Thinner(54)

'About the two hundred, maybe I was wrong- I'

'No - you were right,' Billy said. He had cashed three hundred dollars' worth of traveler's checks on his way over here, thinking it might be necessary to grease the skids a little - but it had never occurred to him that he might have to grease them for such a reason as this. He took out his wallet, removed four fifties, and tossed them onto Biff's desk beside the dog turds. 'You'll keep your mouth shut when Penschley calls you?'

'Oh, yes, sir!' Biff took the money and put it into the drawer with the cigarettes. 'You know it!'

'I hope I do,' Billy said. 'Now, tell me about the Gypsies.'

It was short and easy to follow; the only really complicated part had been the preliminaries. The Gypsies had arrived in Bangor on June 10. Samuel Lemke, the young juggler, and a man who answered the description of Richard Crosskill had come to Biff's office. After a call to Mr Parsons and one to the Bangor chief of police, Richard Crosskill had signed a standard short-term renewable lease form - the short term in this case was specified to be twenty-four hours. Crosskill signed as secretary of the Taduz Corporation while young Lemke stood by the door of Biffs office with his muscular arms crossed.

'And just how much silver did they cross your palm with?' Billy asked.

Biff raised his eyebrows. 'Beg your pardon?'

'You got two hundred from me, probably a hundred from my concerned wife and friends via the Barton op who visited you - I just wondered how much the Gypsies coughed up. You've done pretty well out of this any way you cut it, haven't you, Biff?'

Biff said nothing for a moment. Then, without answering Billy's question, he finished his story.

Crosskill had come back on the two following days to resign the lease agreement. On the thirteenth he arrived again, but by then Biff had had a call from the chief of police and from Parsons. The complaints from the local citizenry had begun. The chief thought it was time for the Gypsies to move on. Parsons thought the same, but he would be willing to let them stay another day or so if they wanted to up the ante a bit - say, from thirty bucks a night to fifty.

Crosskill listened to this and shook his head. He left without speaking. On a whim, Biff had driven out to the burned-out shell of the Bargain Barn that noon. He was in time to see the Gypsy caravan pulling out.

'They headed for the Chamberlain Bridge,' he said, 'and that's all I know. Why don't you get out of here now, Bill? To be honest, you look like an advertisement for a vacation in Biafra. Looking at you sort of gives me the creeps.'

Billy was still holding the cigarette, although he hadn't taken a puff since the first drag. Now he leaned forward butted it on the bronze dog turds. It fell smoldering to Biffs desk. 'To be honest,' he said to Biff, 'I feel exactly the same way about you.'

The rage was back on him. He walked quickly out of Biff Quigley's office before it could move him in the wrong direction or make his hands speak in some terrible language they seemed to know.

It was the twenty-fourth of June. The Gypsies had left Bangor via the Chamberlain Bridge on the thirteenth. Now he was only eleven days behind. Closer ... closer, - but still too far.

He discovered that Route 15, which began on the Brewer side of the bridge, was known as the Bar Harbor Road. It looked as if he might be going there after all. But along the way he would speak to no more realtors and stay at no more first-class motels. If the Barton people were still ahead of him, Kirk might well have put more people on the lookout for him.

The Gypsies had driven the forty-four miles to Ellsworth on the thirteenth, and had been granted a permit to camp on the fairgrounds for three days. Then they had crossed the Penobscot River to Bucksport, where they had stayed another three days before moving on toward the coast again.

Billy discovered all of this on the twenty-fifth; the Gypsies had left Bucksport late on the afternoon of June 19.

Now he was only a week behind them.

Bar Harbor was as crazily booming as the waitress had told him it would be, and Billy thought she had also at least suggested some of the resort town's essential wrongness. The main drag ... until after Labor Day, it's a street carnival. Most of these towns are like that, but Bar Harbor is like, top end, you know? ... I used to go up there sometimes in July or August and hang out, but not anymore. I'm too old for that now.

Me too, Billy thought, sitting on a park bench in cotton pants, a T-shirt which read BANGOR'S GOT SOUL, and a sport coat that hung straight down from the bony rack of his shoulders. He was eating an ice-cream cone and drawing too many glances.

He was tired - he was alarmed to find that he was always tired now, unless he was in the grip of one of his rages. When he parked the car and got out this morning to begin flashing the pictures, he had experienced a moment of nightmarish deja vu as his pants began to slide down his hips - excusez-moi, he thought, as they slid down my non-hips. The pants were corduroys he had bought in the Rockland army-navy store. They had a twenty-eight-inch waist. The clerk had told him (a little nervously) that he was going to run into trouble buying off-the-rack pants pretty soon, because he was almost into the boy waist sizes now. His leg size, however, was still thirty-two, and there just weren't that many thirteen-year-olds who stood six feet, two inches tall.

Now he sat eating a pistachio ice-cream cone, waiting for some of his strength to come back and trying to decide what was so distressing about this beautiful little town where you couldn't park your cark and where you could barely walk on the sidewalks.