"Is this the same topic or a new one?"
"New one. And I’m trying to help you stay alive, so I’d appreciate it if you’d try too."
He was serious again. "No medical problems."
"All right," she said. "Let’s go into buying habits. Go through your wardrobe in your mind. Picture your closet. Look at the ties, suits, jackets, shoes, and shirts. Men your size sometimes buy particular brands or even through mail order, to get a better fit. Even though you’re gone, the catalogs and things will keep coming to your house. Your clothes are still there, and people will study them. Even if you’re smart enough to buy the same kinds of clothes with different labels, the ones in the closet will give them a very accurate picture of how you’ll look."
"Now you’ve got me," he said. "I’m one of those guys who found a few things he liked and stuck with them."
"Change," she said. "Don’t buy anything you would have bought a month ago. It shouldn’t be too hard. You’re going from being an accountant to being a student."
"I hope I am, anyway," he said.
"You are," she said. "Be absolutely certain of that. You’re only going to be running until we get you settled. Just keep that in mind. This is hard, but it’s going to end."
When they walked back to the house on the fourth day, they didn’t stop. Now there was a frantic quality to their conversations, as though Jane were trying to tell him everything she knew at once. While she made dinner, she had him pretend he was talking to his academic adviser at a college, telling her why he wanted to be a teacher, how he discovered he was interested in working with young people. Now and then she would ask him questions.
"Give me a list of the mathematics courses you had in your first degree program."
"Math 101-102, Math 363 and 4 ..."
"Time out. Say, ’advanced calculus,’ or ’probability theory.’ Don’t give them numbers, because the fake transcript might not have the same ones. The transcript will have to carry the same numbers as the catalog for the college you supposedly attended. Anytime somebody is writing down your answers, you have to think ahead."
They went on into the night, making pots of coffee and sitting in the kitchen, again, staring at each other across Jimmy’s table.
"What are you going to do with your money?"
"Bury it, I guess. I can’t put it in a bank. There’s a reporting requirement for cash deposits over ten thousand dollars."
"How much did you take?"
"Three hundred and fifty thousand."
"There are ways to hide it," Jane said. "You open seven or eight checking accounts in different banks: two in the town where you live, and the rest in other places."
"In my own name?"
"Yes. You put a few thousand dollars in each one— say, eight thousand. Make sure they don’t pay any interest, because that gets reported to the IRS."
"Then what?"
"Then you get one of the local banks to think you’re a businessman who leaves cash receipts in the night-deposit box, a few hundred dollars a night, to feed that checking account. You use that one to pay the others now and then."
"What does that accomplish?"
"It lets you start an investment account with one broker or mutual fund for each checking account except the one you’re feeding. You set up automatic monthly withdrawals—a couple hundred a month. You can add a little cash once in a while, but most of the money comes in checks from your local bank. When you get behind, buy travelers’ checks with cash and use them to make deposits in the checking accounts."
"Does that keep me from getting noticed?"
"If you pay taxes on the bogus business and on the investments, it does. You keep the cash deposits small but steady, so nobody thinks you’re doing anything illegal. To the extent that you can, you live off the cash. That also gives you change, so it’s not all hundreds or round-number deposits. When you need to write a check for something like tuition, do it from the second local account. After a few years, you end up with about two thirds of your cash in seven or eight good investments you’ve built gradually. You stop the automatic withdrawals, close all the checking accounts except two—one local and one somewhere else, so you can still pass a little money from one hand to the other when you need to. By that time your teacher’s salary will have kicked in, and you can live like everybody else."
"That leaves me with a third of the cash, less whatever it costs to live until I get a job. What’s that for?"
"That’s in case you make a mistake," she said. "That gets you out."
"How did you learn all this?"
She shrugged. "It’s what I do."
"Why do you do it?"
"Because I need to do something that makes sense."
"You know a lot about colleges, so you must have gone to one. What were you studying to be?"
"Nothing, really," she said. "To tell you the truth, I spent most of my time in the library. One of the great ironies of being an Indian in the twentieth century is that you have to do a lot of reading. I had a vague idea I might go to law school, but I got distracted before I made a decision."
"What distracted you?"
"I was a sophomore when somebody I knew got into trouble. He was a little older. During the war, he had been drafted and ducked out. He hadn’t even changed his name, just stopped answering their letters and went to a different college. He wasn’t exactly a problem for the government. He just didn’t want to kill anybody, but his local board decided he wasn’t a conscientious objector. They probably knew where he was all the time, but they were too busy to go pick him up. After the war ended, they found the time."
"How did you know him?"
"We took a class together. Sometimes we’d have coffee after a seminar. It wasn’t much of a relationship. But one night he came to me in the dorm and told me the F.B.I. had come to his apartment looking for him while he was out. While he was talking, I could tell he had decided that if he had to go to jail, he would kill himself. He was saying goodbye. Not to me—we weren’t even involved, really, but I was the only girl he could talk to right then, that night, and so he was saying goodbye to all women through me—the ones he had known but didn’t anymore, and the ones he would have known if he had lived."
"Did you talk him out of it?"
"No," she said. "I wanted to, but all of a sudden I realized I wasn’t listening to his words. I was looking at him and thinking how easy it would be to make him disappear."
"As a sophomore? You must have been—what— nineteen?"
"I had worked two summers as a skip-tracer for a bill-collection agency in Buffalo, so I had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn’t. I also got a feeling for how the dogs hunt. They’re not all the same, and they don’t look equally hard for everybody who’s on the run. A young guy who’s a student and isn’t dangerous, sometimes they figure he’ll just turn up sooner or later. He’ll pay taxes or apply for a marriage license or a loan or something. Sometimes I think they got a special kick out of arresting draft-dodgers twenty years later, so it would get into the papers to remind people that they never stop looking."
"So you made him disappear?"
"Yes. Then a few people found out about it—friends of his, friends of mine."
"And they told other people?"
"Not right away. But people grow up and the years go by, and just about everybody meets someone at some point who needs that kind of help."
He nodded. "So they made you do it again."
"No," she said. "It wasn’t them, it was me. When I realized I could do it, there was a temptation to do it again. I was the one who decided."
When the sun started to fill the room they turned the lights off and made breakfast. As they washed and dried the dishes at Jimmy’s sink, Felker said, "What’s next?"