“They asked me to some night trailed off. .
“You want me to check that, Krost?” Donaldson asked coldly.
“Finding you makes me feel like a rat catcher-one with lots of experience. Damn it, I told you to stick around where I could get hold of you!”
“Is something wrong, Mr. Donaldson?” Krost was oozing contrition.
“If there’s anything you want me to do…
Donaldson cut him short. “Yeah, for once there’s something you can do. Go down to Motivational Displays on twenty-one.”
“But they’re all gone for the weekend!” Krost bleated.
“Bigelow, their v.p just called from their executive suites. You know where that is?”
“The little apartment with kitchenette at the opposite Krost’s voice end of their offices?” He remembered it well; the bar there was usually well stocked.
“The refrigerator’s out of order and Bigelow’s entertaining a client.”
Krost was offended. “They want a refrigerator fixed at this time of night?”
“Don’t ask questions, just go down there and fix that box. Then get back to me-I want to know where yore going to be goofing off next.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Donaldson.” Krost hung up. Screw you, Mac, you’re not going to pin me down that easy.
Next time when the phone rang, he wouldn’t bother answering. Let Donaldson try and chase him down; he didn’t know all the hidey holes.
He finished wiping his hands on his pants and flicked off the light switch, then locked the door after him’. He idly wondered who the hell Bigelow could be entertaining at this time of night.
So much money, Lex Hughes thought-more money than the Credit Union had had in its vault for as long as he could remember. Not enough to make a man independently wealthy but thirty thousand dollars was still nothing to sneeze at. He made a final entry in the ledger before him, then his pudgy fingers gathered up a number of larger bills and with a lover’s touch added them to the stack before him. He wet his thumb, jogged the stack so the bills were even at the short edge and flicked his thumb slowly across them, counting as he went. Another thousand.
He wrapped a paper band tightly around the bundle and laid it gently in the nearby tray. It was the Christmas Club that accounted for the additional funds, he thought. Next week the accounts would mature and -there would be numerous withdrawals for holiday gift buying.
“How’re you doing, Lex?”
“It’s going to be a long night, Carolyn.” He grouped another stack of bills in front of him and started counting, then suddenly glanced up at the camera overhead. The Eye was what they called it in the Credit Union, the all- seeing, ubiquitous Eye that constantly scanned the railed enclosure and the open vault behind it He had been down in the security monitoring room once and Garfunkel had shown him the small television screen that was tied into the Credit Union camera, as well as the indicator for the small impulse sensor that registered the body heat of anybody near the camera itself. It had given him an eerie feeling and now whenever he saw the camera approaching him on scan, its small red “on” light glowing, he felt queasy inside, as if the camera could read his thoughts.
Once, when he had been a child, they had a kitchen calendar showing a huge, disembodied eye floating in clouds and underneath the legend “Thou God, Thou Seest Me.” His mother had been a strong fundamentalist and her firm belief in a personal God who was aware of your every action had obsessed him since childhood.
Occasionally, he would remember the calendar and as the camera sweep approached him, he would think: Thou Seest Me.
“Lex, do you have the credit vouchers from the Fifth Street operation?”
Hughes started guiltily, he had,momentarily forgotten that she had been working in the vault behind him. “Just a minute,” he mumbled, “they’re here someplace.” He searched his desk and handed them to her.
At twenty-eight, Carolyn Oakes somehow seemed a decade older, he thought with a trace of pity. It wasn’t that she had aged prematurely; it was more her manner and the way she dressed-low-heeled, “sensible” shoes, her carefully brushed brown hair gathered at the back, an almost total lack of make-up. She was actually rather attractive, Hughes thought, but she rarely dated and seemed to have given up on the constant quest for a husband that motivated so many of the girls who worked in the Credit Union. One thing he had to give her-she was dependable and had a precise, mathematical mind that was ideal for the job she held.
She leaned against his desk and kicked off a shoe so she could massage her instep. “God, what a day-I’d like to go home and soak in the tub half the night after we wind up this mess.” He continued banding the money in front of him, his fingers doing it almost automatically. “So why don’t you?”
“I’ve made plans for the weekend. My sister is picking me up tonight and we’re going upstate to spend the weekend with my uncle. I wish now I hadn’t promised.”
“Better give her a call,” Hughes said after a moment’s thought.
“What with the early payday because of Thanksgiving and the Christmas Club money, we’ll be here another two hours at least.”
She slipped her shoe back on and started going over the ledgers at a nearby desk. “The foremen aren’t exactly underpaid, are they?”
Hughes was silent for a moment while he counted, then banded another bundle. “They sure as hell aren’t.”, They had a lot more to show for their years of work than he did, he thought. After twenty years he was fifteen hundred in debt and had a wife who couldn’t resist a bargain and a son who was a dummy and wasn’t even making it in the local junior college…. Any union man on a construction job took home twice what he did. He knew, he saw their paychecks when they cashed them at the Union. Granted that envy was not a Christian trait, nevertheless it … just … wasn’t… fair.
The phone on Carolyn’s desk rang and she answered, then turned to Hughes, her hand covering the mouthpiece. “It’s your wife.”
“Do you mind, Carolyn? I’ll only be a minute.”
“I’ve got some entries to make in the vault anyway,’ Carolyn said.
Hughes leaned over and took the phone. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I know it’s the holidays but I just can’t walk away from the job.” He listened in silence for a second more, then said, “I’ll make it home as soon as I can,” and hung up. He didn’t have much to show for his home life, either, he thought. You made a mistake when you were young and the sap was’rising and you spent the rest of your life regretting it.
There was a brief time, after he had graduated from college, when he had tried his hand at acting in New York. If he had only been able to give it another six months … But he hadn’t and that had been that.
It actually hurt to see a play now, particularly if it was a revival and he knew some of the lines. He’d sit in the audience and mumble them to himself, anticipating the actors on stage. He’d sold out his hopes, he thought, for a woman who didn’t love him and whose only ambition in life was to spend the type of money he could never hope to make. Who was it who said we all lead lives of quiet desperation?
He opened his bottom desk drawer and ran his fingers over the travel folders he kept there, his mind’s eye visualizing the exotic countries they described. Japan, Greece, the Near East …
“Why don’t you go someday?” Carolyn asked gently, coming up behind him.
“Yeah, sure, someday. You know, I saw a little of Japan when I was in the service. Not much of it-when you’re in the Army, somehow you never really see much of the country you’re stationed in. A friend of mine who was in the Navy said the only thing he ever saw overseas were the little steak-and-egg restaurants around fleet landing that catered to the sailors.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “You ever been overseas, Carolyn? Ever been to England or Germany or Greece?”
She nodded, feeling oddly sorry for him. “I belong to a tour group and every summer we go someplace. Last year it was Greece and I saw Athens and Piraeus, the Acropolis, that sort of thing. You ought to join one-it’s cheaper than flying from here to the Coast.” - He took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and kneaded the bridge of his nose for a moment. “You know, I think I could really use about two months on the Italian Riviera.
By myself.” He sighed. “I suppose that surprises you?”
She shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t say it does. Except that the Italian Riviera suffers from a lot of pollution now and the Mediterranean isn’t quite as blue as it looks in the travel folders.”
She was sorry she had mentioned it when she saw the look on his face.
