American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (83 page)

“What’re you going to do?”

“That’s what I’m here to tell you. We couldn’t keep you here indefinitely. We don’t do things that way. So you’re free to go.”

The man raised his head sharply. “There’s a catch to it.”

Rogers nodded. “Yes, there is. We can’t let you go back to sensitive work. That’s the catch, and you already knew it. Now it’s official. You’re free to go and do anything you like, as long as it isn’t physics.”

“Yes.” The man’s voice was quiet. “You want to see me run. How long does that injunction apply? How long’re you going to keep watching me?”

“Until we find out who you are.”

The man began to laugh, quietly and bitterly.

“So he’s leaving here today?” Finchley asked.

“Tomorrow morning. He wants to go to New York. We’re paying his flight transportation, we’ve assigned him a onehundred-per cent disability pension, and given him four months’ back pay at Martino’s scale.”

“Are you going to put a surveillance team on him in New York?”

“Yes. And I’ll be on the plane with him.”

“You will? You’re dropping your job here?”

“Yes. Orders. He’s my personal baby. I’ll head up the New York A.N.G. surveillance unit.”

Finchley looked at him curiously. Rogers kept his eyes level. After a moment, the F.B.I. man made an odd sucking noise between his two upper front teeth and let it go at that. But Rogers saw his mouth stretch into the peculiar grimace a man shows when a fellow professional falls from grace.

“What’s your procedure going to be?” Finchley asked carefully. “Just keep him under constant watch until he makes a wrong move?”

Rogers shook his head. “No. We’ve got to screw it down tighter than that. There’s only one possible means of identification left. We’ve got to build up a psychological profile on Lucas Martino. Then we’ll match it against this fellow’s pattern of actions and responses, in situations where we’d be able to tell exactly how the real Martino’d react. We’re going to dig—deeper than any security clearance, deeper than the Recording Angel, if we have to. We’re going to reduce Lucas Martino to so many points on a graph, and then we’re going to chart this fellow against him. Once he does something Lucas Martino would never have done, we’ll know. Once he expresses an attitude the old, loyal Lucas Martino didn’t have, we’ll come down on him like a ton of bricks.”

“Yes—but . . .” Finchley looked umcomfortable. His specific assignment to Rogers’ team was over. From now on he’d be only a liaison man between Rogers’ A.N.G. surveillance unit and the F.B.I. As a member of a different organization, he’d be expected to give help when needed, but no unaskedfor suggestions. And particularly now, with Rogers bound to be sensitive about rank, he was wary of overstepping. “Well?” Rogers asked.

“Well, what you’re going to do is wait for this man to make his mistake. He’s a clever man, so he won’t make it soon, and it won’t be a big one. It’ll be some little thing, and it may be years before he makes it. It may be fifteen years. He may die without making it. And all that time he’ll be on the spot. All that time he may be Lucas Martino—and if he is, this system’s never going to prove it.”

Rogers’ voice was soft. “Can you think of anything better? Anything at all?” It wasn’t Finchley’s fault they were in this mess. It wasn’t the A.N.G.’s fault he’d had to be demoted. It wasn’t Martino’s fault this whole thing had started. It wasn’t Roger’s fault—still, wasn’t it?, he thought—that Mr. Deptford had been demoted. They were caught up in a structure of circumstances that were each fitted to one another in an inevitable pattern, each so shaped and so placed that they fell naturally into a trackless maze, and there was nothing for anyone to do but follow along.

“No,” Finchley admitted, “I can’t see any way out of it.”

There was a ground fog at the airfield and Rogers stood outside alone, waiting for it to lift. He kept his back turned to the car parked ten feet away, beside the administration building, where the other man was sitting with Finchley. Rogers’ topcoat collar was turned up, and his hands were in his pockets. He was staring out at the dirty metal skin of the airplane waiting on the apron. He was thinking of how aircraft in flight flashed molten in the sky, dazzling as angels, and how on the ground their purity was marred by countless grease-rimmed rivet heads, by oil stains, by scuff marks where mechanics’ feet had slipped, and by droplets of water that dried away to each leave a speck of dirt behind.

He slipped two fingers inside his shirt, like a pickpocket, and pulled out a cigarette. Closing his thin lips around it, he stood bareheaded in the fog, his hair a corona of beaded moisture, and listened to the public address system announce that the fog was dissipating and passengers were requested to board their planes. He looked through the glass wall of the administration building into the passenger lounge and saw the people there getting to their feet, closing their coats, getting their tickets ready.

The man had to go out into the world sometime. This was an ordinary commercial civilian flight, and sixty-five people, not counting Rogers and Finchley, would be exposed to him at one blow.

Rogers hunched his shoulders, lit his cigarette, and wondered what would happen. The fog seemed to have worked its way into his nasal passages and settled at the back of his throat. He felt cold and depressed. The gate checker came out and took up his position, and people began filing out of the passenger lounge.

Rogers listened for the sound of the car door. When it didn’t come at once, he wondered if the man was going to wait until everyone was aboard, in hopes of being able to take the last seat and so, for a little time, avoid being noticed.

The man waited until the passengers were collected in the inevitable knot around the ticket checker. Then he got out of the car, waited for Finchley to slide out, and slammed the door like a gunshot.

Rogers jerked his head in that direction, realizing everyone else was, too.

For a moment, the man stood there holding his overnight bag in one gloved hand, his hat pulled down low over his obscene skull, his topcoat buttoned to the neck, his collar up. Then he set the bag down and pulled off his gloves, raising his face to look directly at the other passengers. Then he lifted his metal hand and yanked his hat off.

In the silence he walked forward quickly, hat and bag in his good hand, taking his ticket out of his breast pocket with the other. He stopped, bent, and picked up a woman’s handbag.

“I believe you dropped this?” he murmured.

The woman took her purse numbly. The man turned to Rogers and, in a deliberately cheerful voice, said, “Well, time to be getting aboard, isn’t it?”

Young Lucas came to the city at a peculiar time.

The summer of 1966 was uncomfortable for New York. It was usually cooler than expected, and it often rained. The people who ordinarily spent their summer evenings in the parks, walking back and forth and then sitting down to watch other people walk past, felt disappointed in the year. The grumbling old men who sold ice cream sticks from threewheeled carts rang their bells more vigorously than they would have liked. Fewer people came to the band concerts on the Mall in Central Park, and the music, instead of diffusing gently through heat-softened air, had a tinny ring to the practiced ear.

There were hot days here and there. There were weeks at a time when it seemed that the weather had settled down at last, and the city, like a machine late in shifting gears but shifting at last, would try to fall into its true summer rhythm. But then it would rain again. The rain glazed the sidewalks instead of soaking into them, and the leaves on the trees curled rather than opened. It would have been a perfectly good enough summer for Boston, but New York had to force itself a little. Everyone was just a fraction on edge, knowing how New York summers ought to be, knowing how you ought to feel in the summer, and knowing that this year just wasn’t making it.

Young Lucas Martino knew only that the city seemed to be a nervous, discontented place. His uncle, Lucas Maggiore, who was his mother’s older brother and who had been in the States since 1936, was glad enough to see and hire him, but he was growing old and he was moody.
Espresso Maggiore
, where young Lucas was to work from noon to three a.m. each day but Monday, grinding coffee, charging the noisy espresso machine, carrying armfuls of cups to the tables, had until recently been a simple neighborhood trattoria for the neighborhood Italians who didn’t care to patronize the rival Greek kaffeneikons.

But the tourist area of Greenwich Village had spread down to include the block where Lucas Maggiore had started his coffee house when he stopped wrestling sacks of roasted beans in a restaurant supply warehouse. So now there were murals on the walls, antique tables, music by Muzak, and a new I.B.M. electric cash register. Lucas Maggiore, a big, heavy, indrawn bachelor who had always managed to have enough money, now had more. He was able to pay his only nephew more than he deserved, and still had enough left to make him wonder if perhaps he shouldn’t live more freely than he had in the past. But he had an ingrained caution against flying too far in the face of temptation, and so he was moody. He felt a vague resentment against the coffee house, hired a manager, and stayed away most of the time. He began stopping more and more often by the Park Department tables in Washington Square, where old men in black overcoats sat and played checkers with the concentration of chessmasters, and sometimes he was on the verge of asking to play.

When young Lucas came to New York, his uncle had embraced him at Pennsylvania Station, patted him between the shoulder blades, and held him off by both arms to look at him:

“Ah! Lucas!
Bello nipotino! E la Mama, il Papa—come lei portano?
”

“They’re fine, Uncle Lucas. They send their love. I’m glad to see you.”

“So. All right—I like you, you like me—we’ll get along. Let’s go.” He took Lucas’ suitcase in one big hand and led the way to the subway station. “Mrs. Dormiglione—my landlady— she has a room for you. Cheap. It’s a good room. Nice place. Old lady Dormiglione, she’s not much for cleaning up. You’ll have to do that yourself. But that way, she won’t bother you much. You’re young, Lucas—you don’t want old people bothering you all the time. You want to be with young people. You’re eighteen—you want a little life.” Lucas Maggiore inclined his head in the direction of a passing girl.

Young Lucas didn’t quite know what to say. He followed his uncle into a downtown express car and stood holding on to the overhead bar as the train jerked to a start. Finally, having nothing conclusive to say, he said nothing. When the train reached Fourth Street, he and his uncle got off, and went to the furnished rooming house just off West Broadway where Lucas Maggiore lived on the top floor and Lucas Martino was to live in the basement—with an entrance separate from the main front door. After young Lucas had been introduced to Mrs. Dormiglione, shown his room, and given a few minutes to put his suitcase away and wash his face, his uncle took him to the coffee house.

On the way there, Lucas Maggiore turned to young Lucas.

“Lucas and Lucas—that’s too many Lucases in one store. Does Matteo have another name for you?”

Lucas thought back. “Well, sometimes Papa calls me Tedeschino.”

“Good! In the store, that’s your name. All right?”

“Fine.”

So that was the name by which Lucas was introduced to the employees of
Espresso Maggiore
. His uncle told him to be at work at noon the next day, advanced him a week’s pay, and left him. They saw each other occasionally after that, and sometimes when his uncle wanted company, he asked young Lucas whether he would like to eat with him, or listen to music on the phonograph in Mrs. Dormiglione’s parlor. But Lucas Maggiore had so arranged things that young Lucas had a life of his own, freedom to live it, and was still close enough so that the boy couldn’t get into serious trouble. He felt that he’d done his best for the youngster, and he was right.

So Lucas spent his first day in New York with a firm base under his feet, but on his own. He thought that the city could have been pleasanter, but that he was being given a fair chance. He felt a little isolated, but that was something he felt was up to him to handle.

In another year, with a soft summer, he might have found it easier to slip quickly into the pattern of the city’s life. But this year most people had not been lulled into relaxation—this year they took no vacations from the closed-up, preoccupied attitudes of winter, and so Lucas discovered that New Yorkers putting a meal in front of you in a diner, selling you a movie ticket, or rubbing against you on a crowded bus, could each of them be behind an impenetrable wall.

With another uncle, he might have been taken up into a family much like the one he had left behind. In another house, he might have had a room somewhere where people next door soon struck up an acquaintance. But, as everything was, things so combined that what kind of life he lived for the next year and a half was entirely up to him. He recognized the situation, and in his methodical, logical way, began to consider what kind of life he needed.

Espresso Maggiore
was essentially one large room, with a counter at one end where the espresso machine was and where the clean cups were kept. There were heavy, elaborately carved tables from Venice and Florence, some with marble tops and some not, and besides the murals executed in an Italianate modern style by one of the neighborhood artists, there were thickly varnished old oil paintings in flaking gilt frames on the walls. There was a sugar bowl on each table, with a small menu card listing the various kinds of coffee served and the small selection of ices and other sweets available. The walls were painted a warm cream-yellow, and the lights were dim. The music played in the background, from speakers concealed in two genuine Cinquecento cupboards, and from time to time one of the steady patrons would find a vaguely Roman bust or statuette—French neoclassic was close enough—which he would donate to the management for the satisfaction of seeing it displayed on a wooden pedestal somewhere in a corner.