Wampum! That was what Harse had called the spheres when he picked the string out of his little kit, and that was what they were.
Each ball bearing was hollow. Open them up and out come the treasures of the crown. Pop, and one of the spheres splits neatly in half, and out spills a star sapphire, as big as the ball of your finger, glittering like the muted lights of hell. Pop, and another sphere drops a ball of yellow gold into your palm. Pop for a narwhal’s tooth, pop for a cube of sugar; pop, pop, and there on the table before Harse sparkled diamonds and lumps of coal, a packet of heroin, a sphere of silver, pearls, beads of glass, machined pellets of tungsten, lumps of saffron and lumps of salt.
‘It is,’ said Harse, ‘for your. Pay? No, no!’ And he headed off Mooney’s greedy fingers.
Click, click, click, and the little pellets of treasure and trash were back in the steel balls.
‘No, no!’ said Harse again, grinning, snapping the balls together like poppets in a string. ‘After you have guided me to Brooklyn and the December twenty-sixth. But I must say to you. This? That some of the balls contain plutonium and some radium. And I do not think that you can get them. Open? But if you did, you perhaps would die. Oh, Ho?’ And, laughing, he began bis taut nap.
Mooney swallowed the last of his icy tea. It was full daylight outside.
Very well, castaway, he said silently to the dozing pale-eyed man, I will guide you. Oh, there never was a guide like Mooney - not when a guide’s fee can run so high. But when you are where you want to go, then we’ll discuss the price...
A hacksaw, he schemed, and a Geiger counter. He had worn his fingers raw trying to find the little button or knob that Harse had used to open them. All right, he was licked there. But there were more ways than one to open a cat’s eye.
A hacksaw. A Geiger counter. And, Mooney speculated drowsily, maybe a gun, if the pale-eyed man got tough.
Mooney fell asleep in joy and anticipation for the first time in more than a dozen years.
It was bright the next morning. Bright and very cold.
‘Look alive!’ Mooney said to the pale-eyed man, shivering. It had been a long walk from Uncle Lester’s house to the bridge, in that ripping, shuddering wind that came in off the Atlantic.
Harse got up off his knees, from where he had been examining the asphalt pavement under the snow. He stood erect beside Mooney, while Mooney put on an egg-sucking smile and aimed his thumb down the road.
The station wagon he had spotted seemed to snarl and pick up speed as it whirled past them onto the bridge.
‘I hope you skid into a ditch!’ Mooney bawled into the icy air. He was in a fury. There was a bus line that went where they wanted to go. A warm, comfortable bus that would stop for them if they signalled, that would drop them just where they wanted to be, to convert one of Harse’s ball-bearings into money. The gold one, Mooney planned. Not the diamond, not the pearl. Just a few dollars was all they wanted, in this Jersey shore area where the towns were small and the gossip big. Just the price of fare into New York, where they could make their way to Tiffany’s.
But the bus cost thirty-five cents apiece. Total seventy cents. Which they didn’t have.
‘Here comes another. Car?’
Mooney dragged back the corners of his lips into another smile and held out his thumb.
It was a panel truck, light blue, with the sides lettered: Chris’s Delicatessen. Free Deliveries. The driver slowed up, looked them over and stopped. He leaned towards the right-hand window.
He called: ‘I can take you far’s Red Ba -’
He got a good look at Mooney’s companion then and swallowed. Harse had put on an overcoat because Mooney insisted on it and he wore a hat because Mooney had told him flatly there would be trouble and questions if he didn’t But he hadn’t taken off his own silvery leotard, which peeped through between neck and hat and where the coat flapped open.
‘- ank,’ finished the driver thoughtfully.
Mooney didn’t give him a chance to change his mind. ‘Red Bank is just where we want to go. Come on!’ Already he had his hand on the door. He jumped in, made room for Harse, reached over him and slammed the door.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said chattily to the driver. ‘Cold morning, isn’t it? And that was some storm last night. Say, we really do appreciate this. Anywhere in Red Bank will be all right to drop us, anywhere at all.’
He leaned forward slightly, just enough to keep the driver from being able to get a really good look at his other passenger.
It would have gone all right, it really would, except that just past Fair Haven, Harse suddenly announced: ‘It is the time for me to. Eat?’
He snip-snapped something around the edges of the gleaming sort of dispatch case, which opened. Mooney, peering over his shoulder, caught glimpses of shiny things and spinning things and things that seemed to glow. So did the driver.
‘Hey,’ he said, interested, ‘What’ve you got there?’
‘My business,’ said Harse, calmly and crushingly.
The driver blinked. He opened his mouth, and then he shut it again, and his neck became rather red.
Mooney said rapidly: ‘Say, isn’t there - uh - isn’t there a lot of snow?’ He feigned fascination with the snow on the road, leaning forward until his face was nearly at the frosty windshield. ‘My gosh, I’ve never seen the road so snowy!’
Beside him, Harse was methodically taking things out of other things. A little cylinder popped open and began to steam; he put it to his lips and drank. A cube the size of a fist opened up at one end and little pellets dropped out into a cup. Harse picked a couple up and began to chew them. A flat, round object the shape of a cafeteria pie flipped open and something grey and doughy appeared -
‘Holy heaven!’
Mooney’s face slammed into the windshield as the driver tramped on his brakes. Not that Mooney could really blame him. The smell from that doughy mass could hardly be believed; and what made it retchingly worse was that Harse was eating it with a pearly small spoon.
The driver said complainingly: ‘Out! Out, you guys! I don’t mind giving you a lift, but I’ve got hard rolls in the back of the truck and that smell’s going to - Out! You heard me!’
‘Oh,’ said Harse, tasting happily. ‘No.’
‘No?’ roared the driver. ‘Now listen! I don’t have to take any lip from hitchhikers! I don’t have to -’
‘One moment,’ said Harse. ‘Please.’ Without hurry and without delay, beaming absently at the driver, he reached into the silvery case again. Snip, snippety-snap; a jointed metal thing wriggled and snicked into place. And Harse, still beaming, pointed it at the driver.
It was a good thing the truck was halted, because the whining blue light reached diffidently out and embraced the driver; and then there was no driver. There was nothing. He was gone, beyond the reach of any further lip from hitchhikers.
So there was Mooney, driving a stolen panel truck, Mooney the bankrupt, Mooney the ne’er-do-well, and now Mooney the accomplice murderer. Or so he thought, though the pale-eyed man had laughed like a panther when he’d asked.
He rehearsed little speeches all the way down U.S. One, Mooney did, and they all began: ‘Your Honour, I didn’t know -’
Well, he hadn’t. How could a man like Mooney know that Harse was so bereft of human compassion as to snuff out a life for the sake of finishing his lunch in peace? And what could Mooney have done about it, without drawing the diffident blue glow to himself? No, Your Honour, really, Your Honour, he took me by surprise...
But by the time they ditched the stolen car, nearly dry of gas, at the Hoboken ferry, Mooney had begun to get his nerve back. In fact, he was beginning to perceive that in that glittering silvery dispatch case that Harse hugged to him were treasures that might do wonders for a smart man unjustly dogged by hard times. The wampum alone! But beyond the wampum, the other good things that might in time be worth more than any amount of mere money.