Wednesday heaped his plate high with several kinds of breakfast meats. Shadow took some melon, a bagel, and a packet of cream cheese. They went and sat down in a booth.
“That was some dream you had last night,” said Wednesday.
“Yes,” said Shadow. “It was.” Laura’s muddy footprints had been visible on the motel carpet when he got up that morning, leading from his bedroom to the lobby and out the door.
“So,” said Wednesday. “Why’d they call you Shadow?”
Shadow shrugged. “It’s a name,” he said. Outside the plate glass the world in the mist had become a pencil drawing executed in a dozen different grays with, here and there, a smudge of electric red or pure white. “How’d you lose your eye?”
Wednesday shoveled half a dozen pieces of bacon into his mouth, chewed, wiped the fat from his lips with the back of his hand. “Didn’t lose it,” he said. “I still know exactly where it is.”
“So what’s the plan?”
Wednesday looked thoughtful. He ate several vivid pink slices of ham, picked a fragment of meat from his beard, dropped it onto his plate. “Plan is as follows. Tomorrow night we shall be meeting with a number of persons preeminent in their respective fields—do not let their demeanor intimidate you. We shall meet at one of the most important places in the entire country. Afterward we shall wine and dine them. I need to enlist them in my current enterprise.”
“And where is this most important place?”
“You’ll see, m’boy. I said one of them. Opinions are justifiably divided. I have sent word to my colleagues. We’ll stop off in Chicago on the way, as I need to pick up some money. Entertaining, in the manner we shall need to entertain, will take more ready cash than I currently have available. Then on to Madison.” Wednesday paid and they left, walked back across the road to the motel parking lot. Wednesday tossed Shadow the car keys.
He drove down to the freeway and out of town.
“You going to miss it?” asked Wednesday. He was sorting through a folder filled with maps.
“The town? No. I didn’t really ever have a life here. I was never in one place too long as a kid, and I didn’t get here until I was in my twenties. So this town is Laura’s.”
“Let’s hope she stays here,” said Wednesday.
“It was a dream,” said Shadow. “Remember.”
“That’s good,” said Wednesday. “Healthy attitude to have. Did you fuck her last night?”
Shadow took a breath. Then, “That is none of your damn business. And no.”
“Did you want to?”
Shadow said nothing at all. He drove north, toward Chicago. Wednesday chuckled, and began to pore over his maps, unfolding and refolding them, making occasional notes on a yellow legal pad with a large silver ballpoint pen.
Eventually he was finished. He put his pen away, put the folder on the backseat. “The best thing about the states we’re heading for,” said Wednesday, “Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there, is they have the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair it’s almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese.”
“Only when you were younger?” asked Shadow. “Looked like you were doing pretty good last night.”
“Yes.” Wednesday smiled. “Would you like to know the secret of my success?”
“You pay them?”
“Nothing so crude. No, the secret is charm. Pure and simple.”
“Charm, huh? Well, like they say, you either got it or you ain’t.”
“Charms can be learned,” said Wednesday.
Shadow tuned the radio to an oldies station, and listened to songs that were current before he was born. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen. The road ahead of them was empty and the ice crystals on the asphalt glittered like diamonds in the morning sun.
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
They parked outside a squat black brownstone. The sidewalk was clear of snow. They walked to the lobby. Wednesday pressed the top button on the gouged metal intercom box. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Then, experimentally, he began to press the other buttons, for other tenants, with no response.
“It’s dead,” said a gaunt old woman, coming down the steps. “Doesn’t work. We call the super, ask him when he going to fix, when he going to mend the heating, he does not care, goes to Arizona for the winter for his chest.” Her accent was thick, Eastern European, Shadow guessed.