pretty similar to any other type of life, only wetter.
The final ad the Club posted listed the name and address of a bar and grill that I should attend on the following Monday evening—Grillers Steak House. Everyone would be there, and I was guaranteed a fun night out or else Tony Curtis would personally pay any expenses I incurred. I like a money-back guarantee as much as the next person, and that helped swing it for me. Also, their presuming me to be a serial killer would make me a pretty formidable force if things weren’t entirely to my satisfaction.
Obviously I hadn’t the faintest idea as to what I was letting myself in for, but I had come this far and there was no turning back. Besides, if the Club didn’t meet with my expectations, then I’d never go back. Plain and simple.
I rented a suit for the occasion—a cotton three-piece, yellowy beige—which I rounded off with a red shirt and a dark blue tie. The guy at the rental company even complimented me on my stylish arrangement.
When the taxi dropped me off it was raining heavily, and even in the short walk to the bar and grill entrance the yellowy beige turned brown, so that by the time I got inside I knew I had a color clash on my hands.
Grillers was one of those all-wooden affairs—mahogany benches running along under windows, teak paneling covering every square centimeter of wall, a worn and unpolished floor, maybe room enough for eighty diners, a large bar in the middle of the restaurant, again made from wood—it was like they’d used half the rain forest to build the place. Framed prints of English castles were nailed to the walls, the lighting was low, a little country and western music drifted from a jukebox over the heads of the few diners who were in that night.
As I stood in the doorway, peering into this wooden maw and clutching a soggy copy of the evening edition—my identifying sign—a shout went up, a big bearlike voice grabbed my attention, and as I turned to a far corner of Grillers I saw them for the first time, all eighteen of them, sitting there like an office party spilling out of control. All their faces were turned toward me, and I suddenly realized that this was it, the moment of truth. I had taken the precaution of memorizing everything I could from Grandson’s clippings and hoped I’d be confident enough to pass myself off as him. I was lucky that there had been a television documentary on him (no pictures of Grandson, thank God, apart from a blurred closed-circuit TV image that could just as easily have been a Sasquatch wearing dungarees) two weeks earlier, and this television psychiatrist had given a quite brilliant profile of him—“a rodent-loving vegetarian who works irregular hours.”
The owner of the bearlike voice stood up, waved a thick slab of hand, and clicked his fingers loudly, his large body rippling underneath his tight white short-sleeved shirt. “Over here. We saved you a place.”
I looked down at my hand, the hand that was holding the evening edition, and saw that I was trembling. I quickly dumped the paper onto the nearest vacant table and shoved my hands deep inside my trouser pockets. I didn’t want anyone seeing that I was nervous. After taking an almighty breath, I straightened my back, stood as tall as I could, and walked toward the Club members. In my head I went over and over all the stuff I had learned about Grandson. Hates lowlifes, likes vegetables . . .
“Nice suit.” I still remember someone saying that as I passed, nodding and smiling to the faces that looked up at me. I think it must have been Chuck Norris, but I couldn’t say for sure.
The big guy who waved me over offered his hand to shake as he belched into my face. “I’m Tony.” I offered my trembling hand and watched it disappear inside his huge fist, and as I stood there, my arm being pumped furiously, all I could think was that Tony Curtis had ballooned to enormous proportions and lost all his looks into the bargain. I could feel everyone staring at me, weighing me up, and again I tried to stand as straight and as tall as I could.
“I’m, uh—”
“Uh-uh—no names. Not real ones.”
“Oh. . . .”
Tony waved his huge arm at the others sitting there. “You ain’t gonna remember none of this, but from