He raised a hand. “Oh, I don’t begrudge you a nickel of it myself. It’s just—well, the old lady’s always after me. Going around town, she keeps seeing all these women wearing shoes. You know how it is, stooped over that way picking up cigarette butts. . . .”
”Belt her one,” I said, “and keep her at home. What kind of a man are you, anyway?”
“I just haven’t got the heart, boss. She’s usually carrying around one of the kids that’s too weak to walk. . . .”
He had one child, a boy of around fourteen who already looked like something out of the back-field of the Los Angeles Rams. They owned their own home and Otis cleared around a hundred a week with salary, commissions, and overtime, now that he’d got a raise when Barbara was purged and we both had to double part time as clerks.
He went back to the shop. I wrote out checks for a bunch of bills that were due on the tenth, and then opened the big sliding doors at the sides of the building. It was growing hot now at eight thirty of a still and cloudless morning in August. I swept down the showroom around the boats and trailers. We had over a dozen models on the floor, running all the way from a car-top duck boat to a sixteen-foot inboard runabout that sold for close to two thousand.
As soon as the bank opened I called out to Otis to watch the front, took the deposit from the safe, picked up the outgoing mail, and walked over to Main. Brassy sunlight beat on my bare head and I could feel beads of perspiration under the thin sports shirt. I crossed with the light and entered.
It was a small place, a branch of the Mid-South Bank & Trust of Sanport, with only a couple of tellers’ windows and Warren Bennett’s desk behind a railing at the right. I got in line at Arthur Pressler’s window, feeling almost chill in the sudden transition from the outside heat to air-conditioning. At the far end, behind a counter, I saw Barbara Renfrew seated at an automatic book-keeping machine, her smooth dark head bent over her work. She looked up in a moment, saw me, and smiled in that shy, quiet way she did. It occurred to me that now she was no longer working for me making a pass at her would be permissible under the revised ground rules without a loss of face on both sides, and that I really should, since I’d been accused of it so many times. It was an attractive thought, but I shrugged it off, hardly knowing why. Maybe it was because I didn’t share Jessica’s staunch faith in her accessibility. Clod, I thought. Godwin, you lack scope and vision. . . .
“Good morning, Barney.”
The line ahead of me had disappeared and I was facing Arthur Pressler through the bars of his window. “Good morning,” I said, passing over the cloth bag. He pulled it open and began adding checks on the machine with the precise and economical movements of some super-robot out of the twenty-second century. He was a rather cold-faced man in his early thirties, with sandy hair, rimless glasses, and a no-nonsense set to his mouth. As far as I knew he had no existence outside this cubicle of his, as if he’d been bought from I.B.M. and bolted to the floor, but he could handle money faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He did it almost in a blur, and he was infallible.
I lit a cigarette and watched him now. He finished the checks and tossed them aside, and then tore into the bundle of currency, dropping it into neat and separate bunches of singles, fives, tens, and twenties. Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. He was counting the twenties. The fifth or sixth was one of those new ones Mrs. Nunn had paid me. It dropped, and the next one started to come down on it, and then he broke his rhythm. He paused. With an almost imperceptible shake of his head he picked them all up and started over. He’d lost count. It was odd, I thought; maybe they hadn’t been oiling him properly. He passed me the duplicate of the deposit slip and I went out and down the street to the post-office.
Business was brisk for Monday. Besides incidental items of tackle we sold one complete rig: fourteen-foot plywood boat, 7-h.p. motor, trailer, and all the incidentals such as a spare gasoline can, kapok seat cushions, and icebox. After the customer had taken delivery and driven off I sent Otis out for a couple of cans of beer to celebrate the deal. I took out my wallet to hand him a dollar, and as I did I noticed I still had that new twenty dollar bill. That was odd. Hadn’t I bought those stamps with it? apparently I’d paid for them with my own money, which I usually tried to keep separate on the other side of the divider. It didn’t matter, though; there was no change involved to foul up the register and the books.
Otis went out. I was transferring the twenty to the other compartment of the wallet when I saw it was the one that had the odd brownish stain at one end, along the edge. I looked at it, and then turned it over. It was on both sides for about half the width of the bill, and extended up along the paper for perhaps an eighth of an inch or less. I wondered idly what it was. It seemed odd there’d be a stain on a bill this fresh from the Federal Reserve vaults, unless they were using taxpayers’ blood for ink now in the printing office.
At four thirty in the afternoon I was up front alone looking for the boat manufacturer’s ad in this month’s Field & Stream when a car pulled in and stopped in front of the window. I saw with a glance at its front license plate it was from Sanport, but when the driver got out he didn’t look much like a potential customer. At least he wasn’t on a fishing trip at the moment. He was dressed in a blue summer-weight suit, white shirt, pale blue tie, and a Panama with a gray band. Salesman, I thought.
He lifted a briefcase out of the seat and came in, a man somewhere around fifty with dark hair that was graying at the temples, composed brown eyes, and a quiet, efficient look about him.
“Good afternoon,” I said, “what can I do for you?”
“Mr. Godwin?” he asked pleasantly.
“That’s right,” I said.
He put the briefcase on the counter and held his wallet in front of me, opened to an identification card. “Ramsey,” he said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
I suppose everybody has that same sinking feeling in the first fraction of a second, wondering what crime he’s committed to get the F.B.I, after him. Then it’s gone, of course, as soon as you realize it’s just a routine security check. Your old friend Julius Bananas has applied for a job balancing a teacup for the State Department and they want to know if he was ever a Communist and how he stood on some of the fundamental issues like girls.
I grinned at him. “Don’t tell me I’ve made the list.”
He smiled, but he didn’t get carried away with it. He’d probably heard all those feeble gags a thousand times. “Are you busy?” he asked. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute, if I could.”
“Sure,” I said. “Fire away. Or, wait; let’s go in the office. There’s a fan.” The whole day had been still, and now in the late afternoon the dead, humid air was stifling.
We walked back to the office and I switched on the fan. He sat down in the straight chair in front of the desk with the briefcase in his lap. I pushed the typewriter stand out of the way and sat down in the swivel chair. Taking out cigarettes, I offered him one, which he refused with a smile and a shake of his head. I lit mine and leaned back.
“What’s it about, Mr. Ramsey?” I asked.
He unstrapped the briefcase and took out an oblong Manila envelope. It seemed to me to be rather small to contain much of a file on the aspiring Mr. Bananas, but then maybe they’d just started and hadn’t come up with much yet in the matter of his political aberrations and mating habits.
“I wanted to ask you about this,” Ramsey said. He slid something out of the envelope and dropped it on the desk between us. I stared at it.