Serenade - James M. Cain [76]
"Stop! Don't say a word. I warn you that my phone is tapped, and everything you say is being heard."
"That occurred to me. That's why I refused to give my name. How can I get to you?"
"Wait a minute. Wait a minute Will you call me in five minutes? I'll have to figure a way--"
"In five minutes it is."
He hung up, and I tried to think of some way we could meet, and yet not tip off the cops over the phone where it would be. I couldn't think. He had said he had news, and my head was just spinning around. Before I even had half an idea the phone rang again. "Well, lad, what's the word?"
"I haven't any. They're following me too, that's the trouble. Wait a minute, wait a minute--"
"I have something that might work."
"What is it?"
"Do you remember the time signature of the serenade you first sang to me?"
"...Yes, of course."
"Write those figures down, the two of them, one beside the other. Now write them again, the same way. You should have a number of four figures."
I jumped up, and got a pen, and wrote the numbers on the memo pad. It was the Don Giovanni serenade, and time signature is 6/8. I wrote 6868..."All right, I've got it."
"Now subtract from it this number." He gave me a number to subtract. I did it. "That is the number of the pay telephone I'm at. The exchange number is Circle 6. Go out to another pay telephone and call me there."
"In twenty minutes. As soon as I get dressed."
I jumped into my clothes, ran up to a drugstore, and called. Whether they were around the booth, listening to me, I didn't care. They couldn't hear what was coming in at the other end. "Is that you, lad?"
"Yes. What news?"
"I have her. She's going down the line with me. I'm at the foot of Seventeenth Street, and I slip my hawsers at midnight tonight. If you wish to see her before we leave, come aboard some time after eleven, but take care you're not detected."
"How did you find her?"
"I didn't. She found me. She's been aboard since yesterday, if you had answered your phone."
"I'll be there. I'll thank you then."
I went back to the apartment, cut out the fooling around, and began to think. I checked over every last thing I had to do that day, then made a little program in my mind of what I was to do first, and what I was to do after that. I knew I would be tailed, and I planned it all on that basis. The first thing I did was to go up to Grand Central, and look up trains for Rye. I found there was a local leaving around ten that night. I came out of there, went in a store and bought some needles and thread. Then I went down to the bank. I still had over six thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, but I needed more than that. I drew out ten thousand, half of it in thousand-dollar bills, twenty-five hundred more in hundreds, and the rest in fives and tens, with about fifty ones. I stuffed all that in my pockets, and went home with it. I remembered about the two shirts I had worn out of the hotel in Mexico, and pulled one just like it. I took two pairs of drawers, put one pair inside the other, sewed the bottoms of each leg together, then quilted that money in, all except the ones, and some fives and tens, that I put in my pockets. I put the drawers on. They felt a little heavy, but I could get my trousers over them without anything showing. Tony came up. They had got out of him how he had called the taxi, and he was almost crying because he had squealed. I told him it didn't make any difference.
When dinner time came, instead of going out I had something sent in. Then I packed. I shoved a stack of newspapers and heavy stuff into a traveling case, and locked it. When I dressed I put on a pair of gray flannel pants I had left over from Hollywood, and over my shirt a dark red sweater. I put on a coat, and over that a light topcoat. I picked out a gray hat, shoved it on the side of my head. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked like what I wanted to look like, a guy dressed up to take a trip. After drawing the money, I knew they would expect that. That was why I had planned it the way I had.