You see, I had to live somewhere. And the place I picked had to be big enough so that a new face in town wouldn’t stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. That consideration knocked out all the towns with less than half a million inhabitants.
Size was the first requirement but there were others. Location was a prime one. If I picked a town in a state in the South or West, my accent was going to work against me. I could never create a good niche for myself in Mississippi, for example, because I’d always be that Yankee who talks funny.
Another big thing — I had to pick a city where I wouldn’t run into anybody I knew. That killed New York, where I knew far too many people, where I could never feel altogether safe. The same consideration killed Los Angeles and Chicago and Philadelphia and St. Louis and Detroit, because those cities booked too many conventions.
By the time I had finished ruling out city after city for one reason or another, Buffalo headed the list and seemed to fill the bill. Its population was just shy of a million. And the only visitors the town ever had were Canadians who didn’t know any better. Which was fine with me.
Now it was a few minutes after six. We were supposed to hit Buffalo a little after midnight.
I got up from my seat, leaving the newspaper and the hat for the time being. I walked to the diner, sat down at an empty table and ordered rye with soda and a rare steak. I drank the rye and ate the dinner and wondered if anybody had come across Ellen’s body yet. It didn’t seem likely. Unless I picked up a little bad luck somewhere along the line, I had two or three days of grace before some buffoon opened the wrong closet door and screamed for the police.
By that time Nat Crowley would have a life of his own. He would be in Buffalo. He would have a new wardrobe and a new apartment and a start on assembling a new circle of friends. He would also have a new job.
His employer would be the local crime syndicate.
I finished my dinner, had another drink and smoked a cigarette. I left the diner and went back to my coach. I sat down, looked at my tabloid for a minute or two, then folded it again and thought some more about Nat Crowley. He was going to be a criminal. Not a wife-murderer, like Donald Barshter. A professional criminal, the kind that doesn’t go to jail.
There were reasons for this. I had to earn a living, since the five grand I was carrying wouldn’t last forever. And I couldn’t walk into the nearest insurance agency and tell them to hire me. I could invent Crowley easily enough but it was something else entirely to invent a past for him. I couldn’t outfit Nat with employers’ references and past job summaries and the rest. A respectable employer would run a check just as a matter of course and pretty soon the police would come knocking on my door. Then it would all be over with.
So Crowley couldn’t work for anybody who would check on him. That left him with two choices — he could go into business for himself, using whatever remained of his five grand as operating capital, or he could get some sort of tie-up with the kind of boys who don’t ask to see your references. Like the syndicate, or the Mafia, or the organization, or the combination, or the outfit, or the mob — or whatever term the press is using these days to conceal its overwhelming ignorance of the whole thing.
I couldn’t think of a business offhand that I felt competent to run or that I could pick up with the amount of capital I could afford to invest. That left me with the mob. And there was another reason for the mob, as far as that went. It fit in with the new personality I was inventing for Nat Crowley.
Because the personality would be as much of a disguise as Crowley would have. Crowley would be six feet tall, with brown eyes and mud-colored hair and properly unobtrusive features. In short, he would look exactly like Donald Barshter. I could play all kinds of games — dyeing my hair, wearing platform shoes, paying a plastic surgeon to twist my nose around. But if I did any of those, one day or another the chosen disguise would slip and some clown would figure out that it was a disguise and that therefore I was hiding something. Which was all I needed.
There are better ways to disguise yourself. You leave your hair its usual color and keep it the usual distance from the ground. Your face remains the same. You change what’s behind it.
You change the clothes from the quiet tweeds and pinstripes and flannels to suits with more of a flair. You buy longer jackets and spend more money on them. You buy expensive shoes and noisy ties. You wear a hat — it alters the shape of your face at least as thoroughly as a nose job and at the same time the hat changes the tone of your appearance tremendously.
Little things. Nat Crowley would walk less hurriedly and more confidently. His voice would be lower, but not so much lower that it would be a strain. He’d speak slowly and he’d hold the words to a minimum.
More little things. Barshter drank either scotch on the rocks or dry martinis. Crowley would drink rye and soda or a bottle of premium beer. Barshter played lousy golf and listened inattentively to classical music. Crowley would hang out at jazz clubs and stick to spectator sports. He might catch the Friday fights from ringside or spend an afternoon at the track but you’d never catch him out at the country club for a weekend in the pool.
It wasn’t just a matter of props. Because props are something you use in an act and this had to be more than an act — it had to be real. I had to let myself slip into Crowley’s personality, playing it by ear at the beginning, living with it until it became my own. Eventually I would be Nat Crowley. I would live his life and think his thoughts and see the world through his eyes.
I could do worse, a lot worse. By now I was looking forward to the whole masquerade the way a satyr with a virgin bride looks forward to his wedding night. Donald Barshter had shot his wad years ago. There was nothing left for him — no kicks, no excitement, no sense of being alive — which, indirectly, was why Ellen and I had fought so much lately. We had nothing better to do. More directly, that was why I had knocked her around during a rare moment of passion. And why I was riding the train to the little city of Buffalo.
Crowley’s life wouldn’t be dull. He wouldn’t waste his days selling insurance and he wouldn’t come home each night to a boring wife who, when she bothered to talk to him at all, would babble on and on about slip covers for the living-room chairs and similar stimulating domestic topics.
Halfway to Rochester I stood up and walked to the john. While I was there I locked myself in the can and went through my wallet. There were a few traces of Barshter along with all that money and I wanted to get rid of them. I tore up a slew of membership cards in a variety of organizations, a driver’s license, a Social Security card, a withholding statement, a batch of business cards — mine and others’ — a fishing license, somebody’s telephone number and similar trivia. I tore up all my credit cards, wishing I had had the time to run up some bills I would never have to pay. But you can’t have everything.
I flushed all this garbage down the toilet and left it on the tracks for the gandy dancers to puzzle over. I took a long look at myself in the mirror, first with my glasses on, then without them. I’d picked up the glasses years ago for reading; somewhere in the course of time I’d started wearing them permanently. Now it was a slight strain without them. I figured I could get used to it.
The window gave me a hard time. You’d think they’d leave the john windows open full-time. They don’t. This one was stuck and I had to wrestle to get it open. I pitched the glasses into the middle of New York State and closed the window again. A face looks different without glasses. But that wasn’t the only reason I gave them the heave.
You see, Nat Crowley wouldn’t wear glasses. He’d squint first.