‘You’re helping me out, Keith.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You said your name was Keith?’
‘That’s right, Mr. Ryder.’
‘I’m Bert to everyone in town.’
‘Then I’ll see you tomorrow, Bert,’ I said and went out to talk to Maisie.
I woke the following morning at 7.00.
For the first time in months, I had slept through the night without waking. This was a record for me.
I stretched, yawned and reached for a cigarette. I looked around the big, airy room.
Bert had called it nice. To me, living rough for the past ten months, this was an understatement.
It had a divan bed on which I was lying, two comfortable armchairs, a small dining table with two chairs, a colour TV set and by the big picture window a small desk and chair. Facing me was a wall-to-wall bookcase, crammed with books. There were two wool rugs, one by the divan, the other under the desk. The flooring was polished wood blocks. There was a small, vine-covered veranda that looked out on to the beach and the sea. For thirty bucks a week the room was a steal.
Before calling on Mrs. Hansen, I had gone to Pinner’s Super Bazaar and had bought myself a couple of short-sleeved shirts, two pairs of cotton socks and a pair of sandals. Everyone in Wicksteed seemed to be in vacation gear.
Mrs. Hansen was a dumpy little woman of around fifty-eight. Her straw-coloured hair and her pale blue eyes were all Danish and she spoke with a slight guttural accent. She said Bert had telephoned about me. I wondered if he had warned her I was an ex-jailbird. I thought not. She took me into a big lounge with French windows looking on to the beach. The room was full of books. She explained that her husband had been the headmaster of the Wicksteed School. He had worked too hard and had had a fatal heart attack. I murmured the correct things. She said he had always been generous and had given away most of his money helping people. She said this with satisfaction. It was the right thing to do, she declared, but then he hadn’t known he was going to pass on so soon. She had been left without much money. I would be her first lodger.
She took me upstairs and showed me the room. She explained it had been her husband’s study. She said he had liked television, but she didn’t, so if I wanted it, she would leave the set where it was. I thanked her. A little anxiously, she asked if thirty dollars would be all right. I said it would. She told me there were two bathrooms and mine was down the corridor. She lived downstairs. She said dinner would be at seven, but I could have it later if I wished. I said seven would be fine. She asked if I had any dislikes. Remembering what I had been eating lately I nearly laughed. I said I wasn’t fussy. She said she would bring the meals up on a tray and would I like her to get some beer in which she would keep in the refrigerator. I said that would be fine. She hoped I would enjoy my work with Bert who (I waited for it) was a nice man. She said she had a black lady (probably nice too, I thought) who did the cleaning and would do my laundry. Would breakfast be all right at eight o’clock?
When she had gone, I unpacked, looked at some of the books but found they were strictly scholastic and there was no light reading. I went along to the bathroom and spent an hour soaking in hot water. Then I changed into my new outfit and went out on to the veranda. I watched the boys and the girls having fun on the beach until Mrs. Hansen brought up the dinner which consisted of fish pie, cheese and ice cream. There was also a can of beer.
I took the tray down when I had finished and left it in the kitchen. Mrs. Hansen was out on the patio, reading. I didn’t disturb her.
Back in my room, I sat on the veranda and smoked. I couldn’t quite believe this was happening to me after those ten awful months when I had been living rough. Now, suddenly, I had a two hundred a week job and a real home. It was too good to be true. Later, I watched TV news, then went to bed. It was a nice bed. In the shaded light by the divan, I thought it was a nice room. I seemed to be catching the ‘nice’ habit. I went to sleep.
Lying on the divan, a cigarette between my fingers, I could hear Mrs. Hansen preparing my breakfast. I was going to have a busy day. Maisie (she had told me her name was Jean Maisie Kent, but would I call her Maisie?) had shown me a list of pupils I was to teach. I had three one-hour lessons in the morning, an hour off for lunch, and five one-hour lessons in the afternoon.
‘They are all just out of school,’ she explained. ‘They are all beginners. The only one you have to be careful about is Hank Sobers. He is a showoff and thinks he knows it all. Just be careful of him, Mr. Devery.’
I said I would and would she call me Keith as I was calling her Maisie?
She nodded. For her age (she couldn’t have been more than sixteen) she was remarkably self-possessed. I asked about the Highway Code, admitting I had forgotten most of it. She said not to worry as Bert took the code classes. That was a relief. All the same I borrowed a copy of the code from her, meaning to look at it that evening, but had forgotten to.
I shaved, took a shower and dressed, then went out on to the veranda. I thought about Bert Ryder. Up to a point I had been truthful when I had told him why I had been jailed for five years, but I hadn’t been truthful about some of the details nor when he had asked if I was still ambitious. Ever since I had returned from Vietnam, after seeing the easy money made out of the black market, I had developed an itch for the big money. There was a Staff Sergeant who had been so well organized that, so he had told me, he and his three buddies would be worth close on a million dollars by the time they quit the Army. They had robbed the Army blind. They had even sold three Sherman tanks to a North Korean dealer to say nothing of cases of rifles, hand grenades, Army stores and so on. In the confusion of the fighting and during the Nixon pullout, no one missed the tanks nor the stolen equipment. I had envied these men. A million dollars! Back at my desk at Barton Sharman I had kept thinking of that Staff Sergeant who looked more like an ape than a human being. So when this merger seemed about to jell, I didn’t hesitate. This was my chance and I was going to take it! Once the merger went through, the share price would treble. I opened an account with a bank in Haverford and lodged with them Bearer bonds worth $450,000 which I was holding in safekeeping for a client of mine. With these bonds I bought the shares. When the merger went through, all I had to do was to sell, pick up the profit and return the bonds.
It looked good, but S.E.C. stepped in and the merger never was. I had lied to Bert when I had told him no one got hurt but me. My client lost his bonds, but I knew the bonds had been tax evasion money so he was almost, probably not quite, as big a thief as I was.
I had also lied to Bert when I had told him I was no longer ambitious. My ambition was like the spots of the leopard. Once you are landed with my kind of ambition, you were stuck with it. My ambition for big money burned inside me with the intensity of a blowtorch flame. It nagged me like raging toothache. During those five grim years in jail I had spent hours thinking and scheming about how to get my hands on big money. I kept telling myself what that ape-like Staff Sergeant could do, I could do. I hadn’t lied to Bert when I had told him I had patience. I had that all right. Sooner or later, I was going to be rich. I was going to have a fine house, a Caddy, a yacht and all the other trimmings that big money buys. I was going to have all that. It would be tough, but I was going to have it. At the age of thirty-eight, starting now from scratch, and with a criminal record, it was going to be more than tough, but not, I told myself, impossible. I had rubbed shoulders enough in my Barton Sharman days with the tycoons, and I knew them to be what they were: tough, hard, ruthless and determined. Many of them were unethical and amoral. Their philosophy was: the weak to the wall; the strong takes the jackpot.