“You can kiss me now, honey,” she whispered. He leaned over and kissed her, then jerked away, stood up quickly on weak legs. His heart was hammering too hard. He tried to walk away from her but sank down instead on his knees and pressed his face against her breasts. “I want to stay,” he said thickly. “Please, let me stay tonight. Please...”
His lips felt dry. He realized that he had crossed that agonizing line of terror and timidity, broken through it like someone plunging through a pane of colored glass. She was pushing him away, not unkindly, not irritated, very differently from that other time when he tried to embrace her. She patted his head this time.
He breathed more easily. He had to control himself. He had to be patient. No genuine gem was ever really possessed.
“Next time, honey, you can stay. But now you’d better go.”
He stumbled to the closet, slid out his telescope jewelry sample case, and felt the familiar mold of the worn handle settle in his hand as he lifted it.
She still had that sleepy loved look. Her lips had a wet shine across the shadowed room. “Let me keep this again this trip, honey.”
He nodded and she gripped the uncut stone in her hands. The trip before last, she had kept the Oriental ruby from his sample case to play with. He had explained to her carefully that it was not just any sort of ruby that you might pick up east of Suez, but a particular kind found in Upper Burma. And the Burmese ruby ranks next in scale of hardness to the sapphire. “Oh honey,” she had breathed, “tell me more about it.”
He walked out of the apartment now and shut the door. He leaned against the wall a moment before walking out into the wet night.
When he got to Barstow, his first stop this trip, there would be a telegram waiting for him from Rose. There always was. A telegram telling him not to be lonely, that she was waiting.
That was nice. Nobody had ever been waiting anywhere for Morten before, that he remembered.
He walked down Hollywood Boulevard toward the bus terminal, carrying his sample case containing 70,000 dollars worth of white Pentelle stone rings — Jonker, Vargas and Liberator cut diamonds. Also, since buyers were preparing for June bride sales, and the accent was on wedding rings, Morten was carrying, in addition to his regular elite line, a lot of customized sets — virgin diamonds, Cellincraft, Lord Jason, and Miss Vanity items.
He was thinking of Rose as he walked to the bus terminal, bought his ticket to Barstow, went to a booth in the coffee shop, ordered coffee, and sat there waiting two hours for his bus. He never once thought of the possibility of being robbed. His company was protected by the Jewelers’ Security Alliance and Harold Morten was considered a good risk. He had never once been robbed. No one had ever even attempted to rob him. It had been years since Morten had even thought of such a thing.
Joe Pollak, on the other hand, had been held up and robbed so many times, Nathenson and Co., of New Jersey, had been forced to fire him, and Joe had never sold jewels since. After the famous Berland robbery, the Security Alliance sent out a mailing piece, urging every traveling salesman to exercise extreme care in order to avoid similar holdups.
A salesman was never to ride alone in an automobile when carrying valuable merchandise. He was never to leave an automobile unattended when it contained goods or samples. If possible, salesmen should ship their merchandise by registered mail to their destination — preferably to a jeweler who was known to them. If this was not possible, the merchandise should be shipped to a hotel, and—
But Morten had thrown the mailing piece away. He didn’t even own a car. He never traveled the same route twice in the same way. He sometimes traveled by bus, sometimes by train, at other times he took a plane. There was no schedule, no routine to his trips. He never checked into the same hotels, except in case of an emergency. He had unique characteristics as a salesman. He entered every retail shop by the back door, did his selling in the rear of the store, left by the back door. He never stayed at the ritzy hotels, but at motels, rooming houses, or at cheap hotels.
Joe Pollak, at a bull session following a convention in San Francisco, once told Morten that the real reason Morten was never robbed was because he didn’t exist. “As a human being, Morty,” Joe had said, “you don’t exist.” Everybody laughed.
“Why not?” Morten asked, his moon-face expressionless.
“Because you’re a statistic, the average man. What do you weigh, Morty? How tall are you? What color are your eyes? Your hair? What kind of clothes do you wear? Think about it, man! The average doesn’t exist except in statistics. Man, you’re anonymous. No heist artist will ever spot you, and even if he did, he couldn’t remember what you looked like the next time he saw you.”
It was an unpleasant fact, but Morten knew that it was true. Sometimes a retail jeweler to whom Morten had sold many times, momentarily forgot he had ever seen him before. And hotel clerks were frequently embarrassed over not remembering him.
Joe had said, “You walk along, man, getting on and off busses, on and off trains, handling maybe fifty grand in ice like it was Fuller brushes, or cakes of sample soap.”
Maybe luck also entered into his not having been robbed, Morten sometimes thought. The fact was that he didn’t even belong among the odd group of transients who sold jewelry. He was a jewelry salesman because of the way he felt about precious stones, because of what the stones did to fill up the big empty holes of loneliness and fear in cheap hotels, in towns that never had a name.
Robbery of precious stones had no meaning either. He was convinced that you could not really buy or sell them, that no one ever really owned, for example, such a thing as an Egyptian emerald.
In Barstow, after the bus crossed the dry river bed where willows drooped over hot white sand, he checked into a cheap hotel. He left the sample jewel case in his room, went to Western Union Office, but this time there was no telegram from Rose. Maybe it would be along later, he thought.
He returned to his hotel, drank his regular shot of bourbon, showered, shaved, washed out his orlan shirt and hung it up to dry on a clotheshanger by the open window. He sat down and looked at some of the glittering samples for an hour, dreaming of the Nile, of the treasure vault of the Shah of Iran where, spread upon Oriental rugs of great price, lie jewels beyond price. The famous crown and near it the two lambskin caps in the traditional flower pot shape, adorned with magnificent aigrettes of diamonds, and about them, trays of pearl, ruby, and emerald necklaces, and hundreds of sparkling rings, a jewel-encrusted sword scabbard, and the finest turquoise in the world, three or four inches long, and without a flaw, and an emerald big as a walnut, covered with the names of the monarchs who had possessed it.
Then when the shirt was dry, he put it on again, and went out for a light dinner of salad and toast, then took a leisurely stroll in the cooling evening breeze. He sat on a park bench, thinking about Rose. Later he would walk back to Western Union. It frightened him to remember the years when there could have been no telegram, when there had been no one, no one at all.
When he got back to Hollywood this time, he would stay with her. She had promised. He would move in and stay with Rose.
As he sat there secretly flushed with anticipation, he heard a slight crunch of gravel behind him in the darkness, and a bursting of breath just to his left. For the first time since he was twelve years old he knew immediately, somehow intuitively, that something horrible was about to happen. His neck tingled. Something in his stomach seemed to turn completely over as he started to shift his head around.