There was no shower in his private bath, but there was a tub. He sat for an hour in water nearly too hot to stand, adding more hot water every time the water in the tub started to cool. After that he went directly to bed, though it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.
He woke at eight-thirty the next morning, and his head was buzzing. His nerves were far worse than yesterday, so bad that his arms and legs were shaking. He lay on his back on the bed, and his forehead was burning up. He felt a dull anger at the symptoms, because they were keeping him from the straight line, and he tried to ignore them. He pushed the covers away and got out of bed, but he immediately became dizzy and fell, hitting his face on the floor.
After a while, he got to the telephone and told the man at the desk that he needed a doctor. The man at the desk was irritated, and showed it, but he did send a doctor. He was a paunchy man with gray hair and a no-nonsense scowl, and when he came in, using the key the desk man had given him, Stubbs was back in bed, not wholly conscious.
The doctor examined him, and asked him questions he had a difficult time answering. Then he closed his black bag with a snap. “You have to stop drinking. You know that, don’t you?”
“I haven’t been drinking,” Stubbs told him. “I never drink.” It was true. Alcohol, even when he was at his best, hurt his head.
The doctor frowned, not sure whether or not to believe him. It being this particular hotel, this particular kind of hotel, the doctor had been prepared to diagnose even before seeing Stubbs. He stood looking down at him, and now he saw that the symptoms were not exactly right. Some of the symptoms that should have been there weren’t, like a craving for water and a special soreness in the joints of the arms. “Then you’ve been working too hard. Some sort of heavy physical labor without proper nutrition. You haven’t been getting enough sleep or enough rest or enough of the right kinds of food. Am I right?”
It was close enough. Stubbs nodded.
The doctor nodded, too, satisfied. “I don’t suppose you want to go to a clinic?”
“No.”
“I thought not. Can you pay for a nurse? You need someone to bring you food, at least for a day or two. You can’t leave that bed.”
“In my wallet,” Stubbs said. He motioned at his pants folded on the chair. “Take some for yourself and a nurse.”
The doctor was surprised at how much money there was in the wallet, and it made him curious as to what this man had been doing to get so run-down and have so much money, but he kept this curiosity to himself. He was a doctor with a small practice in a poor neighborhood, plus work at a clinic, plus being house doctor for this hotel and two others very much like it. He had the constant feeling that violence and evil were all around him, kept just out of sight because these people needed him as a doctor, but if he were ever to turn his head fast and see the evil they would have to kill him, whether they needed him or not. Because of this, he had trained his curiosity to be a small and private thing.
He took some money from Stubbs’ wallet, showed him how much he had taken, and explained what each dollar of it was for. “The man downstairs said you’d only paid for one night. I think you’ll be here four more days at the very least.”
“Pay him for two,” said Stubbs.
The doctor argued with him, but Stubbs ignored him. He concentrated on the straight line and lay quiet in the bed so he’d be well sooner, and after a while the doctor stopped arguing. He shrugged, and took some more money from Stubbs’ wallet, and left.
The nurse was bitter Irish, thin-bodied and sharp-faced, and a rosary rustled in her starched pocket. She fed him, when her watch said it was time and not when he was hungry, and she took good care of him without ever talking to him. It embarrassed him to use the bedpan, but she insisted. She came for two days, because that was how much she’d been paid for. The second day he didn’t really need her, but she came anyway and wouldn’t let him out of the bed. He decided to get up as soon as she left, but he didn’t.
The third day he was on his own again. He got up and stood beside the bed, and he wasn’t dizzy. He felt weak, and very hungry, but that was all, and the trembling in his arms and legs had stopped. He got clean clothing from his suitcase and went out to a restaurant for breakfast.
He walked around a little afterwards, but then the dizziness started to come back, so he went back to the room and lay down on the bed and slept some more. When he woke up it was afternoon, and he went out again for another meal. On the way out the desk clerk stopped him, and he paid for another day.
The fourth day, Friday, he was himself again. He’d nearly forgotten the two weeks at the farmhouse. It was only a dim memory, soft with lost details. In the clear spot in the middle of his brain, the straight line was back.
He packed the two suitcases, stowed the automatic under his coat, and went out to the car. Charles F. Wells lived somewhere in New York.
4
Stubbs closed the phone book and put away his ballpoint pen and the old piece of envelope and walked back out of the drugstore onto 10th Avenue. He stood blinking in the sunshine, not knowing where to go next, where to start. Then he thought of maps, so he went back into the drugstore. “Do you have a map of New York?”
“Manhattan?”
Stubbs frowned. “New York,” he said again, because he didn’t know what else to say.
Manhattan, decided the druggist. He reached behind him and got a small red book. The book was full of the locations of streets and information about subways and places of interest, and pasted in the back of the book was a street map of Manhattan.
Stubbs paid his quarter and took the little red book and started out of the store. Then he stopped again, struck by a sudden suspicion, and went back. “What about the rest?”
The druggist just looked at him. “The rest?”
Stubbs concentrated, and came up with a name. “Brooklyn.”
He was remembering now that New York was in parts. Manhattan was one part, and Brooklyn another. And there were other parts.
“Oh. You want a map of Brooklyn, too?” The druggist started to reach behind him again.
“No,” Stubbs pointed toward the phone booth. “About the phone book,” he said. “Is it just Manhattan?”
“Of course.”
“You don’t have the others?”
The druggist shook his head. “Why don’t you try Grand Central. They’ve got books from all the boroughs of Greater New York and the suburbs there.”
Stubbs nodded. “Grand Central,” he repeated. “Where’s Grand Central?”
The druggist opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Look, let me show you. Give me that map.”
Stubbs handed over the little red book. The druggist opened the map in the back, and showed him. He was here, 10th Avenue and 39th Street. Grand Central was over here, 42nd Street, the other side of 5th Avenue.
Stubbs nodded. “Thank you.”
“Not at all.” The druggist folded the map up for him and handed him back the little book. Stubbs went out to the sidewalk.
In his mind, it had seemed simple. He would come to New York and look in the phone book and it would say Charles Wells and give an address, and he would go to that address. So when he came through the Lincoln Tunnel he parked as soon as he saw a drugstore, and he looked in the phone book. There was a “Wells, C.” and a “Wells, C.F.” and two “Wells, Charles.” Four people in New York that might be the man he wanted.