Which was just as well, actually. The last thing Berridge wanted was to know the specifics of the usage to which his money was to be put, and the next to the last thing was idle conversation with this man over some standard subject tike the weather.
So Berridge, ordinarily an expansive and loquacious man, matched Lynch’s brevity with his own, saying, “No problem at all. The usual terms, I suppose?”
“Right. If it comes off, you’ll hear in about ten days.”
“About the first of the month?”
“Just after. Second or third, something like that.”
“Excellent. You want it now, I suppose.”
“Yes.” “Care to come with me to the bank?”
Lynch nodded, and moved away from the window. Berridge, pleased with himself for not having seated himself behind his mahogany desk, led the way out of the office and down the rear hall to the garage, where he pushed the button that opened the third door along, the one for the Toronado. Past that was his daughter’s Mustang, while on this side were the Cadillac and his wife’s Volkswagen. The hearse and flower car were kept in another garage, beside the house.
Berridge felt good behind the wheel of his Toronado, young and vital. He had noticed that just about every other Toronado driver he had ever seen was, like himself, middle-aged and portly, but this didn’t interfere with the infusion of youth the car gave him. He was as capable of doublethink as anyone.
His money, for instance. He considered himself an honest and upright and patriotic man, he detested beatniks and peaceniks and other antisocial freaks as much as anyone, and if his income-tax statements were annual pieces of remarkably baroque fiction that was no contradiction at all, but merely another facet of his character, the hardheaded businessman facet. Poorer families tended to pay morticians in cash; cash was untraceable; untraceable income would only be reported by fools; Norman Berridge was nobody’s fool. If in a safety-deposit box in a bank downtown there were wads of wrinkled bills, just as they had come to him from the hands of his clientele, that was simply one way of an ordinary person’s defending himself from the encroachments of Big Government.
And if that money was occasionally doubled—and occasionally lost, too—by investment in the unspecified activities of men like Lynch, so what? Since when was investment a crime?
There was no conversation on the ride downtown. Berridge was painfully conscious of Lynch on the seat beside him, but he knew none of the awareness or discomfort showed. He drove, a little too slowly and too cautiously, through the slight mid-morning traffic, angle-parked the car at a parking meter just down the block from the bank, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Lynch said nothing to that, which was typical of the man.
Berridge agonized over whether or not to put a dime in the meter. Would Lynch consider him effete if he did, or slovenly if he didn’t? Contempt seemed possible in either case.
The problem was solved for him when he put his hand in his change pocket; he had no dimes. He walked on by the meter and down to the bank.
He enjoyed the complexity involved in reaching his box, the gates to be gone through, the form to sign, the dignified obsequiousness of the guard, the necessity of both the guard’s key and his own being inserted in the box at the same time, all gave him a feeling of importance, and of safety. And the value so obviously conferred on his safety deposit box seemed to rub off on him as well, giving him a feeling that he himself was considered valuable. All in all, a satisfying experience and a welcome antidote to ten minutes in the silent company of Lynch.
Berridge requested and got a large manila envelope. Carrying this and his box, he entered one of the private chambers, sat at the table there, and counted out fifties and twenties and an occasional ten until he had reached three thousand. The bills stuffed the manila envelope, which he could barely seal shut. Then there was the reverse procedure to go through, returning the box to its place and himself to the outside air.
When he returned to the car, Lynch was smoking, the air inside the car acrid with the smell of smoke. Unobtrusively Berridge turned on the air conditioner when he started the engine. Meantime Lynch ripped open the envelope and began to count the bills. He counted as Berridge drove homeward again, his absorption undisturbed by Berridge’s progress through the streets. Each little handful, when counted, went into another of Lynch’s pockets until when he was done, the envelope was empty, the money was out of sight, and Lynch looked exactly the same as before.
When Berridge was stopped by a red light, Lynch extended a crumpled twenty towards him, saying, “You counted wrong.”
“I did?” Surprised, Berridge took the bill, and didn’t notice the light had turned green until the car behind him sounded its horn. Then he drove the rest of the way with the bill clutched in his right hand.
When they reached the house—large, white stucco, with well-tended plantings all around and a discreet black-with-gray-letters sign on the lawn—Lynch said, “Let me off in front.”
“Certainly.”
Lynch didn’t say goodbye. Berridge watched him cross the street and get into a Pontiac with a New York State plate. Stolen? He had no idea.
After Lynch drove away, Berridge drove the Toronado back into the garage, the door opening for him at his approach. Once inside, seeing the manila envelope crumpled on the seat beside him, he permitted himself to become annoyed at Lynch, at his silence, his cold arrogance, his sloppiness in leaving that envelope there.
Berridge looked at the twenty-dollar bill still in his hand. Lynch had only counted the money once. Why had he been so sure it was Berridge who had made the error?
Berridge’s stomach felt bad.
7
I’m not upset about Parker any more,” Ellen said. “Oh? Very good.”
“All I feel for him now is dislike,” she said, and she knew her voice was calm with her certainty.
“I’m glad things are simpler now,” Dr Godden said. “What made the change?”
“Different things,” she said. “I know that. There was a time when I would have known only one of them, but now I know there’s others.”
“What’s the one you would have known?”
“What he did with the guns,” she said. Then, realizing she’d started somewhere in the middle and he couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about, she hurried on, “You remember Wednesday I told you he’d gone somewhere and gotten a lot of money. The money to finance things.”
“Yes. I found that very interesting. The reasons for getting the financing on the outside and so on.”
“Well, yesterday,” she said, “he got the guns. They’re in toy boxes, model auto racing sets and like that.”
“How many guns?”
“Two machine guns and four pistols. All so innocent, packed up in toy boxes. Stan said he got them from a man who runs a hobby shop as a cover for selling illegal guns.”
“And the guns bothered you?”
“Not the guns,” she said. “What he did with them”
“What did he do with them?”
“He put them on the shelf in Pam’s closet.” Ellen closed her eyes, hugged herself closer. She could see them sitting there, on the shelf in her baby’s room, surrounded by truly innocent toys, all that lethal metal hidden away inside cardboard boxes covered with bright colors and gay lettering and pictures of happy things.
“Don’t you see?” she said, but she kept her own eyes closed. “He’s using Pam. Not just me, not just my house or Stan or even Marty. He’s using Pam, making her innocence hide his—filth.”
“You feel violated,” Dr Godden suggested.
She opened her eyes, studied the patterned carpet as though the twisting lines would only form letters and words and sentences if she could but look at them right, as though the carpet could tell her something of great importance that would make everything clear and easy and possible. But the pattern remained only twisting lines.