ancestor who had lived in the hills and eaten raccoons. “How you getting by? Everything comfortable over there?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Varney. “I appreciate everything you folks have done.” He had used the word “folks” with no time lost in calculation. He had always had an ear for other people’s diction and a tendency to fall easily into it that was almost a weakness. He kept walking because it was not the time, and certainly not the place, for the conversation he was considering. Tracy and Marty were too close, just beyond the door.
Nick said, “Glad to do it. Is she in there?”
Varney nodded. “I just left her.”
Nick disappeared inside the door and Varney went on. He wondered if he should have come to Cincinnati. It had seemed to be the best way to counter Prescott’s latest stratagem. Prescott had made Buffalo an impossible place for him, then abruptly disengaged. Varney could wear himself out looking for Prescott and hiding from a horde of cops while Prescott rested up and concocted some grand plan to take him by surprise after he had defeated himself. It had seemed to Varney that he had been brilliant in sidestepping before any of that happened. He had selected Cincinnati because it was far enough away to keep the Buffalo police from being a problem but close enough to reach in a day. There were other people in other cities who had served as front men to bring him jobs from time to time, but there were none he would have come to like this; each of them had some quality he didn’t like. They were too unpredictable, or too closely connected with the powerful, or too involved in some business that brought with it worse risks than his did—schemes like bringing drugs into the country or shipping stolen cars out of it.
But now he wondered if the wholesalers might create problems he had not expected. He amended the thought: Tracy was going to be a problem. He had been here a week, and she had already begun looking at him with that bored, detached expression that showed she was wondering when he was going to leave. And now Marty, the oldest son, had begun to look at him with a debased, cruder version of it. He wasn’t sure whether Nick had simply not yet had the conversation with his mother that would make him do the same, or if he had, and had decided that a separate relationship with a man like Varney might be a good idea.
For Varney, being in a place that Prescott didn’t know about, and where he could not find him, was not a mistake. Every minute that Varney stayed out of sight, Prescott would be forced to consider the possibility that Varney was nearby, preparing to kill him. Maybe Prescott would be curious enough to begin searching, and not doing whatever he had intended to do. But Cincinnati had not been what Varney had expected. He was going to need to be watchful.
He went to a big discount store off Beechmont Avenue near the mall, bought some supplies, and brought them back to the apartment. He spent the next three hours making small improvements. He installed dead bolts on the doors. He fitted sawed-off sections of broom handles to the windows so they could not easily be opened from outside. He installed shades. Then he wrapped the handles of the set of steak knives he had bought with electrical tape to improve the grip and hid them in convenient places: in the bathroom cabinet, in the refrigerator, taped to the wall of the closet. If an intruder got very lucky sometime and managed to get between Varney and the gun he’d hidden under the bed, the luck would not necessarily bring a lasting advantage.
He walked back to the office building at three, and found the boys had gone off again. They had to deal with the messengers and mules, who kept arriving in town at intervals known only to the family. Tracy liked to have the boys and their helpers handle buys and payoffs and exchanges away from the building in hotels and apartments, and then bring her only the proceeds.
Tracy was not visible in the Crestview Wholesale office, so he sat down in one of the guest chairs in front of her desk and pretended to wait patiently and politely while he listened for sounds coming from the other offices.
After about ten minutes, he heard Tracy’s distinctive shriek and cackle, then another, softer female voice. They seemed to be coming closer. A door opened at the end of the big room, and Tracy came in. She was wearing a different outfit, this one a business suit with small white gloves of the sort that women had not worn for a generation. She tottered forward on her spike heels, the hoops hanging from her earlobes bouncing as she came. “Here we are, sugar,” she said. “Right on time!” Varney didn’t bother to correct her, because he could see she was aware of what the clock said.
The door opened again. A young woman he thought of as foreign-looking, with long, thick black hair, and wearing a white lab coat, appeared. She lingered in the open doorway, looking in his direction.
Tracy clutched his arm to make him stand up, and held it tightly to her bosom as she conducted him past the rows of empty desks toward the door. “Honey, this is Mae. She’s an expert cosmetologist and hair stylist, and she’s going to handle everything you need for your makeover.” She released him at the door. “I’ve got to go out, but I’ll be back around seven to see how you look.” He felt her hand settle in the space between his shoulder blades and give him a push, then heard the
The woman she had called Mae smiled faintly and held her door open for him to enter. As he moved past her, he got a very close look at her. He judged that she was what Tracy had said. Her skin was extremely smooth, but her makeup was elaborate and, he supposed, artful. She wore silver-blue eye shadow and dark mascara that made her eyelashes long and curved upward. He had noticed before that the women who worked behind the cosmetics counters in department stores seemed to work there just to be near the stuff, and to get the first shot at the latest shipments. His impression that she was foreign had been from her eyes, which from a distance had looked like the almond-shaped eyes of Egyptian women in ancient paintings, but that he could see now had simply been shaped by the use of some dark pencil at the corners, and by her cheekbones, which had been accentuated with some kind of coloring. Now that he was close, he could see that the eyes were blue, and the expression in them was amused and maybe a little contemptuous. He tried to analyze it, and realized it was the attitude girls in school had shown who were a couple of years older.
She had a soft, musical voice, but the pronunciation was in the local accent, and he suspected that if she had wanted to, she could still scream at a football game. “Sit down over here,” she said, and pulled a swivel chair away from a desk.
He sat down and looked up at her. “Do you do Tracy’s makeup?”
“Shit, no,” she said, and her accent seemed to become more pronounced. “I wouldn’t do that to anybody. I just get the white out of her hair and glue on the nails.”
He decided that he didn’t mind the fact that she wasn’t impressed with him. It was part of being a couple of years older. “What I’d like—”
She interrupted, but she did it by putting her hand lightly on his shoulder near his neck, so he didn’t mind. “I know what you need. I’m going to strip your hair and dye it, and then I’m going to style it differently. Have you ever worn glasses?”
“No.”
“Good. We’ll pick out some for you later. Then we’ll work on some other things.”
He looked around the room. There was a counter with a sink like one in a kitchen, a hand-held hair dryer, and a large mirror. There were barber’s instruments, and a collection of bottles and jars and packages on the counter. “What is this place? The door says it’s a travel agency.”
She looked around her as though she were looking at it through eyes that had never seen it before. “I don’t know what they use it for when I’m not here. It’s where she gets herself done up. The boys get haircuts in here, too. That sort of thing. I’ve cut hair for a few of their road men in here, too.”
“Road men?”
“Those guys who travel around and do . . .” She hesitated, as though searching for terms but finding nothing. “Whatever it is they do.” She combed his hair quickly, with darting movements.
“Tracy hates it when they don’t look nice—you know, like they’re supposed to be traveling salesmen. Meeting the public, and all that. One time I had to fit one with a wig.”
“What for?”
“Oh, she was pissed!” said Mae delightedly. “He walked into the office, and his head was shaved. She was expecting him, so she started talking to him before she looked up from her desk. So it was like, ‘Put it right over there, sugar.’ ” Mae perfectly imitated the high, saccharine voice. “And she looked up, and without even taking a breath, she goes, ‘You dare come into my office looking like skinhead trash!’ ” Mae managed to reach a tone an octave higher. “ ‘You get your sorry ass right in that room and stay there until I figure out what to do!’ Then she
