An ambush, Ricky thought with some irony, that is defined by love.
Ricky found some scratch paper, and worked for a few moments on a rhyme. When he had it the way he wanted, he called the Village Voice classified section. Once again, as before, he found himself speaking with a clerk in Personals. He made some small talk, as he had on numerous occasions before. But this time he was careful to ask the clerk several key questions and deliver some critical information:
“Look, if I’m out of town, can I still call in and get the responses?”
“Sure,” said the clerk. “Just dial the access code. You can call from anywhere.”
“Great,” Ricky replied. “You see I have some business up on the Cape this weekend, so I have to head up there for a few days, and I still want to get the responses.”
“It won’t be a problem,” the clerk said.
“I hope the weather is good. The forecast is for rain. You ever go up to Cape Cod?”
“Been to Provincetown,” the clerk said. “It’s pretty wild up there after the Fourth of July weekend.”
“No kidding,” Ricky said. “My place is in Wellfleet. Or, at least it used to be. Had to sell it. A fire sale. Going up just to settle a few leftover matters, then back to the city and back to the grind.”
“I hear you,” the clerk said. “I wish I had a place on the Cape.”
“The Cape is special,” Ricky spoke carefully, lingering over each word. “You only really go in the summer, maybe a little in the fall or spring, but each season gets inside you in its own way. It becomes home. More than home, really. A place for starting and ending. When I die, that’s where I want them to bury me.”
“I can only wish,” the clerk said, slightly envious.
“Maybe someday,” Ricky added. He cleared his throat to deliver the message for the classifieds. He had it run under the modest headline: Seeking Mr. R.
“Don’t you mean ‘Mr. Right ’?” the clerk asked.
“No,” Ricky said. “Mr. R. is fine.” Then he launched into what he hoped would be the last rhyme he would ever need to concoct:
Ricky’s here. Ricky’s there.
Ricky could be anywhere.
Ricky maybe likes to roam,
Ricky maybe has gone home.
Perhaps Ricky has gone to ground,
But Ricky likely can’t be found.
Someplace old, someplace new,
Ricky will always elude you.
Mr. R. can search high and low,
Still he will never know,
When Ricky might return again,
As an adversary, not a friend,
Carrying evil, toting death,
Ready to steal someone’s last breath.
“Intense,” the clerk said, with a long, slow whistle. “You say this is a game?”
“Yes,” Ricky answered. “But not one too many people should be eager to play.”
The ad was scheduled for the following Friday, which gave Ricky little time. He knew what would happen: The paper actually hit the newsstands the evening before, and that would be when all three of them would read the message. But this time, they wouldn’t respond in the paper. It will be Merlin, Ricky thought, using his brusque and demanding lawyer’s tones and obliquely threatening manner. Merlin will call the ad supervisor and work his way rapidly down through the paper’s hierarchy until he finds the clerk who took the poem over the telephone. And he will question him closely about the man who called it in. And the clerk will quickly recall the conversation about the Cape. Maybe, Ricky wondered, the young man will even recall that Ricky said it was where he wanted someday to be buried, a small desire, in a way, but one that will trigger much in Merlin. After he acquires the information he will pass it to his brother. A modest act of insulation, to be sure, but a necessary one. Then the three of them will argue once again. The two younger ones have been frightened, probably more frightened than they have been since they were children and abandoned by self-murder by the mother they loved. They will say they want to join Mr. R. on his hunt, and they will say they feel responsible for the danger, and guilty, too, he thought, for making him take care of them once more. But they will not truly mean it, and the older brother will have none of it, anyway. This is a killing he will want to handle alone.
And so, Ricky thought, alone is how he will proceed.
Alone and wanting to finish once and for all what he had been led to believe had been completed. He will hurry toward another death.
He checked out of the cheap room, scouring it first for any signs of his existence. Then, before departing the city, he performed one other series of tasks. He closed out his domestic banking accounts at New York branches, then went into a midtown office for a bank located in the Caribbean. There he opened a simple checking and savings account for Richard Lively. When he’d completed the transaction, depositing a modest sum from his remaining cash, he exited the bank and walked two blocks up Madison Avenue to the Crédit Suisse office that he had passed many times back in the days when he was merely another New Yorker.
A low-level bank official was more than willing to open a new account for Mr. Lively. This was merely a traditional savings account, but it had a single interesting feature. On one day, each year, the bank was to transfer ninety percent of the accumulated funds directly, by wire, to the account number that Ricky provided for the Caribbean bank. They were to deduct their fees from the remainder. The date he selected for this transfer was chosen with a rough sort of haphazard care: At first he’d thought to use his birthday, then he’d thought of his wife’s birthday. Then, he’d considered the day that he’d faked his own death. He also considered using Richard Lively’s birthday. But finally, he’d asked the executive opening the account, a rather pleasant young woman who had taken pains to reassure him of the complete secrecy and compelling sanctity of Swiss banking regulations, and asked her what her birthday was. As he’d hoped, it had no connection to any date that he could remember. A late March day. He liked that. March was the month that actually saw the end of winter and suggested the beginning of spring, but was filled with false promise and deceptive winds. An unsettled month. He thanked the young woman and told her that was the day he selected for any transfers.