The new man said, “We pull his prints, Captain. And we go over to where the dead woman, to uh, 33-A Lombardy. And we plant them.”
Captain Luper nodded, dismissed them with an abrupt move of his hand. He pulled out his desk drawer as they left, took up the little packet of cigars once more, and once more shook his head slightly. Then he got up and moved towards the door.
“Corvette and Stamina. Uh-uh,” said Old Tim. “In the third, Lupe, I like Ranger.”
Captain Luper stood in the doorway. He stretched. Then, looking at a spot on the wall opposite, he said to the world at large, “Any coffee?”
They’ll Never Find You
by Donald Olson
If the plan proposed in this new story by Donald Olson seems an “absurd caprice” to its participants, we should point out that it is not too dissimilar to a program we know to have been part of the course work of at least one university’s Sociology department during the 1970s, though fiction in this case is still wonderfully stranger than truth...
“You do know,” said Nobbs, “how risky this could be.”
“In what way?” Bair’s coolly superior tone mocked his colleague’s timidity. They’d never been close, and now, having said their goodbyes to the director, they waited in an atmosphere of mutual disapproval for the car that would take them and three other junior staffers from the Center to the station.
Nobbs fingered the sealed envelope identical to the one Bair had been given shortly after donning the clothes they now wore and which added to their discomfiture, castoffs donated to one of the Center’s charities, but too shabby for even the neediest of the poof.
Nobbs leaned closer. “Suppose one had an accident. Got run over or hit on the head and lost one’s memory. One might never be identified. Didn’t you say you’d never been fingerprinted either? God, I feel positively naked without a wallet. No credit cards, no driver’s license, nothing.”
“But that’s the whole idea,” said Bair drily, although personally he’d rather be seen naked than in these disgraceful rags. It seemed to him an absurd caprice, this brainchild of the director’s which required each of the staff members to live anonymously and without funds (except for the five dollars each had been given) for a month, among the lowest strata of society, in a strange town, the director’s theory being that without firsthand experience of how the deprived lived, one couldn’t fully appreciate the importance of one’s work at the Center for Advanced Humanitarian Studies.
Bair had lived and worked at the Center for six months, recruited by the director himself, who had been deeply impressed by Bair’s discovery, of a formula for the processing of a vital nutrient derived from the soybean.
Bair and Nobbs didn’t exchange another word. In truth, Bair was ashamed to be seen talking to Nobbs, whose skinny physique added a note of authenticity to his rags. Bair felt confident that he himself didn’t look half so seedy to others as Nobbs looked to him. He wondered where Nobbs was being sent; they’d all been sworn to keep their individual destinations a secret. When Bair opened his own envelope, the name inside meant nothing to him; he’d never heard of Grimley, Ohio.
Not until he changed buses at Cleveland did anyone choose to share a seat with Bair, and the looks of the young man who did made a disagreeable impression on him; he wore a white leather jacket and a falsely disarming smile; his raggedy black hair reeked of oil. The bus was no sooner on the road than he asked Bair for a light, and when Bair couldn’t oblige him, he pulled a book of matches from his own pocket and, wholly unabashed, asked Bair where he was headed.
“Grimley,” said Bair.
“Same here.”
This unlikely coincidence left Bair faintly uneasy, coupled as it was with a sense of his own self drifting away. His eyes grabbed at signs and streetlights and trees as they flashed by, each seeming to pluck away a tiny particle of himself.
“So why you goin’ there, man?”
Bair’s emotions were too confused for him to project a proper show of indignation. “I have business there.”
“Me too.” He gave Bair a more intense look, squinting his dark, liquid eyes and spitting a feather of smoke into the blue-rinsed hair of the woman in front of him. “A stranger, y’know, he ain’t gonna know where the action is, y’know what I mean, pal?”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Bair noncommittally.
“Well, buddy, I’m the boy can tell ya where the action is.”
Bair, in his innocence, preserved through forty years of a solitary, sheltered life, discerned something so authentically evil about his seat companion he was thrilled to his toes and madly eager to learn precisely what sort of “action” the youth was hinting at. He giggled nervously.
At this, the young man once more whipped out the book of matches, ripped the cover in two, and with a stubby pencil wrote on the back of one piece: Call 488-0898. Ask for Deuce. With a sly wink he handed this to Bair. Before slipping it into his pocket, Bair noticed the matchbook came from a place called the Wing-Ding Club and showed pink bubbles tumbling over the rim of a cocktail glass.
“Deuce,” said Bair. “A nickname?”
“Yeah, ’cause my last name’s Wilde. This Deuce is wild, man.”
Presently the young man got up without a parting word and walked to the front of the bus and sat down with a booted blonde who might easily have been an habitué of the Wing-Ding Club.
This enlivening encounter occupied Bair’s mind for the rest of what proved a tiresomely uneventful trip; moreover, the meeting had served to demolish any lingering illusions that he still projected the image, despite his rags, of a man of substance; he began to feel like a bum. He didn’t like the feeling at all.
They’d been given little in the way of a briefing at the Center, merely instructions to pretend they were men down on their luck. Upon reaching Grimley, Bair had expected to find a Skid Row with no lack of accommodations where one could spend the night for fifty cents or a dollar in the company of fellow unfortunates with whom he would take pains to relate and empathize, distasteful and pointless an exercise as it seemed.
To his dismay, the few people who passed on the dingy streets were fairly well-dressed and had respectable working-class faces that regarded Bair with frank distrust; he had a scary vision of wandering like this for a month, a seemingly homeless pariah. Furthermore, it was cold, and he suspected the presence of a river, for the lazy wind blowing from the east carried a faint stench of pollution, like the smell oozing out of sewer grates on cold winter nights.
Bair thought of the matchbook cover and Deuce, but doubted the youth would be interested in extending the sort of Christian hospitality he required. Staring into bar windows, he saw charming scenes of good fellowship, reminding him sadly of his companions at the Center; not that he considered for a moment entering any of these bars, fancying that some ineluctable air of superiority would invite waves of silent hostility.
He ended up spending that first night on a bench in the bus depot, and next morning greeted the bad news of his whiskery face in the rest-room mirror with dull mortification. When the restaurant opened, he slunk to a stool at the far end of the counter and ordered orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee, knowing it was stupid to blow that much of his five bucks on his first meal, but finding it imperative to appease the glowering disapproval of the waitress.
As he was paying his bill, he looked up and caught a glimpse of Deuce through the window, or someone who looked a lot like Deuce, but when Bair reached the street there was no sign of the young man.