were far too mysterious for a young girl to understand, and returned her eyes to her bookkeeping.
He stood and waited until she looked up again. “Is there something you needed, sugar?”
“Yes,” he said. “I want you to help me change some things.”
“Like what?”
“I want to look different—change my hair, get some new clothes, that sort of thing. You probably know the best places in Cincinnati.”
She compressed her face into a worried, vexed expression. “I could do better than give you a list of stores and stylists,” she said. “I have some experience with this kind of thing, but you know, to do it right, it runs into a bit of money.”
“I can pay.”
“Really?” She pretended to be uneasy. “I didn’t like to embarrass you or anything, because I thought you must be broke. I didn’t mention it, but that apartment usually rents for a hundred dollars a day.”
Varney watched her face. It had changed from a disapproving irony that was cautious, because she was delicately testing how far she could go without being in danger, to a still-cautious hopefulness, the greed she was feeling rapidly beginning to overwhelm her. He said, “Oh,” in a toneless voice. “Here.” He watched her eyes when she saw the thick sheaf of folded hundreds emerge from his pocket. “Here’s for the time I’ve been in it.” He tossed the three bills on the desk and watched her eyes follow the rest of the bills back to his pocket, then linger there.
Pointed red fingernails that grew into little curves like claws scraped on the wood as her fingertips touched the money lightly and drew it back into her lap. It was not until the money was out of sight that she said disingenuously, “I didn’t mean to sound inhospitable, sugar. I could have waited. Now, about the changes you’re making. We can get started this afternoon, if you like. You come back here around three, will you?”
“Sure.” He turned and left the office. As he walked down the hallway two of the brothers were coming in the other way, but they weren’t walking together. The older one, Marty, was almost to the door. Varney smiled and said hello to him, but Marty seemed to pass through the greeting, not slowing, just making a barely perceptible nod as he continued on his course. The second brother, Nick, seemed to have noticed the exchange and decided that if his older brother had been cool, it must be the wrong decision.
He was warm. “Hey, buddy,” he said with a grin that seemed to be an unfortunate inheritance from some
