“All right,” she answered.
“Until Miami, then.”
“I’ll be seeing you.”
He returned to Parker’s room and fell into pleasantly exhausted sleep, garlanded with sweet dreams...
Watching Parker and Handy at work, those last two days, he had grown more and more impressed with the way they handled themselves. He had originally planned to remain with them throughout the robbery and the getaway, letting them handle all the details, and double-crossing them only after the operation was completed. But as the time grew shorter, he revised his plans and decided to do away with them before they left Kapor’s house. Through some careful and judicious questioning, he had learned enough about the getaway route and the theories behind it to be able to handle it alone when the time came. But still, he was in a strange country and involved in an operation that was unfamiliar to him, besides being aligned with a pair of the most lupine of wolves. That last day, Friday, his nervousness and excitement grew and grew until he was afraid he would explode. It was more and more difficult to hold himself in check as the day wore on toward night.
They had not found the derringer stowed away beneath the false bottom of his leather toilet kit. It was more of a toy than a gun, especially in comparison with the weapons that Parker and McKay carried, but it was small enough and light enough to be safely hidden and it held two bullets. If he was careful, that should be sufficient.
Friday evening, when Parker and Handy left to steal the second car, he transferred the derringer to his coat pocket, hoping they would not think to search him again before entering Kapor’s house.
McKay came back at the appointed time, and Menlo carried the empty suitcase they’d bought that day out to the car. He climbed in, saying, “Have you had a good fortune?”
“Good enough.”
McKay, too, had his moments of taciturnity.
From this point, when he actually entered the automobile and sat down next to McKay, until the operation was complete, he was in such a state of high excitement that he scarcely knew his name. The operation went like clockwork, and the delight bubbled up in him, mixed deliciously with terror, in a heady combination that was almost like a drug. They drove to the house in the stolen Cadillac, they entered, they found the room containing Kapor’s pitiful collection of bric-a-brac. And there for the first time Menlo saw the white mourner. In his state of heightened sensibilities he saw the mourner as being deeply meaningful and symbolic; in some convoluted way it expressed to him the end of mourning. Now at last all was within his grasp.
The head came off the Apollo, just as Clara had said it would, and inside was the money. It wasn’t really money to him yet — when he thought of money, he still thought of his native currency — but he knew he would have no difficulty in getting used to these unfamiliar green bills, with their Presidents and public buildings. The money poured out of the hollow Apollo, filling the suitcase and more, like a cornucopia. In excitement and dread and anticipation and pleasure so intermingled and intense that he came very close to fainting, he stuffed into his pockets the fingers caressing the crisp green bills, and then pulled his hand from his right pocket again, the fingers now gripping instead the small deadly black derringer.
Both tried to escape him, flinging themselves about, knocking statues down, but the excitement ended at his wrist. His hand was calm and steady. He fired twice, and each went down. They had to go down. In one lightning bolt of time, Auguste Menlo had become invincible. His finger twitched twice; his adversaries ceased to exist. Their husks, their empty shells, lay broken at his feet.
He stowed the derringer back in his pocket, hearing the crisp crinkle of the bills again, and hurried over to pick up the spoils. The statuette under his left arm, the suitcase — heavier now, much heavier — hanging from his right hand. He was flushed, feverish, victorious. He didn’t even remember turning the light off on his way out.
2
Menlo was dreaming.
First, there was a beach. There were great round beach umbrellas, and crowds of people swimming and splashing in the shallow water. Women wearing wool bathing suits and big floppy hats shading their eyes looked out over the water, and men and other women lay face down on blankets, sunbathing. There was a steady roar of sound, shouting and splashing and laughing, ebbing and flowing like the waves that trickled up the flat beach and down again. And children running, people hurrying this way and that. But it was all muted, all slowed down. The shouting and splashing sounded far off as if under water, and all the running and scurrying was like a moving picture run in slow motion.
A woman came walking toward Menlo across the beach. She was tall and golden and blonde and slender, with pleasing fullnesses where they should be, and she was totally nude. But no one else paid any attention. She came closer and closer to him, smiling with a smile that offered everything, and he recognized her but he couldn’t remember her name. He stared at her, trying to remember, and wondering why no one at the beach was alarmed by her nudity. Then the sun got into his eyes, making them sting and water, and he closed them for relief. When he opened them again, the woman was closer, but now she was wearing Parker’s face.
“No!” Menlo screamed, and in a sudden great gout of flame and smoke she disappeared. He looked out over the water, and a huge ship with tremendous white sails was racing toward him, bombarding the beach. The gouts of flame and smoke roared up all around him. People were screaming, and running every which way.
He dropped to his knees and began scrabbling in the sand, digging a hole to hide in, when a voice said, “Why not just clamp down hard on the capsule, my friend and save all that digging?”
He looked up, there was Spannick, sitting on a kitchen chair, and smiling at him. The kitchen chair was very slowly sinking into the sand under Spannick’s weight.
“You’re dead,” he shouted, and Spannick’s face changed to Parker’s. He closed his eyes, knowing he was doomed. He opened them again, and he was in a motel room with one green wall and one white wall and one yellow wall and one wall of glass covered by draperies of the three colors all combined, and he was alone.
He sat up, and slowly the realization came to him that this was truth, that he was awake and the nightmare was over. His elbows were trembling, and his mouth hung open. He tried to close it, but his jaw immediately fell slack again. He tried again, and it fell slack again. He kept trying, sitting mounded in the middle of the bed like a squat pink fish, his elbows trembling and his mouth closing and falling open, closing and falling open. But reality was returning to him, and in a minute he got up from the bed and stood in the middle of the room. He was naked, in honor of the United States and Bett Harrow.
Nightmares did come to him from time to time, particularly when he had been working too hard, or an assignment was unusually difficult, like the purging of an old friend. He knew nightmares, and he knew what to do about them, how to pull their teeth and lay them to rest. The trick was to go over the nightmare detail by detail, remembering it as fully and completely as possible, discovering what part of his past experience had produced each distortion.
Still shaky, he lit a cigarette, and discovered that even American cigarettes taste foul immediately after one wakes up. Still, it should help calm his nerves. He made a face, and dragged deep.
The nightmare then. First, the beach. That was easy. It was one of the tourist beaches on the Caspian Sea; he had never been there, but he had seen such beaches in motion pictures. And in this instance it was meant to symbolize Miami Beach, which he had never seen, even in films.