matter.”
Jesso said nothing and Renette tossed some more stones.
“Renette. It does matter.”
“What he did?”
“No, you. That you won’t come.”
“That doesn’t matter either. Because you agreed.”
“You make it sound easy,” he said, and hearing his own voice, he wondered at the change in it.
“Jesso,” she said. “You sound like good-by.”
“Like hell.”
But when they stood there longer, not speaking, the damp air, maybe, or the lead in the low sky got to him, and Renette too didn’t feel the ease any more and the sure sense of herself, and when he said, “Come,” she followed him, very eager, and they went upstairs without saying anything and closed the door behind them.
Then they made love as if it were the only time, with no before and no after.
Chapter Twenty
He watched the runway fall away and then the city where it lay flat below with a green park spreading at one end and factory chimneys at the other. It disappeared after a while as they entered the overcast. Jesso pulled out his passport again. The green cover was properly worn and inside there were his name and his picture and his signature, and there was nothing wrong with any of it as far as he could tell. He stuck it back in his pocket with the envelope and the airplane tickets. One of them said Hannover to Frankfurt-am-Main and the other one hadn’t been used yet. It said Frankfurt-am-Main to New York. There was a return ticket too. A week at the most and he’d be back. Everything was running so smoothly that he would be back even sooner.
Jesso sat in his seat and didn’t feel right, even though the feeling made no sense. Renette? How could he feel uneasy about something he wanted so much and had altogether? Helmut? Why waste time thinking about a thing like him? Perhaps Kator. He thought of Kator when the plane went down at Frankfurt, when he got off and went along the airport corridor to the other ramp. His connecting flight was there. Jesso stood in the line that went through customs, and if there was any reason to think of Kator, this was it. Maybe the passport wasn’t as good as it looked. Almost Jesso’s turn in line. Maybe they’d take one look, pull him out, and that was Kator’s play. Jesso could see the two guys in green, customs officers. Two German policemen with those crazy shakos on their heads, like flowerpots. And two M.P.'s. They wore khaki and white for the occasion.
The line moved and Jesso stepped closer. He had a very calm thought and it was that he’d kill somebody if they tried to pull him out. “Pass, bitte,” and Jesso handed it over. Then he got it back and walked through the gate. Then the plane, the stewardess who was a living doll from Cleveland, Ohio, and the seat. The seat. The plane took off and that was that.
He didn’t take a deep breath of relief, because he hadn’t been holding his breath. It was a weird state to know that nothing was right and to find nothing wrong that he could do anything about; and weirder still to know that even inside of him nothing was happening. They shipped eels that way, curled inside a block of ice in suspended animation. The whole trip went by without any real passage of time. He didn’t come out of it until the pilot invited everyone over the loud-speaker to look down below, the United States coast was coming up. Jesso thought it was the weirdest yet to be going in one direction in order to go in the other.
Jesso had only one suitcase and got through customs fast. He took a taxi from Idlewild and they made the Queens Midtown Tunnel in less than an hour. It was five in the morning. He knew a nice family hotel on Forty-fifth Street and he took a room at $7.50 with bath. Then he went to sleep until nine. He woke up the way he rarely did, with a quick, wide-awake jump, but there were just the Chinese mandarins on the wallpaper and the thing with the house rules on the door. He showered and shaved and wanted breakfast. There was a hamburger place across the street and he had an English muffin with jam and drank coffee.
That was at nine-forty-five. He smoked a cigarette in the taxi and from nine-thirty till three in the afternoon he kept the same cab going from one bank to the next. He got some cash and a lot of traveler’s checks. They cost a fortune, but that was the least of his worries. He was stepping out of a bank stuffing an envelope into his brief case when he came awake as he hadn’t been since the trip had started. Manufacturers Trust Company, it said next to him on the brass plate. That time in Delf’s office with nothing on his mind but racking up a list of New York banks, that’s when he had picked Manufacturers Trust. He would; he knew it well enough. He shouldn’t have, because Gluck’s office was in the building right across the street.
Jesso hefted the brief case and made for his taxi at the curb. It was double-parked, so all he saw was the rear fender, and then the fender started moving. Jesso made it to the curb, ran out between the cars that stood there, and yelled, but the hacky either didn’t hear or didn’t want to, because the cab was off, moving with the traffic.
“He stood there twenty minutes, bud. At twenty minutes even I draw the line,” said a cop, coming out from between the cars.
He didn’t look mean, he didn’t look as if he were part of a plot, or maybe planted there, maybe no cop at all. Jesso was wide awake now, so much so that he felt he was going to shake any minute.
“He’ll be back,” said the cop. “Just making a circle around the block.” He turned and walked across the street.
Jesso watched him leave, knowing it was just that, a cop moving a cab that was double-parked too long and nothing more, but Jesso felt the sweat creep out even though it was all over. Till then he hadn’t known just how much asleep he’d been, hiding his fear that something would go wrong under a thick blanket of nothingness. He yanked at his tie, wiped a hand across his face, and looked down the street. He felt like a fool for the way he’d taken that business with the cab. Any more of this and it wouldn’t need any Kator to trip him up. Just keep stumbling along with almost a quarter of a million under his arm, just keep goofing the way he’d picked a bank right across from Gluck’s place, and he wouldn’t have to wait for any monster mind like Kator’s to spring a trap for him.
Jesso didn’t see the cab right then, so he looked elsewhere, alert now. He saw the guy in the Brooks Brothers suit across the street and the way he watched the backside of the girl in front of him. He saw the same cop down by the fire plug, and this time he was pinning a ticket on a car. And when the two-tone Buick pulled out of the basement garage opposite, Jesso saw that too. He saw Murph behind the wheel before Murph saw Jesso, but then he didn’t jump back to the curb behind the cars, because first he took another look down the length of the street. No taxi yet. Jump, Jesso. The subway, two blocks down. That damn taxi…
“Hey! Jackie!”
That’s when he jumped.
The Buick had swung around and Murph slowed down. He blinked at Jesso at the bank, trying to get the door open, but it was past three-thirty so Murph got a good look.
Jesso had seen him too. Gluck sat in back, spread out, and when Murph started his yelling Gluck had looked up, but he was looking at Murph. There are millions of Jacks. Jesso didn’t see him by the bank, turning away from the door, not knowing whether to run or stand right there because his taxi was coming down the street. That taxi was going to pull up right behind Gluck’s Buick. And Murphy, stopping the car to crane his neck-was that idiot ever going to catch on and move? Then Gluck looked up again. He said something and Jesso could imagine what it sounded like. If Gluck looked down again… Gluck lowered his head and Jesso made his sprint. And that’s when Gluck looked up again.
There wasn’t any turning back, and if this was going to be the end, it was going to be full of action. There wasn’t going to be any more waiting around for dreamed-up traps to spring, because there weren’t any. And no more clouts on the head in some Brooklyn button shop, because from now on Jesso had a pair of eyes in the back of his head. He slammed the taxi door shut and yelled, “Drive like hell.” Just for good measure he threw a bill next to the cabbie to make it legal. Forty-five bucks was the fare so far; the rest was tip. The cabbie grabbed the C note and took off. Jesso sat behind him and the cabbie hadn’t missed a thing; how Jesso sat and how he held that gun. The taxi took a wild swing around the Buick to get clear, because one door had opened and Gluck had scrambled out. Through the rear window Jesso saw Gluck taking the wheel. Good old trusty Murph. Gluck didn’t trust him.
