`Don’t you get lonely?’ he asked me. `Travelling on your own all the time?’
I told him no, I enjoyed it. I told him I appreciated the solitude, the anonymity. Like I was invisible.
`How do you mean, invisible?’ he said. He seemed interested.
`I travel by road,’ I said. `Always by road. Walk a bit, and ride the buses. Sometimes trains. Always pay cash. That way there’s never a paper trail. No credit card transactions, no passenger manifests, nothing. Nobody could trace me. I never tell anybody my name. If I stay in a hotel, I pay cash and give them a made-up name.’
`Why?’ he said. `Who the hell’s after you?’
`Nobody,’ I said. `It’s just a bit of fun. I like anonymity. I feel like I’m beating the system. And right now, I’m truly pissed at the system.’
I saw him fall back to thinking. He thought a long time. I could see him deflate as he struggled with the problems that wouldn’t go away. I could see his panic come and go like a tide.
`So give me your advice about Finlay,’ he said. `When he asks me about the confession, I’ll say I was stressed out because of some business situation. I’ll say there was some kind of rivalry, threats against my family. I’ll say I don’t know anything about the dead guy or anything about the phone number. I’ll deny everything. Then I’ll just try to settle everything down. What do you think?’
I thought it sounded like a pretty thin plan.
`Tell me one thing,’ I said. `Without giving me any more details, do you perform a useful function for them? Or are you just some kind of onlooker?’
He pulled on his fingers and thought for a moment.
`Yes, I perform a useful function for them,’ he said. `Crucial, even.’
`And if you weren’t there to do it?’ I asked him. `Would they have to recruit someone else?’
`Yes, they would,’ he said. `And it would be
moderately difficult to do that, given the parameters of the function.’
He was rating his chances of staying alive like he would rate a credit application up at his office.
`OK,’ I said. `Your plan is as good as you’re going to get. Go for it.’
I didn’t see what else he could do. He was a small cog in some kind of a big operation. But a crucial cog. And nobody wrecks a big operation for no reason. So his future was actually clear-cut. If they ever figured it was him who had brought in the outside investigator, then he was definitely dead. But if they never found that out, then he was definitely safe. Simple as that. I figured he had a good enough chance, because of one very persuasive fact.
He had confessed because he had thought prison was some kind of a safe sanctuary where they couldn’t get him. That had been part of his thinking behind it. It was bad thinking. He’d been wrong. He wasn’t safe from attack, quite the reverse. They could have got him if they had wanted to. But the other side of that particular coin was that he hadn’t been attacked. As it happened, I had been. Not Hubble. So I figured there was some kind of a proof there that he was OK. They weren’t out to get him, because if they had wanted to kill him, they could have killed him by now, and they would have killed him by now. But they hadn’t. Even though they were apparently very uptight right now because of some kind of a temporary risk. So it seemed like proof. I began to think he would be OK.
`Yes, Hubble,’ I said again. `Go for it, it’s the best you can do.’
The cell stayed locked all day. The floor was
silent. We lay on our beds and drifted through the rest of the afternoon. No more talking. We were all talked out. I was bored and wished I had brought that newspaper with me from the Margrave station house. I could have read it all over again. All about the President cutting crime prevention so he could get re-elected. Saving a buck on the Coast Guard today so he could spend ten bucks on prisons like this one tomorrow.