Nine blocks later the tenements thinned to ragged, open fields that were still soft and marshy. Oily water stood between hummocks in puddles, their surfaces flat, deadly rainbows. On the left, near the horizon, he could see a plane landing at the city’s airport.
He was now on Route 16, traveling past the exurban sprawl between the city and the city limits. He passed McDonald’s. Shakey’s, Nino’s Steak Pit. He passed a Dairy Freez and the Noddy-Time Motel, both closed for the season. He passed the Norton Drive-In, 163
where the marquee said:
FRI-SAT-SUN
RESTLESS WIVES
SOME CAME RUNNING
RATED X
EIGHT-BALL
He passed a bowling alley and a driving range that was closed for the season. Gas stations-two of them with signs that said:
SORRY, NO GAS
It was still four days until they got their gasoline allotments for December. He couldn’t find it in himself to feel sorry for the country as a whole as it went into this science-fiction-style crisis-the country had been pigging petroleum for too long to warrant his sympathy-but he could feel sorry for the little men with their peckers caught in the swing of a big door.
A mile farther on he came to Magliore’s Used Cars. He didn’t know what he had expected, but he felt disappointed. It looked like a cut-rate, fly-by-night operation. Cars were lined up on the lot facing the road under looped lines of flapping banners-red, yellow, blue, green-that had been tied between light standards that would shine down on the product at night. Prices and slogans soaped on the windshields: $795
RUNS GOOD
and
$550
GOOD TRANSPORTATION!
and on a dusty old Valiant with flat tires and a cracked windshield: $75
MECHANIX SPECIAL
A salesman wearing a gray-green topcoat was nodding and smiling noncommittally as a young kid in a red silk jacket talked to him. They were standing by a blue Mustang with cancer of the rocker panels. The kid said something vehement and thumped the driver’s side door with the flat of his hand. Rust flaked off in a small flurry. The salesman shrugged and went on smiling. The Mustang just sat there and got a little older.
There was a combination office and garage in the center of the lot. He parked and got out of his car. There was a lift in the garage, and an old Dodge with giant fins was up on it. A mechanic walked out from under, holding a muffler in both grease-gloved hands like a chalice.
“Say, you can’t park there, mister. That’s in the right-of-way.”
“Where should I park?”
“Take it around back if you’re goin in the office.”
He drove the LTD around to the back, creeping carefully down the narrow way 164
between the corrugated metal side of the garage and a row of cars. He parked behind the garage and got out. The wind, strong and cutting, made him wince. The heater had disarmed his face and he had to squint his eyes to keep them from tearing.
There was an automobile junkyard back here. It stretched for acres, amazing the eye.
Most of the cars had been gutted of parts and now they sat on their wheel rims or axles like the victims of some awful plague who were too contagious to even be dragged to the dead-pit. Grilles with empty headlight sockets gazed at him raptly .
He walked back out front. The mechanic was installing the muffler. An open bottle of Coke was balanced on a pile of tires to his right.
He called to the mechanic: “Is Mr. Magliore in?” Talking to mechanics always made him feel like an asshole. He had gotten his first car twenty-four years ago, and talking to mechanics still made him feel like a pimply teenager.
The mechanic looked over his shoulder and kept working his socket wrench. “Yeah, him and Mansey. Both in the office.”
“Thanks. ”
“Sure.”
He went into the office. The walls were imitation pine, the floor muddy squares of red and white linoleum. There were two old chairs with a pile of tattered magazines between them-Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, True Argosy. No one was sitting in the chairs.
There was one door, probably leading to an inner office, and on the left side, a little cubicle like a theater box office. A woman was sitting in there, working an adding machine. A yellow pencil was poked into her hair. A pair of harlequin glasses hung against her scant bosom, held by a rhinestone chain. He walked over to her, nervous now.
He wet his lips before he spoke.
“Excuse me.”
She looked up. “Yes?”
He had a crazy impulse to say: I’m here to see Sally One-Eye, bitch. Shake your tail.
Instead, he said: “I have an appointment with Mr. Magliore.
“You do?” She looked at him warily for a moment and then riffled through some slips on the table beside the adding machine. She pulled one out. “Your name is Dawes?
Barton Dawes?”
“That’s right.”
“Go right in.” She stretched her lips at him and began to peck at the adding machine again.
He was very nervous. Surely they knew he had conned them. They were running some kind of midnight auto sales here, that much had been obvious from the way Mansey had spoken to him yesterday. And they knew he knew. Maybe it would be better to go right out the door, drive like hell to Monohan’s office, and maybe catch him before he left for Alaska or Timbuktu or wherever he would be leaving for.
Finally, Freddy said. The man shows some sense.
165
He walked over to the door in spite of Freddy, opened it, and stepped into the inner office. There were two men. The one behind the desk was fat and wearing heavy glasses.
The other was razor thin and dressed in a salmon-pink sports coat that made him think of Vinnie. He was bending over the desk. They were looking at a J.C. Whitney catalogue.
They looked up at him. Magliore smiled from behind his desk. The glasses made his eyes appear faded and enormous, like the yolks of poached eggs.
“Mr. Dawes?”
“That’s right. ”
“Glad you could drop by. Want to shut the door?”
“Okay.”
He shut it. When he turned back, Magliore was no longer smiling. Neither was Mansey. They were just looking at him, and the room temperature seemed to have gone down twenty degrees.
“Okay,” Magliore said. “What is this shit?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“I talk for free. But not to shitbirds like you. You call up Pete and give him a line of crap about two Eldorados.” He pronounced it “Eldoraydos.” “You talk to me, mister. You tell me what your act is.”
Standing by the door, he said: “I heard maybe you sold things.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Cars. I sell cars. ”
“No,” he said. “Other stuff. Stuff like . . . ” He looked around at the fakepine-paneled walls. God knew how many agencies were bugging this place. “Just stuff,” he finished, and the words came out on crutches.
“You mean stuff like dope and whores (‘hoors’) and off-track betting? Or did you want to buy a hitter to knock off your wife or your boss?” Magliore saw him wince and laughed harshly. “That’s not too bad, mister, not bad at all for a shitbird. That’s the big
‘What if this place is bugged’ act, right? That’s number one at the police academy, am I right?”
“Look, I’m not a-”
“Shut up,” Mansey said. He was holding the J.C. Whitney catalogue in his hands. His fingernails were manicured. He had never seen manicured nails exactly like that except on TV commercials where the announcer had to hold a bottle of aspirin or something. “If Sal wants you to talk, he’ll tell you to talk.”
He blinked and shut his mouth. This was like a bad dream.
“You guys get dumber every day,” Magliore said. “That’s all right. I like to deal with dummies. I’m used to dealing with dummies. I’m good at it. Now. Not that you don’t know it, but this office is as clean as a whistle. We wash it every week. I got a cigar box full of bugs at home. Contact mikes, button mikes, pressure mikes, Sony tape recorders no bigger than your hand. They don’t even try that much anymore. Now they send 166
shitbirds like you.”
He heard himself say: “I’m not a shitbird.”
An expression of exaggerated surprise spread across Magliore’s face. He turned to Mansey. “Did you hear that? He said he wasn’t a shitbird.”
“Yeah, I heard that,” Mansey said.
“Does he look like a shitbird to you?”
“Yeah, he does,” Mansey said.
“Even talks like a shitbird, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. ”
“So if you’re not a shitbird,” Magliore said, turning back to him, “what are you?”
“I’m-” he began, not sure of just what to say. What was he? Fred, where are you when I need you?