Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (51 page)

“What did you… Didn’t you call yesterday?” An expression of comprehension began to take form on Dickison’s face. “Yes… I tried to tell you yesterday, I don’t know Halloway, and I couldn’t be of any help to you at all. And as it happens you catch me at a bad moment.”

“Well, I appreciate your arranging to meet with me now,” he said, looking at his watch. “I just have a few questions I have to get through that shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. How long have you known Mr. Halloway?”

“That’s right. I remember. You did say you’d be here this morning,” said Dickison with annoyance. “But I don’t know him. I haven’t ever known him. Or met him. Whatever the expression is.”

“On the telephone yesterday you indicated that you had met him socially—”

“I said I might have met him. I thought I recognized the name, possibly. But that’s absolutely all. I have no recollection of him. I’m not even sure whether I actually did meet him on that occasion. I mean whether there was such an occasion.”

“Well, I’d like to ask a few questions about that occasion and any time more recently when you might have contacted or attempted to contact Mr. Halloway.”

“I have never contacted or attempted to contact Halloway, whoever he is, whether or not I ever met him. Look, I’m going to get myself some coffee.” Then as a grudging afterthought: “You had coffee yet?”

Holding the door for Butler to follow, Dickison retreated inside.

“No, thank you. To the best of your recollection, how long ago was your last meeting with Halloway?”

The door shut behind them and I could no longer hear what they were saying. I had, really, no interest in what they said. I watched through the window as they appeared in the kitchen and then withdrew into another room. I waited nearly an hour before the two of them reappeared in the doorway, neither of them looking particularly pleased. Butler’s farewell took the form of a statement that he would probably be getting back to Dickison with a few more questions. Dickison opened his mouth as if to protest and then thought better of it.

Butler trudged out onto the sidewalk and turned east, with me following a few steps behind. One of the surprisingly small number of things an invisible person can do better than other people is to follow someone unobserved through empty streets. It rarely comes up in daily life, but on this particular occasion it was quite useful. He turned south on Central Park West, and after we had walked another block, I was confident that he had not come with a car. It was still possible that he would climb onto a bus, and if he did, I would have a difficult decision to make. I never take buses. There is no safe place in them to retreat to. You can slip into an empty one and have it suddenly fill up at one stop — every scat, every foot of standing room. Furthermore, to get out you have to push open the rear doors. And even if you try to slip out behind someone else, you have to hold them open unnaturally. Still, on this occasion I might have risked it.

At Seventy-second Street Butler descended into the subway, and after a long wait on the platform, we boarded the AA train together. I like the West Side
IND
lines: they are the least crowded in the city. Butler got off at Chambers Street, and I almost lost him there in the station, because people lined up to get out through the exit turnstiles, and, unlike Butler, I could not establish a place in the line. By the time I got up to the street he was nowhere to be seen. Desperate, I climbed up onto the hood of a car, generating a metallic thundering noise and causing the people around me to turn and stare in bewilderment at the dented car body. I spotted Butler a block away, walking north, and charged after him, weaving recklessly through the pedestrians.

Several blocks further on he entered a large, institutional building which could have been built only by a government. The spirit plummets at the sight of these places. I followed right behind him through the lobby, counting on his bulk to shield me from a collision with someone else. He turned and scanned a bank of elevators for floors 2 to 17, locating the car about to depart. It was half full of people: it was inconceivable that I should risk following him in, but I stepped to one side of the door and craned my head in behind him as he entered, so that I could watch him push the button for his floor. Seven.

I turned and ran. It took me a full minute to find a stairway and forever to charge up the six flights. As I paused momentarily behind the metal fire door at the seventh floor to listen for the sound of anyone on the other side, I realized that I was panting audibly. I pushed the door open just far enough to slip through and found myself in a narrow hall by the elevators, facing a doorway in front of which a uniformed guard sat. Struggling to hold down my convulsive breathing, I tiptoed past him into a vast warren of little cubicles and offices. The corridors and open areas were crammed with filing cabinets and metal desks at which women were typing and sorting papers and talking to each other. There was no sign of Butler. I began working my way through the maze of desks, peering into the little cells wherever I could and inspecting the numbers on the office doors and the occasional black plastic name plates next to the door frames.

It was unspeakably dreary, the metal furniture and partitions and opaque glass jumbled together under long white fluorescent lights without any human or aesthetic organization. The noise of the people and the typewriters clattered against the bare walls and ceilings.

After wandering this labyrinth for a quarter of an hour I finally found Butler sitting in a windowless cubicle, jabbing steadily at an old mechanical typewriter. His door was open, but the cubicle was so small that I was unwilling to go in. I leaned in far enough to make out the name Dickison at the top of the page he was typing and then retreated outside to wait.

It took him an hour on the typewriter and then another ten minutes reading it over and penciling corrections. He brought out his work and handed it to an extraordinarily fat woman with greasy hair and dirty fingernails who was reading a book with a picture of a couple in fanciful velvet clothing embracing in front of a castle. She put down her book, fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and to my amazement began typing faster than I had ever seen anyone type. Almost by the time Butler was settled at his desk again, she had finished and was proofreading her work, apparently taking in an entire page at a glance. Remarkable. Almost anyone would refuse out of hand to hire this woman, and yet she was evidently splendid. I found myself wondering whether she had made any errors. She, in any case, seemed satisfied. She brought in the report and laid it on Butler’s desk. He turned directly to the last page and signed it.

“With this we’re supposed to send two copies up to Special Liaison in fourteen-oh-seven — take the case number from the first page — and don’t file anything down here.”

That was all I needed. I left them and walked back out to the stairway to begin my hike up to the fourteenth floor. I did not race, but I did push along fairly briskly, since I wanted, if possible, to be there when the report arrived. As it turned out I was able to beat the internal mail system by twenty hours.

Room 1407 was actually two rooms, one of them a real office with windows and the other an outer office in which a secretary sat. At first I expected to see the report arrive at any moment and I waited standing by the secretary’s desk, until so much time had gone by that I began to think something had gone wrong. Perhaps the number 1407 had referred to something other than a room number. But I could see other correspondence on the secretary’s desk addressed to Special Liaison. Perhaps there had been a change in orders, and the report had been sent somewhere else. But I did not dare go back down to Butler’s office and risk missing the more likely arrival of the report here. I sat down on a wooden chair to wait it out. In the inner office I could see a man of about forty-five reading typewritten reports one after another. At four-thirty people began leaving the building. The secretary left at five, and a few minutes later the man came out of the office, locking it behind him. I gave up and went home.

I was back at seven forty-five in the morning, ready to wait all day if necessary. Everyone else returned to 1407 at exactly eight-thirty. A little after nine-thirty an old man in a grey jacket came through wheeling a large cart containing scores of small compartments stuffed with mail and paperwork. He pulled out a stack and dumped it onto the secretary’s desk. She sorted through it, opening most of the envelopes and stacking everything neatly. It was there: two copies. When she carried the stack in to the man in the inner office I was right behind her.

I stood by the window and watched him go through it all at his desk. He put my report to one side until he had finished with everything else and then read it carefully from beginning to end. He picked up the phone and tapped out a number.

“Hello, can I speak to Mr. Jenkins, please?”

I took a step forward so that I would be sure not to miss anything.

“Well, then, can I speak to Mr. Clellan?”

There was a pause and then a voice at the other end, which I could not make out.

“Hello, Bob? Jim O’Toole. I’ve got a stack of stuff here waiting for you… You know the guy who tried to get in touch with Halloway? … Dickison… Well, we sent a man over to talk to him, and he denies ever having tried to reach him. Says he might have met him years ago but isn’t even sure of that… I don’t know what the story is. Why don’t you take a look at the report, go over the transcript of the call, and see what you think. We can go back and push this guy a little harder if you think there’s any point… We’ve also got the primary school records that they thought no longer existed. They were in boxes in a basement… No, it doesn’t give us any names that we didn’t already have… Pretty much the same as the later school stuff: didn’t work very hard. He did get in a fight on the school bus in the fourth grade once, but that was about the most exciting thing I could find. Someday you’ll have to tell me why you’re interested in this guy. Whatever it is, I sure can’t see it… O.K. It’ll all be here at the mail room on the second floor for pickup any time… Sure. So long.”

He got up, taking one of the two copies of the report, and walked over to a file cabinet, from which he extracted two large manila envelopes. He took everything out to his secretary and handed it to her.

“Put all this into one package and address it to Global Devices — no address — and leave it with the mail room for pickup. And could you take it down yourself? Otherwise, it could take days to get it all the way to the second floor.”

I hurried back down the stairs to the second floor in time to see the secretary leave the package for Global Devices. Just inside the entrance of the mail room was a long, broad counter behind which three people were sorting envelopes and packages. I retreated to the end of the counter and waited. After three quarters of an hour, a Hispanic boy of eighteen with a strapped canvas bag slung over his shoulder stepped up to the counter.

“Pickup for Global Devices.”

A woman behind the counter turned and looked at him. “You from Global Devices? I need an ID.”

“I’m from Speedwell Messenger Service. Call in if you want.” He held out a slip of paper to the woman. I moved closer, hoping to be able to read an address, but it was only the address we were at scribbled on a piece of Speedwell stationery.

The woman handed him a clipboard and said, “Sign on the last line— your name, the date and time, and the addressee.” I watched as he wrote “Global Devices.” She went back and got the package for him.

While he took the elevator, I raced down the stairs to the lobby and waited for him. We walked together out to his bicycle. Nothing could be more hopeless for me than a bicycle. He unchained it from a no-parking sign and climbed on.

I had no clear idea of how it would help me or what I would do next, but seeing my entire plan coming suddenly apart, I reached out just as he shifted his second foot onto the pedal and pushed the bicycle onto its side. The rider, completely unprepared, hit the street hard. Before he had a chance to take stock of the situation, I jumped onto the spokes of the rear wheel, crushing them hopelessly out of shape. As the boy looked up uncertainly to see what had happened, I retreated a few steps. He twisted free and studied the damage to the bicycle, wheeling it carefully up onto the sidewalk. The rear tire jammed against the frame with each revolution.

Perhaps we would now be able to walk together to his destination. I hoped he was not allowed to take taxis.

He leaned the bike against the building and walked a bit unsteadily to a pay telephone, where he dialed a number. As he waited for an answer, he began swearing.

“Goddam fucking shit! Damn!” Then, “Hello, this is Angel… No, I’m still downtown. Somebody trashed my fucking bike while I was inside making my pickup… No, I didn’t leave it in the fucking street! … On the fucking sidewalk chained to a post. They just trashed it. Like everything in this fucking city. You look the other way, they fucking trash it, just like that. No reason, man… One wheel’s all bent out of shape. What you want me to do? … Global Devices, One thirty-five East Twenty-seventh Street. … Sure, I know how to walk. You want me to leave the bike here or what?”

I was on my way, full of triumph. I had tracked them down while they thought they were tracking me down. I was not altogether easy about walking in on them, but I had seized the initiative. I hoped I would think of something to do with it.

135
EAST
TWENTY-SEVENTH
STREET
WAS
AN
OLD
,
SLIGHTLY
SEEDY
TWELVE-story office building, built in the twenties or thirties. From the vast directory in the lobby I could see that it contained scores of small, marginal businesses of every sort: dentists, graphic designers, one-man accounting firms, and an uncountable number of “import-export” firms, whatever they may be. “Global Devices” fit in perfectly. The office number was listed as 723, which would mean a relatively easy climb for me.