He checked his wristwatch. He wasn’t pretending to be worried about the hour now; he was genuinely concerned.
“All right, look, Mr. Fittich, no more bullshit. I don’t have time. This is going to be even better for you than a sale, because here’s what’s going to happen. You take that money and stick it in the back of a desk drawer. Nobody ever has to know I gave it to you. I’ll drive the Subaru to where I have to go, which is only someplace on the West Side. I’d take my own car, but they’ve got a tracking device on it, and I don’t want to be followed. I’ll abandon the Subaru in a safe area and call you by tomorrow to let you know where it is. You bring it back, and all that’s happened is you’ve rented your cheapest car for one day for two thousand bucks tax free. The worst that happens is I don’t call. You’ve still got the money — and a theft write-off.”
Fittich turned the driver’s license over and over in his hand. “Is somebody going to ask me why I’d let you make a test drive alone even with a copy of your license?”
“The guy looked honest to me,” Joe said, feeding Fittich the lines he could use. “It was his picture on the license. And I just couldn’t leave, ’cause I expected a call from a hot prospect who came in earlier and might buy the best piece of iron I have on the lot. Didn’t want to risk missing that call.”
“You got it all figured out,” Fittich said.
His manner changed. The easygoing, smiley-faced salesman was a chrysalis from which another Gem Fittich was emerging, a version with more angles and harder edges.
He stepped to the Xerox and switched it on.
Nevertheless, Joe sensed that Fittich had not yet made up his mind. “The fact is, Mr. Fittich, even if they come in here and ask you some questions, there’s nothing they could do to you — and nothing they’d want to bother doing.”
“You in the drug trade?” Fittich asked bluntly.
“No.”
“’Cause I hate people who sell drugs.”
“I do too.”
“Ruining our kids, ruining what’s left of our country.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Not that there is much left.” Fittich glanced through the window at the man at the bus stop. “They cops?”
“Not really.”
“Cause I support the cops. They got a hard job these days, trying to uphold the law when the biggest criminals are some of our own elected officials.”
Joe shook his head. “These aren’t any kind of cops you’ve ever heard of.”
Fittich thought for a while, and then he said, “That was an honest answer.”
“I’m being as truthful with you as I can be. But I’m in a hurry. They probably think I’m in here to call a mechanic or a tow truck or something. If I’m going to get that Subaru, I want it to be now, before they maybe tumble to what I’m really doing.”
After glancing at the window and the bus stop across the street, Fittich said, “They government?”
“For all intents and purposes — yeah.”
“You know why the drug problem just grows?” Fittich said. “It’s because half this current group of politicians, they’ve been paid off to let it happen, and hell, a bunch of the bastards are even users themselves, so they don’t care.”
Joe said nothing, for fear that he would say the wrong thing. He didn’t know the cause of Fittich’s anger with authority. He could easily misspeak and be viewed suddenly as not a like thinker but as one of the enemy.
Frowning, Gem Fittich made a Xerox copy of the driver’s license. He returned the laminated card to Joe, who put it away in his wallet.
At the desk again, Fittich stared at the money. He seemed to be disturbed about cooperating — not because he was worried about getting in trouble but because the moral dimension, in fact, was of concern to him. Finally he sighed, opened a drawer, and slid the two thousand into it.
From another drawer, he withdrew a set of keys and handed them to Joe.
Taking them gratefully, Joe said, “Where is it?”
Fittich pointed at the car through the window. “Half an hour, I probably got to call the cops and report it stolen, just to cover myself.”
“I understand. With luck, I’ll be where I’m going by then.”
“Hell, don’t worry, they won’t even look for it anyway. You could use it a week and never get nailed.”
“I will call you, Mr. Fittich, and tell you exactly where I left it.”
“I expect you will.” As Joe reached the open door, Fittich said, “Mr. Carpenter, do you believe in the end of all things?”
Joe paused on the threshold. “Excuse me?”
The Gem Fittich who had emerged from the chrysalis of the cheerful salesman was not merely harder edged and edgier; he also had peculiar eyes — eyes different from what they had been, full of not anger but an unnerving pensiveness. “The end of time in our time, the end of this mess of a world we’ve made, all of it just suddenly rolled up and put away like an old moth-eaten rug.”
“I suppose it’s got to end someday,” Joe said.
“Not someday. Soon. Doesn’t it seem to you that wrong and right have all got turned upside down, that we don’t even half know the difference anymore?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and feel it coming? Like a tidal wave a thousand miles high, hanging over us, darker than the night and cold, going to crash over us and sweep us all away?”
“Yes,” Joe said softly and truthfully. “Yes, I’ve often felt just that in the middle of the night.”
The tsunami looming over Joe in dark hours was of an entirely personal nature, however: the loss of his family, towering so high that it blocked the stars and prevented him from seeing the future. He had often longed to be swept away by it.
He sensed that Fittich, sunk in some deep moral weariness, also longed for a delivering apocalypse. Joe was disquieted and surprised to discover he shared this melancholy with the car salesman.
The discovery disturbed him, because this expectation that the end of all things loomed was profoundly dysfunctional and antisocial, an illness from which he himself was only beginning to recover with great difficulty, and he feared for a society in which such gloom was widespread.
“Strange times,” Fittich said, as Joe had said weird times to Barbara a short while ago. “They scare me.” He went to his chair, put his feet on the desk, and stared at the ball game on television. “Better go now.”
With the flesh on the nape of his neck as crinkled as crepe paper, Joe walked outside to the yellow Subaru.
Across the street, the man at the bus stop looked impatiently left and right, as though disgruntled about the unreliability of public transportation.
The engine of the Subaru turned over at once, but it sounded tinny. The steering wheel vibrated slightly. The upholstery was worn, and pine-fragrant solvents didn’t quite mask the sour scent of cigarette smoke that over the years had saturated the vinyl and the carpet.
Without looking at the man in the bus-stop shelter, Joe drove out of the lot. He turned right and headed up the street past his abandoned Honda.
The pickup with the camper shell was still parked in front of the untenanted industrial building.
When Joe reached the intersection just past the camper truck, there was no cross-traffic. He slowed, did not come to a full stop, and instead put his foot down heavily on the accelerator.
In the rearview mirror, he saw the man from the bus stop hurrying toward the camper, which was already backing into the street. Without the transponder to guide them, they would have to maintain visual contact and risk following him close enough to blow their cover — which they thought they still enjoyed.