“Do they think it’s just one vigilante or a bunch of them?”

“They haven’t got any idea.”

“Personally I’d guess it was just one guy,” Paul said. “He’s pretty clever, obviously. He must be clever enough to use two or three different guns just to confuse the police.”

“Beats me,” she said. “And it beats Vic Mastro too, I’m afraid. He wants to nail the vigilante—he knows how much it would do for his career. But he doesn’t want it to happen too quickly. Vic wants to milk it for every ounce of publicity he can get before he finally marches up the City Hall steps with the vigilante in handcuffs.”

“Do you think that will happen?”

“Eventually it’s bound to. Sooner or later the vigilante will make a mistake. He may have made one already—the night he tangled with that nut with the machete. He may have been cut pretty badly. They’re canvassing all the hospitals and private doctors within a hundred-mile radius. They may find him. If this one doesn’t turn up any leads, the next one will. The vigilante has one fatal disadvantage. He only needs to make one mistake. That’s all, just one, and he’s finished. The police can make all the mistakes in the world. They only need to be right once.”

“You make it sound cut and dried. Inevitable.”

“It is, really. It’s only a question of time.”

“What if the vigilante just decided to retire or move on to some other town?”

“Who knows,” she said. “The interesting question to me is, what happens if they do catch him?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s quite a hero to a lot of people out there. What happens if we have to put him on trial?”

“I see what you mean.”

“We could have demonstrations—even riots. Nothing’s unheard of in this town. A vigilante trial in Chicago could turn into an incredible political football.”

“I wonder how it would turn out,” Paul said. “More coffee?”

27

THURSDAY MORNING he dropped Irene at her office and drove south into the slums. He spent the day prowling the inferior regions of the city but the extreme clear cold was keeping people off the streets and at half past two he went back toward the center of the city to carry out the next step in his plan.

He’d singled out half a dozen ads from the classified real-estate page and he looked at four of the offices until he found one that suited his purpose. It was on a backwater fringe of the Loop near the intersection of Rush and Grand Avenue. There were a parking garage, several woebegone shops, a bar, a porno-poster shop, and on one corner a vacant lot and beyond it a building undergoing demolition.

The ad led him to a three-story brick building old enough to be grimed with soot. A narrow passage between two storefronts led him up a flight of steps. The superintendent had a cubbyhole on the landing; he was a bald man with a black monk’s fringe above his ears, in need of a shave and a beer-free diet; he led Paul up another flight to the top floor.

The office was a single room. Its two filthy windows looked out upon Grand Avenue. It was offered as a furnished office: that meant it had a desk that looked as if it had been bought surplus from the army, a flimsy swivel-chair on casters with frayed upholstery, a dented filing cabinet, a gooseneck lamp on the desk, the threadbare remnants of a rug; the lamp and the ceiling fixture had no bulbs in them but someone had left half a roll of toilet paper on top of the filing cabinet. There was a coat closet—two bent wire hangers—and a legend on the frosted glass pane in the door had been badly scraped off, leaving enough paint behind to see that a previous occupant had been a novelty company. There was a black phone on the desk but the superintendent told Paul it would need connecting. The rent was eighty dollars.

Paul signed a six-month lease in the name of his deceased brother-in-law. He gave the superintendent one hundred and sixty dollars in cash for security and the first month’s rent. At no time did Paul remove his gloves. He told the superintendent he ran a small mail-order business in personalized greeting cards; the superintendent showed no curiosity. He gave Paul keys to the outside door, the office door and the bathroom down the hall.

Paul said he’d had a fire in his previous building. He inquired about fire exits. The superintendent showed him the back stairs: fire stairs that went down to a steel door on the ground floor at the rear of the building. It gave out onto an alley cluttered with trash cans. You could open the door from inside without a key but you couldn’t enter from outside without one; the outside had no handle and there were steel buffer plates grooved into the doorframe to prevent a burglar from slipping the lock with plastic or wire.

He spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the remainder of his cover. He ordered cheap printed stationery and a few rubber stamps, mailing envelopes, a postage meter, a second-hand typewriter, a packet of stick-on address labels, a small bag filled with office miscellany: paper clips and ballpoint pens, cellotape, manila file folders. Then he went up State Street to a card shop and bought twenty dollars’ worth of assorted greeting cards.

He stopped at a public booth and called the telephone company; gave the name and previous address and phone number of his brother-in-law in New Jersey and asked the company to connect the telephone in his new office. The appointment was made for Monday morning.

Neuser Studios was born. At half past four he returned to the flyspecked office and distributed his office supplies, wearing rubber kitchen gloves he’d bought in a variety store on his way back from State Street. He slipped one greeting card into each manila folder and stacked them all in the filing cabinet. He set up the old typewriter on the desk and screwed light bulbs into the fixtures.

He’d spent nearly three hundred dollars including the rent and security. It was for the single purpose of establishing a hiding place for the guns.

He could no longer afford to have the guns in his apartment, nor even in his car when he left it unattended. When he began work at Childress his apartment and car would be empty all day long: suspicion might lead Mastro’s troops in his direction and he could afford to take no chances; his apartment and car might be searched.

At the other end of the investigation it was possible they’d canvass arms dealers; there might be ten thousand .38 Centennials in the Chicago area but there was the remote possibility they’d question Truett in the Wisconsin gun shop and find out that Robert Neuser had bought the two pistols there. They’d start hunting for Neuser then. They’d find him listed in an office on Grand Avenue and they’d search the office, and they’d find the guns.

But they wouldn’t connect Neuser with Paul. He must never leave a single fingerprint in the office or indeed anywhere in the building.

Or on the guns.

He cleaned both of them, oiled them and wiped them down. He wiped the cleaning kit as well; then put kit and both guns in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It had no lock and there was always the chance a burglar would break into the place and steal the guns but if that happened it would do Paul no real harm; it might even provide a red herring for the police to chase, if the burglar used the stolen guns.

In any case he could always buy another gun.

When he returned to the street it was dark and the rush-hour traffic was diminishing. He got his car out of the parking garage and turned north toward Irene’s apartment.

28

¶ CHICAGO, JAN. 3RD—A twelve-year-old boy shot and wounded his sixth-grade teacher yesterday when she scolded him for classroom misbehavior, Chicago police reported.