Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Jerry Cappadocia."

"That’s it. If you know the story, why are you making me repeat it?"

"So I can decide whether to shoot you."

"Oh." He stared at the floor for a moment. "What if Harry told it two different ways?"

"You can take it up with him in the afterlife," she said. "So what happened?"

"He let Cappadocia into the game. Harry never knew if what he had in mind was to take over the game or cheat the rich suckers or if he just wanted to play poker with people who had the kind of money he had but didn’t know enough about him to let him win. About the third week, two guys kick in the door and shoot Cappadocia. Whether they were just trying to do a holdup and recognized him, or he resisted, or if they were after him to begin with, nobody knows. But the minute the door hits the floor, the guy who organized the game is in trouble. The rich guys know he put a mobster in their game. The friends of Jerry Cappadocia think he sold their buddy. The police want to talk to him. The people who shot Cappadocia also have to be interested, because the others are, and even if he didn’t see anything, if the inducements were right, he might make a plausible guess. Jerry Cappadocia’s father is semi-retired, but the people who know him say he could make Harry want very much to come up with a name. So suddenly Harry has enemies."

"What did you do for Harry?"

"I asked some more questions. He didn’t think the three men arrested with him were trying to kill him for the Cappadocia thing, because they weren’t armed. He admitted he had also given them fresh personal reasons to hit him. He had been picking up traveling money by doing card tricks without saying ’Abracadabra.’ I thought about it for a while. It seemed to me that what he had been doing wasn’t nice, but it wasn’t a capital offense, so I held the others overnight, put down a name for Harry that he was too scared to make up for himself, and let him go."

"Where did he go then?"

"I don’t know. Maybe here. I didn’t hear from him again until a few days ago."

If this one was a liar, he was good at it. He had the facts, or some of them, right, and they were the ones he could be expected to know. But he was also telling her something she wanted to hear. She wanted to believe that Harry was still all right, that someone had seen him alive a few days ago. "Where did you run into him after all that time?"

"I didn’t. He called me."

"Why?"

"He knew I was in trouble. He told me that if I needed to disappear, there was a door out of the world. He told me that this was where it was."

"And you believed him?"

Felker looked at her, his eyes unblinking but showing puzzlement. "He had no reason to lie to me."

"You didn’t know him very well, and what you knew wasn’t very good. Why trust him?"

Felker seemed to look back on it with the kind of incredulity that people feel when they try to figure out the reasons for the decisions they have made. "Maybe it was the story. It was so ... odd. He said that years ago he had met an old guy on a cruise ship. Gambling is legal on the sea. They have pools on things and slot machines, and on some of them even a couple of tables. Cruises are expensive, so the long ones have mostly people with money."

So he knows that too, she thought. Was there any way to know that besides having Harry tell him? She listened for a mistake.

"So Harry bought a ticket and posed as an amateur who was bored with slot machines and went to find more amateurs. Only there’s an old guy in the game that Harry just can’t beat. No matter how long he waited, all his practice never swung the odds over to his side. The old guy is a South American industrialist. From Venezuela or someplace. One night they’re playing in the old man’s suite and it comes down to where everybody else goes back to his own cabin broke except Harry. They’re playing one-on-one now, and Harry is still losing. Finally, Harry is in for the price of his return ticket, and they show their cards. Harry loses."

He was watching her now too, probably thinking he must be doing all right because she hadn’t shot him yet.

"The old man stands up to rake in the money, and he gets a funny look on his face. His eyes bulge out and he freezes like a statue and starts to topple over. Harry makes a grab for him and gets one hand on his arm, but the other one kind of brushes his face. The guy’s mustache comes off."

She listened, and she began to hear what, she had been listening for—not mistakes, but evidence. He was beginning to sound more and more like Harry as he told the story. The voice, the cadence of his speech were the same. He wasn’t exactly mimicking Harry, because it wasn’t conscious. But he had heard Harry tell this story.

"This is not enough to think about, but the man is having a heart attack. Now Harry’s got a decision to make. When the old guy fell across the table, what he landed on was, among other things, all of Harry’s money and a whole lot more. And he knows that unless they do things a lot differently in South America, a man with a false mustache is not called an industrialist. But Harry did the right thing. He got on the phone, called the doctor, and then bagged all the money and locked it in the little safe in the cabin. The man recovered. Before they took him off in a helicopter, he gave Harry two things—the forty thousand in cash that was in the safe and your address. You see, he knew what Harry would need most... had known from the beginning, because he was no more an amateur than Harry was."

As Jane listened to Felker’s story, the events in her memory rose up to fill in the empty spaces. She could almost feel the hot, humid air that night in late June at the Big Wind Reservation of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho in Wyoming It was the summer of her last year at college, and she had joined the Tecumseh Society, a student group formed on the theory that the Shawnee leader who traveled from tribe to tribe in the early 1800s to unite the Indians might not have been entirely misguided.

Jane’s assignment that summer was to travel with a Jicarilla Apache named Ilona Tazeh through the northern plains to establish voter-registration programs on the festival circuit: the Northern Cheyenne Fourth of July Powwow and the Crow Fair in Montana, the Oglala Nation Powwow and the Standing Rock Powwow in South Dakota. That night after the celebrations, she had lured a few young recruits into the air-conditioning of her tiny motel room. The theme of her pitch was that attempting to deal with the society at large only as Senecas or Commanches or Navajos was tantamount to suicide.

What she talked about were the abrogations of law and decency the state and federal governments had committed against the Iroquois in the preceding twenty years: confiscating all of the Complanter Reservation in Pennsylvania and much of the Allegany Reservation in New York for the Kinzua Dam; taking a large part of the Tuscarora Reservation for a reservoir; and Canada and the United States conspiring to slice off sections of the Mohawks’ St. Regis and Caughnawaga reservations to widen the St. Lawrence Seaway. She was already getting good at this speech, which she always delivered like a messenger from a distant front arriving breathless and weary to warn soldiers who were already fighting similar battles on their own doorsteps.

Ten minutes after they had left, while she was wondering whether she had inspired or bored them, she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to find four old men. At first she thought they had come to look for their sons or daughters, but they told her they were a delegation of elders from different nations. It seemed that earlier in the day, Ilona had tried to impress a tall, handsome Shoshone student with the group’s daring by casually mentioning that her friend Jane had the knack for hiding fugitives from injustice. The elders had come to commend Alfred Strongbear to her care.