Payback by Sam Stewart Page A

printing in pencil, and it stopped him like a shot. For a moment he stood there, staring like a dunce as though he might have misread it, which wasn’t in the cards. It was one easy word; it was something that a slow first-grader couldn’t muff.
    CAT
    And a number.
    He could hear the bathwater running in the tub. He could picture it catapulting over the tubline and flooding on the floor. He still didn’t move.
    He thought about calling the number right now. Get it over with. See who was fucking around. Still he didn’t move. Trying to remember exactly what she’d told him. “He sending you letter.” “He calling many tine.” He pictured the folder of letters in the office, the folder marked Calls. He pictured the doorman handing him the tied-up bundle last night.
    He turned off the tub.
    Melda had neatly put his mail in the second of the night table drawers. He pulled off the twine and a rainbow of letters fell over on the blue Navajo blanket. Bills. Statements. Mailers from his congressman. Diseases wanting money. “Important Special Offer To Cardholders.” More bills. The postcard jumped at him and slipped to the floor. GREETINGS FROM DISNEYLAND just about said it. Mickey Mouse intrepidly dancing on a wall, waving Hi there, sucker.
    And something told him he’d require that whisky and he’d better sit down.
    The glass was on the sink. The “A” Train was pulling into Pennsylvania Station and he stopped it in its tracks. He went back to the bedroom and settled on the bed; reaching for the postcard, he turned it up slowly like the unseen hole-card in Blind Man’s Stud.
    Hey ole buddy, I just got to town and I’m figuring we ought to have a family reunion. Happens I’ve even got the family jewels — cheap piece of tin with some personal engraving, but me, I wouldn’t part with it for less than, say. 500,000 in cash. Call you next Monday. (On Tuesday, the sentimental value goes up.)
    Yer old buddy “Cat”
    Mitchell turned it over and stared at the mouse.
    Cat and mouse was supposedly the game. Five hundred thousand dollars was the prize. He looked at the postmark: 1/23. He’d left for Guatemala on—what?—the twenty-fifth—so the thing had been sitting there for practically a month. What shot through his mind now was I am not afraid . Jungle catechism: I am not afraid . Mantra. Repeat it. Repeat it till you think it; think it till you feel it. Rule #1: Your worst enemy is panic. Rule #2: Don’t move before you think, and Rule #3: Don’t think yourself to death.
    Lighting a cigarette it came to him that Rule #1 was off the list. He could put his checkmark next to it. He felt no panic. What he felt now was numb. Dead but alert. And the thing was to handle it a step at a time; don’t jump to a conclusion (don’t move before you think).
    He was being blackmailed for half a million dollars.
    Accepting that one, the next thing to think about was clearly, By whom?
    By “Cat”?
    But of course there wasn’t any Cat. The Cat was dead. Twice. Both ways. Any way you reckoned. He’d seen one body and he’d personally and carefully buried the other.
    So from there, he could take it onto one of two paths. One—it had nothing to do with the murders. It was simply in the nature of a “personal problem.” Not the kind of problem he could take to the police, but a problem he could handle. Maybe. Or not. And pulling on his cigarette, pulling on his Scotch, he could almost convince himself that that was the case. If he pictured the universe as neutral and random, having no more direction than a couple of schmucks playing billiards in the sky, then once in a while it could pull off a shot—an amazing demonstration of articulate timing that was really nothing greater than a stab in the dark.
    But the other conclusion kept jumping on his back.
    He picked up the telephone, dialed the office, got