361 - Donald E. Westlake [54]
I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was sitting on the wrong side to see the dawn, so I looked out at the darkness and wished the bus were going to Binghamton.
It got lighter and lighter outside the window. The towns passed by. Red Hook and Rhineland and back across the river to Kingston. Then West Park and Highland and across the river again to Poughkeepsie. Then Wappingers Falls and Fishkill and Beacon, Peekskill and Ossining and Tarrytown, White Plains and Yonkers and New York.
I got off at 50th Street. I walked a ways and went into the Cuttington Hotel on 52nd Street.
They would all be looking for me now, so I’d have to register under a phony name. Walking up from the bus terminal, I chose Matthew Allen. A reasonable but forgettable name, and it didn’t use my initials.
Stupid things happen. I got terrified when the register was turned toward me. I’d never given a false name before. My hand shook as I wrote the name, so bad it wasn’t my writing at all. And I couldn’t look the woman desk clerk in the eye. She spent a lot of time explaining to me that I was signing in at an unusual hour and she would have to charge me for last night because the day ended at three p.m. I told her it was all right, and got away from her as soon as I could, following the bellboy.
Once in the room, alone, it struck me funny. After all that had happened, to practically faint when I had to write a phony name. I lay down on the bed and laughed, and the laughter got out of control. Down in a corner of my mind the laughing frightened me. Then the laughter got mixed around and turned upside down and I was crying. Then I laughed because it was funny to be crying, and cried because it was sad to be laughing. When I was empty, I fell asleep.
I woke up at one with smarting feet. I hadn’t taken my shoes off. I stripped and showered, and walked around the room naked while the last of the stiffness went away. Then I got dressed, and sat down at the writing table, and wrote a little letter to my Uncle Henry, telling him to write me as Matthew Allen at this hotel. Not in care of Matthew Allen, but as Matthew Allen. Then I left the room.
I made it to the bank on time, where a little more than half of Bill’s three thousand dollars still waited in our joint account to be spent. I took out two hundred, and went to a luncheonette and had breakfast, surrounded by people eating a late lunch. And then I had nothing in the world to do. I bought four paperback books and a deck of cards and went back to the room.
I knew that Kapp was right, that I should wait before going after Ganolese. If I were to get to him, without myself being killed, it would be better to wait till his attention was distracted. Kapp and his junta would make a fine distraction. Once they had made their move, I could make mine.
The thing was, it wouldn’t be sufficient for me to be killed attempting my revenge. I wasn’t trying to sacrifice myself. I wanted to come out alive on the other side. So it was best to wait.
But I’m not good at waiting. That first afternoon, I read a while and then I ripped up all four of the books. They were action mysteries, and they were supposed to help me stop thinking about myself. But all they managed to do was keep prodding the open wound I’d been trying to ignore. All they did was remind me that, if all went well, I would be alive when this was over. That was the part, most of all, that I didn’t want to think about.
Life uses people up. When I was finished with what I had to do, I could hardly be the same person I’d been the day the Air Force had made me a civilian and I had re-met Dad. Who I would be, what use or purpose I might find—I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. Yet I had to live, or it would be their triumph after all, and my defeat, even if I were to kill them all and then be killed myself, by my hand or theirs.
It was simpler for the lead characters in