Alexander headed up the stairs after them. He did not try to look back through the transom window to catch another glimpse of the furious Miss Lydgate.
2
If there was one thing Bennie Durban knew for sure, it was that it wasn’t possible to stay on the run forever. You could stay out of sight, unknown to the police, or even known to them but not exhibiting anything they could get a handle on; but you couldn’t take off on foot and just go without running into trouble sooner rather than later. It might be different if you had the resources to leave in a big way, but Bennie wasn’t sure it would be. If you had a car, it was registered somewhere. If you stole a car, it would be reported. If you bought a hot car that had all the right paper, you had to pay for it up front, and that kind of thing wasn’t cheap.
What occurred to him, almost right away, was airplanes. At least it occurred to him by the next morning, after he’d spent the night in one of those abandoned buildings where the junkies hung out and the bums didn’t usually go because they got rolled. But he wasn’t a bum. He wasn’t wasted on wine. He wasn’t half senile. He was as sharp as he had ever been because turning the corner onto his block to see enough police piled up in front of his door to stock a Lawrence Sanders movie was enough to make anyone sharp. Right then he had known that the most important thing he could do with himself for the next few hours was to disappear, and he had done it. Being in that abandoned house was like one of those old Twilight Zone episodes where there never was any explanation given for why things were completely weird. The junkies were so close to immobile, they might as well be dead. Then they would run out of what it was they were streaming on and jump up and start screaming. Bennie could never understand what they meant.
The first thing he did the next morning was to find one of those electronics stores that kept a hundred televisions all turned to the same station, so that he could watch the news. Almost the first thing he saw on those television sets was a picture of himself. It was the picture he had had taken for his high school yearbook, so that he was not only younger than he was now but different in every other way. He was even different from the way he had actually looked in high school. He rubbed the flat of his palm against the stubble that had grown out of his face overnight. Some of the fancier high schools on the Main Line let their seniors take yearbook photographs in the clothes they actually wore, but his high school had not been fancy. They had insisted on a jacket and tie, and when he hadn’t had one they had found a set for him, along with a worn but respectable white button-down shirt, as if he were about to be a junior salesman for a life insurance company. He found himself wondering, suddenly, if that was the kind of thing the people who had graduated from his high school had gone on to do. Some of them had gone to college. He remembered the little squealing parties they had given outside the Guidance Counselor’s Office when one of them had been accepted somewhere, and the long list of colleges they had decided to attend that had been appended to the program at the end of the year assembly.
It was, he thought now, just the kind of thing he hated. It wasn’t doing what everybody else did and doing it well that proved intelligence. It wasn’t making good grades on tests and better grades on report cards because you never did anything to get a teacher upset. Intelligence was a divine spark. He’d read that somewhere. It was a divine spark, and genius was a piece of the divine will; and the man who had one or the other was special, marked out, unlike the rest. There were people who thought Bennie Durban was stupid, but that was not the case. He wasn’t even book stupid. He had had no trouble deciphering Nietzsche, and he’d only been fifteen the first time he tried.
The trick, he decided, having gotten as much of the news as he was going to be able to get, was to find a way to be somebody else just long enough to get out of the city and out of the state. The very best thing would be a plane, but the more he looked into it the less likely it seemed to be. Ever since 9/11, it turned out, there was a lot more hassle about getting on and off a plane. Even to buy tickets, you had to have some form of ID, and to get onto the plane you had to have a picture ID. The only ID Bennie Durban had was his driver’s license, and he couldn’t use that. He could buy a new ID, but that was even more expensive than buying a clean hot car. Then there was the problem of what he looked like. He didn’t look like the man the police were looking for in connection with a bunch of body parts found in a basement. He did look like a wino and smelled like one, too. He hadn’t had a chance to take a shower. All his clothes were back at the house, which was still half occupied by police officers. He smelled of sweat and of the restaurant. His hair was so dirty, it left grease on his fingers when he ran his hand through it.