Hello, Charlie, Goodbye

One of the Ancient Japanese martial arts is called ninjitsu. Adepts in this discipline can run into a wood and disappear, make themselves invisible even to alert and careful men; they can hide under water for six hours, jump their own height from a standstill, climb 30-foot sheer walls. Michael Haynes' first wild thought, when the man in the green-brown suit materialized soundlessly beside him in the woods, really it seemed out of thin air, was of ninjitsu. But that was in the first second, or half-second; then he saw the man's face, and knew that he knew it; and then, with perhaps three seconds gone, he remembered the name: MacKinnon. Charles J. MacKinnon. A high school chemistry teacher.

"Well, Haynes," MacKinnon was saying, "you remember me, I guess?"

"I remember you," Haynes said. "You weren't wearing your soldier suit then."

"Ten years ago, I bought this," MacKinnon said. "French army jungle issue. Slacks and a jacket under it, as you might guess."

"You're disguised as a commando, then?" Haynes said. "Where's the party?"

"Ho, ho," MacKinnon said. "You're funnier than I remember you were seventeen years ago. The party is right here, you're the host and I'm the guest of honor. Or it could be the other way around. Suit yourself."

"I take it the thing on the end of your popgun is a silencer?" Haynes said. "The standard TV kind?"

"Right again," MacKinnon said. "It's a .22 popgun, but it's been fiddled with by some ambitious New York teenager, and it doesn't shoot .22s anymore, it shoots soft-nose .220 Swifts, the kind of thing people use for woodchuck hunting in country like this, if you get the picture? I mean, they miss now and then, and the bullet goes a long way?"

Haynes didn't answer. He couldn't think of anything that would be effective, or even sensible. A warm Sunday in Connecticut, 300 yards or so from his own house, in his own woods, clean and parklike. He looked into MacKinnon's face. He didn't think the man was crazy, but how could you tell?

"You have a hell of a long memory, MacKinnon," he said, "but I really don't see the point of the exercise."

"You don't?" MacKinnon said. "Golly, it seems simple enough to me: the girl was my wife, and you kept laying her. Even when I went around to see you, and told you to stop it, and you said you would, you didn't. You kept right on laying her."

"One more slice off a cut loaf, if you don't mind my saying so," Haynes said.

"Sure," MacKinnon said, "if you mean you weren't the only one. That's right. I knew five names. I suppose that you, being in the club, sort of, you might have known more. But I had five names. I don't know if you've been keeping in touch, but in the last couple of years three of those fellows have passed on, as the saying is."

"If you've got me down for number four," Haynes said, "I don't see the point of all the conversation."

"I just wanted to be sure you knew what it was about," MacKinnon said. "Not much sense in it if you didn't know, right?"

"Why'd you wait so long?" Haynes said. "Seventeen years, for Christ's sake?"

"I had to," MacKinnon said patiently. "Seventeen years ago, a lot of people knew I hated your guts. Somebody would have made the connection. Then, another thing, I saw the piece in Time. When I read that last paragraph, the thing where it said you could sell out right now for twenty-five million dollars, I thought it was about time for you to go. I've always had a theory about it, that it's a lot harder for rich people to die than poor people: they have so much more to live for, right?"

"I should have thought you'd have had another idea," Haynes said. "I'm surprised you didn't think of blackmail."

"I did," MacKinnon said. "Oh, I did, I have to admit that." He leaned against a big beech tree beside the path. He crossed his arms and the misshapen black automatic hung loosely in his hand. He was tall, and very thin, bony, probably, Haynes thought, under the loose camouflage suit, under the tweed jacket. He didn't look strong, he didn't seem particularly alert ... "If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, Haynes," MacKinnon said, "forget it. You're six-seven feet away from me and you'd never make it. And if anybody comes wandering through here, it just means you both go. But nobody's going to come wandering through. They haven't for the last three Sundays and they're not going to today. Anyway, as I was saying, I did think about it, about hitting you for money, but I decided it would be immoral, in the first place, and impractical, too."

"How, impractical?" Haynes said. "It's just ordinary blackmail."

"Blackmail," MacKinnon said, "works only when it's a permanent setup. If I have a nice flashlight picture of you ripping open a church poor box, as long as I keep the negative, you'll keep sending the money. But if I tell you I'm going to kill you if you don't give me five hundred thousand dollars, and you say OK, that's a deal, and I let you go, and say I'll meet you here next Sunday for the money, what will be here next Sunday will not be you and the money. What will be here will be the National Guard, every trooper in the state, and J. Edgar Hoover personally directing the operation from his big chair in the sky."

"I might give you my word," Haynes said.

"Your word isn't worth a quarter," MacKinnon said. "You're as immoral a son of a bitch as ever lived. You always were. And here you've put together twenty-five million bucks in fifteen years, all of it in Wall Street, that's no way to get a reputation for being a high moral type. I wouldn't believe you if you said today was Sunday."

"There are always ways to be sure," Haynes said. "There are ways of working out even very complicated deals."

"I'm sure," MacKinnon said. "And I'm sure you know them. I read the Time story. What'd they call you? 'Feral, rapacious Michael Simpson Haynes, terrifying because he has never known satiety ...' You should have sued them."

"I thought of it," Haynes said. "I've also just thought of a way to make a little deal with you. How much were you thinking of? Half a million?"

"I wasn't thinking about any money," MacKinnon said. "You're trying to turn me into a blackmailer. You can stuff that idea, and the money, too."

"I'm not trying to make you a blackmailer," Haynes said. "I'm trying to keep you from being a murderer."

"Murder doesn't enter into it," MacKinnon said. "I'm not going to murder you, I'm going to kill you, execute you. There's a difference. I'm not doing it in hot blood, or passion, or even anger. I just decided, seventeen years ago, to kill you, and now I'm going to do it."

"If it weren't murder," Haynes said, "you could do it in public, instead of in the woods, with a silenced gun, wearing a Boy Scout camouflage suit."

"All right," MacKinnon said, "in the eyes of the world, and legally and all that, I'm going to murder you. But the world and the law and so on and so forth, that doesn't matter, because I'm going to get away clean, all that matters is you and me, and we know damned well that I'm not murdering you, I'm killing you because you, personally and with malice aforethought, had carnal knowledge of my wife. That's the legal phrase, isn't it? Carnal knowledge. And as for doing it in public, you son of a bitch, if I had you in Texas I could do it in public. Just happens we're in Connecticut, a chance of geography, that's all."

"Very immoral," Haynes said. "Much worse than blackmail. And besides, blackmail could take the monkey off your back."

"What do you mean?"

"You're obsessed, hooked," Haynes said. "Seventeen years thinking about one thing, that's the monkey on your back. You're sick with it. You're broke, too. Don't ask me how I know, and don't argue about it: it figures. You've got to be broke. You don't make any money spending seventeen years thinking about killing people. If you weren't broke you wouldn't be wandering around in the woods playing God. Rich is better, you know. Ask me: I've had it both ways."

"I know you better than to ask you anything," MacKinnon said.

"Think about it," Haynes said. "Take a figure out of the hat. Take half a million. I doubt I'd even miss it. But it would be a very big thing in your life. You could burn your soldier suit. You could give the gun back to the kid in New York. In forty-eight hours you could be on the Costa Brava. Anyone holding five hundred thousand dollars in Spain has got to be real rich in five years. You couldn't help yourself."

"Half a million is real rich," MacKinnon said.

"There's that, too," Haynes said.

"That's right," MacKinnon said. "And the point is, you've got the half million and I haven't. So I think I'll shoot you now, before you talk me out of it. If I don't, I've wasted seventeen years."

"No, you haven't," Haynes said. "You killed those other three jokers, whoever they were, you said. You've had that much satisfaction. Look, you don't have to kill everybody who's ever offended you. My God, if I tried to kill everybody who's bugged me ... hell, I wouldn't know where to start."

"I knew," MacKinnon said.

"All right, you knew where to start," Haynes said. "And if you're smart, you'll know where to finish. Here, with half a million dollars."

"A lousy blackmailer," MacKinnon said.

"Your brain must have dried up in the last seventeen years," Haynes said. "You weren't that dumb when you came to see me that other time. What's happened to you? This stupid hate you've been carrying around must have burned you out. You can't see the moral difference between taking half a million dollars and taking my life."

"I can see the difference, all right," MacKinnon said. "The half million you don't mind losing, you couldn't care less, but your life, that you want to keep. So taking your half million wouldn't be any punishment at all, and my idea is punishment. That's the whole idea."

"No," Haynes said. "The whole idea you've had all these years is revenge. There's a big difference."

"There's no difference to me."

"The whole trouble with you," Haynes said, "is that you're not selfish enough."

"How do you figure that?"

"You have this idea of yourself as an avenging deity of some kind," Haynes said. "You tell yourself you're avenging one offense, mine, against one person, you, but actually you see yourself as some kind of avenging deity, something from outer space, roaming the world righting wrong and punishing evildoers. You're a crusader, you see. Like all crusaders you'll die unhappy, and broke. You're a Don Quixote kind of joker--God knows you're thin enough to be Don Quixote himself, I don't think you've been eating very well the last few years--but as I was saying, you're on this idealistic kick, going around avenging injustice, my God, you have to admit it's damned silly to be so steamed up, seventeen years later, because your ex-wife took a few lovers. When did you divorce her, anyway?"

"A year later," MacKinnon said.

"So, sixteen years after you divorced this girl, you're still going around shooting guys who accepted her kind invitation to a roll in the hay. What are you doing, protecting people against her? Is she still alive, even?"

"I guess she is," MacKinnon said. "I'd have heard. But, goddamn it, I'm not protecting anybody against anybody or anything, I'm just---"

"You ought to let me finish," Haynes said. "Whatever you're doing, you're being driven by an unselfish motivation, and that's silly. It's not even morally right. One of the wisest men I know has always argued that selfishness brings the most happiness, not only to oneself, but to the people around one, and he makes a hell of a case for it. Take yourself. Don't try to tell me that killing those other three characters has made you happy. You're not happy. You're miserable. You're down, depressed, beat. Killing me isn't going to make you feel any better. Probably make you feel worse. Supposing, on the other hand, you were suddenly rich. Believe me when I tell you, you'd feel great. When people say that money doesn't bring happiness, and you ask them to point out an example, what do they come up with? They come up with some bum who's third-generation rich, full of guilt feelings because he doesn't like to think how grandpa made the money in the slave trade or something; he's probably a drunk and he's been married twenty-two times. Of course he's miserable. You notice they never point to somebody who was broke (concluded on page 72)Hello, Charlie(continued from page 64) until he was forty and then inherited ten million dollars. You bet they don't, because that joker is the happiest man going."

"So?" MacKinnon said.

"So," Haynes said, "you should smarten up, get selfish, and get happy. I say you're crazy, and you give me an argument, and say you're not. Just suppose we went out and stopped the first six people who passed on the road and asked them, This character has five hundred thousand dollars lying at his feet and he won't pick it up. Is he crazy, or not? What would they say?"

"Sure, sure," MacKinnon said. "Except that it isn't lying at my feet, and there's no way it can be. Mind you, I'm not agreeing, I'm not saying I'll go for your blackmail proposition, but if I did, I'd still be nowhere, because what I said ten minutes ago still goes: when I came for the money every cop between here and New York would be waiting."

"Not true," Haynes said. "Absolutely not true. Because, look, granted I'm not a towering moral figure, still I'm not a louse either. What have I got against you, if you don't kill me, except that you could have, and didn't? Haven't I got to feel grateful to you for that? And what have you got against me, really? Nothing, except that when a very good-looking girl made it plain, nearly two decades ago, that she'd like to go to bed with me, I bought it. Come on, Charlie, you'd have done the same thing. You did do the same thing, you bastard! You were Terrie's second husband. She told me she was still married to her first husband when the two of you made out the first time. So here you are, all set to shoot me for something you did first, and with the same girl, and you claim you're moral and I'm not! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. As for the hops, I told you before, that's no problem, giving you the money. After all, I want to give it to you. And you can forget that nonsense about picking it up out here in the woods. I'm going to give you a bearer draft for the money. You know what a bearer draft is?"

"I think so," MacKinnon said.

"It's cash," Haynes said. "It's a pay-on-sight thing. All right, you'll have to sign a receipt, and you can sign it Adolf Hitler if you feel like it. You can sign it with an X. You can cash it in New York or you can cash it in Istanbul."

"There are cops both places," MacKinnon said.

"Charlie," Haynes said, "this deal is like every other deal: it can't be done unless there's at least a little trust going both ways. Now listen to me. In my house I've got a wall safe, and in the wall safe there is a little emergency money: forty thousand dollars. Also in my house is some fifty-year-old Kentucky bourbon. I want you to trust me when I say that I want you to come into my house, have a drink, take the forty thousand dollars, just as earnest money, just to show you that I'm leveling with you, and blow. All you have to do is leave me an address for the sight draft, and it can be in Hong Kong, I don't care, I'll send it anywhere, four hundred and sixty thousand dollars. As for me, I'm going to trust you to the point of turning my back, right now, and walking down the path to the house. If you still want to shoot me, now's the time for it."

MacKinnon watched him walk away. He didn't lift the automatic. Haynes turned his head.

"You coming, Charlie?" he said.

MacKinnon put the gun away. Haynes waited for him and they went the rest of the way together. It was a big house, standard Colonial, stone and white.

"There's no one here," Haynes said.

"I know," MacKinnon said.

The wall safe was in Haynes' second-floor study, and so was the bourbon. The bourbon was dark and smooth. The safe was full of rubber-banded bundles of money. Haynes took them all out.

"You could wrap it in your suit," he told MacKinnon. MacKinnon unzipped and stepped out. He was, as Haynes had guessed, thin and bony. It was easy to see the long bulge under his right arm where the automatic sat. He rolled the money into a tight brown-and-green-and-black bundle and stood up.

"You can send the bearer draft to general delivery in San Francisco," he said. "In the name Donald Burns."

"It goes tomorrow afternoon," Haynes said. He led MacKinnon to the door. Haynes said so long, but MacKinnon didn't answer. Haynes watched MacKinnon out of sight down the driveway. It was long, curving, tree-lined, and the road was hidden. Haynes ran up three flights of stairs to the glassed-in captain's walk on the roof. He had to wait 30 seconds or so before MacKinnon appeared, walking on the road, not fast. Haynes ran down and picked up the phone.

"Harold?" he said. "Mike Haynes. Look, a fellow's just left my house, he's walking down the road toward your place, and I suspect he may have left a car in your woods, that old logging road of yours. I wonder if you'd be good enough to ask one of your sons to check this for me? I wouldn't want the man to know he's being watched, you see, not at all ... right ... if he has got a car there what kind it is, what color ... I'm sure. They'd know better than you or I would, no question about it. Thanks."

Haynes' neighbor called back. It was a blue Ford wagon and the kid had got the first four digits on the tag. It was enough. Haynes called the police and gave it to them, with a nice description of the stick-up man driving it, his gun and the serial numbers of the money. They nailed him before he'd gone ten miles. Haynes went around to the barracks to identify him and make the charges. MacKinnon wouldn't look at him.

When it was all over, and he was home again, Haynes gave himself a big drink and sat down to think about it. He had a good memory, a bridge player's memory, and he repeated the whole dialog to himself. He felt that it had been, all in all, a tour de force. He had bluffed MacKinnon, confused him, switched him, smothered him in lies and illogicalities, put him upside down. From a cold start he had turned a homicidal maniac into a chump who thought they were buddies. He was pleased with himself. He would be careful, of course, to follow through. And follow through he did. Charlie MacKinnon felt the weight of money. He came to know that if somebody knocked a hole in the wall 20 feet square and the whole prison population started through, still he wouldn't make it. He wasn't actually chained to his cell door, but he might as well have been.

Michael Haynes heard about him now and then. He had made arrangements for information, starting with the obvious one: if MacKinnon ever did get over the wall, Haynes would know about it five minutes after the warden did. But he didn't worry, and after two or three years he had the whole matter well in the back of his mind. He had other things to occupy him. He led a full life. One Saturday morning he turned into the driveway and halfway down a woman was running toward him, a redhead in a white dress, good-looking, yelling, "Mike, you stinker, where've you been?" He didn't recognize her, but that proved little. She came up to the car, charmingly out of breath. "I ran across the lawn when I saw you coming," she said, "and now you don't even remember me!"

Haynes admitted it.

"Never mind," she said. "I'm prepared."

She gave him a folded square of paper. The message was written in pencil. "Meet my sister," it read. "Charlie MacK." When Haynes looked up, the girl had his ignition key in one hand and the twin of MacKinnon's .22 in the other. She was still smiling merrily, though, and Haynes took a deep breath and smiled back at her.

"Tell me," he said, "is that Charlie's old popgun?"

"My brother said I wasn't to let you talk," the redhead said. He heard the first one. It made a noise like chupp! He didn't hear the other three.