361 - Donald E. Westlake [53]
I nodded. “All right.”
“Now Ganolese,” he said, “he’s the one pointed the finger at you, and Will Kelly, and your brother, and your sister-in-law. But he wouldn’t have thought it up all by himself. The word would come in, Eddie Kapp’s planning a move and thus and so, and somebody would go up to Ganolese and tell him the situation and make a suggestion. Do this or that, boss, and the whole thing is clear.”
“Cheever?”
He paused, looking out at the lake while he lit his cigar. Still looking out that way, he said, “And when an operation falls apart, it’s the guy who suggested that operation in the first place who gets any dirty jobs that might come up because of the failure. Like carrying messages to the enemy. Things like that.”
“I see.”
“I thought you might want to know,” he said. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t pick it up.”
“I didn’t.”
He chewed on the cigar, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. After a minute, he said, “You remember what we were talking about in Plattsburg, family and respectability?”
“I remember.”
“This is about Cheever again. The Negro. He wants to be respectable, too, same as everybody else. But he can’t be, and it don’t matter how many generations he’s been here, you see what I mean? So he’s liable to wind up in the organization. If he’s smart and he’s got a good education and he’s tough, he’s liable to get himself a good position in the organization. Better than he could get outside.”
“Us minorities got to stick together,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah, boy, I like you. But I was making a point. About family. The Negro, see, he’s got the respectability itch, same as the Italian or the Jew or the Irishman or the Greek, but he don’t have the same itch about family, you know what I mean? He’s had that part sold out of him. Brought over here as slaves, Papa sold here, Mama sold there, kids sold up and down the river. And it wasn’t so long ago the selling stopped.”
“A hundred years,” I said.
“That ain’t long. He still ain’t gonna get dewy-eyed over somebody else’s family. That’s another point to consider.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“It’s nice up here,” he said suddenly. He inhaled noisily, blew breath out at the lake. “I figure to stick around a while, a week or so, till things get moving. You ought to wait till then, anyway. Why not stay here?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.
“We get to know each other,” he said. “Father and son. What do you say?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
He patted my shoulder. “You do that. We can talk about it tomorrow. You coming back up?”
“You need me?”
“Not unless you want to come. This is just the business meeting now.”
“I’ll stay here a while.”
“Okay. See you in the morning.”
“Sure.”
He went inside. I heard him going up the stairs. I sat a while longer, looking out at the lake. After a while, I tossed the bottle off the end of the dock and went back up to my room. I packed the suitcase and went out the side door and up the slope toward the road. They were all still talking back there in the throne room.
I told a chauffeur, “You’re supposed to drive me into town.”
He did, and I found the Greyhound station. I waited in the diner across the street until the New York bus came. Then I got aboard and went to sleep.
Twenty-Two
I awoke at Hudson, with the dim gray of pre-dawn on the bus windows. It was sprinkling, and the long wipers smacked back and forth across the windshield. I sat midway down the aisle, on the right side. There were only about four other passengers. I had both seats all the way back and I was sprawled at an angle on them, head against the windowpane and shoeless feet in the aisle. I was cramped and muggy. I’d been in that position too long. I felt like wet wool.
What woke me up, the bus had stopped. A man came running across the sidewalk from the store-front bus depot. He had a slick black raincoat draped over his head. The driver pushed the door open and the other man stood in the gutter, and they shouted back and forth over the sound of the