He would find that walk; he had used it before. Somewhere. But before he searched his imagination, there was a phone call to make; he saw a telephone booth up the block, a mangled directory hanging from a chain beneath the metal shelf. He started walking, his legs automatically more rigid, his feet pressing weight on the pavement, his arms heavy in their sockets, the fingers of his hands slightly spaced, curved from years of abuse. A set, dull expression on his face would come later. Not now.
“Belkins Moving and Storage,” announced an operator somewhere in the Bronx.
“My name is Johnson,” said Jason impatiently but kindly. “I’m afraid I have a problem, and I hope you might be able to help me.”
“I’ll try, sir. What is it?”
“I was on my way over to a friend’s house on Seventy-first Street—a friend who died recently, I’m sorry to say—to pick up something I’d lent him. When I got there, your van was in front of the house. It’s most embarrassing, but I think your men may remove my property. Is there someone I might speak to?”
“That would be a dispatcher, sir.”
“Might I have his name, please?”
“What?”
“His name:”
“Sure. Murray. Murray Schumach. I’ll connect you.”
Two clicks preceded a long hum over the line.
“Schumach.”
“Mr. Schumach?”
“That’s right.”
Bourne repeated his embarrassing tale. “Of course, I can easily obtain a letter from my attorney, but the item in question has little or no value—”
“What is it?”
“A fishing rod. Not an expensive one, but with an old-fashioned casting reel, the kind that doesn’t get tangled every five minutes.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I fish out of Sheepshead Bay. They don’t make them reels like they used to. I think it’s the alloys.”
“I think you’re right, Mr. Schumach. I know exactly in which closet he kept it.”
“Oh, what the hell—a fishing rod. Go up and see a guy named Dugan, he’s the supervisor on the job. Tell him I said you could have it, but you’ll have to sign for it. If he gives you static, tell him to go outside and call me; the phone’s disconnected down there.”
“A Mr. Dugan. Thank you very much, Mr. Schumach.”
“Christ, that place is a ballbreaker today!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Some whacko called telling us to get out of there. And the job’s firm, cash guaranteed. Can you believe it?”
Carlos. Jason could believe it.
“It’s difficult, Mr. Schumach.”
“Good fishing,” said the Belkins man.
Bourne walked west on Seventieth Street to Lexington Avenue. Three blocks south he found what he was looking for: an army navy surplus store. He went inside.
Eight minutes later he came out carrying four brown, padded blankets and six wide canvas straps with metal buckles. In the pockets of his field jacket were two ordinary road flares. They had been there on the counter looking like something they were not, triggering images beyond memory, back to a moment of time when there had been meaning and purpose. And anger. He slung the equipment over his left shoulder and trudged up toward Seventy-first Street. The chameleon was heading into the jungle, a jungle as dense as the unremembered Tam Quan.
It was 10:48 when he reached the corner of the tree-lined block that held the secrets of Treadstone Seventy-One. He was going back to the beginning—his beginning—and the fear that he felt was not the fear of physical harm. He was prepared for that, every sinew taut, every muscle ready; his knees and feet, hands and elbows weapons, his eyes trip-wire alarms that would send signals to those weapons. His fear was far more profound. He was about to enter the place of his birth and he was terrified at what he might find there—remember there.
Stop it! The trap is everything. Cain is for Charlie and Delta is for Cain!
The traffic had diminished considerably, the rush hour over, the street in the doldrums of midmorning quiescence. Pedestrians strolled now, they did not hasten; automobiles swung leisurely around the moving van, angry horns replaced by brief grimaces of irritation. Jason crossed with the light to the Treadstone side; the tall, narrow structure of brown, jagged stone and thick blue glass was fifty yards down the block. Blankets and straps in place, an already weary, slow-witted laborer walked behind a well-dressed couple toward it.
He reached the concrete steps as two muscular men, one black, one white, were carrying a covered harp out the door. Bourne stopped and called out, his words halting, his dialect coarse.
“Hey! Where’s Doogan?”
“Where the hell d’you t’ink?” replied the white, angling his head around. “Sittin’ in a fuckin’ chair.”
“He ain’t gonna lift nothin’ heavier than that clipboard, man,” added the black. “He’s an executive, ain’t that right, Joey?”
“He’s a crumbball, is what he is. Watcha’ got there?”
“Schumach sent me,” said Jason. “He wanted another man down here and figured you needed this stuff. Told me to bring it.”
“Murray the menace!” laughed the black. “You new, man? I ain’t seen you before. You come from shape-up?”
“Yeah.”
“Take that shit up to the executive,” grunted Joey, starting down the steps. “He can allocate it, how about that, Pete? Allocate—you like it?”
“I love it, Joey. You a regular dictionary.”
Bourne walked up the reddish brown steps past the descending movers to the door. He stepped inside and saw the winding staircase on the right, and the long narrow corridor in front of him that led to another door thirty feet away. He had climbed those steps a thousand times, walked up and down that corridor thousands more. He had come back, and an overpowering sense of dread swept through him. He started down the dark, narrow corridor; he could see shafts of sunlight bursting through a pair of French doors in the distance. He was approaching the room where Cain was born. That room. He gripped the straps on his shoulder and tried to stop the trembling.
Marie leaned forward in the back seat of the armor-plated government sedan, the binoculars in place. Something had happened; she was not sure what it was, but she could guess. A short, stocky man had passed by the steps of the brownstone a few minutes ago, slowing his pace as he approached the general, obviously saying something to him. The man had then continued down the block and seconds later Crawford had followed him.
Conklin had been found.
It was a small step if what the general said was true. Hired gunmen, unknown to their employer, he unknown to them. Hired to kill a man … for all the wrong reasons! Oh, God, she loathed them all! Mindless, stupid men. Playing with the lives of other men, knowing so little, thinking they knew so much.
They had not listened! They never listened until it was too late, and then only with stern forbearance and strong reminders of what might have been—had things been as they were perceived to be, which they were not. The corruption came from blindness, the lies from obstinacy and embarrassment. Do not embarrass the powerful; the napalm said it all.
Marie focused the binoculars. A Belkins man was approaching the steps, blankets and straps over his shoulder, walking behind an elderly couple, obviously residents of the block out for a stroll. The man in the field jacket and the black knit hat stopped; he began talking to two other movers carrying a triangular-shaped object out the door.
What was it? There was something … something odd. She could not see the man’s face; it was hidden from view, but there was something about the neck, the angle of the head … what was it? The man started up the steps, a blunt man, weary of his day before it had begun … a slovenly man. Marie removed the binoculars; she was too anxious, too ready to see things that were not there.
Oh, God, my love, my Jason. Where are you? Come to me. Let me find you. Do not leave me for these blind, mindless men. Do not let them take you from me.
Where was Crawford? He had promised to keep her informed of every move, everything. She had been blunt. She did not trust him, any of them; she did not trust their intelligence, that word spelled with a lower-case i. He had promised … where was he?
She spoke to the driver. “Will you put down the window, please. It’s stifling in here.”
“Sorry, miss,” replied the civilian-clothed army man. “I’ll turn on the air conditioning for you, though.”
The windows and doors were controlled by buttons only the driver could reach. She was in a glass and metal tomb in a sun-drenched, tree-lined street.
“I don’t believe a word of it!” said Conklin, limping angrily across the room back to the window. He leaned against the sill, looking out, his left hand pulled up to his face, his teeth against the knuckle of his index finger. “Not a goddamned word!”