I’d thought about calling Mr. Bowditch in the hospital to tell him he was selling cheap, but didn’t. For a very simple reason: I thought he wouldn’t care. I could sort of understand that. Even with six pounds taken from Cap’n Kidd’s Bucket o’ Gold, there was plenty left. My job （although Mr. Bowditch never said it） was just to do the deal and not get ripped off. It was a hell of a responsibility, and I was determined to live up to the trust he’d put in me.
I buckled the straps on the knapsack, checked the floor between the closet safe and the bathroom scale for any gold pellets that had gotten away, and found none. I gave Radar a good stroking （for luck） and headed out carrying $115,000 in a beat-up old knapsack.
My old friend Bertie Bird would have called it a lot of cheddar.
5
Stantonville’s downtown was a single street of cheesy shops, a couple of bars, and the kind of diner that serves breakfast all day along with a bottomless cup of bad coffee. A number of the shops were closed and boarded up, with signs saying they were for sale or lease. My dad said that once Stantonville was a thriving little community, a great place to shop for people who didn’t want to go to Elgin, Naperville, Joliet, or all the way to Chicago. Then, in the 1970s, the Stantonville Mall opened. Not just a mall, either, but a supermall with a twelve-screen cineplex, a kiddie amusement park, a climbing wall, a trampoline area called Fliers, an escape room, and guys wandering around dressed as talking animals. That glitterdome of commerce was to the north of Stantonville. It sucked most of the life out of the downtown area, and what the mall missed got sucked out by the Walmart and Sam’s Club to the south, on the turnpike exit.
Being on my bicycle, I avoided the pike and took Route 74-A, a two-lane running past farms and cornfields. There were smells of manure and growing things. It was a pleasant spring morning and would have been a pleasant ride, if I hadn’t been aware of the small fortune I was carrying on my back. I remember thinking about Jack, the boy who’d climbed the beanstalk.
I was on Stantonville’s main drag by nine-fifteen, which was a little early, so I stopped in the diner, got a Coke, and sipped it sitting on a park bench in a dirty little plaza featuring a dry fountain filled with trash and a bird-beshitted statue of someone I’d never heard of. I thought about that plaza and dry fountain later, in a place even more deserted than Stantonville.
I can’t swear that Christopher Polley was there that morning; I can’t swear he wasn’t. Polley was the kind of guy who could fade into the landscape until he was ready for you to see him. He could have been in the diner, chowing down on bacon and eggs. He could have been in the bus shelter or pretending to study the guitars and boomboxes in the Stantonville Pawn & Loan. Or he could have been nowhere. All I can say is that I don’t remember anyone in a retro White Sox hat, the kind with the red circle on the front. Maybe he wasn’t wearing it, but I never saw that son of a bitch without it.
At twenty to ten, I tossed my half-full go-cup into a nearby trash barrel and pedaled slowly down Main Street. The business section, such as it was, ran only four blocks. Near the end of the fourth, just a stone’s throw from a sign reading THANKS FOR VISITING BEAUTIFUL STANTONVILLE, was Excellent Jewelers We Buy & Sell. It looked as shabby and dilapidated as the rest of this dying town’s businesses. There was nothing in the dusty show window. The sign hanging in the door from a little plastic cup said CLOSED.
There was a bell. I pushed it. No response. I pushed it again, very conscious of the pack on my back. I put my nose against the glass and cupped my hands to the sides of my face to cut the glare. I saw a shabby rug and empty display cases. I was starting to think either I’d made a mistake or Mr. Bowditch had when a little man in a tweed cap, button-up sweater, and baggy pants came limping up the center aisle. He looked like the gardener in a British detective show. He stared at me, then limped away and pressed a button by the old-fashioned cash register. The door buzzed. I pushed it open and stepped inside to a smell of dust and slow decay.
“Come in back, come in back,” he said.
I stayed where I was. “You’re Mr. Heinrich, right?”
“Who else?”
“Could I, um, see your driver’s license?”
He frowned at me, then laughed. “The old man sends a careful boy, and good for him.”
He took a beat-up wallet from his back pocket and flopped it open so I could see his driver’s license. Before he flopped it closed again, I saw that his first name was Wilhelm.
“Satisfied?”