tection with all your friends at the Secret Service and with all your money?"
"All right. If you insist, I'll protect myself. Then what?"
"Then we'll kill your ass anyway, Ernie. Hahaha."
The caller hung up. Ernest Walgreen wrote down the last note on the sheet. 11:07- The caller had spoken for four minutes.
"Wow," said Walgreen's secretary, bursting into the office. "I got down every word he said. Do you think he's for real?"
"Very," said Ernest Walgreen. He was fifty-four years old and he felt drained that day. It was as if something in him were crying about the injustice of it. As if there were better times for death threats, not when his son's wife was about to give birth, not when he had bought the ski lodge in Sun Valley, Utah, not when the company he had founded was about to have a record year, not when Mildred, his wife, had just found a consuming hobby of pottery that made her even more cheerful. These were the best years of his life and he found himself telling himself that he was sorry this threat didn't come when he was young and poor. He found himself thinking, I'm too rich to die now. Why didn't the bastards do it when I had trouble with the mortgage payments ?
"What should I do ?" asked his secretary.
"Well, for the time being, we'll move you down the hall. Who knows what these lunatics will do and there's no point getting anyone killed who doesn't have to be."
"You think they're lunatics?"
5
"No," said Walgreen. "That's why I want you to move several offices away."
To his sorrow, the police also thought it was a call by a lunatic. The police gave him a lecture that came right out of a Secret Service manual on terrorists. Worse, it was a dated manual.
The police captain was named Lapointe. He was roughly Walgreen's age. But where Walgreen was lean and tanned and neat, Lapointe's fleshy expanse seemed held together only by his uniform. He had condescended to see Walgreen because Walgreen was an important businessman. He spoke to Walgreen as if addressing a ladies' tea on the horrors of crime.