Evan Hunter: Nobody Knew They Were There

It is all very simple.

All I have to do is do it.

There is a leather carrying handle on the box, but Weglowski does not think (and again here, I detect a dry sense of humor) I should walk through the hotel lobby carrying a blasting machine on a strap. He puts it into a brown paper bag instead. I am carrying the future of the nation in a brown paper bag.

Outside the hotel, Weglowski asks, “When I get my money?”

“I have nothing to do with the money arrangements,” I answer.

“I want before the train.”

“Of course.”

“You tell them. Tell them Weglowski wants his money early tomorrow, before the train. Otherwise, maybe no explosion.”

“What does that mean?”

“You tell them,” he says.

It is eleven-thirty when the taxi drops me off at Hester’s house.

I have deposited the blasting machine in my room, and quickly changed into my brown suit, entering and leaving the hotel through the side entrance as I did earlier tonight when meeting Weglowski. The brown suit is hardly inspired. But it is the only one I have with me, and Epstein possesses one as well, and he is at this moment wearing it under his costume and waiting for me in Hester’s garage (I hope). The costume, such as it is, still bothers me. A man has a distinctive gait, a personal way of holding himself, clearly recognizable unless he is disguised from head to toe. A gorilla suit would have been perfect, a shambling dancing bear, something of the sort, but try to find such stuff in a small university town. We have done the best we might have under the circumstances, but our solution still troubles me, still seems as makeshift as our entire endeavor (which may be significant, who knows?).

I hear party noises as I walk around to the side of the house, music, laughter, the same party noises that are probably being heard all over America on this Friday night following Halloween, but here they are sham, here they have been created only for cover, an assassin’s alibi. I barely avoid discovery by a costumed couple necking in the shadows near the chimney wall on the western end of the house. The garage door is open. There is no light. I enter, and wonder if I dare whisper Epstein’s name.

A hand touches my shoulder.

I come close to screaming.

He materializes in the darkness before me. We stand toe to toe, neither of us speaking. His eyes are already accustomed to the gloom, but it is some time before mine adjust and before I can see him however dimly. He is, to be truthful, quite unrecognizable. He is wearing over the brown suit a raccoon coat borrowed from one of the medical students in Sara’s building. Around his throat, he has wrapped the long blue-and-white striped muffler Hester wore on her unannounced visit to my hotel room Monday night. He is also wearing blue mittens, and a porkpie hat, and he is carrying in his left hand a W.M.U. pennant on a stick. A button pinned to the collar of the raccoon coat reads “Class of ’29,” and the rubber mask he has pulled over his head is apple-cheeked and bulbous-nosed, grinning, the face of an old fart back for the big game with the school’s traditional enemy. We shopped three five-and-dimes before finding that mask. I wonder now if my mustache will cause me to suffocate inside it I also wonder whether anyone at the party will notice that the old grad’s shoes have miraculously changed from the brown Oxfords Epstein is wearing to the brown loafers I am wearing.

“What’s your shoe size?” I whisper.

“What?”

“Your shoe. The size.”

“8½ B. Why?”

“Forget it,” I whisper.

Epstein begins taking clothes off, and I begin putting them on. “ Time did not mention the exact length of the train,” he whispers. “But it did say there would be a locomotive and four cars.”

“Uh-huh.” I have already put on the raccoon coat, and am now wrapping Hester’s muffler around my throat It smells faintly of Muguet du Bois.

“It’s my educated guess,” Epstein whispers, “that if you detonated your blast when the second car is in the middle of the bridge, you’ll get the whole train with plenty of yardage to spare. Do you agree?”

“Yes, I guess so.” I put on the mittens. They are sticky and hot.

“Did you wire the bridge?”

“Yes.”

He hands me the rubber mask, and I pull it on over my head. It is even stickier and hotter than the mittens, and it reeks of Epstein’s aftershave lotion.

“Good luck,” he whispers. “Sara’s waiting for you.”

“Did you talk to anyone?” I ask.

“What?”

“Your voice, your voice.”

“I slurred my words. Like a drunk. Returning graduates usually…

“Yes, I understand.”

“Good luck,” he says again.

I move out of the garage and walk swiftly to the back of the house. The sounds of the party are closer now. I open the kitchen door. Hester’s black housekeeper (Mrs. Hollis, I presume) looks at me and says nothing. I take a deep breath and walk through the kitchen and into the living room.

It is fifteen minutes to midnight.

They are all masked, and I do not know who they are. There is music floating from a phonograph and they flit past me in glittering costumes and I have no clues to their separate hidden identities as they go by.

A tall skeleton, white bones against black cloth, grinning skull mask and black eyes burning in hole sockets bends over me as I mix myself a drink, and says, “Who are you, mister?” and I say, “Guess,” and he dances away, showing me his back and the gaps where the snappers on his costume are imperfectly fastened. There is a woman, I think she is a woman, a matriarch in long peach gown and wide-brimmed hat, parasol slung over her arm, chalk-white face and brilliantly rouged lips. She stalks me relentlessly about the room as I wander from group to group hoping to recognize, and at last her dowager’s limping gait brings her to my side and she leans into my ear and whispers, “Did it go well?” and I answer, Yes, and move away waving my W.M.U. pennant

Sara is Mata Hari, I catch glimpses of her as she wanders through the crowd, the only face I recognize, and that only barely. She wears a black silk dress cut low in the front, black-dyed ostrich feathers at the neckline and the hem. She has rented a black wig, bangs on the forehead, sleek and straight in the back where it falls away to the nape of her neck, long black false eyelashes, heavy blue eye shadow, dark lipstick, a black beauty spot at the corner of her mouth, a cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. She looks dark and mysterious and brooding and secretive, and she is drinking far too much and moving from one masked man to another, engaging each in conversation, flirting outrageously, seemingly unaware of my presence.

He appears at my side suddenly, the Lone Ranger in white hat and black mask, silver bullets in a cartridge belt, six-guns holstered. The Indian beside him, wearing feathers and war paint, fringed buckskin jacket and pants, leather mocassins, beaded belt hung with dagger and tomahawk, whispers, “Can you notice I’m not wearing a bra?” and both merge with the crowd. Someone murmurs, “Who was that masked man, Minnie?” and on the following crest of laughter, the Hunchback of Notre Dame crouches toward me, fixes me with a baleful cataracted glare, harelip pulled back over stained, crooked teeth, and cackles, “Five minutes to midnight, almost time.” A goblin, a gnome, the seeming issue of Quasimodo himself, materializes and babbles in a high excited voice, “Happy Halloween, happy Halloween!” I turn from him swiftly to find someone I recognize at last, Jean Trench, wetting her painted lips with a pink pointed tongue, wearing a black lace chemise, abundant white breasts bulging over its restraining top, black garters biting into her thighs, black net stockings, black patent leather high-heeled shoes.