The Specialists (12 page)

“I’m trying to place this. A son. I never thought about kids, and then by the time I wanted one . . . I remember I picked up some kind of crazy dose. There was this Spanish kid infected half of Brooklyn. What we didn’t do to her afterwards, Christ you can bet she never clapped anybody else.” Platt laughed, then was suddenly sober again. “Couple of years ago I went to a doctor. Specialist. He said that could have been what did it, that I can’t have kids now. When the hell was that? I guess forty-two or three.”

Thank God for that, Manso thought.

“May or June of nineteen forty. This is crazy, you’re either a wise-ass punk or you’re my kid, I don’t know which. This is hard to get used to. Those years I was a nutty kid myself practically. Nineteen forty. I was what? Jesus, I was nineteen.”

“My mother was seventeen.”

“Nineteen years old. Those days I would screw anything.” Platt smiled at the memory. “We were wild kids. They used to say I would screw a snake if somebody would hold its head. What was it she told you? We had a thing going or what?”

“She said just once.”

“One time?” Platt snorted. “How’s she so sure I was the hero?”

“You were the only one. She said you forced her.”

“You mean raped her?”

“She didn’t exactly say.”

“Yeah.” Platt nodded slowly. “There were so many of them in those days. You’d pick up a girl and feed her a little booze and never see her again. Half the time you never knew their last names. Florence, there were lots of girls with that name where I lived. Only generally they were called Flo. Now it’s not such a common name. What did she die of?”

“Cancer.”

“That’s a bitch, all right. Flo Mannheim? I can’t make any connections. What did she look like? What color hair?”

“Sort of a light brown.”

“And yours is dark. And the same as mine, isn’t it? I’m a son of a bitch if this isn’t the damnedest thing ever. I mean it’s crazy.”

Manso nodded “It’s been driving me crazy for months, ever since she told me. Either I have a father or I don’t, and I can’t prove it one way or the other. That’s why I was sort of following you around.”

“Checking on me?”

“Right. I nosed around here a little and then when I found out you were in Vegas, I flew out there and had a closer look. I stayed at the same place. I was right next to you at the crap table one night.”

“You gamble much?”

“Some.”

“How’d you do?”

“I won a little.”

“Me, I took a bath. But what the hell, it’s a vacation, you don’t care. I got to sit down and think about this. You hungry? You want a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee would be fine.”

“Come on. Eddie is what they call you, huh? Eddie Platt. You know, you’re a good-looking kid, and the way you handled that punk. Style. That’s one thing I always had even as a kid, I had style. Who taught you to handle yourself like that? You learn it in the service?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, come on inside, we’ll sit and have coffee.”

Giordano sat in his car reading the resort and travel section of the Sunday
Times
. The newsstand got all the back sections a day early, and the newsie had told him he could stop in the following morning for the news sections. Giordano didn’t think he would bother.

He was reading an article on new travel opportunities in Bulgaria. None of his customers had ever wanted to go to Bulgaria. It was not very likely, he thought, that any of them ever would. Giordano wanted to go there, though. Giordano wanted to go anyplace he’d never been.

He looked up, realizing he’d read the same paragraph three times over and had retained none of it. He propped the paper against the steering wheel and leaned back. His car was parked at a shopping plaza a mile and three-quarters from the Platt estate. The homing device that Simmons had attached to Platt’s Lincoln had an effective range of five miles, and the receiver on the seat next to Giordano was turned all the way up. But there was no sound coming out of it.

The beeper was the type used by police to pinpoint the location of a moving car. In order to do that effectively, you had to have three receiving units in operation, using three cars in radio contact to triangulate on the car under surveillance. They only had one receiver, but it was really all they needed. Simmons had planted the homing device with the switch turned off. When Manso turned it on, that meant he was planted and all systems were go.

If he didn’t turn it on—

A muscle worked in Giordano’s cheek. It was almost five now. Manso had gone inside at three. About that time Giordano took up his post at the shopping plaza, and a little later Simmons and Murdock had shown up to pass on the film cartridges and let him know the beeper was in place. All Giordano could do was wait.

He glared at the receiver. When it beeped, he had to scoot out to Tarrytown to develop Murdock’s films and have a look at Dehn’s sketches, and it would have to be a quick look at that because he had a date with Patricia at 8:30, and while he didn’t expect to be on time, he didn’t want to keep her waiting too long. The more time he spent at the shopping plaza, the closer he would have to cut things, which was aggravating. Worse, the more time passed without a signal from Manso, the more chance there was that there wouldn’t ever be a signal from Manso.

Suppose, he thought, somebody took the car out. Five miles wasn’t all that far. All Platt had to do was send somebody out for groceries and he’d be hung up waiting for a signal that couldn’t come. Of course if the car was gone—that didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other. It could mean, for example, that Eddie was doubled up in the trunk and they were taking him for a ride to the swamp.

But looking was better than sitting still. Giordano turned the key in the ignition and headed the car toward Platt’s home. He had been past the estate several times already and had no trouble finding it. The entrance of the garage was dark and he had time for only a quick look, so he couldn’t say that he actually saw a Lincoln there. But there were three cars in the garage and that was all the cars Platt had, so it figured that one of them was the Lincoln.

More important, Eddie’s car was parked in the driveway.

He went back to the lot. The receiver remained silent. Giordano tried to decide whether Eddie’s car was a good sign or a bad one. He thought it over and came to the conclusion that it was about as significant as the presence of the Lincoln in the garage. It didn’t mean anything much one way or the other. The only question, the question that couldn’t be answered except by the receiving unit, was whether or not Platt would buy Eddie’s story. If he bought it, if he bought just a piece of it, they were still a long way from home. But if he turned it down, Eddie was behind enemy lines with no bullets in his gun and his ass in a sling.

Giordano didn’t see how he could possibly buy it. Oh, the colonel’s sister had done a good job, no question about it. While the five of them were still on their way to Tarrytown she was checking death records at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, looking for a woman who had died within the year, a woman born in Brooklyn somewhere between 1920 and 1925. A woman who’d moved out of Brooklyn just before the start of World War II. A woman who left no husband or children. A woman, in short, who had been in the right place at the right time and who had left that place at the right time and who had over the years left precious few traces of herself.

That was the background, and the colonel’s sister had made a good piece of work of it but it remained nothing more than background, a stage set for Eddie to play against. The long-lost bastard son routine—when the colonel had first outlined it, sitting up straight in that wheelchair and pointing things out on a blackboard like a brass hat in a map room, Giordano had been inches from laughter. But when Old Rugged Cross asked for comments, Giordano kept his mouth shut. There were, after all, two things you didn’t do. You didn’t tell a woman her breath stank and you didn’t tell an officer he had rocks in his head.

Which was not to say that there was anything wrong with the colonel’s head. And the more Giordano had thought about it, the more he saw the good aspects of the plan. If it worked, it gave them a tremendous edge. It not only put a man in the enemy camp. It did that, and it put stars on the man’s shoulders. All in all, Giordano liked it enough to be disappointed when Manso was picked to play the bastard son. It was the proper choice. Manso was right in looks, he talked New York, he knew racket people. Giordano probably had an edge in hand-to-hand, but the bit called for someone who could look the part, and if Giordano went in applying for a job as bodyguard all he would provoke was laughter.

He wondered, suddenly, if he had ever fathered a child.

It was a crazy thought, he told himself. Platt, yeah, maybe he could believe something like that. That was a generation ago, when rubbers were unreliable and only married women had diaphragms and not even science fiction writers had discovered the Pill. For Giordano the whole situation was entirely different. The girls he knew swallowed the Swinger’s Friend with their orange juice every morning. There was a drugstore on every corner and nobody had to have a baby.

Patricia Novak, he thought

Divorced, lonely, living with her parents. Was she on the Pill? He had never even thought to wonder because he had for so long taken it for granted that every woman was on the Pill. Not her, though. He was instantly certain of it. Not her.

Jesus—

You fucking fool, he thought savagely, Eddie’s up against the wall and you got nothing better to do than worry if some pig has a cake in her oven. If she does you’ll never even know about it. You’ll be gone in a week, and New Cornwall isn’t the sort of place anyone ever visited without having to, and you’ll never see her again, and it’ll be two months before she even knows she’s pregnant. And what you don’t know about isn’t really there, unless you’re fool enough to imagine it you idiot.

He looked at his watch. It was 5:27. He found himself wondering what he would do if some girl he barely remembered told him she was raising his child. He supposed he would send money—the hell, you never missed money, it was so easy to get more of it. But how would he feel about it? How would he feel about the kid? And it began to dawn on him that the colonel had nothing resembling rocks in that head of his. The legs might be gone, but there was nothing the matter with the head.

At 5:31 the receiver next to him began to beep.

SEVENTEEN

Frank Dehn said, “They came into the bank at different times and moved into position. Wore ordinary business suits and had their guns under their jackets. Must have moved on a time signal, two men on the tellers, one at the door, another on the bank vice-president. They took him downstairs and made him open the vault. Couldn’t have been much of a problem there. Platt would have seen to it that they picked a man who was clued in and knew to open up for them. They cleaned the tellers after they hit the vault. Left the silver, of course. The teller got hers because she tried to be a hero, went for the alarm. The guard may have been window dressing. Hard to say. The idea is he tried for his gun, but he died with the gun still in his holster and according to a couple of witnesses he never even moved for it kept his hands in the air all the time. So either one of the robbers panicked or else they figured to make it more authentic by scratching a guard. They play nasty.”

“Appearance? Voice?”

“All white, so Howard can drive. They used a stolen car, incidentally, left it seven blocks away. What else? A wart on somebody’s hand, and the majority opinion was that the wart was on the left hand of a tall guy with a crew cut. A dark guy with a thin moustache; a couple of witnesses missed the moustache, but the rest reported it. Not much on the voices except the usual garbage—they were menacing, they were bitter, you know the way witnesses project. What else? The moustache was the last one out the door, kept the crowd covered while the rest piled into the car. Car was not on the scene until they started out, then moved in on cue to pick them up. . . .”

Louis Giordano said, “Her lunch hour’s twelve thirty to one thirty, so if we hit it then, she’ll be out. The tellers have each got an alarm button on the floor. They hit it with their feet if they get a chance, but they’ve all got instructions to stay cool if there’s a holdup. They aren’t supposed to take chances. Where’s the drawings? The buttons are here and here and here, and evidently there’s a wire running across here that they’re all hooked to. Hit that wire and they’re all dead.

“Cash on hand remains pretty constant, as far as she knows. A Wells Fargo car comes by every Wednesday at two to deliver change and small bills and pick up old bills and silver coins for shipment to the Federal Reserve. There’s not that much cash involved, though, so you can discount that part.

“On the vault, she doesn’t know too much about that part of the operation. The president is somebody named Caspers, but he’s out most of the time. There’s a vice-president named Devlin. I get the impression that he runs the show most of the time. He has the vault combination; she knows that because he’s the one who opens up for the armored car boys. . . .”

Edward Manso said, “The front gate is clean. The rest of the fence all the way around is electrified from ten at night until seven in the morning. During the day he has two men on the front gate and one roaming the grounds in back, but there will also be odd hoods that sort of wander around when they don’t have anything better to do. At night, from ten to seven, the force is beefed up. Still two men on the front gate, but others here and here and here. A total of five at night. At night there are alarms on all the doors and windows. They’re wired to the front gate. We went out for air last night and we didn’t go five steps before a flashlight picked us up. The night men have walkie-talkies connecting to the front gate, so everybody’s in close contact. Marlene says she feels like she’s living in a prison. At first I thought she was just there for the soft life, but now I don’t know. I think there’s a pretty big love-hate thing there. He’s got some kind of emotional hold on her. Maybe she responds to his strength, I don’t know. She was bitching about things and I asked her why she stuck around. I got a funny look from her and then a lot of silence. I maybe shouldn’t have asked.”