The Specialists (17 page)

“Then, what do we do with her?” The colonel didn’t say anything, and Giordano said, “No, I don’t buy that. It’s no good, sir.”

“I didn’t say anything yet, Louis.”

“But what you didn’t say was that we kill her, and no, sir, I just won’t buy it.”

“I haven’t tried to sell it to you, Louis.”

Giordano didn’t seem to have heard. “The guard was something different. The guard was completely different. He was one of the soldiers on the other side, and on top of everything he was a schmuck who had to try and be a hero. It wasn’t his money. It wasn’t even that he was just doing his job. He must have run his ass off getting out the side and around the building in time to get himself killed. Screw the guard. And the bank VP that Frank shot, screw him too. He’s a gangster. So the hell with him.

“But not the girl. If we start killing good people just because they’re in the goddamned way, no, I’m sorry, sir, no, I don’t like it.”

The colonel was silent for a few minutes, and Giordano wondered if maybe he had talked too freely. He reviewed his words and decided he meant what he had said.

Cross said, “Would you rather marry her?”

“Her? Christ, no. I don’t want to marry anybody. And not her. She’s a good kid but nothing special. No, I don’t want to marry her.”

“It might be one or the other, Louis. Marry her or kill her, because the first law of nature has to be self-preservation.”

“I know, but——”

“Even if you or I were willing to risk the consequences of releasing her, we couldn’t do it. We have our responsibilities to the others.”

“I know, sir.”

“You’ll want to give this some thought, Louis.”

“Yes.” He considered. “If I gave her a chunk of dough and let her run——”

“They’d pick her up in a week.”

“I guess they would, sir.”

Cross pushed his chair backward and pivoted to face the door. “I’ll get out of your way for a while, Louis. Will you take something to eat now? Steak and eggs?”

“That does sound like a good idea.”

“And a drink? Or would you rather have coffee?”

“I think coffee.”

“Good.” He paused at the door. “Louis? You ought to take your time thinking about this. See the girl before you decide. Sort out your own feelings.”

“I’m sure as hell not going to marry her.”

“Don’t make any decision just now.”

“So I guess we’ll have to kill her, sir.”

“You’ll think it over, Louis.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Simmons and Murdock went over the fence at the back of the Platt estate. Even with the current on, it wasn’t a hard fence to get over. They hit the backyard at opposite sides and killed the three yard men in under five minutes. Simmons got two with a twenty-inch garrote of piano wire. Murdock used a knife on the other one.

When they encountered each other over the body of the third guard, Murdock cupped his hands and made a sound like an owl. When Dehn heard that he stood up from behind the bushes across the road and shot down the two guards at the front gate. He used a .22 rifle with a few yards of Turkish towel wrapped around the barrel. The two shots still sounded like shots, but the noise didn’t carry far enough to matter.

They left the garage alone. Manso had reported that no one lived in the rooms upstairs except for some of the servants, and cooks and cleaning women posed no great threat to them. They went to the backyard and played a pencil beam flashlight over the lawn. There were no traces of a fresh grave.

“He’s in there,” Dehn said. “He’s alive. I feel it.”

“You been going a lot by feelings lately.”

“They’ve been working better for me than thought. Lately.”

“Yeah. Burglar alarm feeds on household current?”

“Right.”

Murdock wanted a look at it. When he saw the make, he told them it was no good. “Batteries cut in if the power cuts out. Eddie must not know how this model works, but I knew a boy in Chicago who went and bought himself five-to-ten in Joliet making the same old mistake. Cut the lines to the house and walked right on in and the alarm went off louder than a cat on barbed wire.”

He checked the window glass in the house. There was tape around the perimeter of each pane, a silvery tape that was hooked into the alarm system, so that if you broke the window and the break ran through the tape, you would set off the alarm.

“But you can cut the glass,” Murdock whispered. “Give me that whatchacallit, glass cutter.”

When Manso heard footsteps, he moved behind the door and flattened out against the wall. He didn’t know if it was day or night. He didn’t know whose walk he heard or whether whoever it was was coming for him. He knew one thing only. If Platt opened that door, he was going to kill him the first chance he got.

He had his knife. They’d let him put his shoes on, and never noticed the little knife taped to the inner sole. He had it in his hand now. The footsteps were coming closer, and any second now there would be the sound of a key turning in the padlock, and the door would creak open, and Platt would come in, with or without a gun, with or without a bodyguard, and Platt was going to get a knife in his neck come hell or high water.

All day long the door had tempted him. It was wood, and thin, and its hinges were on the inside where he could get at them. All in all, it presented about as much of an obstacle as a fence to a bird. Even without the knife he could have gone through it in no time at all.

But what good would that do? If he busted out, the whole house would know about it. If he managed to take the damn thing off its hinges, he was still far from home free. The guards obviously had orders not to let him off the property, and it wouldn’t be all that much of a cinch to break out of the place single-o.

So he had stayed where he was and he spent the day going through hell. Platt said he’d delivered his message to Helen Tremont, and if he did, the colonel would certainly be able to figure out which end was up, so there would be a rescue team coming in sooner or later. The question was just how long he could hold out. Sooner or later Platt would find someone who had known Florence Goddam Mannheim, and would prove conclusively that Eddie didn’t exist.

He couldn’t wait for Platt to let him know he’d got the news. He couldn’t wait at all, as far as that went. Next time he had a shot at Platt, he would take it. If he got lucky, he’d find a way out afterward. If not, well, at least he’d take Platt along with him.

“Eddie? You down here, boy?”

“Ben!”

Footsteps coming close, and he lowered the knife and pressed up against the door. “Ben?”

A low chuckle from Murdock. “Well, I’ve seen prisons, you old son, but this here is positively escape-proof. Why, this makes Alcatraz look like a day camp for poor crippled kids.”

“Open the door, will you?”

“Open it? Why, Eddie, there’s a big old lock on it! A wooden door with an actual padlock. Now, how in the world can I go and open something like that?”

“Fuck you.”

“Don’t be nasty. I’m ’shamed of you, stuck behind a little old wooden door.” Manso heard the sound of metal scraping, and then the door was drawn open. Murdock was holding the padlock in his hand. Its mountings hung from it. “Didn’t even have to pick it apart,” he announced. “Silly thing came right up out of the wood. Frank and Howard is upstairs. We did the five outside and there was one on the first floor that I almost fell over and still managed to cut him ’fore he knew anybody was in the house.”

“Where’s Lou? And what about Platt?”

“Platt’s upstairs, or leastwise I think it’s him in a room with a woman. We decided on finding you first and lettin’ you be in on it if you wanted. Lou, he got shot in the laig. We took that bank, boy. You miss the best part of things, don’t you? Lou’s okay. And the team voted you a full share, even if you didn’t get to play in the World Series.” His voice lost the lightness. “You look sicker than a snake. You feeling poorly?”

“I caught a beating last night. I think it was last night. But if you already took the bank—what the hell time is it now?”

Murdock laughed. “You don’t want to get all involved in details,” he said. “Best to let your mind roll on a bit. You come along with me now, boy, and we’ll go upstairs and kill Platt and get the hell out of here.

She was wearing a black bra and nothing else at all. She sat at her dressing table brushing her dark hair. Platt lay on the bed watching her. Anger mixed within him with embryonic lust.

“Get over here,” he said, “and get naked.”

She turned and put the hairbrush down. “Aren’t I naked enough, Albert?”

“Get outa the bra.”

She reached behind her back to unhook the bra strap. He examined her critically. “They’re starting to sag,” he said. “Well, nothing lasts, does it? You get old and you sag a little.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Get in bed.”

She got in bed, but it was no good, nothing happened. After a few minutes he pushed her violently aside and sat up. She looked at him, eyes wide in surprise. This had not happened before.

“Well,” she said, trying it on. “You get old and you sag a little, don’t you?”

She expected an outburst, perhaps a slap. It didn’t come. Instead he said, “You know the bank in New Cornwall? It got robbed.”

“Was that the one? I heard something on the news.”

“Yeah.”

“So what? Did you have any money in it?”

He looked at her. “Oh, a little,” he said.

“So you’re insured, aren’t you?”

He considered, then shrugged. “Right.”

She got to her feet. He rolled over quickly, caught her arm, and pulled her down on the bed again. “You tell me the truth,” he snapped. “You and Eddie. What happened?”

“It drives you crazy, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t like not knowing what’s going on. Did he screw you?”

“Maybe.”

“What shit is this?”

“Oh, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.”

“You were pretty goddamned positive this morning.”

“I guess I was at that. Albert, you’re hurting me. Let go of my arm. I said let go.”

“Bitch.”

“What are you going to do?”

“To the kid? It depends.”

“He’s not your son, you know.”

“What makes you so damn sure?”

“He told me.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“No, he told me. He’s a plant. Some of your friends in Chicago sent him to check up on you.”

He sat up suddenly, his face white. Was somebody setting up some kind of power play? Kostakis had said he was getting a lot of static from South Jersey types who wanted in on the Trenton action. Maybe somebody on the council was setting up for a redistribution of wealth in Bergen County. And if they were getting ready for something like that, they were certainly maneuvering nicely. The shit with the bank was going to have cops on his neck night and day for weeks. And Buddy Rice was out of the way, and a Chicago plant was living in his house and screwing or not screwing his wife, depending on whether or not she was telling the truth—

That was the trouble. It all depended on whether or not she was telling the truth.

Because if you read it the other way, then the kid downstairs was his long-lost, goddamned son and the aggravation in New Cornwall was an accident, some punks who didn’t know whose bank they were robbing, and all it meant was a few weeks of headaches for his lawyers.

But how in hell was he supposed to know what was true and what wasn’t?

To himself as much as to her he said, “If I decide he’s my kid, every time I look at him, I’m gonna wonder. All the time I’ll be wondering. It’s no good. Either he’s lying or else his mother was crazy and gave him a crazy story. That dose I had, maybe it was just a dose, maybe all along I was sterile. Yeah, that’s it. I could never have kids, so he couldn’t be a kid of mine. Right?”

“If you say so, Albert.”

“I say so.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“Well, I’ll let him sweat until morning. And I’ll let a couple of the boys open him up a little first. If there’s anything in this Chicago thing.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Even if I did, which I don’t, he could have been lying to you, kid.”

“Oh.”

He stretched out on the bed, pleased that things were working out, that the indecisiveness was gone. He reached out a hand and caught hold of one of her breasts. He squeezed sharply and she let out a bark of surprise.

“You got to expect sag with tits this size,” he said. “Get over here. Open your legs, I want some.”

“If you’ll let me watch.”

“Huh?”

“When you kill him.”

“He gets to you, don’t he?”

“Not what you think. Will you let me? I’ll do it the way you always want.”

He grinned and took her head in his hands. “You’ll get a front-row seat,” he told her.

He settled himself, closed his eyes, stroked her dark hair with his hands. “Oh, you bitch,” he said softly, reverently. “Oh, you crazy, classy, screwed-up, delicious bitch. Oh, Jesus Christ.”

Then the door flew open and Manso came in with a gun.

AFTER

In the morning they spent long, lazy hours in bed. An hour or two past noon they would put on bathing suits and walk from their cabin to the beach twenty feet from their door. She never stayed in the water for any length of time. The Caribbean was a bright electric blue, always warm and always clear, with a clean sand bottom. He could swim in it for hours, and sometimes did. She would go in with him and paddle around for a few minutes. Then she would go ashore and lie down on their blanket under the sun. Like him, she tanned readily and did not burn, and within a week she was brown.

At night after dinner they would usually stick around the lodge for a couple of hours. The native bartender did clever things with rum, and the owner, an Alsatian Jew with one blue eye and one brown eye, would join them at their table and trade lies with them.

Then a midnight swim, and lovemaking, and sleep.

She said, “I wish we could stay here forever.”

“Nothing’s forever.”

“I know.”

“And the secret is not to stay any one place too long. That’s one of the secrets.”

“And the other is never come back, because no place is ever as good the second time around.”