“I’m not asking you to do anything. It’s my own free will.”
Magliore rolled his eyes. “Jesus! Mary! Joseph the carpenter! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Because you have what I need.”
“I wish to God I didn’t.”
“Are you going to help me?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve got the money now. Or will have, shortly.”
“It ain’t a matter of money. It’s a matter of principle. I never dealt with a fruitcake like you before. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll call you.”
He decided it would be wrong to press further and left.
He was filling out the relocation form when Magliore’s men came. They were driving a white Econoline van with RAY’s TV SALES AND SERVICE Written on the side, below a dancing TV with a big grin on its picture tube. There were two men, wearing green fatigues and carrying bulky service cases. The cases contained real TV repair tools and tubes, but they also contained sundry other equipment. They “washed” his house. It took an hour and a half. They found bugs in both phones, one in his bedroom, one in the dining room. None in the garage, which made him feel relieved.
“The bastards,” he said, holding the shiny bugs in his hand. He dropped the bugs to the floor and ground them under his heel.
On the way out, one of the men said, not unadmiringly: “Mister, you really beat the shit out of that TV. How many times did you have to hit it?”
“Only once,” he said.
When they had driven away into the cold late afternoon sunshine, he swept the bugs into a dustpan and dropped their shattered, twinkling remains into the kitchen wastebasket. Then he made himself a drink.
January 9, 1974
There were only a few people in the bank at 2:30 in the afternoon, and he went directly to one of the tables in the middle of the floor with the city’s cashier’s check. He tore a deposit ticket out of the back of his checkbook and made it out in the sum of $34,250. He went to a teller’s window and presented the ticket and the check.
The teller, a young girl with sin-black hair and a short purple dress, her legs clad in sheer nylon stockings that would have brought the Pope to present arms, looked from the ticket to the check and then back again, puzzled.
“Something wrong with the check?” he asked pleasantly. He had to admit he was enjoying this.
“Nooo, but… you want to deposit $34,250 and you want $34,250 in cash? Is that it?”
He nodded.
“Just a moment, sir, please.”
He smiled and nodded, keeping a close eye on her legs as she went to the manager’s desk, which was behind a slatted rail but not glassed in, as if to say this man was as human as you or I… or almost, anyway. The manager was a middle-aged man dressed in young clothes. His face was as narrow as the gate of heaven and when he looked at the teller (telleress?) in the purple dress, he arched his eyebrows.
They discussed the check, the deposit slip, its implications for the bank and possibly for the entire Federal Deposit System. The girl bent over the desk, her skirt rode up in back, revealing a mauve-colored slip with lace on the hem. Love o love o careless love, he thought. Come home with me and we will diddle even unto the end of the age, or until they rip my house down, whichever comes first. The thought made him smile. He had a hard-on… well, a semi, anyway. He looked away from her and glanced around the bank. There was a guard, probably a retired cop, standing impassively between the safe and the front doors. An old lady laboriously signing her blue Social Security check. And a large poster on the left wall which showed a picture of the earth as photographed from outer space, a large blue-green gem set against a field of black. Over the planet, in large letters, was written:
Underneath the planet, in slightly smaller letters:
The pretty teller came back. “I’ll have to give this to you in five hundreds and hundreds,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
She made out a receipt for his deposit and then went into the bank vault. When she came out, she had a small carrying case. She spoke to the guard and he came over with her. The guard looked at him suspiciously.
She counted out three stacks of ten thousand dollars, twenty flue-hundred-dollar bills in each stack. She banded each one and then slipped an adding machine notation between the band and the top bill of each stack. In each case the adding machine slip said:
$10,000
She counted out foray-two hundreds, riffling the bills quickly with the pad of her right index finger. On top of these she laid five ten-dollar bills. She banded the bundle and slid in another adding machine slip which said:
$4,250
The four bundles were lined up side by side, and the three of them eyed them suspiciously for a moment, enough money to buy a house, or five Cadillacs, or a Piper Cub airplane, or almost a hundred thousand cartons of cigarettes.
Then she said, a little dubiously: “I can give you a zipper bag-”
“No, this is fine.” He scooped the bundles up and dropped them into his overcoat pockets. The guard watched this cavalier treatment of his raison d'etre with impassive contempt; the pretty teller seemed fascinated (her salary for five years was disappearing casually into the pockets of this man’s off-the-rack overcoat and it hardly made a bulge); and the manager was looking at him with barely concealed dislike, because a bank was a place where money was supposed to be like God, unseen and reverentially regarded.
“Good ’nough,” he said, stuffing his checkbook down on top of the ten-thousand-dollar bundles. “Take it easy.”
He left and they all looked after him. Then the old woman shuffled up to the pretty teller and presented her Social Security check, properly signed, for payment. The pretty teller gave her two hundred and thirty-five dollars and sixty-three cents.
When he got home he put the money in a dusty beer stein on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet. Mary had given the stein to him as a gag present on his birthday, five years ago. He had never particularly cared for it, preferring to drink his beer directly from the bottle. Written on the side of the stein was an emblem showing an Olympic torch and the words:
He put the stein back, now filled with a headier brew, and went upstairs to Charlie’s room, where his desk was. He rummaged through the bottom drawer and found a small manila envelope. He sat down at the desk, added up the new checkbook balance and saw that it came out to $35,053.49. He addressed the manila envelope to Mary, in care of her folks. He slipped the checkbook inside, sealed the envelope, and rummaged in his desk again. He found a half-full book of stamps, and put five eight-centers on the envelope. He regarded it for a moment, and then, below the address, he wrote:
He left the envelope standing on his desk and went into the kitchen to make himself a drink.