North was waiting, dressed in a neat blue suit. “Here’s the keys. She says it’s a chocolate Mink. Middle of the lot.”
The keys shared their chain with a rabbit’s foot. He put the whole affair in his pocket as they clattered down the steps. “Won’t they hear us?”
“They’re still whooping and hollering about the game. The thing is to get out fast before they stop.”
Instead of turning off into the room in which he had drunk coffee with Joe and W.F., they emerged into a snowy parking lot from what was clearly the back of the hospital. The brown car was bigger than he had expected—yet hunched-looking, with its short hood, high trunk, and roomy passenger compartment.
He twisted the key in the ignition, but in vain.
“I thought you said you knew how to drive.”
“It won’t start, that’s all. Won’t even crank.” Prompted by a dim and almost racial memory, he stared down at the pedals. There were three, and a wear-polished steel button to the left of the clutch. He pressed it with his foot; the engine sprang to life.
“That’s better,” North said.
He nodded, wondering about the floor shift. It had been a long time since he had driven a stick, and that had been a short lever on the doghouse of a sports car. This was an ungainly rod topped by a knob of hard, black rubber. He tried out the gears.
“Get moving, damn it!”
“Do you want to get out of here, or do you want to have an accident?” The car rolled smoothly back; he clashed the gears a little shifting into first, but second and third were smooth and firm. “We’re thieves now, I guess,” he said as they turned out of the hospital’s parking lot. “If we don’t get sent back here, we’ll be put in jail.”
Edged into the corner, North grinned at him. “How do you think I got the keys? Or got that door unlocked? I got money too.”
“How much?”
“None of your God-damned business. You got any?”
He said, “Same answer.”
“You know, I kind of like you.” North chuckled. “Which is too bad because I’m going to have to bust your God- damned snotty nose for you someday.”
“I hope it’s not before you’re through having me drive for you. Can’t you drive? You said you could.”
“I’ve been through the FBI’s chauffeur course.”
He asked, “Then why’d you take me with you?”
“Because I felt sorry for you, you jerk.”
He glanced across at North and saw that North was no longer grinning.
A street he did not know unreeled before them; it was wide, with two traffic lanes on each side of two sets of shiny trolley tracks. There were trees, bare and yet snow-laden, between the street and the sidewalk. He thought of the streets he had seen radiating from the intersection outside the mental health center. This was one of them, he felt certain. But which? It seemed to him that though all had run straight, none had run in a definable direction —neither north nor south, east nor west. And yet this street had surely run to North.
“Stop up there,” North told him, “where it says guns. See the sign?”
“You’re going to get a gun?”
“Stop or I’ll break your God-damned neck.”
North seemed to mean it. He pulled to the curb in front of the gun store and switched off the ignition. North got out, and he sighed with relief as he saw North walk past the show window and go into the haberdashery beside it.
He took out the Tina doll and studied its enigmatic smile for what felt like a long time, then pulled the charm Sheng had given him free of his shirt. It was a root, a dry, hard thing shaped like a tiny wrinkled man no taller than Tina’s forearm.
A passing woman glanced through the window, and he realized how strange he must have looked to her with the doll in one hand and the charm in the other. She probably thought he was crazy, and if she called the police, she would find out she was right.
Except that even United had not thought him crazy, only an alcoholic. He was—supposedly—a drunk, and North was what? A schizophrenic maniac. Something like that.
He put the charm and the doll away and turned his attention to the passersby. At first they looked ordinary enough, though a little old-fashioned in their dress. He had seen pictures set in the thirties and forties, and he felt that these quiet, dark figures hurrying through the cold were costumed for just such a picture, girls and women and a few men, all in heavy coats that reached nearly to their shoe-tops, the men in wide-brimmed felt hats, the women and girls in head-hugging cloches.
Or that he was somewhere in Eastern Europe, where according to the evening news such clothing was still worn. One young man who passed him had a fur hat, and several women were wearing fur coats. Was there a place in Eastern Europe where they spoke English? A training city, perhaps, for Russian spies? Yet such a city should have been far more accurate. American clothes and American cars were not hard to get.
Three middle-aged women passed, each with an attache case or a briefcase. It occurred to him that he had seen very few older men, and he began to count. He had counted twenty-three women and three men who looked middle-aged when North came out of the gun store.
“All set,” North told him. “Let’s roll.”
