Nightwork

Whatever happens, I thought, I am not going to look like that when I'm his age. We still didn't say a word to each other.

When the waitress came over, I asked for a cup of coffee. 'What I need is a drink,' Hank said, but he settled for coffee, too.

Against the partition at the end of the small table, there was a small slot for coins and a selector for the juke box near the entrance. I put in two dimes and jabbed the selector at random. By the time the waitress came back with our coffees, the juke box was playing so loudly that nobody could have heard me at the next table unless I shouted.

Hank drank his coffee greedily. It did not smell of cinnamon or rum or oranges, 'I puked twice this morning,' he said.

'The money is in there.' I tapped the envelope.

'Christ, Doug,' Hank said, 'I hope you know what you're doing.'

'So do I,' I said. 'Anyway, it's yours now. I'll leave first Give me ten minutes and then you can go.' I didn't want him to see my rented car and note the license number. I hadn't planned any of this and didn't believe it was really necessary, but caution was becoming automatic with me.

'You'll never regret this,' he said.

'No, I won't,' I said.

With a crumpled handkerchief he wiped at the cold-tears streaming from his eyes. I told the two fellows that I was coming up with the money this week,' he said. 'They're delirious with joy. They're going for the deal. They didn't say boo.' He opened his overcoat and fished past an old gray muffler that hung around his neck like a dead snake. He brought out a pen and a small notebook. 'I'll write a receipt.'

'Forget it,' I said. 'I know I gave you the money and you know you got the money.' He had never asked for a receipt for any of the sums he had lent me or given me.

'Inside of a year you'll be a rich man, Doug,' he said.

'Good,' I said. His optimism was forlorn. I don't want anything on paper. Not anything. As an accountant, I imagine you know how to arrange to check off whatever may be coming to me without any records being kept.' I remembered what Evelyn Coates had said about Xeroxes. I was reasonably sure there were Xeroxes in Scranton, too.

'Yes, I imagine I do.' He said it sadly. He was in the wrong profession, but it was too late now to do anything about it.

'I don't want the Internal Revenue Service looking for me.'

'I understand,' he said. 'I can't say I like it, but I understand.' He shook his head somberly. 'You're the last man in the world I'd...'

That's enough of that, Hank,' I said.

The first record on the juke box ended with an ear-shattering climax, and the voice of the waitress giving an order to the counterman sounded unnaturally loud in the lull. 'Eggs and bacon, up. One English.'

I took another gulp of my coffee and got up, leaving the envelope on the table. I put on my coat. 'I'll be calling you. From time to time.'

He smiled up at me wanly as he put his hand on the envelope. 'Take care of yourself, kid,' he said.

'You, too,' I touched his shoulder and went out into the cold.

* * *

The flight wasn't scheduled to leave until eight Wednesday night.

On Wednesday afternoon, at two-thirty, I left a hundred-dollar bill in the safety-deposit box and walked out of the bank with seventy-two thousand, nine hundred dollars in the attaché case I had bought in Washington. I was through with manila envelopes. I couldn't have explained, even to myself, why I had left the hundred dollars behind. Superstition? A promise to myself that one day I would come back to the country? In any event, I had paid in advance for the rental of the box for a year.

This time I was staying at the Waldorf Astoria. By now, anybody who was looking for me must have decided that I had left the city. I went back to my room and opened the attaché case and took out three thousand dollars, which I put into the new sealskin wallet I had bought for myself. It was large enough to hold my passport and my round-trip charter ticket. At the Christie Ski Club office on Forty-seventh Street, where I had gone after I left Hank in the coffee shop, I had asked for Wales' friend Miss Mansfield, and the girl had filled out my application form and predated it automatically. She told me I had been lucky to come in just then, as they had two cancellations that morning. Offhandedly, I asked her if the Waleses were also making the flight. She checked her list and to my relief said that they weren't on it. I still had plenty of cash from my winning on Ask Gloria and the Washington poker game. Even without the money in the attaché case and after the expenses of the hotels in Washington and Scranton and what it had cost me when I returned the rented car, I still had more money on me than I ever had carried at one time in my whole life. When I checked in at the desk at the Waldorf, I didn't bother to ask what the room cost. It was a pleasant experience.

I gave Evelyn Coates's address in Washington as my residence. Now that I was completely alone, all my jokes had to be private ones.