The Thomas Berryman Number

She wanted her seat moved back, which was fine, but she also wanted to talk about her recently deceased son-in-law. “Michael was only fifty-eight,” she said. “Michael has two lovely daughters at Briarcliff. Michael had been planning to retire in just five years…”

Berryman occasionally glanced away from the woman; he saw the beginnings of Nashville out the window.

The fasten seatbelts order was given. The earphones were collected.

Berryman found himself taking a deep breath. Examining his clothes in relation to the dress of the southern businessmen on board.

When the front door stewardess welcomed crew-cut Thomas Berryman “home,” he smiled like a goat, and spoke perfect southern to her.

Carrying his small, black leather bag across the airfield’s landing tarmac, Berryman thought of it this way: he was just making a stopover on his way back to Mexico.

Nashville, June 26

On the second Tuesday before the Fourth, Berryman came out the electric doors of the Farmer’s Market with a milkbottle quart of orange juice and a pound of Farmwife powdered doughnuts. He was wearing khaki pants, a wrinkled Coca-Cola shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his biceps; and he was a dead ringer for a Tennessee redneck. In his body, and in his mind.

He sat down on the warm hood of his Hertz Ford Galaxie, fingered the milkbottle Braille, and admired Nashville women doing their thing: shopping. He ate several of the warm doughnuts, which were nice, even sitting on hot metal.

As usual, his independence delighted him: it was 11 A.M. and his job for the day was easy, with high pay.

Traffic was light through the early afternoon. It was a day of one-bag pickups.

There were occasional gypsy bands, excellent wives nonetheless, in curlers, with their kerchiefs puffed high over their foreheads like birdcages. There were childlike old men, in aloha sport shirts, with baggy trousers belted high around their waists like mailbags.

Sometimes Berryman would strike up conversation with one or the other. But in the main, he kept his eye on two Amos ’n’ Andy Negro carpenters handcrafting a platform stage in the middle of the parking lot. Jimmie Horn would speak from the platform.

Berryman sat on the Ford. Then he walked the perimeter of the airfield-sized market lot.

He visited a few Plaza shops. Bought a J.C. Penney olive shirt and tie to clash with his Bond’s suit. Watched a policeman reading a comic book in a patrol car.

There was a thirty-gauge shotgun propped up facing the windshield in the front seat.

Around lunchtime he sat under a Cinzano umbrella outside of Lums, and he sipped Cinzano at the urging of a waitress named D. Dusty.

(Afterward, she remembered him.)

Across a narrow arcade, the Farmer’s Market roof was long, flat, pitch tar. It got hot and gooey by midafternoon. The tar oozed at the edges of the gutter.

The building’s front facade, a red-on-royal-blue sign, rose about three feet higher than the roof itself. The roof’s backside was hanging in the woods. Magnolias. A thick green wall from the loading platform all the way out to Route 95 eastbound to Knoxville.

Puffing on a cigarillo, Thomas Berryman took in every detail.

As he was about to leave, Berryman saw a long-haired boy he’d noticed two or three times earlier that day.

The boy was tall and skinny, wearing green army fatigues and smoked brown glasses. His hair was curly and he made Berryman think of Oliver Twist.

He’d been sitting at a bus stop. He’d been trying to make time with a little black waitress in Lums. Now he was sadsacked on the whitestone sidewalk in front of the market itself. He was watching the two black carpenters.

Berryman made a mental note of the boy, then called it a day. On a per diem basis he had made over twenty thousand dollars.

Nashville, June 27

“By the selected day,” Ben Toy had told me, “Berryman will have one plan he thinks is 100% foolproof. And if he doesn’t think his plan is 100%, he’ll walk away from the job. He did that with Jesse Jackson in Chicago. He likes challenges, but his challenges are in the figuring.”

Sitting in my workroom, thinking about Ben Toy again, one thing struck me that should have been clear to me before. Toy had hated Thomas Berryman. I wasn’t so sure that he knew he did, but I was sure that he hated him.

On the 27th day of June, Berryman shut himself in his hotel room, room 4H, from six to six; he studied Jimmie Horn’s known daily routines like a Talmudist.

Berryman’s hotel was a double-building rooming house in the hospital district west of West End Avenue in Nashville. It was called the Claremont, and had a big sign on the porch: HOME COOKED MEALS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Every afternoon at the Claremont the regular boarders could be viewed in the lobby, eating mint ice and Nabiscos, watching the soaps or a baseball game. A room there cost Berryman $26.50 for the week.

For his efforts that first morning, Berryman learned that Jimmie Horn was careless, but that his aides were not.