Cutter nodded. “Sure. That’s nearly two weeks away.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Two weeks from now we’ll nab him coming down the gangplank in Casablanca. He’ll look like Kendig and he’ll be carrying James Butler’s credit cards and passport, but he won’t be Kendig.”

“Maybe that’s what he wants us to think.”

“No. Because he knows we’ll be there on the pier to meet the guy whoever he is. Kendig wouldn’t box himself into a trap like that. It’s got to be a ringer.”

Ross said, “It could be he’s made some arrangements to transfer to another boat while they’re at sea, you know. Then we’d never find him. Suppose they get to within half a day of Casablanca and a small boat comes out and takes him off?”

“No. He’d like us to worry about that but he won’t play it that way. For one thing it would mean depending on a second party. Suppose the boatman chickened out or got appendicitis on the wrong day? No, Kendig’s too independent—he never relies on anybody else to pull him out of anything. For another thing he’s too restless to confine himself to a ship like that one. He’d get cabin fever. Kendig needs a lot of room around him—he needs several exit doors. He won’t trap himself on any ship.”

“You know him better than I do,” Ross said, “but let’s not ignore the fact that he may be using your knowledge of him. Maybe he knows how you’ll figure it and he’s acting accordingly—by doing exactly what you don’t expect him to do.”

Cutter gave him a slow nod. “I’ll tell you what, Ross, if it’ll make you feel better you can send a radiogram to the captain of the Cape of Good Hope—ask him to signal us immediately if James Butler leaves the ship.”

“Hell they can’t be that far out to sea yet. We could probably reach it by helicopter right now.”

“And do what?”

“Well—apprehend him. That’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it?”

“On a Panamanian ship on the high seas? What would you use for a warrant, Ross, a stone tablet from God? Or would you prefer to go in shooting and mow him down in front of two dozen witnesses?”

Ross spread his hands. “At least we’d find out if it’s Kendig or not.”

“Take my word for it,” Cutter said, “It’s not Kendig.”

– 10 –

BY THE END of the third week in the pines he’d written and blue-penciled one hundred and eighty pages of double-spaced material but for several days he’d realized there was no way to wrap it up in two hundred pages; it was likely to run at least half again as long before he got it all said.

He wasn’t bored with it. But the steady work was getting to him. He was getting jaded; he had concentrated too intensely for too long without respite. It was like repeating a word so often that suddenly it lost its meaning. He’s lost his grasp of the thing. It wasn’t irretrievable but he needed a day away from it.

He thought of packing and moving out: going to Mexico or Africa and getting back to work in new surroundings. It was a little unnerving to spend too long in one place. But in this stage it was best to stay inside the United States because it kept him out of Cutter’s technical jurisdiction. It didn’t mean Cutter wasn’t hunting but it meant Cutter couldn’t mobilize much manpower. They’d have to use the FBI. The Bureau had its talents—like establishing Communist cells so that its agents would have something to report on—but the FBI wasn’t likely to track him down unless he stood in Constitution Avenue waving a Soviet flag.… And if he stayed in the States he might as well stay here because it would be hard to find a better place.

But he’d need certain things when he began his run and they weren’t obtainable in the backwoods. The nearest cities were Atlanta and Birmingham and he decided on Birmingham because he knew its workings.

It was September seventeenth, a Tuesday. The drive took nearly seven hours. At two in the afternoon he saw the industrial smudge on the sky and at half-past three he was parking the car against the curb on a hill as steep as anything in San Francisco. He spent the next hour buying articles of clothing, luggage, cosmetics, automobile spray-paint, a leather-worker’s sewing awl and a few other items. The city was acrid with coal fumes from the great steel furnaces. Its faces were predominantly black.

He bought a ream of bond paper, carbons, erasers, masking tape, a thick stack of nine-by-twelve manila envelopes; as with all his purchases he paid cash and asked for a receipt because if you did that it meant you had a legitimate business reason for buying things.

He had a meal in a mediocre restaurant and there was still time to kill; he walked back to the car and stored his purchases in the trunk and then he sat through the first hour of The Outfit in a theater redolent of stale buttered popcorn and unwashed feet. When the movie’s climax began to build so that nobody was likely to leave his seat Kendig went into the men’s room and made his few simple cosmetic preparations, darkening his hair with a mascara rinse and poking a few wads of cotton up into his cheeks to fatten his face. Ordinarily he wore his hair parted on the left and combed across his forehead; now he combed it straight back without a part. Then he knotted the tie he’d bought an hour ago and would throw away after this one use; he turned his reversible sports jacket inside out to show the plaid side which clashed stridently with the necktie and then he stood at the urinal until people started coming out of the movie house; he blended into the crowd and went up the street.

He could see the building from several blocks short of it—a fifteen-story office tower and the neon sign was still there, Topknot Club; there wasn’t much chance it had changed hands in seven years, it was too profitable a front. He went through the heavy glass doors into the lobby and the doorman gave him an incurious glance before he got into the express elevator behind an expensively dressed couple who talked excitedly, all the way to the top in accents so relentlessly thick he lost one word in four.

The elevator gave out into a wide foyer with judiciously spaced spots of colored indirect lighting. The carpet was as deep and silent as spring grass. The man at the desk was clean and well dressed but the muscles and the attitudes were there: not exactly a gorilla but not far from it in function.

Kendig waited for the Southern couple to show their membership cards and go through the door beyond the desk and then he said, “I’m from out of town. A friend brought me up here once a few years ago.”

“You can buy a one-night membership. Cost you three dollars.”

Alabama had local-option drinking laws and you had to be a member of the club to drink here but all it did in effect was give every bar the right to skim a cover charge off every customer. Kendig paid the three dollars and the man in the dinner jacket pressed an ultraviolet stamp against the back of his hand and waved him through.

A trio of haggard musicians played sedate cocktail music on a small bandstand bathed in whorehouse-red illumination. Businessmen sat at tables by twos and threes and there was a discreet sprinkling of high-class B-girl doxies but there was no bar as such. The dimension of the half-drawn curtains on either side of the orchestra indicated that the stage could be opened out for floor shows. Three sides of the room were paneled in pane glass for floor shows. Three sides of the room were paneled in pane glass with a southward view of the city’s lamplit mountainsides. Beyond the doors on the fourth wall would be the bar, the kitchen, the managerial offices and a few smaller rooms for banquets and proms and lead-outs. Southerners were early diners and it was only nine o’clock but few of the patrons were eating; it was a place for convivial drinking more than dining out. And for a few people, the insiders who ran the faster tracks, it was something else entirely: a place where if you knew the right names and had the right amount of money you could buy anything at all.